Against the mindless use of metrics in the workplace

Anyone who has worked at a large organization, especially if they have been in charge of a department or section, will have encountered the dreaded metrics. Someone in upper management decides that they need to measure precisely how effective each part of the organization is functioning and so they develop some sort of metric that is sent out which section heads are supposed to periodically fill in and return.

The problem is that unless you are dealing with highly tangible and easily measurable entities, like the number of widgets that are produced per day, metrics can turn out to be extremely frustrating to fill out and even counter-productive, as Jerry Z. Muller explains.
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The hydration myth that will not die and the bottled water menace

Growing up in the tropics where it was always hot during the day and there were very few buildings that were air-conditioned and ceiling fans were the only cooling devices, we used to perspire a lot. But there was never tall of preemptively hydrating by having a regimen of regular water drinking. We drank when we were thirsty and that was it. So I was somewhat surprised to find people in the US obsessing over drinking water. There was a widespread belief that one should drink at least eight glasses of water a day and that coffee and tea did not count towards that total because they were dehydrating. It turns out that both those things are not true, something that researchers have been saying for some time but the message does not seem to be getting through.
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When and why did our fishy ancestors move to land?

We are the descendants of fish ancestors. Clearly at some point, a transition to land occurred and thus began the process of learning to walk. The question naturally arises of when and why our ancestors made the leap onto land. It is always a tricky to say how any particular feature that is now present evolved in the deep past and there is usually more than one possible explanation.

This caption to the video below explains a possible reason, that moving to land made it possible to see better and farther.

Some 400 million years ago, humanity’s ancient sea-dwelling ancestors made a giant leap to land, sprouting weight-bearing fins that would eventually carry us out of the water forever. So what precipitated this evolutionarily pivotal change of terrain? According to recent research led by Malcolm MacIver, a computational neuroscientist and engineer at Northwestern University in Illinois, the jump to solid ground might have more to do with vertebrates’ eyes than limbs. Testing their theory that exponentially clearer views of bountiful prey above water led our ancestors to select for eyes atop the head, with primitive limbs coming long after, MacIver and colleagues ran extensive fossil-data simulations. They concluded that above-water sight did indeed provide an ‘informational zip line’ out of the water – what they call the buena vista (or ‘good view’) hypothesis. Moreover, they believe that those above-water views would eventually lead our land-dwelling ancestors to select for prospective cognition – the ability to mentally place oneself in the future – while fish were left in the muck of the moment.

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MIT professor suspended for getting secret donations from Jeffrey Epstein

Seth Lloyd is a well-known MIT professor who has done important work on quantum computing and information theory. (I quote him in my latest book.) But an internal investigation by the university’s law firm Goodwin Proctor, commissioned by MIT after it was revealed that its highly regarded MediaLab had been getting unreported donations from Jeffrey Epstein, reveals that Lloyd has also been getting secret gifts from Epstein.
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A hopeful vision for the future

This excellent short video, narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, illustrated by Molly Crabapple, and produced by The Intercept and Naomi Klein, imagines a future where people took the threat of catastrophic climate change seriously and adopted the Green New Deal. But the visions extend well beyond combating climate change but also deals with changing our society to make it more egalitarian and socially cohesive.

The Intelligent Design-Young Earth Creationist tension

At the height of the battles over the efforts of intelligent design creationists (IDC) to have their ideas taught as an alternative to evolution in the science curriculum in public schools, I wrote an article that was published in the June 2002 issue of Physics Today under the title Philosophy Is Essential to the Intelligent Design Debate in which I argued that important ideas about the nature of science that had been made by philosophers of science were not being adequately used by the defenders of science who were trying to keep religious ideas like IDC out of the school science curriculum.
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Monterey SkeptiCamp meeting on Saturday, January 4th

The sixth annual meeting of this group that features “a day of free presentations on science, skepticism and critical thinking” will be held this coming Saturday from 10:00am to 4:00pm. The event is free and open to the public but prior registration is requested. I will be one of the speakers talking about the ideas in my new book.

You can get information on the speaker schedule, registration, and other information here.

The event is organized by the Monterey County Skeptics and the Humanist Association of the Monterey Bay Area.

The fanaticism of football players and their fans

Jaime Hoffman, the athletic director of the liberal arts Occidental College, had a meeting with college’s general counsel, head athletic trainer, head football coach, and president and decided that because of the declining enrollment in their football program that resulted in too few eligible players to fully field a team and the danger that injuries posed to their smaller and more inexperienced players, that they cancel the remaining games of the season
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