Bias in the Judicial System

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When it comes to bail, for instance, you might hope the judges were able to look at the whole case together, carefully balancing all the pros and cons before coming to a decision. But unfortunately, the evidence says otherwise. Instead, psychologists have shown that judges are doing nothing more strategic than going through an ordered checklist of warning flags in their heads. If any of those flags — past convictions, community ties, prosecution's request — are raised by the defendant story, the judge will stop and deny bail. 

The problem is that so many of those flags are correlated with race, gender and educational level. Judges can’t help relying on intuition more than they should; and in doing so, they are unwittingly perpetuating biases in the system. 

Hannah Fry, Hello World

The advantage of thinking like a child

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Great strategists. respond to the moment, like children. Their minds are always moving, and they are always excited and curious. They quickly forget the past – the present is much too interesting. 

The Greek thinker Aristotle thought that life was defined by movement. What does not move is dead. What has speed and mobility has more possibilities, more life. You may think that what you’d like to recapture from your youth is your looks, your physical fitness, your simple pleasure, but what you really need is the fluidity of mind you once possessed. Whenever you find your thought revolving around a particular subject or idea – an obsession, resentment - force them past it. Distract yourself with something else. Like a child, find something new to be absorbed by, something worthy of concentrated attention. Do not waste time on things you cannot change or influence. Just keep moving. 

Robert Greene, The 33 Strategies of War

Seeing Music

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When Julie Landsman auditioned for the role of principal French horn at the Metropolitan Opera of New York (Met for short), the screens had just gone up in the practice hail. At the time, there were no women in the brass section of the orchestra, because everyone “knew” that women could not play the horn as well as men. But Landsman came and sat down and played—and she played well.

But when they declared her the winner and she stepped out from behind the screen, there was a gasp. It wasn’t just that she was a woman, and female horn players were rare.. And it wasn’t just that bold, extended high C, which was the kind of macho sound that they expected from a man only. It was because they knew her. Landsman had played for the Met before as a substitute. Until they listened to her with just their ears, however, they had no idea she was so good.

When the screen created a pure Blink moment, a small miracle happened, the kind of small miracle that is always possible when we take charge of the first two seconds: they saw her for who she truly was.

Malcolm Gladwell, Blink

The miracle question

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Suppose that you go to bed tonight and sleep well. Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved. When you wake up in the morning, what’s the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, “Well, something must have happened – the problem is gone!”

The miracle question doesn't ask you to describe the miracle itself; it asks you to identify the tangible signs that the miracle happened. Once (someone has identified) specific and vivid signs of progress... a second question is perhaps even more important. It's the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even for just a short time?"

There are exceptions to every problem and that those exceptions, once identified, can be carefully analyzed, like the game film of a sporting event. Let's replay that scene, where things were working for you. What was happening? How did you behave? That analysis can point directly toward a solution that is, by definition, workable. After all, it worked before.

Chip & Dan Heath, Switch

Tuesday Tech Tools: 17 Editing tools

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Looking for some tools (apps and online) that will help you with editing your writing (or the writing of others)? Here are some useful options. The tech tools site also has a list of links to writing helps for better organization, academic papers, and putting together scripts. If you have other suggestions, feel free to send them my way.

1Checker
Mac app that checks your grammar and spelling. Free.

After the Deadline*
Checks your story for grammar, spelling and style. Works as a plugin for WordPress blogs, an add-on for the Firefox browser, etc.

AutoCrit
Scans your writing and highlights flaws such as repetitive words, overuse of adverbs and use of passive voice. $30 a month.

Expresso*
An app that analyzes your writing, breaking down everything from which words you are using frequently to the number of times parts of speech come up in your writing. See what percentage of sentences are extra-long and which words are filler and which verbs are weak. Free.

Ginger
Writing tool that works as grammar checker, sentence rephraser, translator, dictionary and text reader. Free.

Grammarly*
Automated proofreader and personal grammar coach. Free version though the premium option has more features ($29.95).

Hemingway App
The Hemingway app is designed to make you a better writer by highlighting problems in your writing. Goal is to make more direct and active--more Hemingway-ey, as the Washington Post proclaims. Just paste your text into the app and it will highlight hard to read sentences, adverbs, complex phrases, and passive voice.  Color coordinated highlighting. Click on these words to see the suggested alternatives.  Word count, readability grade, etc.  $6.99.

Marked 2
Tools for writers including word counts, document stats, highlights repeated words.  Mac only.  $9.99.

oDesk
Hire an experienced proofreader based on an hourly rate (typically one hour for every 5000 words).

PaperRater
Grammar, plagiarism, and spell checker. Mostly free but $7.50 per month for all features.

Proofread Bot
Shows your mistakes and what areas of your writing that could be strengthened. The more words reviewed, the greater the cost starting at $5 for 20,000 words.  

Readability Score
Cut and paste your text into a dialogue box to see the writing's grade level. Free, but for any contribution you get access to more advanced tools like readability alerts, PDF and Word doc processing and bulk uploads. TextEvaluator offers more feedback on the text.

Slickwrite
Writing app that checks grammar along with flow, structure, word frequency, and overused phrases.

TextEvaluator
Like Readability Score, it will tell you what grade level a piece of text is written on, the average length of sentences, etc.  But TextEvaluator goes further, including grammatical complexity, insights on vocabulary, etc.

Word Counter
Cut and paste your document (or just type) to see how many words, characters, and sentences you are using. It shows what words are overused, the average number of words in your sentences, and the reading level you are writing at. Free.

Word Frequency Counter
See how often you use (and overuse) words and phrases in your writing.

Writefull
Checks your text against a huge database of correct language. Use it to find language you might not have considered. A desktop app that works with emails, Word docs, etc. Free.

Seeing Victory

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A plank 12” wide laying on the floor would be easy to walk. Place the same plank between two ten story buildings and “walk the plank” is a different matter. You “see” yourself easily and safely walking the plank on the floor. You “see” yourself falling from the plank stretched between the buildings. Since the mind completes the picture you paint in it, your fears are quite real. Many times a golfer will knock a ball in the lake or hit it out of bounds and then stop back with the comment, “I know I was going to do that.” His mind painted a picture and his body completed the action. On the positive, side, the successful gofer knows that he must ‘see’ the ball going into the cup before he strokes it. A hitter in baseball sees the ball dropping in for a base hit before he swings at the ball, and the successful salesman sees the customer buying before he makes the calls. Michelangelo clearly saw the Mighty Moses in that block of marble before he struck the first blow.

Zig Ziglar, See You at the Top

Worshiping the pursuit of extreme success

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Our jobs were never meant to shoulder the burdens of a faith, and they are buckling under the weight. A staggering 87 percent of employees are not engaged at their job, according to Gallup. That number is rising by the year.  One solution to this epidemic of disengagement would be to make work less awful. But maybe the better prescription is to make work less central.

Derek Thompson writing in The Atlantic

The uses and limits of numbers

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The statistics can’t capture the true toll of the COVID virus. They can’t tell us what it’s like to work in an intensive-care unit, or how it feels to lose a loved one to the disease. They can’t even tell us the total number of lives that have been lost (as opposed to the number of deaths that fit into a neat category, such as those occurring within twenty eight days of a positive test). They can’t tell us with certainty when normality will return. But they are, nonetheless, the only means we have to understand just how deadly the virus is, figure out what works, and explore, however tentatively, the possible futures that lie ahead.

Hannah Fry writing in The New Yorker

Living my thoughts

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I had to surrender my clothes (when I entered the Nazi concentration camp) and in turn inherited the worn-out rags of an inmate who had already been sent to the gas chamber immediately after his arrival at the Auschwitz railway station. Instead of the many pages of my manuscript (which I had hidden in my own coat), I found in a pocket of the newly acquired coat one single page torn out of a Hebrew prayer book, containing the main Jewish prayer, Shema Yisrael. How should I have interpreted such a “coincidence” other than as a challenge to live my thoughts instead of merely putting them on paper?

Viktor Frankl, The Will to Meaning