Category: personal AnGoL

Daniel Kahneman advocates for recording your decisions in a dedicated decision journal. A good decision is known before the outcome. It involves a mental representation of the facts known at the time as well as applied judgment. Good decisions are valuable but they are more valuable if they are part of a good decision process because a good process allows for feedback about where you can improve. This feedback, in turn, allows you to constantly get better at making decisions.

Source: Why Bad Things Happen to Good Decisions

3. Write down decisions you make — and your rationale at the time — into a “decision journal.”

Next time you hire someone, cut a partnership deal, decide on a key product spec — or make any hard decision — write down your reasoning in a journal. Later, you can see how the decision played out relative to your reasoning at the time you made the decision. You can learn whether you should have trusted your gut at the time or not.

Source: Pinterest Founder Ben Silbermann’s Lessons on Decision Making, Values, and Taking Time for Yourself

In the end, the nothing-to-hide argument has nothing to say. When the nothing-to-hide argument is unpacked, and its underlying assumptions examined and challenged, we can see how it shifts the debate to its terms, then draws power from its unfair advantage. The nothing-to-hide argument speaks to some problems but not to others. It represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often raised with government security measures. When e

Source: Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’

“We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side” — Charlie Munger

Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. It is a dynamic, emergent property of interaction and can be destroyed in an instant with an ill-timed sigh. Without behaviors that create and maintain a level of psychological safety in a group, people do not fully contribute — and when they don’t, the power of cognitive diversity is left unrealized. Furthermore, anxiety rises and defensive behavior prevails.
So the question is, how do you establish and maintain psychological safety with a cognitively diverse group?

Source: The Two Traits of the Best Problem-Solving Teams

In this blog post we had a little bit of a history lesson regarding object detectors. We also had a sneak peek into a Python framework that I am working on for object detection in images. From there we had a quick review of how the Histogram of Oriented Gradients method is used in conjunction with a Linear SVM to train a robust object detector. However, no matter what method of object detection you use, you will likely end up with multiple bounding boxes surrounding the object you want to detect. In order

Source: Histogram of Oriented Gradients and Object Detection – PyImageSearch

6. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins This is a classic business book that should be on anyone’s bookshelf. Jim Collins and his team did an in-depth analysis of 28 companies and discovered what were the key determinants that led to significant improvements in performance. Although not specific to project management, this substantive analysis into how companies made real improvements in performance has lessons you can apply in any context. If you are looking to i

Source: The 6 Essential Project Management Books – DZone Agile

Saving my copy of this:

I am unfamiliar with speed reading techniques, so I cannot evaluate them.
The best way to read quickly is to read lots.  And lots.  And to have started a long time ago.  Then maybe you know what is coming in the current book.  Reading quickly is often, in a margin-relevant way, close to not reading much at all.
Note that when you add up the time costs of reading lots, quick readers don’t consume information as efficiently as you might think.  They’ve chosen a path with high upfront costs and low marginal costs.  “It took me 44 years to read this book” is not a bad answer to many questions about reading speed.
Another way to read quickly is to cut bait on the losers.  I start ten or so books for every one I finish.  I don’t mind disliking a book, and I never regret having picked it up and started it.  I am ruthless in my discards.
Fairfax and Arlington counties have wonderful public library systems, and I go about five times a week to one branch or another.  Usually I scan the New Books shelf and look at nothing else.  I can go shopping at the best store in the world, almost any day, for free.
I am both interested and compulsive.  How can I let that book go unread or at least unsampled?  I can’t.
Virtually every Tuesday I visit the New Books table at Borders.  Tuesday is when most new books arrive.  Who knows what might be there?  How can I let that New Books table go unvisited?  I can’t.  About half the time I buy something, but I always walk away happy.
Here is another reading tip: do less of other activities.
Blogging hasn’t hurt my writing, it has helped by non-fiction reading, but I read fewer novels.  That is the biggest intellectual opportunity cost of MR, though for the last month I’ve made a concerted effort to read more fiction.  But it is not like the old days when I would set aside two months to work through The Inferno, Aeneid, and the like, with multiple secondary sources and multiple translations at hand.  I no longer have the time or the mood, and I miss this.

Source: How to read fast – Marginal REVOLUTION

TLDR: Make it a choice rather than an obligation

Here’s something that’ll make you think twice: “The majority of American conversations are characterized by a complaint,” says Scott Bea, Psy.D., a psychologist at the Cleveland Clinic. It makes sense. Human brains have what’s called a negative bias. “We tend to notice things that are threatening in our condition,” says Bea. It goes back to our ancestors’ time when being able to spot threats was crucial to survival.

Source: The Phrase You Say Every Day That’s Making You More Negative | Shape Magazine

The primary assumption of the centroid tracking algorithm is that a given object will potentially move in between subsequent frames, but the distance between the centroids for frames and will be smaller than all other distances between objects. Therefore, if we choose to associate centroids with minimum distances between subsequent frames we can build our object tracker.

Source: Simple object tracking with OpenCV – PyImageSearch