April 29th, 2010
The new 458 Italia is the successor to the immensely popular F430 sports car.
It signals a massive leap forward from the best-selling F430, thanks to technology from Formula 1 racing. The cab- forward shape, with long sloping flanks and triple exhaust pipes, was fashioned by aerodynamics rather than style. Special venting directs air through and around the car.
The 458 transports you to 60 mph in some 3.2 hair-burning seconds (mama mia!).
How can this be? For one, maximum engine power is achieved at a boggling 9,000 revolutions per minute. Most cars redline at less than 7,000 rpm, so that’s the equivalent of the Dow Jones suddenly shooting to 18,000 — it’s just not supposed to happen.
The driver can dial in the level of Jekyll versus Hyde with a five-mode system on the steering wheel, called the manettino. Choose from quiet boulevard cruising to general sport mode all the way up to Felipe Massa master.
Steering is sharper than any other car out there; most turns are made with a wiggle. Even hairpin corners are achieved barely moving your hands.
All of the controls, including lights and blinkers, are now found on the steering wheel itself, so you never have to take your hands off.
The Ferrari 458 Italia at a Glance
- Engine: 4.5-liter V-8 with 562 horsepower and 398 pound- feet of torque
- Transmission: 7-speed double-clutch automated manual with paddle shifters
- Speed: 0 to 60 mph in about 3.2 seconds
- Gas mileage per gallon: 15 combined city and highway
Categories: Entertainment |
Tags: 458, 458 Italia, dream car, Ferrari, Italia | 1 Comment
April 7th, 2010
What Is the Secret of Success?
People who succeed must work hard, but lots of people work hard and don’t succeed. So stars must have some distinct talent or gift, right? They must be special somehow. That’s the common explanation of why some people do well and others don’t – and it is wrong or, at least, it tells only part of the story. In leaving out the other elements of success, this old model dangerously distorts reality. It personalizes a process that, while personal, is also social and cultural. It thus leaves people looking for talent in the wrong places.
Take the Canadian Hockey League. Its late-teenage athletes are superb players. They’re fit and talented, and many turn professional. However, though they all pour out endless energy to reach the top, that’s only half the story. The other half is found in what biologists call the “ecology” of a specific living thing. A tall oak tree standing in the forest didn’t just come from a good acorn; that acorn also landed in the right place, on good soil with no other trees blocking the sun, and so on. Likewise, these athletes are superior, in part, because of their work and gifts, and, in part, because of the intersection of random chance and an arbitrary social choice.
The date that demarcates athletes in the top Canadian hockey leagues is January 1. An overwhelming percentage of champions are born in the first few months of the year. Scant months make a big difference in a child’s development, so when kids with birthdays early in the year begin to compete, they are already larger, more coordinated and more promising than those born later the same year. Thus, they get singled out early as having more potential. They receive more coaching and more time on the ice. As a result, they become better hockey players than slightly younger kids. Adults focus resources on them early in their development, but it isn’t their talent that gets rewarded; it is their birth dates.
This early selection process matters greatly because of a second factor that determines superior performance – amount of practice time. If you track a group of potential professionals in an area such as music from childhood through adulthood, a marked pattern emerges: Their final status depends on how much they practice. Strong amateurs accumulate about 2,000 hours of practice by adulthood. Future music teachers build up about 4,000 hours. Really good students amass about 8,000 hours and “elite performers” invest about 10,000 hours of practice. This 10,000-hour marker carries over to other fields, such as sports, the arts and even technical training, like computer programming. People who have dominated the computer world, such as Bill Joy, who rewrote UNIX and Java, put in parallel practice time. That’s what carried Joy to stunning computer feats. But it wasn’t dedication alone that let him succeed; it was also the right situation. In the 1970s, Joy attended the University of Michigan – one of the few places in the U.S. at the time with the resources to let many people practice programming at once. Joy didn’t go to Michigan to study computers; he stumbled across the computer center by accident. But, once he did, he could program round the clock, due to access and to a glitch in the system that let students get more than their allotted computer time. Bill Gates had similar luck; he was bright and talented with computers, but he also attended a Seattle private school that had a computer club in the 1960s, and he could “steal” time on the computers of a nearby university.
For such an incredible tally of time, effort and proximity to pay off, the larger context still has to work. The 75 richest people who ever lived include individuals from across history’s span, but nearly 20% of them come from “a single generation in a single country”: the mid-19th century in the U.S. John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould and more became so rich because they were born at just the right time to take advantage of the American economic explosion. You’ll find a similar age grouping for Gates, Joy and other major tech players: Gates was born in 1955, Joy in 1954, Paul Allen in 1953, Steve Ballmer in 1956 and Steve Jobs in 1955. They shaped their field because they entered it at the right time: early enough to have a major impact, but late enough to get practice time on computers after the early days of punch cards.
This historical positioning is rarely conscious and it doesn’t necessarily seem like a good thing at the time. It can happen accidentally, even via negative social forces, and still produce striking success. Take Harvard Law graduate Joseph Flom (last living “named” partner of the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom). When he started, he was one of the few grads who could not get hired. He was “ungainly, awkward, a fat kid” and Jewish, at a time when the New York legal establishment was made up of socially graceful WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) who all knew one another. Excluded from white glove firms, Flom and two partners started their own firm and handled whatever cases came to them. One kind of case got referred to them specifically because Flom was Jewish and, thus, at the time, an outsider to his profession. Established firms didn’t want to touch the harsher edges of corporate law, like takeovers involving ugly proxy battles, so they shunted such cases to Flom. When the business climate shifted and takeovers became common, Flom was already an expert, with far more experience in the field than his competitors, and far less emotional investment in maintaining good personal relations with other lawyers (who had already excluded him). Demand for his legal services boomed and he prospered.
Genius Is Not Enough
When Christopher Langan won on a quiz show called 1 VS. 100, he became famous for his staggering IQ, said to be “too high to be accurately measured.” Langan’s childhood intellectual accomplishments were stunning. He talked at six months old, taught himself to read by age three, read Principia Mathematica at 16 and “got a perfect score on his SAT, even though he fell asleep” during the exam. Nevertheless, he achieved little success until he won the quiz show – because pure intellectual genius alone is not enough. It must be paired with “practical intelligence,” which Langan’s life had systematically omitted. His mother was isolated from her family and had four sons, each by a different man. Langan’s father was an abusive alcoholic. Langan lost his first college scholarship because he was a social misfit, and car trouble kept him from his classes at Montana State. He raked clams, worked in factories and took jobs as a bouncer at bars. He never really used his intelligence professionally.
Robert Oppenheimer (scientific director of the Manhattan Project) provides a vivid counterexample of what happens when practical intelligence and genius are combined. Like Langan, he demonstrated his intelligence at an early age, conducting science experiments by third grade, and speaking Latin and Greek by age nine. He, too, ran into self-created trouble at college: gripped by serious depression, he planned to kill his adviser! Langan dropped out of college due to a dead car and social differences, but Oppenheimer was merely put on probation for planning a homicide. The difference was Oppenheimer’s practical intelligence. At ease with social norms, he could talk his way into opportunities, in large part, due to his background. His family placed him in special schools that gave him extra attention when he showed his potential. They praised his interests and gave him the sense that he would rise to the top, which he did as a physicist. These men illustrate what formal long-term studies of high IQ individuals have shown: Family background markedly influences success, even for a genius. To succeed, brilliant people need praise for their intellectual gains, guidance through human society’s complexities and practicality.
The Social Roots of Conflict and Math Ability
For years, deadly family feuds disrupted life in Harlan County, Kentucky. Sons and cousins killed cousins and sons, as their fathers had killed other fathers. Facing violence bravely and accepting feuds as part of life became integral to Appalachian culture – but why there to such an intense degree? The answer resides in the origins of the British immigrants who came to Harlan County in 1819. They brought a “culture of honor” that required a man to respond violently to threats, insults and economic pressure.
Such cultures turn out to be common in rocky areas where herding is pivotal. The shepherd lives at risk, and must act quickly and in isolation to protect his livelihood. This is unlike farming, which depends on community involvement. In herding cultures, a single insult might define a man’s character, so he must respond to it. Such characteristics carry over into regional cultures, long after their roots are forgotten. Men from America’s South, where the heritage includes a culture of honor, are more likely to be gracious on first meeting – but also likelier to respond to an insult with violent anger – than U.S. northerners, even if both have long lived far from their home regions.
In another example, Asian superiority in math has clear cultural roots. Asians have linguistic advantages. The Chinese words for numbers are shorter than the English words, thus easier to process quickly. Japan, Korea and China’s counting system is more logical, too; rather than using new words for numbers greater than ten, it makes combinations: “Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two.” Thus, adding and subtracting are almost automatic: Say the words and you add them.
Some Asian mathematical superiority comes, surprisingly, from historical contrasts between Asian agriculture, especially rice growing, and European farming. In 18thcentury Europe, peasants worked hard in the spring to plant their fields, worked somewhat hard in the summer to weed them and labored hard again to harvest in the fall. They were sometimes idle in the winter and had many days off because of how the plants grew. By contrast, rice farming took regular, extremely hard work. Asian peasants had to prepare rice paddies with an established, constantly monitored water flow. Rice crops were timed for two annual yields from the same fields. Farmers could choose among a much larger array of seeds, switching strains of rice from one planting to another. This produced a deeply ingrained cultural predisposition toward working very long hours while maintaining focused attention on multiple factors: exactly what you need to master math.
In the Air
Social influences affect individual actions even in the specific field of commercial plane crashes. Commercial airliners are mature machines with highly dependable technology, so accidents don’t happen because a plane suddenly bursts into flames. Instead, they happen because pilots encounter complications, like bad weather, in situations where one mistake happens, then another, then another. In fact, “the typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors,” stemming not from lack of flying skill, but from stress, poor communication and the crew’s social morés.
National cultures differ in several relevant traits, for example, the “Power Distance Index.” The more a “culture values and respects authority,” the less likely its members are to challenge their superiors or to tell them unpleasant information (e.g., that a crash is impending). Cultures also differ in how independent they expect their members to be. Some cultures expect people to align with the group; others expect members to be “highly individualistic.” In certain contexts, like a stress-filled, error-ridden plane cabin, members of individualistic cultures function better at focusing attention on missed information. As a result, crews from hierarchical, group-focused nations (e.g., Korea) are more likely to crash planes than those from other nations, unless specialized training counters these cultural influences. Thus, once businesses recognize that many of the factors determining performance are cultural, they can develop training programs to reshape cultural habits and generate greater success. Korean Air did so when it asked consultant David Greenberg to retrain its crews. He taught the crew members English to help lighten “the heavy weight of their country’s cultural legacy.” He also taught them new attitudes about hierarchy, and showed that it was possible for them to be “re-normed.”
The Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) in New York is attempting a similar revision of cultural norms. To improve low-income students’ education, KIPP teaches some of the cultural practices that help middle-class students succeed academically. One “protocol,” called “SSLANT,” stands for “smile, sit up, listen, ask questions, nod when being spoken to and track with your eyes.” KIPP also extends the school day, week and year. These actions address a socioeconomic reality: Outside school, middle- and upper-class kids are more intellectually active. Various activities stimulate their minds over vacations and on weekends, when lower class kids lose ground. KIPP asks a lot of its students and challenges long-standing educational models, but it also produces superior results, giving students who were performing badly a much better chance at academic success.
Categories: Book Summaries |
Tags: cultural, hard work, Luck, outliers, skill, social, talent | 2 Comments
March 11th, 2010
過去的女人一生的成敗可能就是嫁得好不好，不只要找到好老公，也一定要找到好飯票才是保障。
但現在不一樣了，找到飯票不一定可以養妳一輩子，更多飯票還會不小心跳票。
日前當紅偶像劇「敗犬女王」播出後，引起台灣各處熱烈討論「敗犬」的話題……
這個多年前在日本流行的話題現在也轉移到了台灣。許多人看到我都說：「敗犬女王好像是妳喔！」沒想到「女王」這詞受歡迎，我也與有榮焉。老實說我並沒有看這部戲，隨著大家熱烈討論，我也漸漸知道劇情故事。沒想到劇中也探討起姊弟戀的情節，於是姊弟戀和敗犬，成了現在流行與討論的話題，我也常被問到身為一位標準敗犬的的心情分享。
還記得大約兩年前我第一次看到《敗犬的遠吠》這本日文翻譯書，那時看到把未婚的女生稱為敗犬，已婚的女生稱為勝犬，我還氣憤不已。隨著自己的成長，過了兩年後我也從20幾歲的女生邁向了3字頭的熟女，回頭看到敗犬這個名詞，反而有另一種不同的看法。現在一點也不會因為未婚被稱為敗犬而生氣，反而很開心的想大聲說：「我是敗犬！」
我想每個女生都曾在20幾歲時作著結婚夢，希望自己不要太晚婚或嫁不出去，於是期許自己在幾歲以前結婚反而成了巨大的壓力。我曾經也有這種「想婚」的經歷，但是到了30歲的想法變得不一樣了，身邊的朋友陸陸續續結婚，喜酒吃不完、紅包包不完，看看別人的婚姻生活，我突然覺得其實單身的生活也很不錯。
過去的女人一生的成敗可能就是嫁的好不好，不只要找到好老公，也一定要找到好飯票才是保障。但現在不一樣了，現在的外遇、離婚率高，結了婚不代表能保障一輩子的幸福，女人大多數婚後也要繼續工作，找到飯票不一定可以養妳一輩子，更多飯票還會不小心跳票。
所以女人寧可自己有錢、有工作，也一定要會理財，才能確保後半輩子無憂無慮。找到飯票，不如擁有自己的飯票。
現在的女人樂於工作，事業上有成就，比起過去更獨立自主，晚婚的女人越來越多。前陣子看到30～35歲未婚女性佔了42％之高的統計，不一定要結婚也能過得自在快樂的女人也不少；但是最重要的一點就是，敗犬要有自信，過得開心，一定要有錢。
我覺得，女人越有錢，越不用靠男人，對婚姻的依賴性也就會降低，自主性與自由意識也變高。以前的女人聽到男人說：「妳不用工作，嫁給我，讓我養妳吧！」時，會很開心；現在的女人反而會擔心男人養不養得起自己。對於婚姻和金錢上的不安全感，讓許多女人寧可單身自己賺自己花，也不一定要急著踏入婚姻。
敗犬要有錢，因為女人有錢可以擁有自己的房子、車子，可以出國旅遊、購物犒賞自己，花錢美容保養自己，可以常和朋友聚餐、擴展自己的生活圈，可以充電進修、投資自己，可以擁有很多自己的時間，也擁有屬於自己可以規劃使用的金錢，敗犬在這一點其實享了很大的福利。
我認識許多優秀的敗犬，她們不只漂亮又會賺錢，也很懂得投資、理財，現在的女生知道要好好管理自己的錢，懂得學習、充實相關知識。我參加許多理財的講座和課程，發現在場的女生有時比男生還多。女人有錢、有事業，會管理自己的錢，這種女人往往活得比較有自信。
敗犬不代表就不會步入婚姻，只是樂於當敗犬的女生更希望能在婚姻之外找到更多實現自己價值的事。女人不用依靠婚姻才能讓人生完整，而是讓自己成為一個更完整的人。當一個「優質敗犬」，才能遇到更優質的對象，未來才能當一個名符其實的「勝犬」。
現在的我，很樂於享受我的敗犬生活，我努力工作、認真生活、用力玩樂，把我想做的事、想完成的夢想都努力的趁現在未婚的時候完成。我談戀愛，但是我不希望現在就要結婚，因為我很樂在我的生活，也很享受現在的人生。
我不認為婚姻就是愛情的終點或幸福的證書，我也不認同女人的價值只是在已婚、未婚上，女人的價值應該是屬於自己的，自己創造的。不管已婚還是未婚，女人都要有屬於自己的錢，以及懂得管理自己的錢。
要找飯票，說不定會跳票，擁有自己的飯票，才是最有保障的事。
男人可以越老越有身價，為何我們女人不能讓自己越老越正、越老越聰明、越老越有身價呢？！只要努力投資自己，敗犬也可以越老越有身價！
女人要有錢，敗犬更一定要有錢！
來源：http://books.sina.com.tw/books/love/barticle/8006-1.html
Categories: 愛情學測 |
Tags: 女王, 敗犬, 賺錢 | 1 Comment
February 10th, 2010
Roddick is 27 and Decker is 22. They met when Roddick saw her in the 2007 swimsuit issue and had his agent contact her. That’s really romantic… Well, actually it’s kind of weird, but as long as they’re happy.
Andy Roddick has been unlucky in his professional life. The tennis star would likely have many more major titles to his name if he played in an era that didn’t include the greatest player of all-time, Roger Federer.
But any sympathy you might have for Roddick goes out the window as soon as you realize how fortunate he’s been in love: the guy is married to Brooklyn Decker!
No longer a little-known model, Decker has reached the pinnacle of her business. She headlines the 2010 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. The cover was revealed on last night’s The Late Show with David Letterman, as the host unveiled the photo below as a Times Square billboard.
Decker married tennis pro Roddick last year after they started dating in 2007. He posted on his Twitter, “So happy/proud of my wife… the new cover for sports illustrated swimsuit issue!!!! unreal… so excited!!!!!!!!!!”
Congratulations to Brooklyn Decker and Andy Roddick!
Categories: Entertainment, Interesting News |
Tags: Andy Roddick, Brooklyn Decker, Federer, SI, Sports Illustrated | No Comments
