OK, I was wrong. One more
short week. I didn’t recognize that we would
not be publishing on MLK Day. I
personally consider it just as important a holiday as most of the others we
take off. And it is a banking
holiday. And the garbage and recycling collections
skip the day. But I didn’t get the day
off, so it slipped my mind. Great
example of lack of attention trumping the presence of memory. Wow – that would make a good article
title!
The three posts this week cover the three basic dimensions
that we cover at EID. Tuesday was on
innovation. Wednesday was on psychology,
and Thursday was on design. Of course we
have a lot of flavors of each of these topics – motor coordination, attention,
learning, consumer electronics, workplace ergonomics, etc etc etc. We have a wide variety of constituencies, which
is why we cover so many topics. And I
try to write the articles so that they are interesting to everyone. Comments suggest I do a reasonable job of
this. You can let me know if I am
not. The more feedback the better.
So Tuesday was about this really cool innovation I learned
about how Mercedes and Brabus have collaborated to fight the Moscow rush hour
traffic. Apparently, the typical Moscow
commute time is 3-4 hours. So half of your day’s productivity is wasted. For what they refer to as mini-garchs, it is worth
a company’s investment to customize one of the these. Full oligarchs don’t actually go to the
office, they work from their dachas. And
the bottom level just deal with the traffic.
I guess there are some socio-economic messages in there, but we focused
on the innovation. They have
instrumented a commuting vehicle that is better than 95% of most offices. Definitely better than mine.
Wednesday was, as usual, my favorite topic of
self-delusion. In this case it was the example
that when we embellish our stories, we start believing them ourselves – to the
point where we don’t even notice the deception.
This happens will all self-delusion because of the neurochemical
processes involved in reconsolidation (for example here). But with social media posts it
is more powerful because it is just words, so the images are not
dissonant. And every time someone
comments, the embellished story hits us again by reappearing in our news feeds.
So then Thursday was a rant against the poor design of many
classrooms. Higher ed, but especially
K-6. General class topics, but
especially STEM. For all students, but
especially minorities and women. And
even worse, there are some really low cost interventions that we are not using
nearly enough. Read the post and see
what you can do, either as a teacher or as a parent. Grassroots solutions work too. You don’t need a school board vote.
