What We’re Reading
A few good pieces the Collab team came across this week …
Focus
Let me tell you why my tv series in the 90s was so good, besides just an inordinate amount of just pure good fortune. In most tv series, 50 percent of the time is spent working on the show, 50 percent of the time is spent dealing with personality, political, and hierarchical issues of making something. We spent 99 percent of our time writing. Me and Larry [David]. The two of us. The door was closed. It’s closed. Somebody calls. We’re not taking the call. We were gonna make this thing funny. That’s why the show was good.
Trust
Never put growth before trust. If you put growth above trust, then all of a sudden you create a toxic culture. People don’t want to work in that environment or use the product. Then you get these campaigns, #deleteuber, #deletefacebook. It’s a referendum on the culture, not the product.
Technology
When my spouse was pregnant 14 years ago, we had an ultrasound. There was a geneticist in the room, and she pointed out some white spots around the heart of the fetus. “Those are markers for Down syndrome,” she noted, “and your risk has now gone up to 1 in 20.” She further let us know that we could learn whether the fetus in fact had the genetic modification underlying Down syndrome via an amniocentesis. But amniocentesis was risky — the risk of killing the fetus during the procedure was roughly 1 in 300. Being a statistician, I determined to find out where these numbers were coming from. To cut a long story short, I discovered that a statistical analysis had been done a decade previously in the UK, where these white spots, which reflect calcium buildup, were indeed established as a predictor of Down syndrome. But I also noticed that the imaging machine used in our test had a few hundred more pixels per square inch than the machine used in the UK study. I went back to tell the geneticist that I believed that the white spots were likely false positives — that they were literally “white noise.” She said “Ah, that explains why we started seeing an uptick in Down syndrome diagnoses a few years ago; it’s when the new machine arrived.”
Life
At the end, I believe parents want two things:
— To know their family loves them immensely.
— To recognize that their love and parenting gave their children the skills and confidence to add value and live rewarding lives.
Demographics
Deaths now outnumber births among white people in more than half the states in the country, demographers have found, signaling what could be a faster-than-expected transition to a future in which whites are no longer a majority of the American population.
Dining
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, food spending for meals prepared at home grew by less than 2% a year from 2013 to 2016 while spending on meals prepared elsewhere grew more than 20%.
Have a good weekend.