media

Another Critique of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule”

I’m currently reading a very interesting book entitled Selling the Dream: How Hockey Parents and Their Kids are Paying the Price for Our National Obsession. (The “our” is Canada, if you hadn’t already guessed that from the reference to hockey.) If nothing else, this book has made me, as a figure skater, realize that participating in hockey can be almost as expensive as participating in figure skating, especially when parents put their kids into all kinds of additional hockey training and coaching.

However, the part of the book that I found particularly fascinating was its comments on Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hour rule”, which I have criticized in another post.  (more…)

All About Work’s First Birthday
(credit: own photo)

(credit: own photo)

Today marks the first birthday of All About Work. In one year, it’s received over 10,000 hits, and working on it has been a lot of fun for me.

The five posts that received the most hits during the year are: (more…)

Scabby the Rat Gets Some Well-Deserved Attention

Although strikes and other labour-related actions often get negative coverage in the media, occasionally there are light-hearted parts to these events. And one of these is Scabby the Rat, the giant inflatable rat that shows up in front of American workplaces where union members are on strike or locked out.

This week, the VICE website posted a wonderfully entertaining and informative article about Scabby, prompted by a suggestion by one US union leader that Scabby no longer reflected unionism’s new “value proposition”. (more…)

Jonah Lehrer’s 2nd Book Pulled by Publisher

Despite Jonah Lehrer’s very public and very lucrative apology last week for his plagiarism problems, those problems don’t seem to be going away.

Michael Moynihan, the journalist who uncovered Lehrer’s fabricated Bob Dylan quotes, has posted a story today that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Lehrer’s book publisher, has removed How We Decide from sale. How We Decide was Lehrer’s second book, published before the (in)famous Imagine; I’ve written about some of the other problems with that book here.

The reason given for taking the book off the market was an “internal review” that uncovered “significant problems”. The “problems” weren’t specified by the publisher, but Moynihan points to a set of quotes in How We Decide allegedly from an interview conducted by Lehrer specifically for the book, but which bear a remarkable similarity to 20-year-old quotes on Wikipedia about the same issue.

The Knight Foundation, which hired Lehrer for the $20,000 speech, later apologized for the decision to pay him that much (although they didn’t ask him to return his speaking fee, at least not publicly). I’m thinking that right about now they’re probably really sorry…..

Books about Women and Careers: Is This Progress?

This year is the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Feminine Mystique, the revolutionary book by Betty Friedan that made many women in the 1960s realize they weren’t the only ones dissatisfied with their lives and with what society expected of them. (In this excellent interview,  sociologist Stephanie Coontz talks about her book A Strange Stirring which explores how influential The Feminine Mystique was.)

This week I read I Shouldn’t Be Telling You This, a career book for women written by Kate White, the former editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. (more…)

Jonah Lehrer Apologizes (And Gets $20,000)

Jonah Lehrer – the author whose misadventures in plagiarism I’ve written about in several previous posts – is back.

On Feb. 12, Lehrer gave a speech on “bad decision-making” at an event sponsored by the Knight Foundation. According to this story, for appearing at the event – his first major public appearance since last July – Lehrer received a fee of $20,000. The reaction to this news has not been positive. In fact, not very positive at all.

Following up on suggestions like this one, a writer for Forbes magazine phoned Lehrer to ask if he would consider donating the $20,000 fee to charity. Lehrer hung up on him.

You can read the transcript of Lehrer’s speech here. At least this time he gave full references for his sources.

UPDATE: The Knight Foundation has apologized for paying Lehrer $20,000 for his speech. However, it is not clear whether the foundation is actually cancelling the payment or asking for it to be repaid.

A great idea from the Intern Labor Rights group.

David Yamada's avatarMinding the Workplace

Who says labor activists can’t deliver a message with a stylish wink? At last week’s New York Fashion Week, members of Intern Labor Rights — an outgrowth of the Occupy Wall Street Arts & Labor group — distributed colorful swag bags to attendees. Tyler McCall, blogging for Fashionista, got one:

Frankly, I was expecting lame pantyhose or maybe chapstick or something when I opened the box. Instead, there was a pin that read “Pay Your Interns” and some folded up literature about why unpaid internships are wrong and how you can get involved in the movement.

Here’s what she found inside:

“The Devil Pays Nada”

The fashion industry, you see, is notorious for using unpaid interns (among other exploited workers) on an international scale. And Fashion Week is a great event for reaching a global audience. Here’s what Intern Labor Rights had to say in announcing their swag bag promotion:

We…

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Making a Living as an Independent Musician: An Interview with Shane Wiebe

I often talk about the music industry when I teach population ecology theory, because the music industry is an almost perfect example of that theory in action. A large group of organizations – the major record companies and retailers – used to set the norm for how things were done, and controlled the allocation of essential resources (money, talent, production and distribution channels) so as to maintain their dominant position. But those organizations felt so secure in their dominance that they chose to ignore new entrants – independent musicians and record companies – that used other resources (the Internet, online sales, new distribution formats, easy-to-use music production software) to establish themselves. And what happened? The organizational field shifted and redefined itself, and the traditional organizations couldn’t adapt quickly enough to survive – as demonstrated by such recent events as the 91-year-old British record store chain HMV struggling with massive financial debt.

I wanted to write a blog entry about how the music industry has radically evolved, even within the past few years. But rather than looking at these developments from outside, I thought it would be more interesting to hear the perspective of an artist who has experienced some of these changes first-hand. (more…)

Creativity and Research, Part II: Cookbooks and Cancer

In my last post, I wrote about the #overlyhonestmethods discussion on Twitter and its insights into creative (and funny) ways that researchers deal with unexpected problems in their work. While I was following #overlyhonestmethods, I came across a mention of a creative-sounding study reviewing the research on whether specific foods can cause cancer. Since the media regularly covers cancer research – and often makes wrong or misleading reports about it – I found the text of the whole article to see what it had to say. When I saw that the article had the awesome title of Is Everything We Eat Associated With Cancer? A Systematic Cookbook Review, I knew I had to write something about it. (more…)

Creativity and Research, Part I: #overlyhonestmethods

One of the most fun parts of my job is doing research. There are times when I have to remind myself of that, like the recent Saturday night I spent recoding 800 pieces of data because one statistical program wouldn’t talk to another one. But I really enjoy finding something that makes me wonder, (more…)