Daniel's blog

Is the average value always really the best one?

An interesting piece on why taking only a single average number is not always the best approach. Based on Sam Savage’s book The Flaw of Averages.

As the drowning statistician who thought the lake lake is three feet deep on average had to find out the hard way…

You can read the piece here: http://www.analycorp.com/uncertainty/flawarticle.htm

Just came across a great commentary in the FT – Smile if you’re European.

“Europe is having a terrible time – except compared with probably every other continent and any time in history…”

I wrote a blog post along similar lines over a year ago, when I spent some time in Europe right after getting back from my placements in Colombia and India. You can read it here: Ennui and effete European society

One friend has just recommended me this article – 10 things extraordinary people say every day.

It contains 10 simple lines which can have a far reaching effect on your interactions with people around you. I would not take it however as something you should start saying. Far from that.  It is more of an invitation to think about what impact those lines can have and if you can associate yourself with such behaviour. Only if you genuinely feel that way, use them!

Here is the article:  10 things extraordinary people say every day

I have recently seen a very interesting TED talk by Amy Cuddy on how by consciously working with your body language we can shape who we are and how we come across.

I think it is very true, watch it till the end!

Crowdsourcing is a way of connecting online workers with people needing to get a simple but time consuming work done quickly and cheaply. Tasks are posted through online job-boards where individuals from around the world can apply to do them on-line for a fee offered by the contractor.

The most popular one is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk named after an 18th-century chess-playing machine in which a human secretly moved the pieces. The Economist recently published an interesting article on how this concept can be used for example in social research by employing volunteers globally to participate in psychological experiments.

When I was choosing a charity to donate to through OneLeap (see my previous post), I came across an amazing organization called Samasource which extends the concept of crowdsourcing to people in emerging countries – calling it microwork.

Through its network of computer hubs, it allows capable yet poor people to complete simple tasks such as typing up business cards or basic database management. Companies give Samasource work to be done, it than chops it up into small tasks and sends them to poor people in their network for completion. Once finished, it than checks the results, puts them back together and sends the finished work to its clients. While saving costs to large companies, it most importantly greatly improves employment and earning opportunities for otherwise poor people disconnected from the global job market.

You can have a look at their website here.

I just came across a really interesting website offering connections to people who would difficult to contact otherwise.

Here is how it works:

Users create a profile summarizing their experience and interests and select a charity their would like to receive donations. If you want to contact them, you have to donate money to their chosen charity (they set the amount) and than you can send them max 400 word message. If they reply within ten days, charity gets 80% of the funds, if not, you get your money back.

I like how it uses our satisfaction from helping a charity to connect people together. It is get getting high-profile media coverage so really interesting people are signing up.

You can sign up here, I have already created my profile!

Just saw an interesting article at bbc.co.uk applying teachings of old Greek philosophers to solving Greece’s current problems. What would they say if they lived now?

My favourite one is from Archimedes: ‘Finding the solution to a knotty problem requires hard thinking, but the answer often comes only when you switch off – and take a bath’.

You can read the article here!

Bellow you can see a wordle, graphical representation of most common words, generated from all my blog posts. The bigger font, the more frequent the word – a great way to represent data in a graphical way! I will let you draw your own conclusions on what it says about my blog posts.

You can create your own wordles easily here.

A really good nudge to show you the effect of your daily actions by the WWF.