Stan Taylor

Today, I ran across Bob Sutton’s blog, Work Matters. Just up my alley: he shares lots of practical applications of some fairly esoteric ideas. I found Bob’s blog via this post: Strong Opinions, Weakly Held. In it, Bob shares this insight:

A couple years ago, I was talking the Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future’s Bob Johansen about wisdom, and he explained that – to deal with an uncertain future and still move forward – they advise people to have “strong opinions, which are weakly held.” They’ve been giving this advice for years, and I understand that it was first developed by Instituite Director Paul Saffo. Bob explained that weak opinions are problematic because people aren’t inspired to develop the best arguments possible for them, or to put forth the energy required to test them. Bob explained that it was just as important, however, to not be too attached to what you believe because, otherwise, it undermines your ability to “see” and “hear” evidence that clashes with your opinions.

That’s an eloquent description that I find ever so sensible. I do indeed have strong opinions, and like my friend Rafe Colburn, I like to think my opinions are based on well considered evidence, and that I’m willing to change my opinions in light of new evidence.

I’m not too sure what I think of this comic, but hey, it’s not often that computational linguists are mentioned in any context. I’ll take what I can get.

Very silly

According to the Wall Street Journal, some companies rushed to grant stock options to executives in the days after the September 11 attacks. The company’s stock price had fallen after the attacks and the options were pegged to the current stock price. When the stocks recovered, the executives would profit. Just slimy.

Over at The American Prospect’s blog, Ezra Klein takes a closer look at U.S. economy growth. In 2004, the economy grew by a respectable 2.4%, but real income growth was as follows:

• Richest 1%: 12.5%
• Everyone else: 1.5%

Klein observes:

In fact, it’s no longer just the middle class and the poor who’re falling behind. The distribution has grown so uneven that the 95th percentile is making meager headway — even the merely rich are falling behind. It’s the richest of the rich making headway. But they now account for so much wealth and holdings that their acceleration can effortlessly outweigh everyone else’s deterioration. Add in that the reliable income growth conveyors of yesterday, like education and hours worked, no longer heavily correlate with income increases (earnings dropped for college graduates in 2004) and you’ve got a real problem on your hands…

This web page about English usage ‘non-errors’ has been making the rounds in the bloggin world this week. It contains a list of English usage that people frequently correct, but the author of this page calls them ‘non-errors’ since they are in common usage. I poked around and discovered that the author of the page is an English professor who has published a book on English usage errors.
Given the author’s knowledge of English usage, I’m a little disappointed that he calls the items on this page ‘non-errors.’ In fact, his primary argument that the issues in question are not errors is the fact that they are commonly used. I don’t see how he can publish a prescriptivist book on usage and then not disclose that his view of these issues is based on a descriptivist argument.

Ben Stein’s State of the Union.

From the Richmond Times Dispatch
(via Eliot Gelwan)

Eric Sink has a recent blog post about negotiating. He makes the common sense observation:

In negotiation, the one thing that really strengthens your position is the ability to walk away from the deal.

My salary history over the last ten years bears out Eric’s observation. With every job change except one, I received a decent salary increase. The one exception was the job I accepted after having been laid off. I was not in a strong position to negotiate salary, and I took a big hit for it. It took me several years to get back to the salary I had before.

While browsing the web this morning, I came across this review of a recent coporate identity redesign. I think the author has some interesting thoughts on the redesign, but I couldn’t decipher his meaning very easily due to his extremely long sentences. An example:

Just recently, in late June, Kansas-based Payless Shoesource, unveiled a new logo and a new direction for their retail stores as a result of new leadership change in the summer of 2005 when Matt Rubel, who previously worked on retail brands like J. Crew, Revlon, Tommy Hilfiger and Nike’s Cole Haan division, joined the company and procured Payless Shoesource in need of a new, more focused direction: to dispel the notion that they only sell “cheap shoes,” to appeal to a more design and budget-conscious customer (in other words, Targetize it) and, ultimately, to somehow deliver on the brand’s promise and strategic direction, “to democratize footwear and accessory fashion and inspire fun fashion possibilities for the family.”

Parsing that sentence gives me a headache.
(To be fair, it seems that the author is not a native English speaker)