Coyle tells the story of Simon Clifford, a gym teacher from Leeds, England, who traveled to Brazil in 1997 to better understand why the Brazilians were so good at soccer.
While conventional wisdom had held that the main factors were poverty, soccer as a dominant national sport and a good climate, Clifford found that until the late 1950s, the Brazilians were not a soccer powerhouse. But during that decade, Brazil became obsessed with a type of indoor soccer called futsal. The game is played with a smaller, heavier ball in a much tighter indoor space. Because the ball is heavy and small, it can’t be kicked in the air easily. As a result, precision in passing is key.
In one minute of futsal, the average player passes six times as much as in a minute of regular soccer. And in soccer, passing precision is key in separating great from good. So inadvertently, the Brazilians were acquiring the right soccer skills through futsal in a much more deliberate way than if they had been training on large, outdoor fields. In 1958, Brazil won the World Cup, beginning a dynasty of soccer domination.
Asking whether 10000 hours of practice can help achieve entrepreneurial excellence, Jon Auerbach of Charles River Ventures tell us this story. The upshot is that sometimes, practice isn’t deliberate; so perhaps you have been practicing for something but you are not aware of it yet.
How parents around the world describe their children, in charts
How parents around the world describe their children, in charts
Olga Khazan:
The biggest difference between American parents and their counterparts in Europe might be that they are far more relaxed about enrichment than we are, according to a study released this week by Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super at the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut.
Not only are Americans far more likely to focus on their children’s intelligence and cognitive skills, they are also far less likely to describe them as “happy” or “easy” children to parent.
Follow the link to take a look at the charts.
How parents around the world describe their children, in charts
www.theatlantic.com/internati…
Olga Khazan:
The biggest difference between American parents and their counterparts in Europe might be that they are far more relaxed about enrichment than we are, according to a study released this week by Sara Harkness and Charles M. Super at the School of Family Studies at the University of Connecticut.
Not only are Americans far more likely to focus on their children’s intelligence and cognitive skills, they are also far less likely to describe them as “happy” or “easy” children to parent.
Follow the link to take a look at the charts.
RIP
Richie Havens.
The best academic blogs
Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic is searching for blogs that publish scarcely (once per day) and are interesting in their own terms, even if they’re super niche. Comment on the article if you know a blog like this.
Here is his selection:
- Edible Geography: Nicola Twilley’s spatial investigations of food.
- We Make Money Not Art: Regine DeBatty’s explorations of aesthetics (and science and technology).
- Yoni Appelbaum: Brilliant, evocative historical investigations.
- Mind Hacks: Vaughan Bell on the (mis)understanding of brains and psychology.
- Wynken De Worde: Sarah Werner on books and early modern culture.
- Robert Hooke’s London: Felicity Henderson’s catalog of Hooke’s experience of the city.
- Infranet Lab Blog: Thoughts at the edge of infrastructure by a fascinating research collective.
- 99 Percent Invisible: Not a blog and not created by an academic, Roman Mars’ radio show is nonetheless exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for.
I instantly subscribed to Brain Hacks.
The best academic blogs
www.theatlantic.com/technolog…
Alexis Madrigal of the Atlantic is searching for blogs that publish scarcely (once per day) and are interesting in their own terms, even if they’re super niche. Comment on the article if you know a blog like this.
Here is his selection:
- Edible Geography: Nicola Twilley’s spatial investigations of food.
- We Make Money Not Art: Regine DeBatty’s explorations of aesthetics (and science and technology).
- Yoni Appelbaum: Brilliant, evocative historical investigations.
- Mind Hacks: Vaughan Bell on the (mis)understanding of brains and psychology.
- Wynken De Worde: Sarah Werner on books and early modern culture.
- Robert Hooke’s London: Felicity Henderson’s catalog of Hooke’s experience of the city.
- Infranet Lab Blog: Thoughts at the edge of infrastructure by a fascinating research collective.
- 99 Percent Invisible: Not a blog and not created by an academic, Roman Mars’ radio show is nonetheless exactly the kind of thing I’m looking for.
I instantly subscribed to Brain Hacks.
Nice selection of diverse photos from reader suggestions on In Focus.
Here is a dog rescue.
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Nice selection of diverse photos from reader suggestions on In Focus.
Here is a dog rescue.
A Real Madrid fan's magical adventure
Abel Rodríguez waxes floors for a living in Los Angeles and takes two weeks of vacation a year to work gratis for Real Madrid when the European football club trains in Los Angeles every summer. He had always dreamed of seeing Real Madrid playing their Spanish rivals Barcelona in Madrid, so his family persuaded him to go. He went. With no hotel or ticket to the game, he sat outside the club’s training complex for hours until manager José Mourinho spotted him as he was leaving…“Stop! It’s the guy from Los Angeles.”
Read the full story here.
A Real Madrid fan's magical adventure
Abel Rodríguez waxes floors for a living in Los Angeles and takes two weeks of vacation a year to work gratis for Real Madrid when the European football club trains in Los Angeles every summer. He had always dreamed of seeing Real Madrid playing their Spanish rivals Barcelona in Madrid, so his family persuaded him to go. He went. With no hotel or ticket to the game, he sat outside the club’s training complex for hours until manager José Mourinho spotted him as he was leaving…“Stop! It’s the guy from Los Angeles.”
Read the full story here.
A better Discover for Twitter
The idea is that if you don’t check Twitter frequently, once you come back, Discover shows you the most important stuff on Twitter itself but not on your Twitter feed. You should be able to see what is most interesting/important in your Twitter feed.
Mat Honan for Wired:
Discover needs to get far better at surfacing the most interesting things from your own timeline that happened since you last looked at Twitter. Imagine if instead of showing interesting things from all around Twitter, Discover focused on your own timeline and showed you the most interesting and important things since you last checked Twitter. It could display the tweets by people you follow that were the most retweeted and the most favorited. It could show the links that came up the most often over the past hour (or two hours, or four hours or whatever) on your timeline, or that had people talking. If two or three of the people you follow message each other back and forth for multiple tweets, it should put that conversation in front of you, starting with the first tweet (especially if more people join in).
A better Discover for Twitter
The idea is that if you don’t check Twitter frequently, once you come back, Discover shows you the most important stuff on Twitter itself but not on your Twitter feed. You should be able to see what is most interesting/important in your Twitter feed.
Mat Honan for Wired:
Discover needs to get far better at surfacing the most interesting things from your own timeline that happened since you last looked at Twitter. Imagine if instead of showing interesting things from all around Twitter, Discover focused on your own timeline and showed you the most interesting and important things since you last checked Twitter. It could display the tweets by people you follow that were the most retweeted and the most favorited. It could show the links that came up the most often over the past hour (or two hours, or four hours or whatever) on your timeline, or that had people talking. If two or three of the people you follow message each other back and forth for multiple tweets, it should put that conversation in front of you, starting with the first tweet (especially if more people join in).
A mesmerising supercut of Back-to-the-camera shots of people watching something cool.
A mesmerising supercut of Back-to-the-camera shots of people watching something cool.
Daft Punk - Get Lucky.
This is probably an unfinished production of the song or an outtake but it must close to the real thing.
Daft Punk - Get Lucky.
This is probably an unfinished production of the song or an outtake but it must close to the real thing.
In what amounts to a direct challenge to the government’s austerity agenda and widespread tightening of access to benefits, Unicef ranks the UK 16th out of 29 developed countries for overall wellbeing – and warns that teenagers’ prospects trail behind their counterparts in many European countries, including Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal.
Continuing high rates of teenage pregnancy, relatively low levels of young people in education, employment or training and problems of alcohol abuse in young teens push the UK down the international league table.
Unicef said the situation facing young people in Britain is “expected to worsen” as a result of government policies, and it warns that “since 2010 the downgrading of youth policy and cuts to local government services are having a profound negative effect on young people”.
More indicators that this thing is not working. See Jack Cassidy in the New Yorker back in December and the related Warston post here.
Another indicator could be children chewing wallpaper because they don’t have anything else to eat.
And now a world renowned NGO is warning the UK government.
What’s next?
Unicef: British children facing bleaker future under coalition
In what amounts to a direct challenge to the government’s austerity agenda and widespread tightening of access to benefits, Unicef ranks the UK 16th out of 29 developed countries for overall wellbeing – and warns that teenagers’ prospects trail behind their counterparts in many European countries, including Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal.
Continuing high rates of teenage pregnancy, relatively low levels of young people in education, employment or training and problems of alcohol abuse in young teens push the UK down the international league table.
Unicef said the situation facing young people in Britain is “expected to worsen” as a result of government policies, and it warns that “since 2010 the downgrading of youth policy and cuts to local government services are having a profound negative effect on young people”.
More indicators that this thing is not working. See Jack Cassidy in the New Yorker back in December and the related Warston post here.
Another indicator could be children chewing wallpaper because they don’t have anything else to eat.
And now a world renowned NGO is warning the UK government.
What’s next?
Unicef: British children facing bleaker future under coalition
Japan will make its own airplane
Japan will make its own airplane
If all goes well this year, Mr. Kawai, now 65 and president of the Mitsubishi Aircraft Corporation, will preside over Japan’s biggest aviation comeback since the war. In late 2013, the company plans the first flight of its Mitsubishi Regional Jet, a sleek, 90-seat commercial plane that is Japan’s bid to break into the industry’s big leagues after almost 70 years.
“For decades, we were confined to supplying parts for other passenger jets. But we’re finally heading into new territory,” Mr. Kawai said in a recent interview at Mitsubishi Aircraft’s Tokyo office.
Competition such as this can only be healthy. I’m sure the Japanese will do a great job building planes. I think we should rejoice.