The real reason for the 40-hour work week

Why do Americans work Monday through Friday and take weekends off?

Labor unions say we should thank the rise of organized labor in the early 20th century, whose tireless efforts on behalf of workers forced selfish capitalists to give their employees a break.

Henry Ford, in an article published in World’s Work Magazine in 1926, says his company switched from 6-day/48 hours to the modern work week in order to give workers a break. Many people still quote Ford as the visionary who paid his workers extra so they could afford to buy his cars. [see this excellent account from Ooomf, reprinted at TNW]

But I have a much simpler explanation: Henry Ford paid his workers more, and gave them weekends off because he didn’t want them to work for his competitors.

Google gives its employees free food. Will future labor historians look back and thank the visionary Google management for putting people above profits? Or is it just a clever way to keep employees longer at the office? If you have free food at the office, why go on a networking lunch with somebody from outside?

Most employers really do care that their employees have relaxing leisure time, but even if they didn’t, a 40 hour work week is a good idea if for no other reason than to raise the stakes for your competitors.

Doug Lemov’s Tips for Teachers

A few notes from Econtalk’s interview with Doug Lemov, founder of Uncommon Schools, who gives several practical tips on how to be a better teacher.Since we all find ourselves “teaching” sometimes, I’d like to see these tips applied more to business presentations too:

• "At bats": Like baseball batters, who practice over and over, make sure your audience applies your instructions over and over, not just until they get it correct once or twice.
• How deeply you know something is more important for getting to the next level than whether you “know it” or not. You must review, practice until something becomes intuitive, not just till you pass a test
• e.g. You learn vocabulary words by understanding the distinctions with synonyms, not just the meanings
• "cold calling": the teacher tells everyone in the classroom to prepare the answer, then asks one student at random
• students know they are on call the entire lecture, so they have to pay attention
• If the person called says "I don't know", you follow up with more questions till they get it.
• "Call and response": Turn your questions into a game a al Rock Paper Scissors. Everyone answers the question at once (e.g. by raising a number of fingers signifying their answer to a multiple choice question)
• Now you know how many in your class really understood -- and you can adjust accordingly
• Technology can help too if everyone answers a quiz on their smart phone.

These and dozens of other practical tips are available in Lemov’s book Teach Like a Champion. Definitely worth checking out.

A few hardware links to get started

I've been playing with hardware now for a year or so and this may be a good time to summarize some of the interesting products I've found. I confess that most of the real product-making has been done by my colleagues in Beijing, but I try to stay on top of it by playing as much as I can, and here are some things I've learned.

First, for sources of good up-to-date information, it's hard to beat the hackthings blog. Most every day, they feature an interesting new product or idea, often with background of how it was (or will be) manufactured or sold. Whether you're a hobbyist or a potential startup, you'll also appreciate the lengthy list of hardware resources/tools on Steve Blank's entrepreneur site.

If you're going to teach yourself hardware, Arduino is a great place to start (as I did), but you can quickly burn through a lot of parts. Instead, use an Arduino software simulator like the one from 123d.circuits.io.  For a similar browser-based simulator for non-Arduino purposes, try https://www.circuitlab.com/. 

If you're building self-tracking body hardware, you might check out the $500 E-Health Sensor Shield Kit  for Arduino and Raspberry Pi. It comes with ten body sensors, including pulse/oxygen (SPO2), body temperature, glucometer, galvanic skin response, EMG, ECG and more. For instructions on how to just make it all from scratch, see this DIY EEG/EKG/EMG site.

Low-power devices connected to your smartphone will use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and people have suggested I check out the $35 BLE Mini from Redbear Labs, the $100 nRF8001 Development Kit  from Nordic Semiconductor, or the $30 LightBlue Cortado (shipping in mid-2014).

I have a ton more links in a private Evernote folder, as well as on my public Pinboard account. As always, ping me if you have other suggestions.

The FDA needs to be more Bayesian

John Wilbanks is one of my favorite open science geeks (I even met him once in person, when he did a presentation for Microsoft Research). In a blog post this week, he writes a well-reasoned explanation for why the “Evil FDA shuts down lone entrepreneur” narrative is wrong.

Tech companies like 23andme, he writes, think in a “Bayesian” way, where the safety or “truth” of a medical claim is a probabilistic concept that depends on the number of data points (i.e. users). This doesn’t sit well with the FDA, to whom Truth is a binary fact: something is either safe or unsafe, period:

That “traditional” submission to the FDA would be of a very specific kind of analysis based on randomized controlled trials. It is designed to keep bad things from happening to people, not to make sure good things happen to people.

He concludes, correctly, that this is a clash of cultures and that if 23andme wants to succeed (and he hopes they do), they need to accept reality. This is how the FDA works. They should have known that:

[U]ntil the FDA learns how to deal with Bayes’s rule and its discomforts - and until DTC companies figure out a business model that isn’t based on massive loss leadership - we’re going to keep coming back to this clash of culture and business models. Both sides need to make some changes if we’re going to avoid doing this over, and over, and over

But why must “both sides” make changes? I’m reminded of similar advice given to Chinese dissidents that they need to “work through the system”, rather than make public their often misleading and “socially irresponsible” opinions.

I am able to make up my own mind about 23andme’s “marketing” claims, and so can you. The FDA, regardless of how understandable their position, is wrong. Shouldn’t those of us who believe in open data just say so?

Is there such a thing as a "generic" apple?

When you eat any food, shouldn't you care more about the particular piece you are eating, rather than the generic values listed in an app or book about calorie counting or nutrition?  The nutritional value of something as plain as an apple will depend on:  its variety (Gala? Fuji? McIntosh?), size, harvest date, length and conditions of storage, which parts you eat (peel? seeds?), and even what other items you may eat along with it.

Ultimately, the real value is whatever nutrition your body absorbs from it after your internal microbes pick it apart, and once the rest of your meal and environment are taken into account. In fact, there is such a wide variation in nutritional value that [I bet] some of the apples you might eat are actually less nutritious than foods we normally think of as “bad”.

I have a deeper appreciation for these importance nutritional differences, and the subtleties missing from nutrition labels after reading a new book by Jo Robinson: Eating on the Wild Side- The Missing Link to Optimum Health. It’s chock full of practical advice like:

• Slice/chop/press garlic, then let it rest for ten minutes before cooking to boost its nutrition.
• Cooked carrots have 2x the beta carotene of raw carrots.  Cut your own sticks for carrots; the baby kind are much less nutritious.  Then eat them mixed with fat (e.g. butter) to amplify the nutrition.
• Red cherry tomatoes have 12x more lycopene than red beefsteak tomatoes
• Canned artichoke hearts are among the most nutritious vegetables in the supermarket.
• Same with canned beans: which are healthier than fresh, and have more oxygen radical absorption than red wine or blackberries.
• Broccoli loses half its nutrition when you nuke it. Much better to steam for 4 minutes, or sauté in olive oil and garlic.

There are many, many more tips like this, backed by with tons of references from years of reading medical and nutrition journals. It’s changed the way I think about food, and made me look at apples much less generically.

 

More rational optimism

I can’t help being an optimist about technology and the future. Some of my  favorite books are : The Rational Optimist- How Prosperity Evolves (P.S.). Or Ramez Naam’s The Infinite Resource- The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet. So this summary from The Motley Fool is right up my alley. One excerpt:

In two generations, the average American gained a decade of life expectancy.

Do you know what can happen in a decade? A little more than 10 years ago, AOL dominated the Internet, oil cost $13 a barrel, Fortune magazine named Enron one of America's "most admired corporations," and Apple was a joke. Everything can change, in other words. You get an extra one of those now.

I remember what life was like a decade ago, and I wouldn’t go back. I can’t wait for the next one.

The Post-Pasteurian world

As a long-time fan of food writer Michael Pollan (read more here and here), it was inevitable that I’d read his latest, Cooked- A Natural History of Transformation (short summary: it’s great) and while there I stumbled upon an excellent paper in Cultural Anthropology by MIT scientist Heather Paxon that describes a viewpoint that is becoming more persuasive the more I understand it: the bacteria and microbes that surround us are nearly all friendly.

A tiny, tiny number of microbes are unfriendly (and make no mistake, a bacterium like Listeria monocytogenes, is extremely unfriendly), but the entire national regulatory system tries to kill these small bugs, at the expense of the vast majority of microbes that are friendly – and necessary.

Whereas Pasteurianism creates in citizens expectations that the state will ensure a safe food supply, such that “food panics” throw into doubt “the state’s ability to regulate business and bodies” (Dunn 2007:36), post-Pasteurianism questions whether state regulators have only the interests of citizen-consumers at heart.

Your body was designed to live among many different microbes. The friendly ones, in fact, are partly responsible for protecting us against the unfriendly ones. When you kill every microbe, with scorched-earth tactics like broad spectrum antibiotics or even with pasteurization, something else is lost too, and it’s important not to forget that.