"Magical Number" On Stage with Leonard Lopate

Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein and the 2006 United States Memory Champion in the "speed cards" event, was interviewed by Leonard Leopate during his WNYC show. During the interview, Lopate asked Foer to explain "chunking," which is the theme of this blog. Foer immediately explained it as the 7 plus or minus two rule which comprises the Magical Number.
 
If there are lingering doubts as to the perceived importance of memory, consider that this book is already the third best-selling book on Amazon, was the subject of an opinion piece on NYT by Maureen Doud, book reviews by Michiko Kakutani and by Marie Arana of the Washington Post. That said, it should be remembered [sic] that the IBM Watson team faced greater challenges in natural language understanding than providing in sheer memory resources. The carefully curated content in Wikipedia, which uses logical connections carefully created by countless contributors, exploited by Watson's statistical reasoning resources, did the heavy lifting -- not fast hyperlink traversal of all those terabytes. ◦

"Magical Number" On Stage with Leonard Lopate

Think You Can Multitask? Guess Again (Except for 2.5% of You)

Working adults, especially knowledge workers, like to brag (or is it complain?) that they are "multitaskers." These individuals no doubt comprise a very vibrant part of the economy, but this sort of armchair psychology is baseless, and, when applied to domains such as driving while speaking on a cell phone, potentially dangerous.

In research on multiple task processing reported by Time (more fully published in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review), the expected result based on previous studies, was borne out: "During the hour-and-a-half session, 97.5% of the students [subjects] showed a significant decrease in their driving abilities and memory skills while multitasking." Other research had shown that people can alternate between tasks, but are generally not able to perform demanding tasks concurrently. What got the broad press interest was J. Watson and D. Strayer's finding that around 2.5% of the subjects showed no such decline, and a few "supertaskers" actually did better. 

By all means, let's have DARPA build cyborgs that exploit the capabilities of supertaskers. Public policy restricting calls to hands-free operation miss the point and do not address the underlying performance deficit suffered by most drivers. Consider the summary offered by Science News:

As expected, overall group performance declined markedly when driving and the cell-phone task were performed at the same time. Volunteers took an average of 20 percent longer to hit the brakes when needed, and increasingly fell behind the pace car.

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Think You Can Multitask? Guess Again (Except for 2.5% of You)

RadioLab's Duo Demystifies " 'Slacker' Brain"

One of public radio's most aurally delicious programs, Radiolab, produced by local station WNYC, was again featured on Morning Edition today. Radiolab takes on the subject of willpower -- and its consistent failures.  The excerpt of a longer Radiolab story began by asking NPR host Steve Inskeep to perform the classic digit span task -- memorizing a series of numbers.  The reason was to illustrate the effects of cognitive load on decision-making processes, such as choosing between eating chocolate cake and fruit.  The latter task was part of an experiment by Stanford's Baba Shiv, related to the Radiolab team by Radiolab's sometime collaborator, science writer Jonah Lehrer. The 1956 study was front and center in the segment, which discussed how marketers might overpower the better intentions of prospective customers by taxing their brain function.

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RadioLab's Duo Demystifies " 'Slacker' Brain"

Spitzer's Seven Rings of Saturn

Sources as authoritative as NASA number the rings of Saturn at seven, though recent research discovered another major ring much further out from the planet. This last ring, according to today's CNN story, was just discovered using the Spitzer Space Telescope (no relation to the former New York governor's astral inspiration).  That ring is so far out (3.7 million miles out from the planet), so large (300 Saturns would fit inside it), and so thin (just ice and dust, so thin that it wasn't noticed until now), that it hardly counts in anthropomorphic terms.

The Magical Number is, without a doubt, a thoroughly anthropomorphic quantity.

Image from Wikipedia Commons.

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Spitzer's Seven Rings of Saturn

Wrongly Counted, Rightly Named "Seven Sacred Pools of Hana"

Kipahulu is a village in Hana on the island of Maui which includes part of the Haleakala National Park. The mostly beautific island of Maui features Seven Sacred Pools inside the park, also known as the "Oheʻo Gulch," but more often referred to as the "Seven Sacred Pools of Hana."

There are more than seven pools, but there's a good reason for the name.

Photo courtesy Wikipedia Commons. ◦

Wrongly Counted, Rightly Named "Seven Sacred Pools of Hana"

From Church of Customer: 7 Reasons Why Small Biz Should Blog

First in 2004 (and later updated) Ben McConnell offered seven reasons why small businesses should produce blogs. A highly compact version of his list of Seven follows:

1. Customer evangelism
   
2. A feedback mechanism for customer interaction
   
3. Knowledge sharing facilitates search engine visibility
   
4. Buzz
5. Simultaneous conversations that maximize the use of time
   
6. Some blog templates are spiffy and may enhance the public web image
   
7. Position the firm as a knowledgeable resource

These suggestions are sound enough, but in practice it's important to connect them with other systems, workflow and processes within the enterprise. That can be an added challenge for which the ROI is not immediate.

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From Church of Customer: 7 Reasons Why Small Biz Should Blog

Koussevitzky Grant Relights Classical Music's Fading Candle

Emily B. at Fractured Atlas wrote that the Momenta Quartet

in February 2009. . .was one of only seven recipients of the prestigious Koussevitzky Music Fund Grant to commission a new work of classical music. Their commitment to pairing the music of contemporary composers — they have given over 40 world premieres in the last five years — with that of masters from the past sets this talented group apart.

Emily Bowles is a freelance writer and editor with a chronic bend towards the arts. She is also the marketing director of NYC Performing Arts Spaces, a program of Fractured Atlas.

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Koussevitzky Grant Relights Classical Music's Fading Candle