Links - 10th September 2019 (2)

aPORKalypse DINNER – Ownself Make Chef - "Our pork themed dinner got its start in 2011 at The Wok & Barrel with 6 courses of pork, even dessert. It has evolved over the years and now stands at 10 courses of divine pork delights at Ownself Make Chef.At 10 courses of PORK, aPORKalypse XII promises to go HOG THE WAY."

Music May Orchestrate Better Brain Connectivity in Preterm Infants - "Preterm babies who listened to music in the neonatal intensive care unit had brain activity that more closely resembled that of full-term babies"

Sing Solo for Higher Fidelity - "we tend to adjust our own singing pitch to accommodate others. And now scientists in the U.K. have found that even trained choral singers will follow their fellow choir members. But not necessarily in the right direction... when one partner veered off pitch, the other singer followed her, perhaps to compensate for the error—meaning even though they weren’t singing the pitch as written, the resulting duet was more harmonious... The results support a common practice in choirs: put weak singers next to strong ones, so they can follow their pitch"

Weekday–Weekend Sleep Imbalance Bad for Blood Sugar Regulation - "Few things are more satisfying than sleeping late on weekends. But though the extra z’s may improve your mood, they do not appear to improve your health. Because a new study shows that so-called “recovery sleep” cannot reset the body’s metabolic clock…and may actually lead to some serious health issues."

Grandma's Influence Is Good for Grandkids - "“Families with grandmothers alive were larger by about two and the survival of these grandchildren to age 15 was much improved.”This beneficial effect was only seen when the matriarchs lived nearby. Which suggests that grandmothers help by playing an active role in their grandchildren’s lives. Unfortunately, that role is tougher for them to fulfill as they get older... the benefits associated with having a grandmother on hand depended on her age. Once grandma hit 75, the grandchild survival benefit disappeared—and then some.“In other words, it was better for grandchildren to have no living grandmother at all than it was to live with an old one or one that was in poor health.”"

Another reason mosquitoes bite you? They're thirsty - "when mosquitoes have adequate hydration, they bite much less frequently... It really feels like this throws a monkey wrench into our best-laid plans for mosquito control, as if the little imps are gaming us. Give them water and they lay their eggs in it; take it away and they come directly for us"

Tim Bouverie on Appeasement During WW2 | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "Despite the euphoria, which greeted it at the beginning, swiftly realized to have been a humiliation. People are incredibly ecstatic that Chamberlain has brought back peace, and that they're not going to have to wear gas masks, and jump into trenches because German bombers are coming overhead. But very soon, they realized, well, why were we digging trenches? Why were we trying on gas masks, we were doing this because we were being threatened by a bully, and we've given in to the bully, and this is something that Britain hasn't historically done, we've let down our allies, the Czechs and the French, and we have no real guarantee beyond a tiny piece of paper, that there aren't going to be further demands, which are going to put us in a similar situation. So it lowers British prestige. And crucially, it tells Stalin that the Western powers cannot be trusted. And so the Soviets begin to think about doing a deal with their previous arch enemies, the Nazis"

AC Grayling on the history of philosophy | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "You can reduce philosophy to two great questions. One of them is, what exists? What is reality? What is the world? And the other one is, what matters in the world? What's the value in the world? Now, these two questions are obviously too big to be answered just by themselves. So you have to break them down. And it's in the breaking down of these questions that you get into more particular questions… It was also, happened to generate these ways of thinking about the problems that have allowed their own special disciplines to break away and become independent. So for example, in the 16th and 17th centuries, this question about the nature of reality gave rise to natural science. In the 18th century gave rise to psychology. In the 19th century to Sociology and empirical linguistics. In the 20th century, philosophy has contributed enormously to the development of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. So you can see philosophy is very consequential. It gives birth to almost all of the great special inquiries. But still, the fundamental questions remain. So it both changes. And it stays the same"

An Indian Cricket Team in Imperial Britain | History Extra Podcast - History Extra - "There's a certain radical kind of nationalism eschewing the, you know, the politics of the Congress, which was seen as moderate. Too mendicant, too based, you know, too, focused on simply petitioning and praying the British to, you know, cast an eye over their grievances. Now, the idea was, the British can only be chucked out of India by using force. And, and so the bomb and the gun become the, the favorite tools of resistance. So between 1907 and 1909, the political climate in India goes, grows quite dark. Because, of course, these attempts to assassinate British officials and throw bombs at them and so on, is met with growing repression. So it's in this context that you have a bid to send an Indian cricket team again, but to establish and show to the British, that India would be a loyal part of the British Empire. So it's being championed by the moderate elements, those who see themselves as British Indians, who want to emphasize the loyalty of India to the British Empire, because the reason they're worried is that the most spectacular instance of violence happens not in India, it happens in London. You have the secretary, one of the people who's working at the India office, for you know, which is headed by the Secretary of State for India. A man named William Curzon Wyllie is assassinated. And he, of course, being an old India hand, he's assassinated by a young Indian Punjabi named Madan Lal Dhingra, who, of course, is then executed at London's Pentonville Prison"

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Wednesday's business with Dominic O'Connell - "I'd start on the base of all our experience with Boris as Mayor of London was positive, he was pro business, he was interested in people, he was interested in talent, interested in skills, and he used to appear at all the key business events… I think that F business was nonsense, that was just a word in a day"

BBC World Service - The World This Week, Hope dawns for Afghanistan - "A country and an economy as important as Turkey needs an independent central bank and quite clearly now, with the first sacking of a central bank governor since 1981, Turkey no longer has that."

Escape The Echo Chamber - Posts - "I'm sorry I was born white and privileged. It disgusts me. And I feel so much shame"
"Emmy and Golden Globe winning actress Rosanna Arquette has formally apologized for being white and privileged.
She wants you to know she is disgusted and ashamed for her skin color and wealth."
Are liberals still pretending this is not about guilt and shaming? One once claimed to me that all liberals were doing was saying you were stepping on their feet/others' feet and you should stop stepping on them

MGAG - Posts - "DO NOT OPEN BOOKLET UNTIL INSTRUCTED (but while you are waiting, why not learn how to draw a monkey?)"
"Universiti Malaysia Perlis seems lit"

Checkmate to deliberate practice: the case of Magnus Carlsen - "The role of practice in the acquisition of expertise has been a key research question at least since Bryan and Harter's (1899) study on expertise in Morse telegraphy, which proposed that it takes 10 years to become an expert. The framework of deliberate practice (Ericsson et al., 1993) has taken an extreme position by denying the role of talent in most domains and stating that superior performance is an increasing monotonic function of deliberate practice—the more goal-oriented practice, the higher the level of skill. For example, Ericsson et al. (1993) argue that “individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice” (p. 392). The deliberate practice framework has captured the imagination of the popular press, as can be seen by the publication of several pop-science books such as Talent is Overrated (Colvin, 2008), Outliers (Gladwell, 2008) and Bounce (Syed, 2011).In recent years, this framework has been criticized in academic circles; for example, in retrospective studies, the amount of deliberate practice accounts for only about one third of the variance in expertise in music and in chess (Hambrick et al., 2014). More naturalistic data also question the validity of the framework. As top performers have spent similar number of hours to improve and maintain their skills, the fact that individuals such as Roger Federer in tennis, Michael Jordan in basketball, Usain Bolt in sprint or Michael Schumacher in auto racing have so outrageously dominated their sport throws considerable doubt on the deliberate practice framework. A particularly spectacular example is provided by chess grandmaster Magnus Carlsen (Norway)... on average, Carlsen practiced statistically significantly fewer years than the other players. (Note also that, for the players in Table Table1,1, the correlation between rating and the number of years of practice is negative (r = −0.21) but not statistically significant (p = 0.55))... Together with scientific research, the case of Magnus Carlsen demonstrates that deliberate practice is necessary, but not sufficient, for achieving high levels of expert performance (Campitelli and Gobet, 2011)."
So much for the 10,000 hour rule

Practising For 10,000 Hours May Not Turn You Into a Star After All, Says New Study - "Psychologists Brooke Macnamara and Megha Maitra, from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, decided to put this to the test with their own group of violin-playing volunteers – but they found practice didn't have as much of an impact as we might think."The idea [of 10,000 hours] has become really entrenched in our culture, but it's an oversimplification"... "When it comes to human skill, a complex combination of environmental factors, genetic factors and their interactions explains the performance differences across people."... Most of the "best" violinists in the study actually practised less often than the average practice time for the "good" group... The original study identified "complete correspondence between the skill level of the groups and their average accumulation of practice time alone with the violin"."

BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Tuesday's business with Dharshini David - "‘The women counterport monitors senior roles in FTSE350 businesses and for the fourth year, it's found that progress has been pretty woeful… The report is produced by pipeline. It calls for FTSE350 companies to have minimum targets of 33% female representation on their executive committee and at least one female executive director, and also for pension fund managers to take those targets into account when investing. Well, Lorna Fitzsimmons is the co founder of Pipeline... It makes commercial sense to have greater gender diversity?’
‘Well, the research has been emphatic for quite some time. And if you just take a four year analysis of purely the value of women on the executive committees of FTSE 350, it is emphatic. If you have over 25% women on your executive committee, your profit margins are almost three times higher than firms with all male executives. And it’s emphatic year on year on year... we specialize in big data to prove to companies exactly that the outcomes, how do you get to the outcome’"
Big data is useless if you conflate correlation and causation. Hopefully when they do reports which don't touch on politically sensitive topics, their models are more robust

mirax on Twitter - "The ascendance of Priti Patel and Sajid Javid to positions of power is only a sign of progress if you see tokenism (in which people of colour must assimilate to oppressive ideologies in return for representation) itself as progressive.I don't🤷🏾‍♀️"
"Drivel. Self-serving definition of oppressive politics and lefty racism. It must grate that the Tories produce women PM's and minority leaders without even grandstanding about racial politics and via merit."
Also in comments to original tweet: "Minorities no doing so hot GOTTA BE RACISM
Minorities that doing well GOTTA UNCLE TOMS
And that folks is the closed circular ideology of a demagogue."