The Father of Molecular Gastronomy Whips Up a New Formula

via Wired: "The name has since been applied to the kitchen wizardry of chefs like el Bulli's Ferran Adria and Alinea's Grant Achatz. But This is interested in basic culinary knowledge — not flashy preparations — and has continued to accumulate his precisions, which now number some 25,000. He also has received a PhD in the field he created, served as an adviser to the French minister of education, published several books, lectured internationally, and even been invited to join the lab of one of his fans, Nobel Prize winning molecular chemist Jean-Marie Lehn.

In 2001, This came up with a formal system of classification for what happens when foods are mixed, baked, whipped, fried, sauteed in lime juice, and so forth. It shows, for example, how the 451 classical French sauces break down into 23 distinct types. More important, the system allows the creation and pairing of billions of novel, potentially tasty dishes."

Self-centered cultures narrow your viewpoint

via http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12247-selfcentered-cultures-narrow-your-viewpoint.html

When it comes to putting yourself in the shoes of others, cultures that emphasise interdependence over individualism may have the upper hand.

In a new psychological experiment, Chinese students outperformed their US counterparts when ask to infer another person's perspective. The researchers say the findings help explain how misunderstandings can occur in cross-cultural communication.

In the experiment, psychologists Boaz Keysar and Shali Wu at the University of Chicago, Illinois, US, recruited 40 students. Half of the volunteers were non-Asians who had grown up in the US, and the other half were native Mandarin speakers who had very recently emigrated from various parts of China.

The volunteers played a game in which they had to follow the instructions of a person sitting across the table from them, an individual known as the 'director'.

The US volunteers were also slower in reacting when asked to move an object when there was a duplicate in the grid that only they could see. They generally took about 30% longer to complete such instructions from the director.

In contrast, such duplicate objects did not slow the speed at which Chinese participants responded.

Keysar believes the Chinese students had an easier time understanding the director’s perspective because they come from a more collectivist society than their US counterparts. He speculates, for example, that compared with children in China, youngsters in the US are more likely to feel that it is "all about them".

In another example, he describes how a Texas corporation "aiming to improve productivity, told its employees to look in the mirror and say 'I am beautiful' 100 times before coming to work. In contrast, a Japanese supermarket instructed its employees to begin their day by telling each other 'you are beautiful'."

Nisbett adds that in some Asian cultures people use less blunt language, making it necessary for them to read between the lines, and imagine the perspective of the individual with whom they are speaking.

Parental Consent in India

Fast Company:
For Hiring

"When Himabindu Marichetty showed up to talk about a job at software development firm Virtusa in Hyderabad, India, the 24-year-old college grad wore a traditional Asian outfit called a salwar kameez and brought a resume, her handbag--and her father.

Marichetty's father didn't negotiate for her, but he did meet and question Virtusa executives to learn firsthand about the company's corporate culture and his daughter's career potential. He was impressed. After a chat with dad, Marichetty accepted a job at Virtusa as a quality-assurance engineer. 'We have more of a bond with our parents,' she says. 'They definitely help us take the right path.' Adds her father, M. Rama Rao: 'I would be successful as a father only when I fulfill all my responsibilities, and one of them is to make sure that [my children] are successful in their career.'

Marichetty isn't a freak job candidate. In many Indian families, multiple generations live under a single roof, making cooperative decisions in matters both social and economic. And children, even well into their twenties and thirties, typically defer to the authority of their elders. So parents--and especially fathers--can take on influential roles in directing young people's careers. (Think an amped-up version of the United States' emerging class of 'helicopter parents.')"

And for retention:

PRC, an outsourcing call center owned by Barry Diller's InterActiveCorp, loses as many as 37% of its 3,800 Indian workers after a year. But it managed to hold onto Bhupender Mehta, a 23-year-old customer-service rep, after he considered taking another job. How? Mehta, who lives with his wife, brother, and retired parents in a three-bedroom flat in New Delhi, said his supervisor called Mehta's wife, prompting a bigger family-wide discussion.

"Finally, my father gave me the verdict," he says. "'No, you're not leaving. Why leave when this company treats you so well?'"

The key to winning dad over? In the previous year, he had received an engraved PRC pen, congratulatory letters for Mehta's good work, free movie tickets to Superman, and use of the company gym and pool--the latter of which is a scarce and typically expensive luxury in India. Says the younger Mehta: "The pool made a big difference."

At I.B.M., a Smarter Way to Outsource - New York Times

via New York Times: "To compete, companies like I.B.M. have to move up the economic ladder to do more complicated work, as do entire Western economies and individual workers. “Once you start moving up the occupational chains, the work is not as rules-based,” said Frank Levy, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “People are doing more custom work that varies case by case.”

In the field of technology services, Mr. Levy said, the essential skill is “often a lot more about business knowledge than it is about software technology — and it’s a lot harder to ship that kind of work overseas.”

The offshore specialists in India are learning that lesson. As they increasingly compete for higher-end work, the Indian companies are hiring thousands of workers this year in the United States, adding an odd twist to the offshoring trend. Tata alone plans to recruit 1,000 workers in America, said Surya Kant, president of the company’s American unit, for “the near-shore work that requires regular contact with clients in person.”"

The utility project I.B.M. is doing in Texas offers a glimpse of the global formula. The far-flung work team includes research scientists in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., and Austin, Tex.; software developers in Pune and Bangalore, India; engineering equipment and quality-control specialists in Miami and New York; and utility experts and software designers like Mr. Taft that have come from Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Raleigh, N.C., and elsewhere.

I.B.M. plans to use the skills learned and software written for the smart-grid project in work with utility clients around the world. In the services field, these are deemed “reusable assets,” reducing costs in the future.

Return of the Tribes

via the Weekly Standard:

Monotheism replaced Rome's law codes with the law of God. The first near-success of globalization was the bewildering survival and spread of Christianity, the transitional faith between the exclusive tribal monotheism of Judaism and the universal aspirations of Islam. Beginning as a cult uncertain of the legitimacy of proselytizing among those of different inheritances, Christianity quickly developed a taste for salesmanship, adapting its message from one of local destiny to one of universal possibility. Furthermore, its message to the poor (a constituency contemporary globalization ignores) had as exemplary an appeal among the less-fortunate of the bygone Mediterranean world as it does today in sub-Saharan Africa. Christianity was an outsider's religion co-opted by rulers, while Islam meant to rule--and include--all social classes from the years of its foundation.

Globalization really got moving with the advent of Islam. Open to converts from its earliest days, Islam moved rapidly, in just a few centuries, from voluntary through coerced to forced conversions. While the latter were never universally demanded, they were frequent (as were forced conversions to Christianity elsewhere). The immediate and enduring conflict between Christianity and Islam involved different visions of globalization, a competition of quality, design, and power (think of it as Toyota vs. Ford in a battle for souls). Those Christian and Muslim visions continue to experience drastic mutations in the battle for new and local loyalties, having now reached every habitable continent. Their success has blinded us to their weakness: Neither religion has been able to subdue their old antiglobalist nemesis: magic.

When we speak of religion--that greatest of all strategic factors--our vocabulary is so limited that we conflate radically different impulses, needs, and practices. When breaking down African populations for statistical purposes, for example, demographers are apt to present us with a portrait of country X as 45 percent Christian, 30 percent Muslim, and 25 percent animist/native religion. Such figures are wildly deceptive (as honest missionaries will admit). African Christians or Muslims rarely abandon tribal practices altogether, shopping daily between belief systems for the best results. Sometimes, the pastor's counsel helps; other times it's the shaman who delivers.

The Anglican priest in South Africa decries witchcraft, but fails to see that his otherworldly belief system offers no adequate substitute for solving certain types of daily problems. Quite simply, Big Religion and local cults are inherently different commodities. From Brazil to Borneo, local Christians don't see imported and traditional belief systems as mutually exclusive, any more than a kitchen fortunate enough to have a refrigerator should therefore be denied a stove.

There's an enormous difference between Big Religions--Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and the others--and the local cults that endure long beyond their predicted disappearance. This distinction is critical, not only in itself, but also because it is emblematic of the obstacles that local identities present to globalization as we imagine it. Big Religion interests itself in a world beyond this world, while the emphasis of local faiths has always been on magic (bending aspects of the natural world to the will of the practitioner of hermetic knowledge). Magic affects daily life in the here and now, and its force and appeal can be far more potent than our rationalist worldview accepts: What we cannot explain, we mock. (An advantage Christianity enjoys among the poor of the developing world is the image of Jesus the Conjure-Man, turning water into wine and walking on water--he's a more-promising shaman than Muhammad.)

Another aspect of identity that we, the inheritors of proselytizing world religions, fail to grasp is that local cults are exclusive. They not only do not seek new members, but can't imagine integrating outsiders (the politicized tribal beliefs of the Asante in Ghana are a limited exception, since they were devised to confirm the subjugation of neighboring tribes). Cult beliefs are bound to the local soil, the trees, the waters. Tribal religions are about place and person, an identity bound to a specific environment. While slaves did take voodoo practices with them to the new world, the rituals immediately began to mutate under the stress of transplantation. Tribal religions form an invisible defensive wall, as local practices do today, from the Andes to the Caucasus.

Impact on business? Decentralized P2P global tribe networks.

Love on Campus

via The American Scholar - By William Deresiewicz: "Americans’ traditional resentment of hierarchy and hostility toward intellect have intensified since World War II and particularly since the 1960s. Elites have been discredited, the notion of high culture dethroned, the means of communication decentralized. Public discourse has become more demotic; families, churches, and other institutions more democratic. The existence of academia, an institution predicated on intellectual hierarchy, irritates Americans’ insistence on equality, their feeling that intellect constitutes a contemptible kind of advantage. At the same time, as American society has become more meritocratic, its economy more technocratic, people want that advantage for themselves or their children. With the U.S. News rankings and the annual admissions frenzy, universities are playing an ever-more conspicuous role in creating the larger social hierarchy that no one acknowledges but everyone wants to climb. It’s no wonder that people resent the gatekeepers and enjoy seeing them symbolically humiliated."

That is why, for the Greeks, the teacher’s relationship with the child was regarded as more valuable and more intimate than the parents’. Your parents bring you into nature, but your teacher brings you into culture. Natural transmission is easy; any animal can do it. Cultural transmission is hard; it takes a teacher. But Socrates also inaugurated a new idea about what teaching means. His students had already been educated into their culture by the time they got to him. He wanted to educate them out of it, teach them to question its values. His teaching wasn’t cultural, it was counter-cultural.

Teaching, as Neil Postman says, is a subversive activity — all the more so today, when children are marinated in cultural messages from the moment they’re born. It no longer takes any training to learn to bow to your city’s gods (sex or children, money or nation). But it often takes a teacher to help you question those gods. The teacher’s job, in Keats’s terms, is to point you through the vale of soul-making. We’re born once, into nature and into the culture that quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we’re granted such grace, we’re born again. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his mortal soul?

Patriotism's Secret History

via The Nation:

Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by a leading Christian socialist, Francis Bellamy, who was fired from his Boston ministry for his sermons depicting Jesus as a socialist. Bellamy penned the Pledge of Allegiance for Youth's Companion, a magazine for young people published in Boston with a circulation of about 500,000.

A few years earlier, the magazine had sponsored a largely successful campaign to sell American flags to public schools. In 1891 the magazine hired Bellamy--whose first cousin Edward Bellamy was the famous socialist author of the utopian novel Looking Backward--to organize a public relations campaign to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America by promoting use of the flag in public schools. Bellamy gained the support of the National Education Association, along with President Benjamin Harrison and Congress, for a national ritual observance in the schools, and he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance as part of the program's flag salute ceremony.

Bellamy thought such an event would be a powerful expression on behalf of free public education. Moreover, he wanted all the schoolchildren of America to recite the pledge at the same moment. He hoped the pledge would promote a moral vision to counter the individualism embodied in capitalism and expressed in the climate of the Gilded Age, with its robber barons and exploitation of workers. Bellamy intended the line "One nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all" to express a more collective and egalitarian vision of America.

Chaohua Wang : China Diary

via LRB |

Two opposing interpretations of the movement of 1989 have gained ground, mainly in the West but also to some extent in China. The first is socio-economic. In early 1988, the government pushed forcefully to free prices, but the inflation that followed provoked such strong reactions throughout the country that it was compelled to reinstitute food rationing in the big cities in January 1989. Some American scholars have argued that this was a factor in the massive social unrest that manifested itself in the spring of 1989. In China itself, thinkers on the New Left have taken this argument a step further, seeing the military crackdown of 4 June as essentially paving the way for the marketisation of the economy, by breaking resistance to the lifting of price controls (they were removed again, this time successfully, in the early 1990s). According to this view, the driving force behind the mass movement, even its inspiration, was the refusal of reforms that would deprive the population of established standards of collective welfare. What the gunshots in Beijing shattered were the last hopes for the ‘iron rice bowl’ of socialism, clearing the way to a fully-fledged capitalism in China.

Another school of thought turns this argument upside down. In this account, the mass movement, far from clinging to the socialist past, looked boldly ahead to a liberal future. The growing number of banners written in English, and the styrofoam statue of a ‘Goddess of Democracy’, modelled partly on the Statue of Liberty, erected on Tiananmen in the last days of May, all show that America was the demonstrators’ real dream: not the iron rice bowl, but the market and the ballot box. Last month, George Bush presided over the erection in Washington of a monument to the Victims of Communism, in the form of a scaled-down bronze replica of the styrofoam goddess.

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

Psychology Today: "Why most suicide bombers are Muslim, beautiful people have more daughters, humans are naturally polygamous, sexual harassment isn't sexist, and blonds are more attractive."

Talk About a Gender Stereotype -- Holden 2007 (705): 1 -- ScienceNOW

via ScienceNOW:

From old adages to modern pop psychology, the notion that women yak more than men is pervasive. But according to a new study, the biggest to date, the two sexes are in fact pretty much neck and neck. Girls have a jump on boys in verbal fluency early in life, but research is confusing on the subject of whether they actually talk more than boys do as adults. One oft-cited statistic, whose origins are shrouded in the mists of time, has it that the average woman utters 20,000 words a day, compared to only 7000 issuing from the laconic male. But until now, there has been "no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for [an] extended period of time,” says psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin.

To remedy that, Pennebaker, along with Arizona psychologist Matthias Mehl and other colleagues equipped 396 college students--210 of them women--for several days with voice recorders that automatically turned on every 12.5 minutes to record for 30 seconds during their waking hours. All words spoken by the wearer were transcribed, counted, and extrapolated to estimate a daily word count. Pennebaker says the findings, appearing in today's issue of Science, should put the myths to rest: Both men and women averaged roughly 16,000 words a day. And there was no appreciable international difference either, at least in North America.

Perpective - You are nothing

"Let’s say there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. And let’s say there are 100 billion galaxies in our universe. At any given moment, then, assuming ultra-massive and dwarf galaxies average each other out, there might be 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe. That’s 1.0 X 10 to the twenty-second power. That’s 10 sextillion. Here’s a way of looking at it: there are enough stars in the universe that if everybody on Earth were charged with naming his or her share, we’d each get to name a trillion and a half of them.

via http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/308

Social Networks vs. Online Communities

Collaboration Loop - Social Networks vs. Online Communities: "Thus a community is based on fairly intense interactions between its members, while a network is not. According to Ross Mayfield, the founder and CEO of Socialtext, communities are:

* Top-down
* Place-centric
* Moderator controlled
* Topic driven
* Centralized
* Architected

While Networks are:

* Bottom-up
* People-centric
* User controlled
* Decentralized
* Context driven
* Self-organizing"

Drinkers in Korea Dial for Designated Drivers

via New York Times:

Korean replacement drivers - they drive drunks home in the drunk's own car.

Their work has become such an essential part of life in Seoul and other major cities of South Korea that the national statistical office last year began monitoring the price of replacement driver services as an element in calculating the benchmark consumer price index. An estimated 100,000 replacement drivers handle 700,000 customers a day across the country, the number increasing by 30 percent on Fridays, according to the Korea Service Driver Society, a lobby for replacement drivers.

Easily translatable to other countries. India already has something like this.

Blackbeard's Lessons on Management

via The New Yorker: "“The Republic of Pirates,” a new book by Colin Woodard, make clear, pirate ships limited the power of captains and guaranteed crew members a say in the ship’s affairs. The surprising thing is that, even with this untraditional power structure, pirates were, in Leeson’s words, among “the most sophisticated and successful criminal organizations in history.”"

Leeson is fascinated by pirates because they flourished outside the state—and, therefore, outside the law. They could not count on higher authorities to insure that people would live up to promises or obey rules.

[P]irate ships developed models that in many ways anticipated those of later Western democracies. First, pirates adopted a system of divided and limited power. Captains had total authority during battle, when debate and disagreement were likely to be both inefficient and dangerous. Outside of battle, the quartermaster, not the captain, was in charge. On most ships, the distribution of booty was set down in writing, and it was relatively equal; pirate captains often received only twice as many shares as crewmen. (Woodward writes that Privateer captains typically received fourteen times as much loot as crewmen.) The most powerful check on captains and quartermasters was that they did not hold their positions by natural right or blood or success in combat; the crew elected them and could depose them. And when questions arose about the rules that governed behavior on board, interpretation was left not to the captain but to a jury of crewmen.

[T]here is an abiding fear among executives and management theorists alike that moving too far beyond traditional top-down models, or putting too many restrictions on C.E.O. authority, will ultimately lead to inefficiencies and chaos. In that sense, pirate governance, peculiar as it may sound, offers an intriguing example of how limits on executive power can actually make an enterprise more successful and, because workers are convinced they’re being treated fairly, can deepen their commitment.