We have the lake and the Wii. All set for the weekend!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page

Enjoying a lovely dinner at Redwood in Bethesda.

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page

This place is really Chuck E. Cheese without a singing rat and toddlers.

Otherwise it’s pretty much the same insanity. But the nieces seem to be enjoying.
 
Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page

I have a LOT of spring cleaning to do, but each time I sit down for more than two minutes, the cats plop down to nap on me. Life is rough!
 
Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page

I just learned about IfWeRanTheWorld via Craig Newmark’s blog. He writes:

It’s still in process, but Cindy Gallop was thinking about one of the biggest of problems, how to turn the good intentions of millions of people into actual action. The idea is to use crowdsourcing to get people together.

But it gets really interesting when you read more about IWRTW from the folks at Wired, who do a more in-depth profile of the proposed service:

Their unlaunched site, IfWeRantheWorld.com, should succeed in giving online activism some sorely-needed teeth. Rather than raising awareness, the site is set up to convert intent into action, to get things done. As a side effect, it could reinvent advertising as a transparent interaction between corporations and individuals.

“The single largest pool of untapped resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action,” said Gallop, who founded the company with Davis two years ago after digital guru Esther Dyson introduced them. Gallop says current do-gooder networks make it too hard to find achievable, concrete tasks that fit one’s skill set, time and budget — and that offer instant gratification.

“For a large amount of the world, doing good is fundamentally very, very boring,” explained Gallop. “If you go to the homepage of something like DoSomething.org, or any one of the many [like it], there is an instant yawn factor -– ‘I know this is really good stuff, I should be doing it, but I’m half asleep already.”

The premise of their online service is to facilitate breaking down action into simple tasks that are easy to accomplish (read the Wired article for more details).

But here’s the part I especially like:

There’s no shortage of sites dedicated to online activism, but this one lets individuals contribute time, ingenuity and other resources with greater efficiency, while exerting a sliding level of control. Davis and Gallop studied World of Warcraft to create a structure in which a rotating cast of leaders might direct a given project at different stages — the same way WOW teams self-organize around different people, depending on how their areas of expertise stack up to the task at hand.

How cool is that?!

I’ve got mixed feelings about this being run as a for-profit enterprise (in fact, the Wired folks are also excited about how this could “reinvent advertising” … BFD), but hey, let them shift a paradigm or two and then others can imitate.

The New Yorker has just published a really interesting piece by Jonah Lehrer on delaying gratification and how it tracks to future performance.

The article describes tests conducted by Stanford researcher Walter Mischel, which involved seeing how nursery school kids reacted to the choice of one marshmallow right away or two if they were willing to wait for a short while. Only 1/3 of the children were able to wait successfully. It’s quite a long article, but for me, this is the money section (emphasis mine):

What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten. “If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

In adults, this skill is often referred to as metacognition, or thinking about thinking, and it’s what allows people to outsmart their shortcomings. (When Odysseus had himself tied to the ship’s mast, he was using some of the skills of metacognition: knowing he wouldn’t be able to resist the Sirens’ song, he made it impossible to give in.) Mischel’s large data set from various studies allowed him to see that children with a more accurate understanding of the workings of self-control were better able to delay gratification.

“What’s interesting about four-year-olds is that they’re just figuring out the rules of thinking,” Mischel says. “The kids who couldn’t delay would often have the rules backwards. They would think that the best way to resist the marshmallow is to stare right at it, to keep a close eye on the goal. But that’s a terrible idea. If you do that, you’re going to ring the bell before I leave the room.”

According to Mischel, this view of will power also helps explain why the marshmallow task is such a powerfully predictive test. “If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television,” Mischel says. “And you can save more money for retirement. It’s not just about marshmallows.”

This also maps very nicely to what David Kessler has to say about what he calls “conditioned hypereating” in his new book The End of Overeating:

Once your behavior becomes conditioned and driven, you get into this cycle and you get cued. When the neural circuits get activated, it focuses your attention. There’s a bit of an arousal as you have increased attentional focus, and then the only way to get it out of working memory is to consume the product. The next time you’re cued, you eat again, and you’re in this cycle. Every time you do it you strengthen it.

And in his book, Kessler points out that one tool that can be used to stop this pattern of overeating is called “thought stopping.” He writes (p 221):

Turning off a thought has to be almost immediate. … The more seconds you spend thinking about what to do in the face of an urge, the greater the chance you’ll give into it. Once you begin to debate “Should I or shouldn’t I?” you’ve lost the battle.

I’m really struck by the potential implications of this where I work, where one of our goals is to have adults make meaningful changes in their individual behavior, like saving more money for retirement or adopting healthier eating habits to avoid/manage chronic diseases, etc.

Am watching and rewatching the end of the Scrubs finale:

I love these soundtrack finales. Bet that "Book of Love" is going to be the first dance choice for a lot of weddings this season, not to mention be a popular iTunes download.

The Scrubs finale reminded me how much I liked the same treatment for the finale of Six Feet Under, featuring Sia's "Breathe Me":

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page

More than 90 7th and 8th graders from 27 different Diocese of Arlington schools perform during Bishop Ireton’s spring concert. Awesome program!

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page

Saw this from the folks at Daily Kos; they are having their Netroots Nation event in my hometown later this summer. It's an algorithmic analysis of the climate of Pittsburgh:

I would like to put forward the proposition that, unlike most temperate regions which use a two bit climate system, that Pittsburgh instead uses a single bit to encode its climate. You see, Pittsburgh assigns Summer to one value, let's say 0. Winter gets the other, in this case 1. In order to approximate Spring and Fall, a 50% dithering pattern is used. Thus a week during Spring might look like either 0101010 or 1010101. So when the entire season is taken as a whole, Spring and Fall display average temperature for a temperate region. However, any single day can only be one of two possible states– Summer or Winter.  …

I am proposing that this is the reason that Pittsburgh temperature seems so variable, and Fall and Spring so erratic.

I'm not sure that Pittsburgh's weather is that erratic compared to some, but had to linke to any post that combines my Yinzer hometown and computer geeky-ness!

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page

This article from Slate is interesting. It makes the point that the case against high-fructose corn syrup is not a particularly solid one:

So there's every reason to believe that fructose is worse for you than glucose, at least taken pound-for-pound. But it's another thing altogether to suggest that high-fructose corn syrup is worse for you than other caloric sweeteners. Despite its name, HFCS doesn't contain much more fructose than table sugar—the product refined from beets or sugar cane.

The article also talks about other issues with HFCS, namely the question of cost to produce and taste. But this looks like the main issue is one of labeling. "High-fructose" corn syrup just isn't that higher in fructose than table suger.

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page

Hanging out in a park off Duke St. In Alexandria. Will head over to Queen of Apostles in an hour or so for my nieces’ confirmation.

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page

This is the first time I’ve been at Bon Air so early in the season. I hadn’t realized how much they prune the roses back! Not sure if you can tell in the photo of the brick path, but I spent an hour or so under the arbor watching a huge bumblebee “guarding” the entrance. Every several seconds another bee would come by and be chased off. Curious!

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page

Sent from my iPhone

Posted via email from Beth’s Posterous Page