Mind maps

Just read Tony Buzan's "How to Mind Map". While I'd heard of (and used every now and then) the concept, I hadn't ever thrown myself into it completely. I'm very much a one-line-after-another to-do list sort of person.

So I'm trying this.

http://www.mind-mapping.co.uk/make-mind-map.htm

Or Google it, I'm sure there are better tutorials out there.

AF4

If you've ever had to make a to-do list to get things done, you have enough things to forget. At one point, I'd ended up with a list 4 pages long :/
AutoFocus4 is a system to get through all of that, systematically *and* intuitively.

Try it.

http://www.markforster.net/blog/2009/9/5/preliminary-instructions-for-autofocus-v-4.html

The Pareto Principle (80-20 rule)

Originally, the Pareto Principle referred to the observation that 80% of Italy’s wealth belonged to only 20% of the population.

More generally, the Pareto Principle is the observation (not law) that most things in life are not distributed evenly. It can mean all of the following things:

* 20% of the input creates 80% of the result
* 20% of the workers produce 80% of the result
* 20% of the customers create 80% of the revenue
* 20% of the bugs cause 80% of the crashes
* 20% of the features cause 80% of the usage
* and so on ...

The numbers don’t have to be “20%” and “80%” exactly. The thing to appreciate is that most things in life (effort, reward, output) are not distributed evenly – some contribute more than others.

How can this be used effectively?

- reward the employees that produce the maximum result
- sort out the critical bugs before you get to the rest
- focus on the customers that give you the maximum revenue
- and so on ...

The economics term for this is "diminishing marginal benefit".

Realize you have the option to focus on the important 20%.

• Quality - When you're looking at overall quality, *everything* needs to be looked at. But when you're just trying to finish off things that need to be done - focus on the important 20% first, then look at the remaining.
  
• Effectiveness - You could read 3 articles in depth - or, skim a dozen articles in an hour (5 min each) and then read the 2 most relevant. Which is more effective?
  
• Volume - "Superstar management" : if you get top results from your 'superstar' 20%, spend all your time managing them. This theory is flawed, because it would be better to take 80% up a notch than try to squeeze more out of the hens that lay the golden eggs. Sheer numbers guarantee that.
  

And while you're at it, here's an interesting link about The Internet and the death of 80:20. And here's an application of the principle to betting on horce racing.

Work smart, not hard - on the right things.

English Pronunciation!?!

This is a re-post of some forward I'd gotten sometime somewhere.
"I kan the taalk eenglees, and the waalk eenglees" :}

--

If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world. After trying the verses, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months of hard labour to reading six lines aloud. Try them yourself.


Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!

The five 'C's - an approach to visual texts

Or "How to read a photograph : the preliminaries".
Wish I'd found this before I'd submitted by assignment for my Semiotics course.
*sigh

The five 'C's - an approach to visual texts

1. Context - When was this made? What is the subject matter? What clues are given for a time frame? Consider clothing, implements - tools, weapons, architecture, etc.

2. Characters - Who or what is portrayed here? Is it a person? Animal? Symbol? What clues are given about who/what they are?

3. Color - What colors, if any, are used? Do you think they were used just for visual appeal? What is the mood or tone established by these colors?

4. Composition - Look at the use of space. Is one image bigger than another? Is that to suggest a relationship? What kind of relationship? Is the entire space used? Why or why not? What is the foreground? The background? Do either suggest importance?

5. Construction - Someone conciously constructed this image for a purpose. Who do you think made this? Why? For what audience? Who would connect with this image? Who would not?

PS : I found the 5 'C's in a PPT on some site. Unfortunately I lost the link. If anyone happens to find it, do let me know. Thanks :)

How to mess with your sleep - at a whole new level

Most people work with a monophasic sleep routine ie. sleeping in a single stretch (as grandma says, 8 hours). Others prefer biphasic, where you get your one chunk at night and a nap sometime in the middle of the day - a very popular routine, with entire cultural phenomena (eg: the concept of 'siesta') designed around it.

But why one over the other? Or put differently, which is best? If you want to squeeze the maximum out of each day, consider time spent sleeping a waste, or simply have an exam coming up and syllabus to cram, read on -

Now, there is evidence that humans evolved on a biphasic or polyphasic adaptation. It would be hard to believe that our old monkey ancestors would get their forty winks at a stretch. There'd always be something or the other trying to eat you. *Not* being comatose for eight hours seems to give you a better chance to survive.

Research on napping and circadian rhythms also suggests that sometime in the middle of the day (around afternoon) there is a natural drop in body temperature - which is why sleeping *after* lunch is a good idea. You'll be sleepy anyway, might as well put it to use.
NASA's research on its trainees found that a 25 minute nap in the afternoon had the maximum positive effects on the human system. In fact, since the natural body rythm makes us drowsy seven or eight hours after we wake up, that also gives us the best window to nap - thiry minutes, seven or eight hours from the time you get up.

But that's simply biphasic sleep. It'll increase your energy levels, restore mental alertness and has a positive correlation with sustained memory. What if we could have all of that, while doing away with the one-third waste of a life associated with sleeping eight hours a day?

Behold, there *are* people nuts enough to do this. Enter polyphasic sleep, where you aren't going to get your total sleep requirement in one (or two) blocks. Your sleep requirement is dispersed over the day. In other words, you *dont* roll-over-and-get-up-many-hours-later sleep. You're awake, napping as needed. Clearly, staying up continuously and napping every few hours isn't the best way to go about this.

Enter a study which found a statistical correlation between man-made disasters, car accidents, fires and night-time sleep. That's right, boys and girls, they mapped the time of the day with the severity of loss. As you'd expect, both in number and scale, the "dead zone" period won. The time between 2 AM and 5AM is largely beyond reach for the majority of the population. People will drop off, and this needs to be accepted and dealt with accordingly. A night-out isn't the best idea for a student, and a construction worker handling heavy machinery needs to get some shut-eye during *that* time. So remember to allocate a 2 hour sleep period somewhere in that.

Also, remember that according the our natural circadian rhythm, a four-hour wake period seems optimal. Give or take a bit for individual stamina, but four hours is the most you should go without a nap if you're running polyphasic. Less than that and you won't get sleep, and more than that might make you crash for longer when you do finally get sleep.

So there you have it. Biphasic reduces your night core sleep and gets your day's total sleep to around five hours, giving you an extra two-three hours in the day and stable energy levels throughout. Polyphasic means you'll be napping for half an hour every four odd hours, which means you've cut your sleep down to under three hours in a day. If you go back to monophasic, keep in mind that most people function on a core requirement of five, so any improvement on that is a bonus.

If you're just looking for a quick fix to get through a few days without sleep, remember that sleep in humans is largely a 90 minute sub-cycle within our normal 24-hour rythm. In other words, if you need a nap longer than half an hour, plan for multiples of 90 minutes for maximum efficiency. You'll manage your sleep debt and functioning, yet save on a large chunk of time.

And now, I'm off to sleep. G'nite folks.

Break Away

There is sadness in every heart,
A loneliness in every soul,
Shambles where joy should have been,
Once life has taken its toll.

So many people just come and go,
Such few hearts ever come to stay,
Empty shells that smile at us,
And then they're on their way.

Where will you find one among these,
Who will you find above the mud?
Stuck in their own shallow reality,
With the same tears, the same blood.

Ah, we're on the same page again,
Have no fear, again we go,
Find another character to play,
Find another in our little freakshow.

Rolling down memory lane,
Roll by the brothers, smile at the smiles,
All the soft eyes and pretty voices,
Just keep rolling, put on the miles.

Sometimes rolling by candles on the way,
Flames that once lit up the darkening moon,
A few people that could light up your day,
Disappeared, like the stars at noon.

Maybe they'll twinkle yet again,
Perhaps they won't, who is to say,
Life so very long, yet so short,
A game of chance, that we all play.

Can you tell you, who will be there,
Standing by you, days after now,
Who can ever say what will be,
We can only wonder how.

To have those that make you twinkle,
Is a gift of chance to you,
Break away from the skies of gloom,
Take the chance, to live anew.

--
Originally written : Nov 2005