The Emergency Exit Rule

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People who have high emotional intelligence understand that if you want to be more persuasive and even win most arguments, it's important to do two things:

·       Avoid distracting, emotional mini controversies.

·       Offer easy ways for people to overcome emotional objections, and more easily follow the path you want them to take.

I call this whole concept the "Emergency Exit Rule." It's about planting seeds that allow people to save face and maintain their pride--while ultimately agreeing with you.

Imagine a police detective arrests a suspect. During interrogation, he or she uses a common but controversial strategy called the Reid technique. It involves questioning frameworks that can be summarized by example, like this:

·       "We know that you walked out of the store with the jewelry, but you don't seem like a bad person. Maybe you didn't realize how expensive it really was?"

·       "It's clear you were intoxicated when the police pulled you over. Am I right in thinking you'd probably had only a couple of drinks, and didn't realize you might have been over the limit?"

 The Emergency Exit Rule is all about giving them the easiest, most attractive way possible to back down and agree with your position.

Bill Murphy Jr. writing in Inc.

Teens & Social Media

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Teenagers are using TikTok (67%), Instagram (62%) and Snapchat (59%) more than other social media platforms to stay in touch with one another, according to the Pew Research Center. YouTube (95%) is their destination site for consuming media. Meanwhile, Facebook has lost most of its teen audience (from 71% in 2014 to 32%). The survey did not include chat and audio app Discord.

About a third of teens (36%) say they spend too much time on social media. Black teens were more likely to use TikTok while Hispanic teens were more likely than other groups to use WhatsApp. Read the details of the survey here and you’ll find a Washington Post article on the findings here.

Give Yourself Time to Write

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Many smart people tell themselves lies like, “I do my best work at the last minute.” It’s not true. Writers sit at their desks for hours, wrestling with ideas. They ask questions, talk with other smart people over drinks or dinner, go on long walks. And then write a whole bunch more. Don’t worry that what you write is not very good and isn’t immediately usable. You get ideas when you write; you don’t just write down ideas.

Denise K. Magner writing in the Chronicle of Higher Ed

Tuesday Tech Tools: 20 Research Tools

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Academic OneFile
This Cengage database, often available through public libraries, has access to thousands of journals. Not all articles are available in full text. Subscription required.

Academic Search Premier*
This database provides access to the latest research published in thousands of scholarly journals. Subscription required.

Brookings
A non-profit think tank, Brookings has a large network of scholars who produce reports and papers on a wide variety of important news topics.

Comparea
See a visual comparison of two states, cities, countries or continents. Move them around.  It will also tell how many times bigger a geographic area is to another.

Connected Papers
A visual literature-mapping and recommendation tool that finds publicly available scholarly papers. Around 200 million articles, including preprints. The articlle alert system builds a list of recommended papers that users can train by liking or disliking the articles.

Contact Out
A plugin that surfaces email addresses and phone numbers for LinkedIn users. Free plan allows 100 search credits. Paid plans starting from $19 a month.

Content Gems
Monitor blogs, social media, etc Filter content based on keywords. Dends you links. Limited free account or paid accounts (starting at $10) based on the number of researched keywords.

Data.gov
US government data sets.

Directory of Open Access Journals
A growing database that covers only journals that are free and open to the public.

Directory of Open Access Repositories
This free site is operated by the University of Nottingham in the UK. It aggregates databases from around the world, locating open access research across disciplines.

Fact Check
A political fact checking site run by The Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.

Feedly
Web-based and largest RSS feed. Subscribe to get new posts from a site. Uses upvotes and downvotes to learn which new articles is most relevant to the user. Useful to academic researchers looking to stay on top of new papers but also for those who want to monitor news, RSS feeds, Reddit, Twitter and podcasts. Free, but a paid account offers more features such as the ability to follow more than 100 sources and hide adverts. $6 or more a month. Compare to Inoreader.

Google Scholar*
The dominant tool in the field of research, users can set alerts for publication of new scholarly papers on particular research topics, authors, or keywords. Sometimes picks up useful preprints, theses, and dissertations. Access to the studies could be restricted. If you can’t get a particular study itself through a university/library affiliation, be sure to click “All Versions” at the bottom of the search result. Widely acknowledged as the biggest corpus in existence, one estimate puts the volume at close to 400 million articles.

Google Trends
Real time search info that can be broken down by day or region. Pulls data from YouTube and Google News as well. Insights on what people want to know right now.

Hunter
Searches for contact information by employer. 100 searches free. Paid plans range from $49 – $399.

Open Knowledge Map
A visual-mapping tool that creates maps based on keywords to arrange 100s of scholarly papers, data sets, and software that are related into bubbles. Users can change and update them. It can group papers into themes you may not have considered to find subfields of research.

Research Rabbit
Launched in 2021, it describes itself as “Spotify for papers”. Users save relevant papers to a collection. A list of recommended articles updates based on the collection. Alerts are more personalized than Google Scholar. Free.

Research Gate
Sends email recommendations of scholarly papers and offers a feed of them. Users can also see a chronological newsfeed of papers posted by their ResearchGate contacts. Around 150 million publication pages and 20 million users. Free.

TLDR
A scientific search engine that generates one-sentence summaries of research papers.

Storyful Multisearch
Chrome browser extension that searches multiple social networking platforms at the same time. Free.

More Tech Tools

The Dictatorship of Data

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The dictatorship of data ensnares even the best of them. Google runs everything according to data. That strategy has led to much of its success. But it also trips up the company from time to time. Its cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, long insisted on knowing all job candidates’ SAT scores and their grade point averages when they graduated from college. In their thinking, the first number measured potential and the second measured achievement. Accomplished managers in their 40s were hounded for the scores, to their outright bafflement. The company even continued to demand the numbers long after its internal studies showed no correlation between the scores and job performance.

Google ought to know better, to resist being seduced by data’s false charms. The measure leaves little room for change in a person’s life. It counts book smarts at the expense of knowledge. And it may not reflect the qualifications of people from the humanities, where know-how may be less quantifiable than in science and engineering. Google’s obsession with such data for HR purposes is especially queer considering that the company’s founders are products of Montessori schools, which emphasize learning, not grades. By Google’s standards, neither Bill Gates nor Mark Zuckerberg nor Steve Jobs would have been hired, since they lack college degrees.

Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, writing in MIT’s Technology Review

13 Articles about What to do on the Job

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The virtues not listed on your resume

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David Brooks, in his book, The Road to Character (Random House), distinguishes between what he calls "résumé virtues" and "eulogy virtues." The former are the skills that get you good grades, good jobs, nice houses, and hefty bank accounts. The latter are what make you a good person. Though I think the distinction between skills and virtues is an important one, Brooks is wrong to imply that résumé virtues are all that we need to produce excellence at work, or that eulogy virtues are for what comes after one’s work has ceased. Eulogy virtues are just as important to becoming good doctors, good lawyers, good teachers, good nurses, good physical therapists, and even good bankers as are résumé virtues. And they are also important to becoming good children, parents, spouses, friends, and citizens. As Aristotle knew, virtue is needed for material success just as it is needed for moral success.

Barry Schwartz writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Steps to Influencing Behavior

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There are five stages in what’s known as the “behavioural change stairway model” that take anyone from “listening to influencing behaviour”. The first stage is active listening – namely, being able to show the other person that you have taken in what they’ve said and, more importantly, have a sense of what it means to them.

Rather than focusing on what you want to say, listen to what the other person is telling you, then try to repeat it back to them. Start with, “It seems like what you’re saying is” or “Can I just check, it sounds like what you’re saying is”. If that feels too contrived, it often works simply to repeat the last sentence or thought someone has expressed (known in counselling practice as “reflecting”).

Try, “It seems like you’re feeling frustrated with this situation – is that right?” Always give the other person the opportunity to comment on or correct your assessment. 

Rosie Ifould writing in The Guardian

Stripping Away

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As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of trophies. According to numerous Eastern philosophies, this is backwards. As we age, we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves, but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find happiness and peace. 

Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

The Good Myth

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Six developmental trends may be identified as a standard or a criterion against which we may compare a particular personal myth. Over the course of adolescence through middle adulthood, a personal myths should ideally develop in the direction of increasing (1) coherence, (2)  openness, (3) credibility, (4) differentiation, (5) reconciliation, and (6) generative integration. The prototype of the “good story” in human identity is one that receives high marks on these six narrative standards.  

Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By

Tuesday Tech Tools: 14 QR Generators

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Legit QR generators will have SSL certification along with positive reviews from notable companies.

delivr
Creates QR codes. Privacy focused.

Kaywa
5 dynamic codes for free, then $13.75 and up a month for analytics, etc.

Mashable
Article on how to create a QR code.

QR Explore
Offers a bulk QR code generator and label generator.

QR Stuff
QR code generator for both static and dynamic QR codes. Must sign up for an account first. Especially for small businesses. Free.

QRicket
Free QR code generator for static QR codes. Works especially with bit.ly and Google analytics. Free.

QRTIGER
A reliable QR Code generator that can integrate with 1000s of apps. Both for business and personal projects. Generate a static QR code for free if the content needs no editing.

Shopify
Offers a static QR code generator.

Sparq code (formally Maestro) no longer available

Unitag QR
EU company offering a QR code generator and a QR code reader. Must create an account first. Especially for small companies that conduct transactions in Euros.

Visme
Create graphics and maps just for a particular platform for social-specific content. Free for up to five maps with limited features. Paid accounts starting at $15 month. Also has a QR code generator for static codes.

Visualead
Integrate QR codes seamlessly into branded packaging. Good for marketers, small businesses, and professionals with limited graphic design skills.

Zebra QR
Create QR menus in a PDF or a landing page. Especially for dining places (cafes, restaurants, etc.)

Zxing Project

More Tech Tools

11 Articles about Job Negotiation

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Painting your Internal World

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Therapists often run into a curious problem during treatment: Clients aren’t very good at describing their emotions. How exactly do you express the nature of your depression? So this spring, relationship counselor Crystal Rice hit upon a clever idea. She had her clients use Pinterest, the popular picture-pinning social network, to create arrays of images that map out their feelings. It’s a brilliant epiphany: While emotions can be devilishly difficult to convey in words, they’re often very accessible via pictures. “This way we can really identify what’s going on,” Rice says.

As Rice discovered with her clients, Pinterest’s appeal is that it gives us curiously powerful visual ways to communicate, think, and remember. If you see one picture of a guitar, it’s just a guitar; but when you see 80 of them lined up you start to see guitarness. This additive power is precisely what helps Rice’s clients paint their internal worlds.  

Part of the value of Pinterest is that it brings you out of yourself and into the world of things. As the Huffington Post writer Bianca Bosker argued, Facebook and Twitter are inwardly focused (“Look at me!”) while Pinterest is outwardly focused (“Look at this!”). It’s the world as seen through not your eyes but your imagination.  

Granted, Pinterest encourages plenty of dubious behavior too. It can be grindingly materialistic; all those pins of stuff to buy! Marketers are predictably adrool, and as they swarm aboard, the whole service might very well end up collapsing into a heap of product shilling.  

But I suspect we’ll see increasingly odd and clever ways of using Pinterest. If a picture is worth a thousand words, those collections are worth millions.

Clive Thompson, Wired Magazine 

25 Data Science Articles from July 2022

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Is machine learning about to face a reproducibility crisis?

The US Space Force has picked Wallaroo’s AI & machine learning platform to solve edge model deployment challenges in space  

A new Python package for computing effect sizes

Deep learning researchers should try other techniques when solving a problem

Chinese-made Huawei equipment atop cell towers is capable of capturing and disrupting highly restricted Defense Department communications

A small satellite mission for DARPA called Red-Eye comes to light that tested crosslinks and on-orbit processing

NGA is supporting the new Dept of State-funded Conflict Observatory program which helps document potential war crimes

US military cybersecurity experts at DARPA are concerned about the ubiquitous & open source Linux kernel

“Satellite modularity may be the key to answering new imperatives for the military space”

Large language models are not very good at being factual. “It looks very coherent. It’s almost true. But it’s often wrong.”

AI-enabled image fraud in scientific publications

It’s turning out to be harder than expected to integrate multiple types of satellites with a new ground architecture using custom-built ground stations

What does the smallsats trend & the rise of low earth orbit constellations mean for Geostationary Orbit?

China sent a new data relay satellite into orbit that can work in different orbital positions low- and mid-orbiting satellites

From physicist to machine learning engineer for Google—talking about skills he had to learn, “use cases, best practices & the field of ML”

Making atomic force microscopy more accurate with artificial intelligence by using machine learning techniques to reduce AFM uncertainty

Apache Hive hacks for a data scientist

Countries that have launched the most objects into space ranked

A practical guide for time series data forecasting using machine learning models in Python

He dropped out to become a poet. Now he’s won the top award for mathematics: “Mathematicians are a lot like artists in that really we’re looking for beauty”

How predicting the occurrence of a word (n-gram language modeling) can be used at the convergence of artificial intelligence & linguistics (natural language processing)

Team seeks to improve coordination between data from geospatial intelligence information systems – operated by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and US Air Force aircraft

Some of the best spreadsheets with the power of Python and the ease of use of Excel

“The question of whether space is really crowded is hotly debated in the industry” Myths vs. Reality

Adversarial machine learning poses a new threat to national security

Daily data science articles here.