Best of Brain Drain: 2010

You are, of course, free to read whatever you want on this blog. If you ask me, though, the following represent my favorite work from the year that was (in chronological order):

• 30
  
  
• Fish!
  
  
• Ready?
  
  
• Switch is Sticky, Too
  
  
• Presentation Zen Design
  
  
• Life Is
  
  
• Why Nobody Likes You
  
  
• Wow?
  
  
• Future-proof Your Students (v1)
  
  
• Let There Be

If anyone has a favorite that's not on the list, let me know. Would love to hear what post(s) made an impression on you.

And to all my readers, thanks for sticking with Brain Drain throughout 2010!

Books of 2010

As I usually do this time of year, here's a look back at my reading list that was:

AUTHOR	TITLE
Dan Ariely	Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions
	The Upside of Irrationality
Leo Babauta	focus: A simplicity manifesto in the Age of Distraction
Albert-László Barabási	Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do
John D. Barrow	100 Essential Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know: Math Explains Your World
Josh Bernoff and Tim Shadler	Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business
Nick Bilton	I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain are Being Creatively Disrupted
Bryan Burrough	The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
Nicholas Carr	The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains
William A. Cohen	A Class with Drucker: The Lost Lessons of the World's Greatest Management Teacher
Avinash K. Dixit and Barry J. Nalebuff	The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life
Nancy Duarte	slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
Jasper Fforde	Shades of Grey
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson	Rework
Carmine Gallo	The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience
Seth Godin	Knock Knock
	Linchpin
	Money for Nothing (and Your Clicks for Free)
	Who's There
Jay Greene	Design Is How It Works: How the Smartest Companies Turn Products into Icons
Chris Guillebeau	The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want, and Change the World
Chip and Dan Heath	Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Jeff Jarvis	What Would Google Do?
Mitch Joel	Six Pixels of Separation
Mark W. Johnson	Seizing the White Space: Business Model Innovation for Growth and Renewal
Steven Johnson	Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation
Michael Lewis	The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Matthew E. May	In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing
Hugh Macleod	Ignore Everybody (and 39 Other Keys to Creativity)
Christopher McDougall	Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen
John Medina	Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School
Rafi Mohammed	The 1% Windfall: How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow
Youngme Moon	Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd
Daniel H. Pink	Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
William Poundstone	Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It)
Garr Reynolds	Presentation Zen Design
Nouriel Roubini with Stephen Mihm	Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
Gretchen Rubin	The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
Todd Sattersten	Fixed to Flexible: Four Simple Lessons About Cost, Price, Margin and The Options Available to the 21st Century Business
Clay Shirky	Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
Robin Sloan (ed.)	New Liberal Arts
Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein	Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth and Happiness
Jorge A. Vasconellos e Sa	Strategy Moves: 14 Complete Attack and Defense Strategies for Competitive Advantage

Certainly one of the better reading lists I've had in a while. I'm happy I got to write about most of the titles, too. In my opinion, the best of the lot were Different, Ignore Everybody, Presentation Zen Design and Born to Run. But really, I was very pleased to have had a chance to read the bulk of this material, which with only a couple of exceptions rate as outstanding.

Peace on Earth

Photo: Ayala Tower One, Makati, December 2010

Easy Holiday Reading

With a New Year approaching, here are some timely and light reading recommendations for your downtime this holiday season:

First, Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project. Perhaps a more appropriate title for the book would have been "A Year in the Life of Gretchen Rubin as She Strives to be Happier;" nevertheless, it is an interesting peek into one person's attempt at bringing more happiness into their life for reasons that do not involve the vapid "Finding Yourself". It is by no means a great literary accomplishment nor a riveting memoir, nor does it aspire to be, but it does serve well enough to give readers an idea about how to get started on their own variety of "Happiness Project," which author Rubin acknowledges will be unique to each person.

The book's earlier chapters are much stronger than its later ones, where Rubin decides to judiciously rehash reader feedback from her blog (also entitled The Happiness Project). Certainly, it's not a book for everyone; all the same, I think The Happiness Project is a good template to emulate, especially with respect to New Year's Resolutions.

Second, Chris Guillebeau's The Art of Non-conformity. A travel writer with a sizeable and growing online following, Guillebeau has an unconventional personal and professional background that makes for often compelling reading material.

Naturally, later portions that deal specifically with travel and "travel hacking" (i.e., getting good deals on travel arrangements) are of particular interest in AONC, have obvious appeal and probably represent the best chapters. But personal anecdotes throughout the book that convey Guillebeau's philosophy towards life, work and education prove entertaining, interesting, and sometimes even inspiring.

Finally, focus: A Simplicity Manifesto for the Age of Distraction by Leo Babauta. Babauta knows all about the pressures of the modern-day work environment, particularly the need to be "always on". In focus, he gives voice to something that many suspect but are too scared to find out for themselves: the world will not end if we don't check our emails, read through our feeds, or update our social networking profile. Thus, this simplicity manifesto is both a challenge and guidebook to break the habits of always staying connected in order to achieve greater focus -- one might even say, purpose -- in what we do.

A PDF version of focus is available for free on Babauta's ZenHabits blog; a premium version for several platforms has additional chapters and other content. Admittedly, as the book progresses it tends to become repetitive, with the message that everything will be fine if we spend time "off-grid" emphasized over and over again. Still, it's an important message to take to heart, more so for those looking for a different way to approach their professional commitments in the coming year.

All in all, I'd say that each of these three books have given me healthy and new perspectives for the New Year. Happy reading!

Symphony of Lights: Ayala Triangle Gardens

This year, Makati City's Ayala Triangle Gardens were the venue for a holiday-themed light show called "the Symphony of Lights". Some (shaky?) photos, for posterity:

Brain Rules

Neuroscience interests me, but I seem to have a blind spot for it. Case in point: I read Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide last year and enjoyed it thoroughly, yet ask me now and I'll be hard pressed to recall anything about it.

But that hasn't kept me from adding material on the topic to my reading list. One such book I decided to have a go at was John Medina's Brain Rules. Actually, what prompted me to seek out the book was the following excellent presentation by Garr Reynolds:

View this presentation on Slideshare.

I'm glad I read it (I'm even happier I chanced upon the presentation). In fact, Brain Rules also helps explain why I'm not exactly attuned to neuroscience: every brain is wired differently (Brain Rule #3).

So a year from now, just take my word for it that I found John Medina's book worthwhile and surprisingly light for the topic. I probably won't be able to tell you why -- but you can be assured I mean it.

The Art of Strategy

"So how's the book?" was the wife's question not long after dad lent me his copy of Dixit and Nalebuff's The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life.

"I haven't gotten around to it," was my reply at the time, "but I'm willing to bet it's got a few chapters about prisoner's dilemma games, stag hunts, overfishing and bargaining."

And I was right.

Some backstory to this: in my second year of grad school, I also signed up for a course on game theory. It was a practical and applied course that covered the key concepts and analytical tools associated with the branch of economics. Decision trees. Backwards induction. Pure and mixed strategies. Nash equilibria. Subgame perfect equilibria. And so on.

Although there was a text assigned for the course, it was a compromise decision on the part of our Professor. Sure, we were encouraged to check out von Neumann and Morgenstern's classic Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, but for how this course was set up that would have been too technical as a primary text. Consequently, we ended up with a basic text (that will remain nameless) useful for its exercises and examples, if not particularly for its breadth and depth. In the process, I learned quite a bit about game theory as explained in the context of prisoner's dilemmas, stag hunts, overfishing and bargaining -- all classic cases used in the study of game theory.

In this regard, reading through The Art of Strategy I was struck by how it would have been an ideal text for that course, owing both to its coverage as well as its practical approach to game theory.

It goes without saying that game theory can be complicated, yet Dixit and Nalebuff's book is perhaps as accessible a reader on the subject as one can find. It shies away from technical jargon yet offers a fairly comprehensive discussion of those key concepts and classic examples that have aided in the development of game theory. But where The Art of Strategy really excels is in demonstrating to readers the broad application that game theory has whether you're a person out to lose some weight or a corporation that engages in auctions for scarce resources.

In fact, as I was reading it I couldn't help but look for my old notes just for good measure. On balance, I think that's as good an endorsement of the book as any.

Whale Fail [The Internet is Down]

The Google eBookstore launched a couple of days ago (unfortunately, it's region-locked, so it'll take a while for the service to roll out everywhere), and just as quickly people discovered that the Google Books site has an error page that pays homage to Twitter's Fail Whale:

Props to the Google Books team for both the nod to Twitter and the intelligent literary reference (to Moby Dick, in case you missed it). Personally, I feel strangely validated that I'm not the only one who's taken notice of these quirky error pages, seeing how widely this "Whale Fail" has made the rounds on different social media channels.

Now if only The Internet is Down would go viral as a meme like I'd planned...

[Confused about The Internet is Down? Then read the first in the series.]

In-Flight Entertainment 14

Some 80's nostalgia, caught on a plane but not in theaters:

The A-Team. Wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be (but it certainly could've been much better). For starters, I think the entire cast was great; it was the story that could've stood improvement. That said, when I realized the movie can serve as a prequel of sorts to the television series upon which it's based, I did start feeling better about it. It's too bad the cameos meant for fan service occur as the credits roll and not in-story. It's also too bad they couldn't get Mr. T to do a cameo ("Pity the fool!").

The Karate Kid. Rather entertaining on its own, although the formulaic plot might have a lot to do with that. Two things did bother me about the film, though. First, I felt Jaden Smith and the rest of the cast were just too young for the violence and romance portrayed in the film. The former is depicted far too brutally; the latter just makes the film look silly. Second, it's hard to get over the fact that the film has nothing to do with karate; the martial arts are all kung fu. There's a valuable addition to the story in the mentor-mentee dynamic between Smith's character and Jackie Chan's, even if it can be a bit uncomfortable to watch the Hong Kong actor play an out-and-out dramatic role. I do feel that the original is still much better, and watching the film I can't help but miss both Ralph Macchio's Daniel Russo and Pat Morita's Keisuke Miyagi.

Random Travel Notes 14

Took three separate trips in November: to Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. The first two were work-related. The last one was, in the grand scheme of things, the vacation of the bunch.

Still, it was a rather hectic month with all these trips bunched together like that. So here's another installment of Random Travel Notes:

Finally: smarter queueing at Philippine Immigration Control (outbound). As I've written in the past, it's always perplexed me why no one at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) has figured out that one long line for all counters is more efficient than separate lines at each counter. Now, it would seem that now someone has! Of course, this is just outbound from the Philippines (the lesson hasn't been applied on inbound passport control), but at least, once again, there's progress.

Have Kindle, will travel. The different trips gave me a chance to try out my 3G Kindle's anywhere-in-the-world Internet connectivity, and it did not disappoint. Pretty convenient especially in the face of limited or dodgy hotel internet access. In fact, it came in handy for quick online price comparisons while doing some shopping, not to mention getting directions on the fly. Gmail web access was also quite useful, of course. Suffice it to say, it's become the backup mobile Internet device I'm not leaving home without.

Hong Kong: Mid-level Escalators. Ever check out Hong Kong's Central Mid-Levels escalators? Me neither, so the wife and I decided to (mostly because of a write-up on Lonely Planet). Impressions: nothing really to write home about, but I'd argue that you'd probably get more out of it if you were ascending the escalators rather than going in the opposite direction (which we did en route to the Star Ferry). Tourists, take note.

What matters to OFWs. The purpose of the Hong Kong trip was to attend the 25th anniversary celebration at Queen Elizabeth Stadium for AFreight, our affiliate company that does freight forwarding of personal effects for Overseas Filipinos (read: balikbayan boxes). During the show, there was a short video presentation about the company. While the video did present a short history of the company, we were taken by surprise at how the OFWs in attendance cheered (CHEERED!) when the video began to show photos of deliveries being made. If you ask me, it was really very touching to see that it matters a lot to them to be able to provide for their loved ones back home.

Should've bought photography gear in Hong Kong. By comparison, there are good deals to be had on DSLR equipment in Hong Kong. For my part, I wish I took the plunge (budgetary constraints and wallet death notwithstanding).

Singapore's budget terminal ain't bad. If fact, Changi Terminal 3 would give Manila's NAIA Terminal One a run for its money. Unlike its Philippine counterpart, which is the main international terminal of the country, Singapore's budget terminal is organized, well appointed, and comfortable for passengers looking to rest, eat or do last minute shopping. Frankly, it's embarrassing that the Philippines gateway to the world can't even compare, especially given the travel and airport taxes that one has to pay.

Do they all look like Otaku? Let me just say: the immigration officer who stamped our passports in Japan looked like a typical roly-poly good natured anime character. I kid not.

Where're the trash cans in Japan? It's something you're bound to experience in Tokyo: noticing that there aren't many trash cans around the sidewalks or public spaces, and yet the city is preternaturally clean. Quite remarkable, in my opinion. It speaks volumes about Japanese discipline and culture, particularly their penchant for reducing waste and taking your trash with you until you can dispose of it properly.

What's up with the Tokyo subway? In Hong Kong and Singapore, you find out how much a subway ride costs after you key in your destination at a ticketing machine. In Tokyo, it's the reverse: you have to know how much your ticket will cost even before you buy a ticket. It's an odd and inefficient design decision, especially for one of the most complex underground mass transit systems in the world. (It's also frustrating to be confronted with when you're not a native Japanese speaker and happen to be in a rush.)

Hey! My survival Japanese is still pretty good. Japanese was my foreign language in college. I've forgotten most of it (lack of practice), but it was comforting to know that I've retained enough to get by as a tourist in Japan. Added bonus: I can still read some hiragana, katakana and a smidgen of kanji. At least I can reassure my parents that the money they spent on my education wasn't (all) wasted.

Fuji-san. First time to see Mt. Fuji in the autumn/winter. Lovely. The people in Shizuoka must be pretty lucky to have that view, for the most part, year in and year out.

Akihabara! In the past, I never really had a reason to spend time in Akihabara. But this trip, I did have one objective in mind: to make it to Super Potato in Akihabara and buy myself a Nintendo Famicom (obviously, I spend too much time reading Kotaku). Well, I did make it to Super Potato (yay!) and found the Famicoms (yay!) but didn't buy any (yay?). See, when I got there reality set in: what would I do with it when I got home? Seeing as it was likely to just gather dust among so much other old junk, I decided to fulfill another unrequited ambition and buy a copy of Macross Ace Frontier instead. At another store. If I spent any more time at Super Potato, my wallet may not have made it out alive.

Cheap. Not cheap. Came across several stores around Tokyo selling second-hand photography equipment. Unfortunately for me, prices were still rather steep, although I suspect if you're out looking for high-end gear, you'd find good deals (by comparison, I was after low-hanging fruit). On an unrelated note, I noticed that toys and figurines were quite reasonable at Book-Off or Tokyu Hands. Didn't buy any for myself, though. Must be this minimalist phase I'm going through (read: I'm getting soft in my old age).

Caught Zed, missed the Blue Men. The wife and I made it a point to catch Cirque du Soleil's Zed during our free day in Tokyo. Great show! It was the wife's first Cirque du Soleil experience (she loved it) and my fourth (after Saltimbanco, O, and Zaia). We also learned that Blue Man Group were also in Tokyo; unfortunately they didn't have a show on our free day. Win some, lose some. No regrets, though: we're quite happy with the show we did get to see.

Sakura ga arimasen. Of course, cherry blossoms weren't in season yet. Would've been a huge plus for the wife and I if they were. At any rate, this gives us a reason to come back to Japan. Sometime.

Bureaupathologies [Presentation Thursdays]

View this presentation on Slideshare.

Some slides on the concept of "Bureaupathologies". Obviously, these continue with the topic of Bureaucracy.

I last used these slides around...2004? Frankly, I'd forgotten this was even in the syllabus. Maybe we removed the topic when we reevaluated the course content.

Chalk another one up to posterity and learning something new every day.

[Confused about Presentation Thursdays? Then read the first in the series].