Self Distraction

Self Distraction

The praise sandwich is baloney

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You might know this under a different term so let me explain what I mean by praise sandwich. It’s when you have criticism to give a writer and you think it’s going to be pretty bad so you begin with something nice and you end with something encouraging.

The idea is that the little writer believes the praise and is thereby cushioned enough to accept your true criticism. That the poor little writer will learn from you, that you can give them the benefit of your knowledge and do so in such a way that they don’t realise how harsh you’ve really had to be.

Give me strength.

You’re already detecting a certain antagonism from me about this idea so let me nip in quickly with this: no, it hasn’t just happened to me. It’s certainly happened over the years and I think I’ve even been taught to use it too. But I read a piece recently by someone who was advocating it and perhaps because it was couched in a lot of talk about being professional, it narked me.

Because if you actually are a pro, you can smell the praise sandwich from the first bite.

Don’t waste my time with it, don’t insult me with it. If you think you need to give me a praise sandwich, we shouldn’t be working together. We should not be in the same writing group. Good writing groups are so hard to find that I never have. I’ve long since given up trying, though I did have a go with one a few months ago. It wasn’t the right group for me: there was some professional work going on there but not much and at most the writers fed each other praise on toast.

I did too: I ended up talking encouragingly to a writer who will never get her book published. I could tell her why, I had told her why, she just wasn’t ever going to listen. For a simple reason too: she’s not a pro. She’s a reader, not a writer. Usually criticism is just one’s opinion but in this case it was as practical and pragmatic and certain as if she’d told me she was entering a poetry contest and the piece she was submitting was 170,000-word doctoral thesis about trout.

Tell me what good I did her. Tell me what good the praise sandwich I got back was. This was a group that prided itself on being so tough that it could scald the skin off your arms but to me it was kindergarten. It was nap time at kindergarten.

Please, I’m asking you, give me some credit for being a pro and do not use the praise sandwich on me.

Details matter

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Apple pays more attention to the details then anyone else. Sometimes the details they pay attention to are so small, you don’t notice them at all for a long time… but once you see what they’ve done, you can never unsee it, or accept anything less.

Here’s a great example from OS X Yosemite. Compare the two images above. The top is from OS X Yosemite, the bottom from Windows 7. Notice anything? One of these images has much better typography than the other. But can you tell why?

Apple has tweaked the typography in OS X Yosemite so that link underlines skup over the descenders. What’a descender? It’s the little dangling parts on letters, like the tail of the lowercase ‘p’, ‘g’ or ‘y’.

Once you see this small typography tweak Apple made in OS X Yosemite, you can’t unsee it – John Brownlee, Cult of Mac (27 October)

I love this stuff. It’s like the way you can tell when a writer cares or has just knocked a piece out for the cash. Previously I’ve thought this about things like the way Microsoft can’t be bothered to translate all of Windows’ dialogue boxes: you can be working a PC in France and after a few French warnings, there’s an important one in English. I think details matter anyway, always, forever, but when you’re making something that literally millions and millions of people will use and see for eight hours or more every day, details are special.

Read the full piece.

RS, I? Why you should eat Resistant Starch breakfasts

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I thought starch was something people used on clothes. But Time magazine has a short piece about why these foodstuffs do you good for keeping your slim. I am slightly more interested in how they affect your energy; this is on my mind right now because I went out for breakfast about six hours ago and I am still feeling sluggish and full.

You know that eating breakfast jump-starts your metabolism. But did you realize that certain a.m. choices can crank up your fat-burning even more?

The key: eating a breakfast that’s high in Resistant Starch (RS). Found in foods like bananas and oats, RS actually signals your body to use fat for energy.

Start your day skinny with these fat-burning meals,.

The Best Fat-Burning Breakfasts – Shaun Chavis, Time (29 October 2014)

There follows a few short recipes, all taken from this book, The Carb Lovers Diet Cookbook by Ellen Kunes. Read the full piece.

Ugh. Positivity. Double ugh: it might work

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I’m British, a writer and a journalist: I recoil at words like positivity and happiness. Only the words, you understand. The actual things, fine, good, great, whatever. But people who go around saying positivity and happiness, I just want them to leave before they start asking for donations on 1-800-BITE-ME.

But.

The Positivity Blog has a shortish piece about the opposite of happy-clappy positivity: it’s about doubt. I’m British, a writer and a journalist: I am all doubt.

All Doubt, All the Time. Henrik Edberg suggests doing this:

First, when your inner doubts bubble up, be quick. Don’t let them spin out of control or grow from a whisper to a stream of discouraging sentences. Instead, talk back to that doubtful part of yourself.

In your mind, say or shout something like: No, no, no, we are not going down that road again.

By doing so you can disrupt the thought pattern and stop that inner self-doubter from taking over.

3 Powerful Steps to Stop Self-Doubt from Holding You Back in Life – Henrik Edberg, Positivity Blog (undated but probably 22 October 2014)

Read the full piece for the other two and a half tips.

Is this the most useless feature of the Apple Watch?

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Could be. First the feature, then why it’s useless:

[Jony Ive says] Just yesterday, somebody was saying, ‘Wow, do you know what I just did? I set the alarm in the morning, and it woke just me by tapping my wrist. It didn’t wake my wife or my baby,’” he recounted. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

“San Francisco Treasure” Jony Ive Talks Apple Watch at SFMOMA Gala – Nellie Bowles and Dawn Chmielewski, Re/code (1 November 2014)

It is fantastic and it would make my getting up hours before Angela that much easier. So far, so Apple.

But.

It’s beyond likely that the Apple Watch will need charging up every night. Maybe I’m jaded because I’ve had problems with the ordinary alarm on my iPhone, but I think this is going to be a feature that has to wait for better battery technology than currently exists.

Ive was talking at a San Francisco event; read Re/code’s full piece.

Weekend Read: When Crowdsourcing Turns on You

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At best you think crowdsourcing is a marvellous thing where people get together to achieve a common goal. At worst you think getting people to do that is cheaper than hiring them. But there is always the assumption that the people are good and the intention is pure. And sometimes, not so much.

We completed three documents in five days, at a breakneck speed that put us third among 9,000 competitors. We had just two documents to go. The secret to our success was our size and our system. My collaborator, computer scientist Manuel Cebrian, and I had created a platform that allowed thousands of individuals to work together on these scrambled documents. Plus, we rewarded assistance by enticing key players with a share of the $50,000 bounty, should we win.

However, my optimism faded suddenly on Day 5. My phone rang, and Cebrian shouted, “We are under attack!” I swung open my laptop and logged into the system, only to see thousands of man-hours of meticulous work disappear in seconds, as virtual paper scraps scattered before me in all directions. It was the first in a series of attacks sustained by our team, and marked the end of our winning streak.

How Crowdsourcing Turned On Me – Iyad Rahwen, Nautilus (23 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

The Verge on the best coming-soon Android features

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This means nothing to me. But if it’s your thing, knock yourself out while I deal with a sudden hankering to visit Vienna. Let me know if any of these features look like they’ll be handy for productivity, would you? Thanks.

Google’s approach for rolling out the latest version of Android, Lollipop, is a little different. There are the usual things we see every year — a new Nexus phone and a new Nexus tablet — but instead of a big event, the company is posting details in blog posts and on the main Android site. So if you’re tracking the rollout closely, you probably have a sense of what’s new and what’s cool in the OS. If you’re not, though, getting a sense of what Lollipop is actually like and what it actually does isn’t easy.

Luckily, we got a chance to sit down with some Google execs last week to get a walkthrough of the coolest features. We won’t know everything until we actually have a chance to use the final version, but there are some clever additions we saw last week. Here are some of our favorites.

12 of the best new features in Android Lollipop – Dieter Bohn, The Verge (28 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Weekend read: your supermarket owns you

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I’ve thought this a lot and I think I’ve said it before. Whoever walks into a supermarket at the same time as you will be walking out at the same time too. We don’t shop, we move and we are moved around stores in hyper-efficient ways. The website Bon Appétit has a meaty two-part piece about the psychology of these shops – and how when you know what is being done to you, you might be able to do something about it.

The simple fact of the matter is that going grocery shopping isn’t—and never was—as simple as you imagined, whether you’re on your own for the first time, or you’ve been shopping for a family of eight for 20 years.

Sometimes it seems less like you’re going out to buy milk and bread than you’re buffeted by endless marketing, too many choices, and not enough information. Does the perky green label mean that this box of cereal is good for me? Are there certain expiration dates that are less important than others? Am I a bad mom if I buy frozen spinach for dinner? How do I know what kind of fish to buy? Am I right to be a little scared of the butcher? And how did I end up spending $150 if all I went in for was some milk and bread?

How to Buy Food: The Psychology of the Supermarket – Michael Y Park, Bon Appétit (30 October 2014)

Read the full piece.

Via The Loop.

Google: the search engine that looked at goats

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It’s not a metaphor. But it is a warning. Here’s the intriguing bit:

A few weeks ago, I discovered that Google knows the lifespan of a goat. Search for “how long does a goat live” and you’ll see it displayed in a special card above the search results. 15 to 18 years! It’s not an important fact, and I can’t imagine people ask it very often — but there it is. I couldn’t tell you where they got the answer (it’s surprisingly hard to nail down, as I’ll get into later) but I’m pretty sure it’s right. It’s the kind of accidental discovery that Google loves to serve up. I went looking for a fact, and there it was. You come away feeling as if the engine knows the answer to any question you could ask.

The official name for this feature is the Knowledge Graph, Google’s project for converting information on the web into easily managed cards. The sudden appearance of the goat data says a lot about the piecemeal way Google has been building it. How long had they known about goats? I made a few calls and Google got back with an answer: the card was added a year ago, as part of a broader animal expansion that also included a goat’s mass (45 to 300 kilograms) and height (40 to 58cm), with similar specs for other beasts. Unless you’d thought to Google “how long does a goat live”, you would never have known.

Why Google is learning about goats – Russell Brandom, The Verge (28 October 2014)

Read the full piece for the warning bit. Spoiler: what we think of is fact can be just a lot of good guesses.