🎥 Lego In Real Life 3 – some awesome stop motion going on here.

Rick Gladstone in the New York Times:

The Ebola virus has struck again in the Democratic Republic of Congo and has killed at least 20 people, the country’s Health Ministry reported Wednesday, just a week after officials announced the end of an Ebola outbreak 1,550 miles away.

I just ran across Stencila, which claims to be “the office suite for reproducible research”:

The calls for research to be transparent and reproducible have never been louder. But today’s tools for reproducible research can be intimidating - especially if you’re not a coder. We’re building software for reproducible research with the intuitive, visual interfaces that you and your colleagues are used to.

Something like this is desperately needed, but adoption will be an uphill battle. Academics are often still reluctant to use Google Docs instead of emailing Word files back and forth, and making this switch would save everyone a huge amount of time.

This checks all my boxes: Inside San Franciso’s Fire Department, Where Ladders Are Made by Hand

Notion looks like a pretty interesting collaboration platform. It offers functionally like Trello, Evernote, and Google Sheets in a single unified product.

My biggest concern with Notion is data portability. I feel pretty safe that Atlassian and Google are going to be around for a while, and if they ever shut down products I use, there are so many users that there will be lots of good export tools. Even if Notion has a good API, it would take some work to extract everything and ingest into something else.

I’ve recently moved back to a folder structure of text files on Dropbox for my personal notes after using Apple Notes and Bear. It feels good knowing that my notes are essentially plain text files in a folder — no weird databases or opaque iCloud to worry about.

Sounds like Mendeley is doing some squirrelly stuff with encrypting their local database to prevent users exporting to other reference managers 👎.

I’ve updated my reference management software roundup accordingly.

Applied Public Policy & Management Knowledge Base (“expert content that complements your core coursework as an undergraduate or graduate student in a public policy, public administration, public health, or public affairs program) is advertising on Instagram of all places. 🤔

Mike Karnjanaprakorn, unrolled from Twitter:

I’ve spent a lot of time improving my personal productivity process to GSD. Here are some my best tips and hacks:

1. Time-block your week. Knock out your most important rocks near the beginning of the week. Try to not schedule any meetings in the morning. Use that time for deep work.
2. My favorite mantra: Do the hardest thing first.
3. 3 x 3 x 3 is a simple framework. Three priorities for the quarter, week and day. Check-in on this list daily. Prioritize your day to move the ball forward inch by inch.
4. Have a digital inbox to capture all of your thoughts. By getting ideas out of your head, you make room for new ones. Your brain was meant to come up with ideas, not store them.
5. Mirroring - almost everything has been done before. Learn from others and mirror what they did, 80% of the time it’s the same playbook. Figure out the 5 most important steps. Do them and innovate in the other 20%.
6. Invest into compound time. Invest into learning. Invest into yourself. Find time by deleting at least one recurring meeting out of your calendar every month.
7. These days I like to keep my calendar fairly open. This allows my curiosity to roam. I spend time reading books, writing in my journal, and meeting with interesting people to get inspired.
8. Automate the rest of your life, especially things you hate doing. For example, I use Calendly to schedule meetings and Amazon Subscribe & Save for repeat household goods. Use that extra time to invest in yourself or recharge.
9. Balance is key. Take at least one day off each week. Go on vacation for at least two weeks. Exercise a few times a week. Get at least 8 hours of sleep every night. Eat more plants, less sugar. Develop healthy habits.
10. My productivity stack right now: Todoist (tasks), Evernote (notes) and Google for everything else (calendar, emails, docs, files, etc). I like to keep things as simple as possible.
11. While I love my digital tools, I still use paper notebooks every single day to journal. I love my Hobinichi Techo Planner
12. Maintain an exciting and compelling vision of the future to fight apathy. Make sure it’s slightly out of reach to keep pushing you. Never give up.

@cmyeaton:

My standard advice is 1. download Anaconda or Enthought 2. buy Python for Data Analysis (https://amzn.to/2ITq5ME) 3. focus on working through a project, not aimless learning.

Solid advice, especially item 3. Aimless learning is not a good way to learn anything involving programming…having an important project is key for motivation to break through inevitable frustration.

I would add one more piece of advice: if you can, find a mentor who can answer high-level questions (“does approach X make sense?”) and can help if you get really stuck.

ZoteroBib is a new service from Zotero for quickly generating bibliographies from DOIs, PubMed IDs, etc. There are other similar services, but none this nice. Perfect for formatting references for a CV, or generating a one-off references section for a short article.

What?

Jim Robbins for The New York Times:

Scientists have surmised there is a stream of viruses circling the planet, above the planet’s weather systems but below the level of airline travel. Very little is known about this realm, and that’s why the number of deposited viruses stunned the team in Spain. Each day, they calculated, some 800 million viruses cascade onto every square meter of the planet.

Robert Kocher for the Harvard Business Review:

Today, for every doctor, only 6 of the 16 non-doctor workers have clinical roles, including registered nurses, allied health professionals, aides, care coordinators, and medical assistants. Surprisingly, 10 of the 16 non-doctor workers are purely administrative and management staff, receptionists and information clerks, and office clerks.

I wonder how many of those administrative staff could be replaced by better computer systems and a smarter payer model.

PSA: “Canadian surgeons are urging people to throw out wire-bristled barbecue brushes, because none of them have figured out a surefire way of removing the wires when they get stuck in people’s throats.” (via CBC news)

Fascinating tweetstorm by Austen Allred about education, quoted in full below for readability/posterity:

This is a tweetstorm about things that have surprised me having started a school, coming from a non-educational background

1. Students’ brains are broken by our existing system. We’ve been reworked purely for extrinsic reward and forgotten how to learn entirely. The most frequently asked questions we get are “is this required?” and “donwe get a certificate for this?” It’s sad Most universities, surprisingly, have no way to measure their effectiveness, and most don’t try. If you can’t measure effectiveness you can’t fail.
2. Many academics believe you can’t learn online. Not that you can only learn a subset of things or that the learning is worse because it misses x y and z if not in person. They literally don’t believe it’s possible to have an effective online education.
3. Apparently I can’t spell or number things correctly
4. We accept students from all sorts of backgrounds, including socioeconomic, educational, etc. Our top performers? The poorest students with no college education. Hypothesis? They have no other options
5. Everyone knows too many people attending universities don’t consider the financial burden, but NO ONE thinks about the time. Four years is a LONG time, but it doesn’t enter into peoples’ thinking generally when deciding if they should get a degree
6. We had one student on the edge of homelessness, was $400 short on bills and almost had to quit because of that. I personally loaned him the money, and his income moved from $10/hr to $70k+/yr. It only took $400, but he didn’t have anywhere to get that from. Insane.
7. Psychology matters much, much more than people think, and varies wildly based on socioeconomic background. People that don’t know many people that are middle class literally don’t understand what’s possible, and are unable to take the corresponding risks as a result of that.
8. 99% of people, when left long blocks of time alone to work on something without anyone to be accountable to, will watch Netflix.
9. Nearly everyone recognizes that MOOCs are by and large a failure with ~2% completion rates, but they make us feel good because now it’s the students’ fault not they’re not learning, not the school’s
10. Tuition at any Ivy League school is pretty much a rounding error no one cares about. Endowments are all that matters.
11. Think for profit universities are bad? They’re worse than you think. Almost no matter how little you think of them they manage to be worse than that
12. There are dozens of careers that are a 100% employment guarantee. There are dozens of careers where <50% get jobs. Everyone knows what those are on a university faculty, but no one does anything about it because universities don’t see it as their role to get you a job
13. Universities and colleges that achieve accreditation (the kind that matters) are incredibly locked in as to what they teach, how long they teach it, and what requirements are
14. Code bootcamps know they don’t prepare programmers very well for the job market, but they can’t lengthen their programs because then they’d have to increase the prices they charge accordingly, and the market disappears at 2x bootcamp prices
15. There are many, many code bootcamps with <25% hiring rate that do millions of dollars per year in revenue by promising jobs
16. People rely mainly on their parents for advice on what to do about education, and that has to be among the worst places to go for educational advice
17. Accreditation is a ticket for Title IV funding (grants, fed subsidized student loans), and because of that adds a $10m+ premium to any school that is for sale. There are companies that get and sell accreditation and that’s all they do
18. Economically we vastly undervalue education. A $10k swing in income when you’re 20 yrs old is actually worth $400k+ over your lifetime, but we’re (rightfully) skeptical of the returns
19. We really have no way to measure how much universities help because there’s so much selection bias involved. E.g. what if you took all the people that got accepted to Stanford or Harvard and had them all go to the same community college? Or different schools? We don’t know.
20. People who have never made upper middle class jobs are unused to working for people that want them to succeed
21. Lack of access to a computer almost kept some of our best students from being able to attend. Those aren’t expensive.
22. Bank accounts are surprisingly hard to get if you don’t have much money
23. One of the biggest limiting factor in many Americans getting an education is geography. They don’t live near a college/university and making that move would be tremendously expensive relative to their incomes

That’s all for now. Thanks for playing!

David Leonhardt on driving deaths in the US in The New York Times:

Had the United States kept pace with the rest of the world, about 10,000 fewer Americans each year — or almost 30 every day — would be killed. Instead, more people die in crashes than from gun violence. Many of the victims, like Erin Kaplan, were young and healthy.

…

“The overwhelming factor is speed,” says Leonard Evans, an automotive researcher. Small differences in speed cause large differences in harm. Other countries tend to have lower speed limits (despite the famous German autobahn) and more speed cameras. Install enough cameras, and speeding really will decline.

See also: this Numberphile video (via Kottke), which proves that “going from 70 mph to 100 mph more than doubles your energy…and going from 55 to 100 more than triples it.”

James Doubek for NPR:

The vast majority of Uber and Lyft drivers are earning less than minimum wage and almost a third of them are actually losing money by driving, according to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A working paper by Stephen M. Zoepf, Stella Chen, Paa Adu and Gonzalo Pozo at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research says the median pretax profit earned from driving is $3.37 per hour after taking expenses into account. Seventy-four percent of drivers earn less than their state’s minimum wage, the researchers say.

I’ve been thinking for a while that Lyft-like services only work because drivers have limited information about their true operating costs (gas, vehicle depreciation, car insurance, etc.). Uber says the methods in this paper are flawed, but they don’t say how.

Doubek continues:

Uber and Lyft both have “notoriously high” turnover rates among drivers. A report last year said just 4 percent of Uber drivers work for the company for at least a year.

If it’s such a great deal for drivers, why the high turnover?

An ER visit, a $12,000 bill — and a health insurer that wouldn’t pay:

The problem: These denials are made after patients visit the ER, sometimes based on the diagnosis after seeing a doctor, not on the symptoms that sent them, like in Cloyd’s case.

This is such a stupid policy.

Barry O’Reilly: > In the majority of organizations, being “busy” is systemic, and often for perverse reasons. Being visibly busy is often seen as or at least equated to hard work, real work, important work. > > But too often this spinning motion is mistaken for progress. > > Believe me, it’s not. > > Have a list of your top priorities. If what you’re being ask to do isn’t on it, then don’t do it, or alternatively suggest how people can move ahead without you.

Truth.

What did the group of emo nannies call their band?

Sad State of Au Pairs

To all the people advocating arming teachers: www.caseyliss.com/2018/2/17…

Aaron E. Carrol in The Upshot:

The idea that spending more on preventive care will reduce overall health care spending is widely believed and often promoted as a reason to support reform. It’s thought that too many people with chronic illnesses wait until they are truly ill before seeking care, often in emergency rooms, where it costs more. It should follow then that treating diseases earlier, or screening for them before they become more serious, would wind up saving money in the long run.

Unfortunately, almost none of this is true.

If the US spends more per capita in healthcare than comparable countries, we should have the best quality of life. But this requires policymakers and individuals to do what public health experts tell them to do.

@bederson:

This is such a good idea. Get feedback that improves your course while engaging students and steering them to a way of thinking about your (improving) course that may help end of semester course evals. > @TLTC_UMD: Mid-semester student evaluation data can help instructors tweak their practice during the course. Come learn how to construct and implement mid-semester evaluations: ow.ly/5WaR30iq2…

I’ve always wondered why teachers/professors don’t collect anonymous performance data from students regularly. If I was teaching, I would require each student to answer one question anonymously after each lecture (“did you understand the material discussed in class?” or similar), with the opportunity to provide additional feedback.

A compostable phone case: pelacase.com

(They say it doesn’t compost while you’re using it.)

Must read, but depressing as hell: How to Not Die in America 

This is great: Ten Things I Wish I’d Known About bash

“Daily physical activity is an opportunity for the average school to become a high-performing school,” said Jesper Fritz, a doctoral student at Lund University and physician at the Skane University Hospital in Malmo who was the study’s lead author.

— Why Kids Shouldn’t Sit Still in Class

Currently obsessed with Darius’ new album Utopia.

Some very interesting thoughts by Tiago Forte in a Twitter thread, which I’ve reposted here for readability:

I’m increasingly convinced that THE most important thing in productivity is to end every cycle with a clear milestone or deliverable

Both “deep work” (large batch) and “multitasking” (small batch) miss the point in this regard

The absolute size of your work batches doesn’t matter, and a wide range of sizes is probably best

But if u don’t end your cycle with a clear deliverable, you’re de-optimizing the next cycle before it’s even begun

You’ll either have to spend the entire next cycle tying up loose ends of previous one, OR remembering what you started in previous one

Latter is not as innocuous as it seems. Its difficult to pick back up smthg that was begun, but not brought far enough 2 reduce ambiguity

You’re left with the constraints of previous work session, but w/out benefits of clearly defined next steps

But it goes deeper. By finishing w/ an artifact, physical or conceptual or visual, you have something to ponder between sessions

The mind cannot creatively ponder messy work-in-process. Occurs as a morass of open loops, no anchor to push back on

A deliverable is a thingified idea - it provides distinctions, decisions, constraints, affordances that can be embraced, or rejected

Thingified ideas provide another benefit in rapidly changing, networked world: u can get feedback on them, improving orientation

Key skill in matching cycle time to delivery pace is acceleration (and deceleration)

Simple level: be able to cram in that last bit of work to finish it in this work session, instead of pushing it to next one or deceleration: know when to slow down and > really do the most thorough job, instead of maintaining speed and starting smthg new>

Complex level: know how to align life rhythms so that cycle time and deliverables fluctuate in sync, to the same rhythm

This involves multiple skills: next-level calendaring/scheduling, rapidly creating conditions for flow, setting/enforcing blackout times abruptly changing states of mind, > self-awareness to know limits, defining tasks/deliverables and their interfaces, distraction mgmt>

It also means spending more time planning (all aspects of life), relative to doing, which feels to many like lowered productivity

But it’s necessary, because planning has way more leverage available to it than doing. Doing is base, planning is exponent

Also shows why very healthy body and mind is critical. It limits sprint/stamina at most fundamental, hardware level

Thus a tiny constraint at hardware level magnifies into massive constraint at mind (software) level. Ceiling on cycle time limits range

Also shows why maintaining relationships/hobbies is important. These cannot be pulled on demand, operate on much longer cycles

And the reserves they fill (love, connection, acceptance, humor) cannot effectively be filled any other way

Ability to quickly and thoroughly relax is probably key capability required. Middle ground of low level stress shortens next cycle

W/out producing clear deliverable, or even planning of next deliverable, which is hard to do when stressed

But walking away when a deliverable is finished is very hard, bec all biomarkers are attuned to immediate gratification & stimulation

Dopamine provides anticipation + pleasure, whereas serotonin lacks anticipation, making it hard to pursue in presence of former

After yrs of time-tracking I almost never work more than 30 hrs/wk, bec there’s no point in working if I can’t produce a deliverable

Better to spend that time creating the conditions for massive acceleration, which brings exponential rewards

(I pulled the text out with the excellent Spooler.)