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If at first you don't succeed

Researchers analyzed records of scientists who, early in their careers, applied for R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) between 1990 and 2005. They utilized the NIH’s evaluation scores to separate individuals into two groups: (1) the “near-misses” whose scores were just below the threshold that received funding and (2) the “just-made-its” whose scores were just above that threshold. Researchers then considered how many papers each group published, on average, over the next 10 years and how many of those papers turned out to be hits, as determined by the number of citations those papers received. Analysis revealed that individuals in the near-miss group received less funding, but published just as many papers, and more hit papers, than individuals in the just-made-it group. The researchers found that individuals in the near-miss funding group were 6.1% more likely to publish a hit paper over the next 10 years compared to scientists in the just-made-it group.

Persistence of Contradicted Claims in the Literature | Dementia and Cognitive Impairment | JAMA | JAMA Network

For the 2 vitamin E epidemiological studies, even in 2005, 50% of citing articles remained favorable. A favorable stance was independently less likely in more recent articles, specifically in articles that also cited the HOPE trial (odds ratio for 2001, 0.05 [95% confidence interval, 0.01-0.19; P < .001] and the odds ratio for 2005, 0.06 [95% confidence interval, 0.02-0.24; P < .001], as compared with 1997), and in general/internal medicine vs specialty journals. Among articles citing the HOPE trial in 2005, 41.4% were unfavorable. In 2006, 62.5% of articles referencing the highly cited article that had proposed beta-carotene and 61.7% of those referencing the highly cited article on estrogen effectiveness were still favorable; 100% and 96%, respectively, of the citations appeared in specialty journals; and citations were significantly less favorable (P = .001 and P = .009, respectively) when the major contradicting trials were also mentioned. Counterarguments defending vitamin E or estrogen included diverse selection and information biases and genuine differences across studies in participants, interventions, cointerventions, and outcomes. Favorable citations to beta-carotene, long after evidence contradicted its effectiveness, did not consider the contradicting evidence.

Kids should pay more attention to mistakes, study suggests -- ScienceDaily

The children then took a fast-moving accuracy task on a computer while their brain activity was recorded. The task: Help a zookeeper capture escaped animals by pressing the spacebar when an animal appeared -- unless it was a group of three orangutan friends, who were helping capture the other animals, in which case they had to withhold their response. Within half-of-a-second after making a mistake, brain activity increases as the person becomes aware of and pays close attention to what went wrong. Essentially, a bigger brain response means the person is focusing more on the error. Children with growth mindsets were significantly more likely to have this larger brain response after making a mistake in the study. In addition, they were more likely to improve their performance on the task after making a mistake.

Cohen's first performance

Cohen has always found performing unnerving. His first major attempt came in 1967, when Judy Collins asked him to play at Town Hall, in New York, at an anti-Vietnam War benefit. The idea was that he would make his stage début by singing “Suzanne,” an early song of his that Collins had turned into a hit after he sang it to her on the telephone. “I can’t do it, Judy,” he told her. “I would die from embarrassment.” As Collins writes in her memoir, she finally cajoled him into it, but that night, from the wings, she could see that Cohen, “his legs shaking inside his trousers,” was in trouble. He got halfway through the first verse and then stopped and mumbled an apology. “I can’t go on,” he said and walked off into the wings. Out of sight, Cohen rested his head on Collins’s shoulder as she tried to get him to respond to the encouraging shouts from the crowd. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t go back.” “But you will,” she said, and, finally, he acceded. He went out, with the crowd cheering, and finished singing “Suzanne.”

People avoid risky innovation

As individuals, we have no portfolio strategy — so those 10% odds are no longer palatable. When we fail, most rational people respond by trying to avoid dumb ideas and pick smart bets with clear impact the next time. People who happen to have a hit in their first few tries are even more vulnerable to the belief that they have to succeed every time (and take it harder when subsequent failures inevitably occur.) And that’s it — the dead-end for innovation.

Berlin airport's non-so-swift fire solution

Confronted with the fire system fiasco, Rainer Schwarz, chief executive officer of Flughafen Berlin Brandenburg (FBB), the airport company owned by the city of Berlin, the state of Brandenburg, and the federal government, downplayed it. Schwarz and his staff told the airport’s board of oversight, as well as Stephan Loge, the commissioner of Dahme-Spreewald County, who had the final authority to issue the airport an operating license, that they were working through some issues, but that the situation was under control. Schwarz also appointed an emergency task force to propose solutions that would allow the airport to open on time. In March 2012 the group submitted its stopgap: Eight hundred low-paid workers armed with cell phones would take up positions throughout the terminal. If anyone smelled smoke or saw a fire, he would alert the airport fire station and direct passengers toward the exits. Never mind that the region’s cell phone networks were notoriously unreliable, or that some students would be stationed near the smoke evacuation channels, where in a fire temperatures could reach 1,000F.

Marissa Mayer making a late call on e-mail colors

Months into her tenure, she was meeting with Sharma’s team regularly in a conference room that started to look more like a design studio: projectors hung from the ceiling, rendering screens displayed on the wall. All around, dozens of foam core boards were pinned with ideas. Mayer would regularly interrogate designers about the minutest details of display and user experience. By early December, one day before Yahoo Mail was set to release, she convened a meeting at Phish Food, a conference room in the executive building of Yahoo’s campus, to talk about the product’s color. For months, the team had settled on blue and gray. If users were going to read emails on their phones all day long, the thinking went, it was best to choose the most subtly contrasting hues. But now, Mayer explained, she wanted to change the colors to various shades of purple, which she believed better suited Yahoo’s brand.Some around the table were encouraged that their C.E.O. refused to release a product that she was less than fully satisfied with. If changing a few pixels led to an increase of 0.01 percent more users, that could translate to millions of dollars in ad revenue. Others, however, were visibly furious. According to one senior executive, Sharma’s body language changed the moment Mayer issued her request. He looked deflated. Altering the color of such an intricate product would require that members of his team spend all night adjusting colors in thousands of places. He slumped off and prepared to tell his staff the bad news.

Idiot lawyers quote idiot academics: excluding fracking technology, fracking doesn't pollute.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found no evidence that fracturing shale causes groundwater contamination.[…]The team identified eight clusters of fugitive-gas-contaminated groundwater, and found that each of the clusters was attributable to either a failure of annulus cement, faulty production casings, or well failure. The team did not find any evidence to suggest that a vertical migration of hydrocarbon gas from depth to groundwater through intervening layers of geological formations had occurred […] Thus, none of the contamination was due to hydraulic fracturing or horizontal drilling techniques.

Startups, Celebrities, And The Deadpool | TechCrunch

The list goes on and on. Having a celebrity on board means that picking up initial coverage from the media is easier. But that is at most what it means. Are companies with celebrity backing less focused on their fundamentals, or perhaps more focused on how they appear?
All novels are failures. Perfection itself would be a failure. All we can hope is that we will fail better. That we won’t succumb to fear of the unknown. That we will not fall prey to the easy enchantments of repeating what may have worked in the past. I try to remember that the job — as well as the plight, and the unexpected joy — of the artist is to embrace uncertainty, to be sharpened and honed by it. To be birthed by it. Each time we come to the end of a piece of work, we have failed as we have leapt—spectacularly, brazenly — into the unknown.
In second place was a story by Blackberry on Cracked: 5 Real-Life Stories of Twins Creepier Than Any Horror Movie that generated 656,478 actions. After that, the numbers drop to 115,000 shares, to 80,000, to the number 10 story, a post by Marriot in Fast Company Called the Future of Travel that generated just 23,023 social actions.
The same peripatetic style surfaced at Fab. It began as a gay social network, Fabulis, then added on daily deals, then got a total makeover to offer flash sales focused on design. The name was shortened to Fab. In that incarnation it found huge success, but by December of 2012 Goldberg announced Fab would move away from flash sales entirely and move towards full-priced e-commerce. A few months later he shifted again, announcing Fab’s own branded merchandise and going so far as to acquire a custom-furniture manufacturer. Sources say numerous internal projects met a similar fate, starting as a major focus and then being suddenly cast aside.
Do you think the tech world has a woman problem?I think the tech world is just kind of — it doesn’t have a woman problem. Women in tech are great. There's just not that many of them because tech is just a kind of thing that a lot of women aren’t that interested in, I think. I mean, I don't think it has a problem. I'd worry more about taking away what makes tech great. The freewheeling nature of it is what leads to innovation. And my fear is that if we’re all going to police what we say, maybe we lose that innovation. And tech is important, it’s really important to this country and to the world. And I'd hate to see us kill the goose that lays the golden egg by turning it into a politically correct wasteland.
Just two atoms in thickness, the glass was an accidental discovery, Muller said. The scientists had been making graphene, a two-dimensional sheet of carbon atoms in a chicken wire crystal formation, on copper foils in a quartz furnace. They noticed some "muck" on the graphene, and upon further inspection, found it to be composed of the elements of everyday glass, silicon and oxygen. They concluded that an air leak had caused the copper to react with the quartz, also made of silicon and oxygen. This produced the glass layer on the would-be pure graphene. Besides its sheer novelty, Muller said, the work answers an 80-year-old question about the fundamental structure of glass. Scientists, with no way to directly see it, had struggled to understand it: it behaves like a solid, but was thought to look more like a liquid. Now, the Cornell scientists have produced a picture of individual atoms of glass, and they found that it strikingly resembles a diagram drawn in 1932 by W.H. Zachariasen -- a longstanding theoretical representation of the arrangement of atoms in glass. "This is the work that, when I look back at my career, I will be most proud of," Muller said. "It's the first time that anyone has been able to see the arrangement of atoms in a glass."
Three out of four venture-backed start-ups fail, according to research by Shikhar Ghosh, a Harvard Business School lecturer. Ghosh also found that more than 95 percent of start-ups fall short of their initial projections.
While Spitzer was polite in that first encounter, Davis said, she later blackballed him as a client twice when he racked up complaints from her girls. “He was aggressive, trying to force them to do things,” she said. “They felt he was too rough. He was trying to pull your head toward him to make you do things uncovered. You’d say, ‘No, I have to put a condom on,’ only he’s not listening to you. He’s just steamrolling over you.”
As for the Gettysburg Address—one of the most powerful speeches in human history, one that many American schoolchildren can recite by heart (Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth …) and a statement of national purpose that for some rivals the Declaration of Independence—a Pennsylvania newspaper reported, “We pass over the silly remarks of the President. For the credit of the nation we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them, and they shall be no more repeated or thought of.” A London Times correspondent wrote, “Anything more dull and commonplace it wouldn’t be easy to produce.”
The woman then asked if it would bother him if she swam in the nude, and he replied that it would not. She proceeded to take off her clothes and jumped into the pool, swimming for about 20 minutes. The home owner retrieved a towel from inside his home, the woman dried off, dressed and left. It was at that point he re-entered his home to discover that he had been robbed of a handgun, jewelry and medication.
Mr. Bulger does not like being called a rat, a k a an informer. And so the frail-looking 83-year-old defendant in bluejeans, white sneakers and a dark blue shirt spat a vulgarity, his first words in more than 16 years to Mr. Weeks, whom he had long treated as a son and groomed as a successor. Mr. Weeks, still on the stand, shouted a two-word expletive of his own, and Mr. Bulger replied in kind. “Hey!” the judge interjected.