What the dog saw - Malcolm Gladwell

There were mixed reviews on this book on Amazon but mostly they complained that this was just recycled stories from newspaper articles he had written.  Not having read the newspaper I bought the book anyway and found it entertaining.

Loc184 “To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish"

Loc310 great story about the founders of Ronco etc. They were, he says, waiting for him to fail: he had never worked that particular slicer before and, sure enough, he was massacring the vegetables. Still, in a single pitch he took in $200. “Their eyes popped out of their heads,” Arnold recalls. “They said, ‘We don’t understand it. You don’t even know how to work the damn machine.’ I said, ‘But I know how to do one thing better than you.’ They said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘I know how to ask for the money.’ And that’s the secret to the whole damn business.”

Loc345 Thirty years ago, the videocassette recorder came on the market, and it was a disruptive product, too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the VCR became, it was seldom put to that purpose. That’s because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers — not once or twice but three or four times — and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine, and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process. All the VCR-makers did was hand over the box with a smile and a pat on the back, tossing in an instruction manual for good measure. Any pitchman could have told you that wasn’t going to do it.

Loc607 Moskowitz does not believe that consumers — even spaghetti lovers — know what they desire if what they desire does not yet exist. “The mind,” as Moskowitz is fond of saying, “knows not what the tongue wants.”

Loc901 on power laws in economics: “No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.”

Loc. 1828 Dogs aren’t smarter than chimps; they just have a different attitude toward people. “Dogs are really interested in humans,” Hare went on. “Interested to the point of obsession. To a dog, you are a giant walking tennis ball.”

Loc 1858 Combinations of posture and gesture are called phrasing, and the great communicators are those who match their phrasing with their communicative intentions

Loc2427 Homelessness doesn’t have a normal distribution, it turned out. It has a power-law distribution. “We found that eighty percent of the homeless were in and out really quickly,” he said. “In Philadelphia, the most common length of time that someone is homeless is one day. And the second most common length is two days. And they never come back. Anyone who ever has to stay in a shelter involuntarily knows that all you think about is how to make sure you never come back.”

Loc 2455 The homelessness problem is like the LAPD’s bad-cop problem. It’s a matter of a few hard cases, and that’s good news, because when a problem is that concentrated you can wrap your arms around it and think about solving it. The bad news is that those few hard cases are hard.They are falling-down drunks with liver disease and complex infections and mental illness. They need time and attention and lots of money. But enormous sums of money are already being spent on the chronically homeless, and Culhane saw that the kind of money it would take to solve the homeless problem could well be less than the kind of money it took to ignore it. Murray Barr used more healthcare dollars, after all, than almost anyone in the state of Nevada. It would probably have been cheaper to give him a full-time nurse and his own apartment.

Loc. 2538-39 Power-law problems leave us with an unpleasant choice. We can be true to our principles or we can fix the problem. We cannot do both.

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Loc2829Welch writes in his new book, Should I Be Tested for Cancer?, a brilliant account of the statistical and medical uncertainties surrounding cancer screening.

Loc4095 Frightening impact poor teahcers have out of all proportion to other effects in students outcomes

Nonetheless, if you follow Brown and Smith for three or four years, their effect on their students’ test scores starts to become predictable: with enough data, it is possible to identify who the very good teachers are and who the very poor teachers are. What’s more — and this is the finding that has galvanized the educational world — the difference between good teachers and poor teachers turns out to be vast.

Loc 4098 Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile.

Loc4897 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.

Loc5081 tips on getting teh job you want 

the kinds of things that employers are looking for — what are they looking for in terms of personality. One of the most important things is that you have to come across as being confident in what you are doing and in who you are. How do you do that? Speak clearly and smile.”