I recently finished "Moon Walking with Einstein" (1) and it's given me an idea regarding blogging: I want to start writing a weekly blog, as this seems like a good thing to do and a interesting creative exercise. However the problem is where to start i.e. the dreaded blank page.
One of the parts the book "Moon Walking with Einstein" which I particularly enjoyed was his conversations and analysis of the work of popular psychologist Tony Buzan (2) . I loved the part about his bullshit detector going on red alert … but he does also credit Tony Buzan with having some good points, which he has promoted heavily, although he drops the ball by writing unscientific nonsense.
Anyway, back to the good part of Tony Buzan's work: "Inventor of Mind Maps". Even if it is not clear to me if Buzan invented Mind Maps, or Leonardo da Vinci (2,3) or whether spider diagrams (as I like to call them) are just a simple visualization technique for free association (my personal opinion); I like mind maps for several reasons:
- I would rather turn up at a cafe with a pen and paper than a laptop
- In presentation I don't like regular note taking and apparently there are some scientific studies showing that students doing spider diagrams are more effective [need citation]
On Friday I was having a very good lunch with an old colleague/friend, and I want to finish this your blog post with a short piece from this book which was really touched a nerve for me. In the 3rd chapter called 'The expert expert' he talks about the chicken industry and the hard problem of distinguishing between male and female baby chickens. This is a tough economic problem as you don't want to waste too much resources developing male chickens who are not required for the egg production. Up until the 1920s most farmers had to wait until about eight weeks before they could tell the male and the female apart which meant a lot of economic resources were wasted and eggs were more expensive.
Now the fascinating part is that in the 1930s a Japanese based solution came along (4): they found by squeezing gently the tummy The tell me of a baby chicken this pushed the almost embryonic genitals out and although they weren't yet well formed, people with a lot of experience could just distinguish between the male and the female at one day old! This is a huge economic advantage, however it was a very complicated process which took thousands of hours of training and a lot of the students failed even after completing complex training. So the value of the highly skilled chicken sexer was enormous and they were flown around the world…
The bit which fascinates me is it I can see parallels with
- the 10,000 hour rule
- the IT industry with people tend to 10-20 years experience
about 10 years ago many of us in the UK IT industry were encouraged to step aside from complex technical roles, as big business predicted that this area being purely outsourced India in the future. It is true Indian outsourcing has become an enormous part of the IT industry, but there are still good highly skilled jobs in the West and some has even come back to the more expensive Western organizations. This is particularly true of some of the top IT work being done in expensive cities (San Fransico, Seattle, Washington, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Sydney …) and so probably a win-win situation, as Indian IT is booming but they haven't got 100% of the cake :)
Links
(1) The official wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_with_Einstein and for a nice chapter-by-chapter summary http://www.maxmednik.com/home/notes-on-moonwalking-with-einstein by a Google Engineer
(2) The official wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Buzan and
(3) The official wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_map and some interesting spin on http://www.tonybuzan.com/
