raleighnet.org

The Blue Eyes Brown Eyes Exercise is a very interesting exploration of racism, but I don’t entirely believe everything (and not just because as we all know it’s the people with blue eyes who are superior).

Dyslexic kids suddenly gaining markedly improved reading skills because of a one day change of expectations? Adults, who have to see what the point of the exercise is in advance, actually mirroring racist behaviors?

I don’t know, it just sounds like experimenter bias coloring anecdotal results to me. I would really like to see it in action though because it sounds fascinating.

Marshall Brain’s presentation to Duke University students, How to Make a Million Dollars is surprisingly good.

Now, if I could just think of an idea so I can start swimming in that pool.

Entries have been kind of sparse around these parts lately. They’re probably going to get even sparser over the next few weeks. But, check back in June. There should be some entries in June.

When it comes to pennies, this guy’s quite the engineer. He says he was trying to avoid studying, but holy crap this guy must have wasted a lot of time building those structures.

Being the vain sort, I sometimes run a vanity search on Google for “will raleigh”. “Will” being a stopper word for Google, I need to use the quotes to get the search to produce decent results, and even then most of the hits are questions with “will” as a verb like: Will Raleigh go to the store?

Still, my name does show up in a couple places, and as far as I could see, I was pretty much the only Will Raleigh out there.

No more it seems. Now, I review movies I’ve never seen, and I’m a fictional Duke who murdered my wife.

Now, it’s nice being a duke and being able to review movies I’ve never seen and all, but it would be nicer still if all of you other Wills out there would start going by or Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy.

There’s something really strange about Inc.com’s profile of Keith Ferrazzi, The 10 Secrets of a Master Networker. It’s like there’s a pendulum swinging the the story and it alternates between being incredibly interesting and potentially useful one minute followed up by sounding a lot like my own personal hell the next. It goes back and forth like that several times. It’s really weird.

Dang it all! I finally get around to fixing that toilet that keeps periodically turning itself on, and it turns out I fixed the wrong thing. Let this be a lesson to you. You can’t trust the helpful little diagnostic diagrams they have at the home depot. I think I actually made it worse. Bah!

OK, I’m posting The Commonly Confused Words Test because it played directly into my vanity calling me a genius and heaping praise upon praise onto me. But, I’m a little tweaked that it says I missed a few and then doesn’t tell me what it thinks I missed (or why it thinks I’m wrong). What the hell is that?! I would assume that the test is wrong if not for the fact that it’s so obviously correct about my greatness.

The Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act requires the big 3 credit reporting bureaus to provide consumers with 1 free copy of their credit report each year. The idea is to give people a chance to correct mistaken information and protect against identity theft.

It’s a phased roll-out with the Western region of the US coming on-line first in December, 2004. That region includes Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

Why, I’m in California, and it’s pretty much December now. And look, their site is up and working. I ordered my free report from AnnualCreditReport.com. Have you?

There is a ton of really interesting information in Malcolm Gladwell’s article, The New-Boy Network - What do job interviews really tell us?. It starts a bit slow, but keep reading as it quickly gets to some great stuff.

Choice bit:

The observers, presented with a ten-second silent video clip, had no difficulty rating the teachers on a fifteen- item checklist of personality traits. In fact, when Ambady cut the clips back to five seconds, the ratings were the same. They were even the same when she showed her raters just two seconds of videotape. That sounds unbelievable unless you actually watch Ambady’s teacher clips, as I did, and realize that the eight seconds that distinguish the longest clips from the shortest are superfluous: anything beyond the first flash of insight is unnecessary. When we make a snap judgment, it is made in a snap. It’s also, very clearly, a judgment: we get a feeling that we have no difficulty articulating.

Ambady’s next step led to an even more remarkable conclusion. She compared those snap judgments of teacher effectiveness with evaluations made, after a full semester of classes, by students of the same teachers. The correlation between the two, she found, was astoundingly high. A person watching a two-second silent video clip of a teacher he has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who sits in the teacher’s class for an entire semester.

We’ve all heard the old chestnut about never getting a second chance to make a first impression, but that seems remarkable to me. I’m assuming that 2 seconds of silent video isn’t enough to form a valid impression of competency, but then I’m left with a deeper question. Do we ever really know anybody? How much time do you have to spend with somebody before the weight of evidence overrides that initial impression?