Friday Jan 09, 2009
- Working from home? Make sure you're adding unique value
- Rules, incentives and Barry Schwartz's call for "practical wisdom" - and what of goals?
- Recommending "Managing Humans" by by Michael Lopp (aka Rands)
- The Knowledge Distortion Field
- Why security bugs are different to other bugs
- Happiness is a healthy social network
- Prototype Sun Ray laptops
- Father of three
- Teaching critical thinking in schools?
- links for 2008-05-17
aliases
announcement
birth
book
brompton
children
cloud
computer
croudsourcing
damage
datamining
decision
dtrace
ethics
family
fun
futurology
gapminder
geros
goalfree
goals
happiness
home
human
incentives
intel
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ipod
junk
kepner-tregoe
knowledge
life
loft
losug
mail
making
management
mdb
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methodologies
metro
mice
modelling
morals
mrgum
network
nfs
nis+
nis_cachemgr
nscd
opensolaris
performance
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photo
pizza
poverty
process
programming
psychology
rands
review
rodents
rules
security
seedcamp
sgrt
sigbus
signals
sigsegv
smart
smf
solaris
sprcfb
squirrels
sun
sunray
superhero
system
ted
teleworking
terminal
terminfo
thinking
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trust
wisdom
All
/Family
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/Internet
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/Mac
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/Palm
/Security
/Solaris
/Sun
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Friday Jan 09, 2009
Once again New Scientist justifies my subscription - a fascinating article on how your friends' friends can affect your mood such as happiness. In other words, not just your immediate circle of friends.
The tips provided were:
Five tips for a healthier social network
- Choose your friends carefully.
- Choose which of your existing friends you spend the most time with. For example, hang out with people who are upbeat, or avoid couch potatoes.
- Join a club whose members you would like to emulate (running, healthy cooking), and socialise with them.
- If you are with people whose emotional state or behaviours you could do without, try to avoid the natural inclination to mimic their facial expressions and postures.
- Be aware at all times of your susceptibility to social influence - and remember that being a social animal is mostly a good thing.
The article questions whether Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point argument that social epidemics are dependent on certain key individuals is correct - though my recall of that book is that connectors are one of the key individuals who by definition have wide social networks. The key point of this article is that the effect spans several degrees of separation.
The comments on the article are well worth reading too including the slightly concerning consequence of the above advice which means undesirable people (eg depressives) could end up isolated.
Some of the happiest times I've had are hanging out with dance friends. Find the right music, venue and dance partner and your cares and woes are soon forgotten. However, that joy extends beyond the dance itself - it's infectious.
It has become de rigueur to bash Gladwell these days. However, I think he was basically correct, as far as he goes. The two places where I think he falls short is that there are occasionally other patterns. and second, that it is not possible to predict *which* mavens, connectors, etc., will be involved in a given adoption. It thus becomes difficult to really use his observations as a marketing tool. You cannot simply target mavens, because the maven for this product will possibly not be the maven for the last product.
Posted by Brian Utterback on January 12, 2009 at 04:35 PM GMT #