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A batch of the best highlights from what Fabien's read, .
La plupart des entreprises allouent des ressources à un projet en fonction de ce qu'elles pensent être nécessaire pour que le projet arriver à son terme.
Chez Alan, au lieu de nous demander combien de temps nous estimons qu'il faudra pour le projet, nous allons plutôt nous demander combien de temps nous "voulons" y passer.
la question devient ainsi: combien de vaut cette idée? et la réponse déterminera notre appétit.
Healthy Business
Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve
The people who campaigned for the common school constantly attacked the segregation of clever from stupid which it was the purpose of intelligence tests to accomplish. From their point of view this was quite consistent: once grant their premise that everyone was in some unexplained way the equal of everyone else, and it became as sensible to decry the efficiency of the means by which children were classified one above the other as it was to condemn the consequences. If one child was not in fact more able than another, then intelligence tests must be a fraud. The critics mocked the psychologists, and seemed to think their case was proved when they declared (quite rightly) that the tests did not, and could not, measure the abstraction of all-round intelligence. All the critics did was to surround the subject with further verbal confusion. The confusion was to some degree inevitable (as with physics in the seventeenth century) in a new branch of science touching, as it did, upon strong commitments to metaphysics. How could men be equal in the eyes of God and yet unequal in the eyes of the Psychologist? The socialists made the muddle worse. Very few laymen could at first understand that intelligence was not an abstraction, but an operational concept. Psychologists were not assessing all-round intelligence, there is no such thing, but the qualities needed to benefit from a higher education. If this bundle of qualities was labelled as 'intelligence', that was only done as a convenience. The test of the tests was empirical: did they work? And the answer was that on the whole they did. Most of the children who scored high on the tests also performed well in the grammar schools. It was really a statistical question, a matter of establishing that high performance in the tests (they could have been called the Idiocy tests for all the difference it would have made) was correlated1 with high performance in the grammar school, high performance at the university, and high performance in life.
The Rise of the Meritocracy
Michael Young
First, despite eating far more than their sleep-rested counterparts, the sleep-deprived rats rapidly began losing body mass during the study. Second, they could no longer regulate their core body temperature. The more sleep-deprived the rats were, the colder they became, regressing toward ambient room temperature. This was a perilous state to be in. All mammals, humans included, live on the edge of a thermal cliff. Physiological processes within the mammalian body can only operate within a remarkably narrow temperature range. Dropping below or above these life-defining thermal thresholds is a fast track to death.
Why We Sleep
Matthew Walker
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