November 12, 2006
Five Rules for telling a Joke
- Pick your moments. It's easiest to tell a joke when everyone's relaxed and enjoying themselves. Telling a joke to relieve tension is a high-risk strategy, but potentially hilarious. Besides, there'll be other funerals.
- Know where you're going - the punchline - before you start
- Don't be tempted to over-elaborate. Eddie Izzard makes it look easy, but remember that one man's surreal flight of fancy is another man's rambling, incoherent humiliation.
- Project a demeanour of relaxed confidence - it gives your listener permission to laugh. You can try deadpan, but social joke-telling usually requires the teller to laugh too.
- Enjoy it. If your entire self-esteem is resting on whether people laugh at your joke, then you're doing it for the wrong reasons. On the other hand, you are showing signs of the borderline personality disorder that characterises all the best comedians, so perhaps you should consider telling jokes for a living.
Via Mind Hacks- How to be funny
Related;
Is this the perfect comedy face?
The Naked Jape: Uncovering the Hidden World of Jokes by Jimmy Carr, Lucy Greeves
September 14, 2006
A Concept Map of Microsoft Office 2007
A cool concept map of MS Office 2007 resources by MS Office evangelist, Don Campbell.
August 16, 2006
This and That across the Web
Some things that caught my eye across the web;
F. A. Hayek, intellectual father of the Wikipedia
Getting Things Done Software Systems
Fallacious arguments for low levels of tariff protection
Southern bluefin tuna & Japan
Double-Tongued Dictionary
Jill Carroll's story
Some TV is worth watching
The Relentless Application of Self-Interest
Survey of Professional Forecasters
Supply-side Economics at 25
WATCHING LEBANON-Washington’s interests in Israel’s war by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Albert Hirschman
What an Electric Vehicle Costs
How do oil price shocks affect the economy?
An update on the Chicago Climate Exchange
Excel in-cell bar graph
Errors in economics a reason for modesty: Baumol
Health Care Costs
The trade balance, the current account balance, and other definitions
A Roundup of Interesting Economics Links
Liberal agonies
Oil Shock; Micro and Macro
Retail Sales and Nominal GDP
Times Cover Art
August 12, 2006
How to Improve Your Memory
“The keys are to improve your imagination and to improve your ability to associate and locate things. When you do that you are automatically training your creativity and memory, enabling yourself to focus and concentrate more. It's simply a matter of sticking to that task, as any athlete would, so that you become fit in that area.”
-Tony Buzan
“He was often so preoccupied with ideas that he forgot what he was doing. Once, reportedly, he was giving a tour of a Glasgow tannery, and he absent-mindedly fell right into the tannery pit, from which his friends extricated him”
-Jim Powell, referring to absent-mindedness of Adam Smith
Some techniques for memory improvement via BBC (thanks to Mind Hacks);
Memory Master training –a free course
Across the Blogs; PsyBlog, Memory Olympiads, Free Memory Improvement, MindWare
For Comment; As I don’t have the patience to try any of techniques above, tell us those who have tried any of the techniques above and have seen even a marginal improvement in their memory.
July 18, 2006
Fun with Google
In an earlier post I linked to the book 55 Ways to Have Fun with Google. Amongst many others, it talks about the following fun application of the Google Maps; If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop?
Another cool idea is the Wayfaring Map which is dedicated to academic podcasts across the world ( via Cyberlibris blog)
Related;
From Kevin Kelly; Google SketchUp, Google Answers, Google Hacks, The Search
Eric Schmidt, Google CEO talks at SIEPR
July 1, 2006
Men go to meetings, women go to ….
According to a recent survey,
“Of workers who attend meetings each week, fully 75 percent say that those gatherings could be more effective, the survey showed. That means a lot of unproductive time, because 91 million workers spend time in meetings each week. For most, it's one to eight hours, but a hardy 11 percent of men (men are far more meeting-prone than women) somehow survive 13 or more hours of meetings a week.”
Here is a take on the survey from a woman.
Related;
Actionable Learning: A Handbook for Capacity Building Through Case Based Learning
See under Appendix 3- Team Skills for Fundamentals of Meeting Management
June 3, 2006
The Big Bang to MS Office
PC Magazine has a review of the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta 2 version, one of features being a blogging tool for MS Word;
“Like Google's free Blogger for Word add-in, Office's equivalent new feature works with Blogger, but it also works, of course, with Microsoft's own blogging services. You use the File/New menu to open a new blog entry; specify your blog service, username, and password, and then create a new entry or download existing ones for editing.”
Edward Tufte might faint after seeing the chart in the figure as an example of good graphing feature of the Excel 2007.
Related Links;
- Go for a video tour of the new interface. Some ‘official’ blogs covering it; Jense Harris and Microsoft Excel 2007. The talk is more about focusing on results.
- Junk Chart have more some of the new graph features in Excel.
- J-Walk Blog; Those who will have the most difficulty adapting are the great masses of office workers who have learned how to perform a dozen or so common tasks in Excel or Word, and they do them day after day. These people, for the most part, will experience serious frustration. In many cases, these workers don't even look at the "big picture." Rather, their task is broken down into a series of very specific steps that they've learned over the years. What happens when those steps no longer work? …There are millions of customized Office apps in use that use toolbars and/or custom menus. If you load such a file in Office 2007, your familiar menu modifications and toolbars do not appear. Well, they are still there, but the user must know to click the Add-Ins tab. Then, all of the toolbars and menu modifications are visible, stuffed into a single unorganized chunk. Toolbars are no longer free-floating, and you may need to do some serious scrolling to even find the toolbar button you're looking for. And once a toolbar is displayed, there's no way to hide it.
May 29, 2006
Time Management Advice from Economists
“A national chain of hamburger restaurants takes its name from Wimpy, Popeye’s portly friend with a voracious appetite but small exchequer, who made famous the line, “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” Wimpy nicely exemplifies the problems of “intertemporal choice” that intrigue behavioral economists like David Laibson. “There’s a fundamental tension, in humans and other animals, between seizing available rewards in the present, and being patient for rewards in the future,” he says. “It’s radically important. People very robustly want instant gratification right now, and want to be patient in the future. If you ask people, ‘Which do you want right now, fruit or chocolate?’ they say, ‘Chocolate!’ But if you ask, ‘Which one a week from now?’ they will say, ‘Fruit.’ Now we want chocolate, cigarettes, and a trashy movie. In the future, we want to eat fruit, to quit smoking, and to watch Bergman films.” …
Luckily, Odysseus also confronts the problem posed by Wimpy—and Homer’s hero solves the dilemma. The goddess Circe informs Odysseus that his ship will pass the island of the Sirens, whose irresistible singing can lure sailors to steer toward them and onto rocks. The Sirens are a marvelous metaphor for human appetite, both in its seductions and its pitfalls. Circe advises Odysseus to prepare for temptations to come: he must order his crew to stopper their ears with wax, so they cannot hear the Sirens’ songs, but he may hear the Sirens’ beautiful voices without risk if he has his sailors lash him to a mast, and commands them to ignore his pleas for release until they have passed beyond danger. “Odysseus pre-commits himself by doing this,” Laibson explains. “Binding himself to the mast prevents his future self from countermanding the decision made by his present self.”
- Source: The Marketplace of Perceptions
“My wife would tell you that my life works only because I am a workaholic. But I don't think of myself as a workaholic, and I don't feel like I am working hard. I just really enjoy what I do.”
- Greg Mankiw
“First, the best way to avoid a piled-up in tray is to deal with jobs immediately, either by doing them, or by deciding never to do them. This won’t work for every kind of job, but the more types of jobs you can handle in this way, the better. So to implement this tip you need a way of classifying jobs. One way is by the time they are likely to take (see tip #2). IF you take this approach you can decide to do all 5-minute jobs immediately, or not at all. I prefer to focus on discretionary jobs where an immediate decision not to take the job is feasible. For an academic, refereeing for journals is like this. I try to deal with requests for referee reports in the same week I get them. If I have free time, and the job looks straightforward on a first reading, I try to do it within two days. Editors who are used to waiting for months really love a quick turnaround like this, and I live in hope that it will build up good karma for my own submissions. If I can’t manage a report within a week then, unless the paper looks to be very important, or I am obligated to the journal in question, I reply immediately that I’m not available. Editors usually don’t mind this, especially if I can suggest someone else.”
- John Quggin
“There is always time to do more, most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack.
Do the most important things first in the day and don't let anybody stop you. Estimate "most important" using a zero discount rate. Don't make exceptions. The hours from 7 to 12 are your time to build for the future before the world descends on you.
Some tasks (drawing up outlines?) expand or contract to fill the time you give them. Shove all these into times when you are pressed to do something else very soon.
Each day stop writing just a bit before you have said everything you want to. Better to approach your next writing day "hungry" than to feel "written out." Your biggest enemy is a day spent not writing, not a day spent writing too little.
Blogging builds up good work habits; the deadline is always "now."
- Tyler Cowen’s 5 tips
I would also recommend to read Getting Things Done by David Allen. It’s been more than a year since I started reading the book, still haven’t managed to complete it! As David says managing commitments well requires the implementation of some basic activities and behaviors:
"First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through.Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it.
Third, once you've decided on all the actions you need to take, you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly."
Related:
Dave Pollard has been attempting to implement the ‘Getting Things Done’ system.
43 Folders have more.
Or you might want to try Rumsfeld’s system of information retrieval.