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The 37% Rule derives from optimal stopping’s most famous puzzle, which has come to be known as the “secretary problem.” Its setup is much like the apartment hunter’s dilemma that we considered earlier. Imagine you’re interviewing a set of applicants for a position as a secretary, and your goal is to maximize the…
...people who engage in “work-related prospection”– that is, thinking and planning about the day and week ahead and the steps you need to take to achieve your career goals – tend to weather the stresses of the journey better than people whose minds wander aimlessly. This translated to greater job satisfaction…
It has been observed that if the last 50,000 years of man's existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately 62 years each, there have been 800 such lifetimes. Of the 800, fully 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it become possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to…
I recently codeveloped a game with a colleague who teaches a course in global studies to advanced high school students. We called the game Global Shuffle, and it was meant to simulate two realities of the 21st century global marketplace. First, the developed world creates certain kinds of resources, and the developing…
Resources that are openly licensed benefit schools in a number of ways, but most notably they help to: Increase Equity – All students have access to high quality learning materials that have the most up-to-date and relevant content because openly licensed educational resources can be freely distributed to anyone. Save…
And Mallow laughed joyously, "You've missed, Sutt, missed as badly as the Commdor himself. You've missed everything, and understood nothing. Look, man, the Empire can replace nothing. The Empire has always been a realm of colossal resources. They've calculated everything in planets, in stellar systems, in whole…
Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should…
Well, first thing’s first: we need to expand. We need to create a second base, and a third, and a fourth. We need to use our resources to build more resource-gathers, and fast. The enemy scouts are likely approaching already. How might we do that? Well, there are only so many ways to make money in this world. We…
It's difficult to put firm numbers to the costs and benefits of lead abatement. But for a rough idea, let's start with the two biggest costs. Nevin estimates that there are perhaps 16 million pre-1960 houses with lead-painted windows, and replacing them all would cost something like $10 billion per year over 20 years…
When psychologist Peter Gollwitzer tried to determine how to enable people to set goals and engage in goal-directed behavior as effectively as possible, he found that several things helped improve focus and performance: (1) thinking ahead, or viewing the situation as just one moment on a larger, longer timeline and…
Many people—including, presumably, most of those reading this book—believe that death is probably the final end of all personal experience and do not expect to continue their existence in some other life or other world. In this view, it is precisely the fact that our lives are limited that makes them precious. How we…
The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value.
The dedicated doctor knows that he must be both scientist and humanitarian; his most agonizing decisions lie in the field of human relations.
The resources of the Deity cannot be so meagre, that, in order to create a human being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.