street life

Courageous Woman Street: I wanna live here!!

7 Tech Questions

I’d like to share some of my comments/ questions about technology. Feel free to post your responses as a comment and/or add a question of your own! (We could fill this out to 10 questions easily...)

1. I was on a low-budget international flight the other day and every “extra” needed to be pre-booked and pre-paid. The guy next to me chose the personal entertainment system but had nothing to eat for the 9 hours 11 minutes onboard. (I would have died of starvation before dying of boredom!) Just wondering, if you had to choose between food or entertainment on a long flight, what would you pick?

2. About TV.... Do you still watch it? If so, what do you watch? Are you an unashamed consumer of pop TV or do you pretend you don’t have time for trash?

3. In Cambodia some of my friends have been known to swap their mobile phones with a friend/ girlfriend/ boyfriend for a day or more. (I’m not really sure why...maybe it is trust thing?) Could you swap your cell phone with your friend for a day?

4. To continue with the theme of phones... I read somewhere that the greeting “hello” only came into common usage after the introduction of the telephone. (One of the alternative suggestions for greeting people when this new technology came out was “ahoy”!!) Three questions: Do you actually answer your phone or do people usually have to leave a message? If so, how do you answer your phone? Do you think there is still hope for a revival of the word ahoy?

5. A couple of people have told me recently that with facebook, skype and texting, they don’t use email for anything except work. Interesting. Is email just not fun enough anymore?

6. Air travel. After my accidental flight to the Sunshine Coast instead of the Gold Coast, I had to catch two buses and a taxi to get back to arrive at my intended destination. It cost me more than the initial air fare. So I’m wondering if flights are just too cheap? Too easy? But then, as our friends and family scatter across the globe we have travel further if we want to keep in touch. My question: How many of your close friends do you need to get on a plane to visit?

7. Finally, I remember the pen license fiasco of fourth grade. At the start of the year our whole class switched form using pencils to pens. Within weeks our teacher decided this was a bad idea. Her eight and nine year olds simply didn’t have the handwriting that she expected from children entrusted with a pen. We had to revert to using pencils until our teacher decided our writing has good enough to receive our pen license. It could be revoked for continued messy work too. Oh the shame! Some kids were stuck on pencils for months ... Yet in our type/ text/ digital culture I wonder how many of us can boast of neat, consistent handwriting? Putting it simply, I wonder: Would my fourth grade teacher have to revoke your pen license?

The Crowd Within

Two heads are better than one. Ask the audience is a helpful lifeline on the TV show Millionaire. And tapping into your own creative thinking by revisiting problems later works too. Here's an extract from an interesting article I read in The Economist, 'The Crowd Within'.

My take away? Keep talking to yourself. Continue being curious.

That problem solving becomes easier when more minds are put to the task is no more than common sense. But the phenomenon goes further than that. Ask two people to answer a question... and average their answers. Their combined guesses will usually be more accurate than if just one person had been asked. Ask a crowd, rather than a pair, and the average is often very close to the truth. The phenomenon was called "the wisdom of crowds" by James Surowiecki... Now a pair of psychologists have found an intriguing corollary. They have discovered that two guesses made by the same person at different times are also better than one.

That is strange. Until now, psychologists have assumed that when people make a guess, they make the most accurate guess they can. Ask them to make a second guess and it should, by definition, be less accurate. ..Yet Edward Vul and Harold Pashler have revealed in a study just published in the Psychological Science that they average of first and second guesses is indeed better than either guess on its own.

The two researchers asked 428 people eight questions drawn from the CIA World Factbook... Half of the participants were unexpectedly asked to made a second, different guess immediately after they completed the initial questionnaire. The other half were asked to make a second guess three weeks later.

Dr Vul and Dr Pashler found that in both circumstances the average of the two guesses was better than either guess on its own. They also noticed that the interval between the first and second guesses determined how accurate that average was. Second guesses made immediately improved accuracy by an average of 6.5%; those made after three weeks improved the accuracy by 16%.

Photo evidence 26.2

Some photos from the marathon...the bottom two are taken from Gretchen's blog (link at right). Why so huggy? Maybe the before hug is because I'm freaking out, twitchy and nervous as anything. The hug afterwards may be explained as two tired friends trying hard not to fall over... and that was before we went out for a few drinks ; ) (Joking...we totally behaved...)

Marathon Update

Winning isn't whipping everyone else's ass. It's whipping your own. Kenny Moore

Last Friday June 27 was the first day of the U.S Olympic Track and Field Trials. Thousands of athletes, coaches, spectators and reporters descended on Eugene, Oregon to see some of the world's best fight it out for their place on the Beijing team. On June 27, I was a few hours drive away in Sun River, Oregon. Gretchen and I were preparing for one 42.2km race with 150 other runners and a handful of spectators. I was competing against myself.

On one level the marathon has to be the easiest running event there is. All that is required is to start at an easy, controlled pace and keep up a steady run/ jog for 26.2 miles. Cross the line. No worries. Feel like a hero. Yet I trained 4 intense months for this and it has been a learning curve steeper than Everest.

The run was gorgeous, scenic, 30+ degrees damn hot and dry. I fought blisters, nausea, dizziness and dehydration but kept shuffling along, passing a few fading runners in the final miles, motivating myself with every cheesy affirming phrase I could think of.

My goal was to finish in under 4 hours. I clocked 3 hours 56 minutes and 46 seconds. Surprisingly, this placed me first in my age group and fifth out of the women. Bonus!

But to all who crossed the line in Sun River- from 19 year old Matt to the 73 year old athletes Bob and Eugene- feel like a hero!