Gerhard Stoltz's Library tagged performance → View Popular

Despite confidentiality clauses and password-protected files, not only are very few secrets relevant to the competitive advantage of a company: reliance on them makes business more fragile than they would otherwise be. Building competitive advantage on secrets is betting against every contemporary social and technological trend.
This is not the ‘practice’ one naturally gets while studying a subject, or even while performing a job, but it’s rather a very focused and self-reflexive activity that not only gets things done, but also carefully analyzes and improves every aspect of the performance.

19 May 09

"In two experiments, we found that exposure to images of young, cute animals (kittens and puppies) increased performance on a task that demanded extreme carefulness in order to successfully execute finely tuned motor movements (the children's game Operation), an effect that cannot be attributed to general positivity (eg., mood or specific positive emotion) or arousal (measure via self-report and autonomic physiology)," the researchers reported (available here, PDF format). "This finding suggests that cuteness does not just influence one's willingness to engage in caregiving behaviors but also influences the ability of one to do so. That is, cuteness not only compels us to care for cute things but also prepares us to do so via its effects on behavioral carefulness."

11 May 09

19 Apr 09

it took weeks—until the rats were well past puberty—for a social hierarchy to evolve (as indicated by which mouse got first dibs at food and water, among other measures). Perhaps more surprising was that the hierarchies were not determined by the differences in weight, activity or size that had developed among the maturing quartets—or by anything else Francis could identify.

17 Jan 09

Using undergraduate college students as subjects, the researchers found that the lowest performers had a consistent and stunning tendency to vastly over-rate their general ability and their performance on the task at hand - much greater than any other group.
In the discussion, the authors explore why incompetent people might have so little awareness. They note, first, that many of our real-life interactions don't include honest negative feedback.

19 Nov 08

Researchers found the super aged brains had many fewer fiber-like tangles than the brains of those who had aged normally. The tangles consist of a protein called tau that accumulates inside brain cells and is thought to eventually kill the cells. Tangles are found in moderate numbers in the brains of elderly and increase substantially in the brains of Alzheimer's disease patients.
It was always assumed that the accumulation of these tangles is a progressive phenomenon through the aging process. But we are seeing that some individuals are immune to tangle formation and that the presence of these tangles seems to influence cognitive performance.
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- Understanding the specific genetic and molecular characteristics of the brains that makes them resistant, someday may lead to the ability to protect average brains from memory loss. "

08 Nov 08

The System Administrators' Guild of Australia, SAGE-AU, issued a statement again stressing its opposition to Internet filtering on grounds that it simply wouldn't work. "SAGE-AU remains concerned that the filters tested are unable to provide an effective, reliable filtering solution with the performance required for modern broadband connections," she said. "The filters tested have demonstrated an excessively high exclusion rate of legitimate Internet content."