The 007s — Week 11

It's been a tough few months and the longer that I am procrastinating, the more difficult it is getting to rekindle the habit of writing. So, I am going to write a piece every day for the coming 30 days, to bring back my mojo. Currently reading: Sapiens and HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence

Image Source: Creative Boom

• Aspergers Syndrome: I first heard of the developmental disorder: Aspergers Syndrome very recently in Elon Musk’s highly viewed TED Talk. Young people with Asperger’s Syndrome have a difficult time relating to others socially and their behavioral and thinking patterns can be rigid and repetitive. Generally, children and teens with Asperger’s Syndrome can speak with others and can perform fairly well in their school work. However, they have trouble understanding social situations and subtle forms of communication like body language, humor, and sarcasm. They might also think and talk a lot about one topic or interest or only want to do a small range of activities. These interests can become obsessive and interfere with everyday life. Most Aspergers Syndrome cases are diagnosed between the ages of five and nine, with some diagnosed as early as age three.

• Short Run Phillips Curve: The Phillips curve argues that unemployment and inflation are inversely related: as levels of unemployment decrease, inflation increases. The relationship, however, is not linear. Graphically, this means the short-run Phillips curve is L-shaped (refer to the diagram below). A.W. Phillips published his observations about the inverse correlation between wage changes and unemployment in Great Britain in 1958. Data from the 1960’s modeled the trade-off between unemployment and inflation fairly well, the correlation offered potential economic policy outcomes, one that fiscal and monetary policy could be used to achieve full employment at the cost of higher price levels, or to lower inflation at the cost of lowered employment. However, when governments attempted to use the Phillips curve to control unemployment and inflation, the relationship fell apart. Data from the 1970’s and onward did not follow the trend of the classic Phillips curve and ultimately, the Phillips curve was proved to be unstable, and therefore, not usable for policy purposes.

• Marshmallow Experiment: In the 1960s, a Stanford professor named Walter Mischel came up with the Marshmallow experiment. During the experiments, Mischel and his team tested hundreds of children — most of them around the ages of 4 and 5 years old— with an experimental design that measures a child’s ability to delay gratification. The child was given the option of waiting a bit to get their favorite treat, or choose not to wait, receiving a less-desired treat. The minutes or seconds a child waited, measured their ability to delay gratification. He along with his team showed that a simple delay of gratification (eating a marshmallow) at a younger age could predict the future achievements of children in school and life.

• Metcalfe’s Law: Metcalfe’s Law was conceived by George Gilder but is attributed to Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet (1980). It speaks to both the growth in the number of connections as well as the value. Given that the Internet as we know it today was not around when the Law was formulated, it spoke more to the value of devices in general. For example, owning a single fax machine is useless. When there are two fax machines, you can communicate with one other person, but when there are millions, the device has some value. Metcalfe’s Law is a concept used in computer networks and telecommunications to represent the value of a network — it states that a network’s impact is the square of the number of nodes in the network. For example, if a network has 10 nodes, its inherent value is 100 (10 * 10). The end nodes can be computers, servers, and/or connecting users. Over time Metcalfe’s Law was linked with the Internet’s substantial growth and how it works in line with Moore’s Law.

• Salem Witch Trials: Centuries ago many practicing Christians, and those of other religions, had a strong belief that the Devil could give certain people known as witches the power to harm others in return for their loyalty. A “witchcraft craze” rippled through Europe from the 1300s to the end of the 1600s. Tens of thousands of supposed witches — mostly women — were executed. Though the Salem trials came on just as the European craze was winding down, local circumstances explain their onset. They occurred in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693 wherein more than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft and 20 were executed. Eventually, the colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated the families of those convicted. Since then, the story of the trials has become synonymous with paranoia and injustice, and it continues to beguile the popular imagination more than 300 years later.

• Contact Hypothesis: The contact hypothesis is a theory in psychology that suggests that prejudice and conflict between groups can be reduced if members of the groups interact with each other. One of the key early theorists studying the contact hypothesis was Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport who published the influential book The Nature of Prejudice in 1954. In his book, Allport reviewed previous research on intergroup contact and prejudice. He found that contact reduced prejudice in some instances, but it wasn’t a panacea. In order to account for this, he developed the given four conditions that have been studied by later researchers:
  - The members of the two groups have equal status. Allport believed that contact in which members of one group are treated as subordinates wouldn’t reduce prejudice — and could actually make things worse
  - The members of the two groups have common goals
  - The members of the two groups work cooperatively. As per Allport, “Only the type of contact that leads people to do things together is likely to result in changed attitudes”
  - There is institutional support for the contact (for example, if group leaders or other authority figures support the contact between groups)

• Affirmative Action: The term affirmative action refers to a policy aimed at increasing workplace or educational opportunities for underrepresented parts (members who have been discriminated against) of society. These programs are commonly implemented by businesses and governments by taking individuals’ race, sex, religion, or national origin into account. Affirmative action focuses on demographics with historically low representation in leadership, professional, and academic roles and is often considered a means of countering discrimination against particular groups. The policy came to prominence in the United States in the 1960s, to enforce the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a way to promote equal opportunity across various segments of society.