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Companies That Read More Perform Better Financially - ScienceBlog.com
Size Matters in Information Consumption
“The way companies consume information is reminiscent of biological organisms,” says co-author Eddie Lee. “As with organisms, there are important size differences. Larger firms tend to consume information more efficiently but face significant challenges in coordination.”
The study reveals that larger companies tend to read more broadly rather than specialize, challenging traditional ideas about labor specialization. However, this broader reading often comes with increased redundancy, as larger organizations face greater coordination challenges.
Reading and Financial Success
Perhaps most significantly, the research found that companies consuming more information than typical for their size tend to show better financial performance. These information-hungry firms demonstrated higher future returns and valuations compared to their peers.
The study also uncovered links between reading patterns and company innovation, suggesting that how organizations manage information could provide valuable insights into their operational dynamics and financial health.
Private Equity for Apps: Evernote’s Owner Has Big Plans - Bloomberg
As an acquirer, Bending Spoons has a type: distressed businesses with a steady cash flow that sell subscription software. Then it brings in twentysomething coders and data scientists in Italy who add features and sometimes push the limits of what subscribers will pay. To set these apps on a new path, the company often fires the employees it inherited.
terrible hacky Google alternative to pullquote
Adding Quotes from the Web using Google Keep
You can also use quote collections made up of text passages you’ve curated from the Web. Google Keep allows you to select text on any page and “Save to Keep” — capturing the text and the URL of the web page to your Keep account. (You can do Web clippings with Keep in several different ways. On desktop, there is a Chrome extension that you install. On mobile — both iOS and Android — if you install the Keep app, it gives you a share sheet that you can access from a mobile browser to collect web clippings.) Keep allows you to select your clippings and export them as a group to Docs, which can then be brought into NotebookLM as a source. So for instance an analyst researching information about a new financial services company could visit a dozen web sites that contain news articles about the company, selecting quotes and saving them to Keep as they read. When they’re done with that research, they go to their main Keep page, and select all the clippings that are relevant to their project. Then they click on the three dots in the upper right corner and choose “Copy to Google Docs.”
Reduced Body Flexibility Is Associated With Poor Survival in Middle‐Aged Men and Women: A Prospective Cohort Study
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first cohort study to
show that a reduced level of body flexibility—as assessed by
the Flexindex, a composite score of maximal passive ROM of 20
movements in seven major joints—is related to higher mortality
in a large middle-
aged cohort of men and women. By analyzing
death rates according Flexindex's data distribution, a consistent
pattern emerged among middle-
aged men and women, indicat-
ing a gradual and inverse relationship between Flexindex and
both natural and non-
COVID-
19 mortality during an average
follow-
up of nearly 13
years.
The association was most pronounced at the extremes of the
Flexindex score distribution [death rate%]—men: [P91–99] 7.8%
versus [P1–10] 21.2% and women: [P91–99] 2.0% versus [P1–10]
15.4%.—and remained significant when further sequentially ad-
justed for age, BMI and health status.
Tagging turns collecting into thinking
As a rule of thumb, you should always make something from the information you process. You should always translate information to knowledge by adding context and relevance.
Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method • Zettelkasten Method
To become a hypertext, a Zettelkasten requires multiple texts, or notes, that you can connect via hyperlinks. We call an individual note a Zettel. Zettel is the German word for “paper slip”. They are the smallest building blocks of the Zettelkasten.
Introduction to the Zettelkasten Method • Zettelkasten Method
Normal note-taking will create a bloated mess over time. The Zettelkasten on the other hand will scale itself automatically to the size of the problem you are tackling. This is what Luhmann talked about when he wrote about “internal growth” (I translated it into “organic growth”) in his manual.
Strange Loops: Reading a Book on How to Read a Book • Zettelkasten Method
Problem-solving skills, in particular decision-making skills. By
far, the best paper I read on this issue is “Detailed
Characterization of the Expert Problem-Solving Process in Science
and Engineering: Guidance for Teaching and Assessment”[^argenta]
Each book should be treated as a problem to be solved: How to
attack it? How much time to invest in it, and how to spread this
time over the chapters (evenly or weighted)? How can I re-construct
it, so I learn the most? Is this a book that should be treated as
inspiration, or should I really make an effort to re-create the
content in my own words?
Opinion | Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind - The New York Times
One lesson of the digital age is that more is not always better. More emails and more reports and more Slacks and more tweets and more videos and more news articles and more slide decks and more Zoom calls have not led, it seems, to more great ideas. “We can produce more information,” Mark said. “But that means there’s more information for us to process. Our processing capability is the bottleneck.”
Opinion | Beyond the ‘Matrix’ Theory of the Human Mind - The New York Times
One is that these systems will do more to distract and entertain than to focus. Right now, the large language models tend to hallucinate information: Ask them to answer a complex question, and you will receive a convincing, erudite response in which key facts and citations are often made up. I suspect this will slow their widespread use in important industries much more than is being admitted, akin to the way driverless cars have been tough to roll out because they need to be perfectly reliable rather than just pretty good.
Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter
Much of journalism simply involves remembering relevant events from the past. An AI-powered link database has a perfect memory; all it’s missing is a usable chat interface. If it had one, it might be a perfect research assistant.
Why note-taking apps don't make us smarter
Gloria Mark, a professor of information science at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of “Attention Span,” started researching the way people used computers in 2004. The average time people spent on a single screen was 2.5 minutes. “I was astounded,” she told me. “That was so much worse than I’d thought it would be.” But that was just the beginning. By 2012, Mark and her colleagues found the average time on a single task was 75 seconds. Now it’s down to about 47.
arXiv.org e-Print archive
arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
Software & Gadgets — Zettelkasten Forum
Software & Gadgets
Discuss apps and real-world tools.
Three apps that made me more productive this year
And I fell hard for Capacities, a “personal knowledge management” app in the mold of Roam, Obsidian, Mem, and other similar journaling and note-taking tools that I have tried over the years.
As with most of the productivity apps I use, much of my preference for Capacities is simply aesthetic: I like its big, blank white canvas; its tagging and linking features, and its integrated AI assistant, which can be useful for exploring new topics and appending what you learn to notes you take there.
Instead of a one-size-fits-all note, Capacities lets you create lots of different kinds of objects, each with their own metadata and tab for browsing and organizing. (Daily Notes, People, and Books are some of the objects.) I’ve used it to create pages for important people in my life with various reference data about them, such as their birthdates and family members’ names. I also have dedicated pages for my beat companies, and keep them updated with information about organization charts, key dates, and other information.
Bring your text to life with our “Text annotator” template | The Flourish blog | Flourish | Data Visualization & Storytelling
Ah, the memories of being a student and diligently highlighting key phrases and scribbling notes into the page margin of a handout or textbook. But annotating a text with explanatory notes isn’t just for students: it’s also a great way to explain to an audience the inner meaning of anything from a poem to political speech. Hence our new premium template: “Text annotator”.
The template allows you to present text to your audience with interactive annotations that add extra context or explanation. Try clicking on the highlighted phrases in the example below.
Lord Alfred Tennyson
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
You can now share quoted text directly to Facebook | The Verge
Facebook is much more generous on that front — you can post updates of more than 60,000 characters there — but the company still sees plenty of screenshots anyway. Today it's introducing quote sharing, a feature developers can use to enable native sharing of quotes from their apps onto Facebook itself.
Facebook is launching quote sharing with Amazon, which built quote sharing into its Kindle e-reader. Now instead of copying and pasting text from Kindle into Facebook, you can simply highlight it and share it to Facebook.
How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity - The New York Times
A few months ago, I was having a drink in Cambridge, Mass., with a friend, a talented journalist who was piecing together a portrait of a secretive Wall Street wizard. “But I haven’t found the real story yet; I’m still gathering string,” my friend told me, invoking an old newsroom term to describe the first stage of reporting, when you’re looking for something that you can’t yet name. Later that night, as I walked home from the bar, I realized “gathering string” is just another way of talking about super-encountering. After all, “string” is the stuff that accumulates in a journalist’s pocket. It’s the note you jot down in your car after the interview, the knickknack you notice on someone’s shelf, or the anomaly that jumps out at you in Appendix B of an otherwise boring research study.
Ev thinks that Medium's value is... highlighting?
But the more interesting bit of network value we’re starting to see a lot more of is qualitative feedback. Highlights is one of my favorite example of this:
Keeping a fossil record in digital silt
We're going to need better apps to help us share, sort, and make sense of this new flood. Screenshots are more semantically diverse than typical snapshots, and we already struggle to manage our photo backlog. Rita J. King, codirector of the Science House consultancy, has thousands of screenshots from her online ramblings (pictures of bacteria, charts explaining probability). Rummaging through them reminds her of ideas she's forgotten and triggers new ones. “It's like a scrapbook, or a fossil record in digital silt,” King says. A lifetime of scraps, glimpsed through the screen.
Proposal to enable people to vet information at page level
The list of rebuttals to a given page would need to be constructed by real humans. People are still required to identify whether a page is critical of another or not, and will continue to be required until we are able to create artificial intelligence which can understand the intention of a human author.Each list of rebuttals would be tied to a specific piece of content — usually a specific webpage, but as so often happens, the content of this webpage may be cloned, and all such clones would ideally be collapsed into a single entity within the system, so that any time a rebuttal was added to any of the clones, all other clones would reflect that new addition.The system must also remain completely neutral. All rebutted, corrected, debunked etc content is only in the system because ‘someone’, ‘somewhere’ on the web has created a critical response to it. Just because a page has been critiqued does not necessarily mean it is wrong. It just means someone disagrees with it.
Medium reinvents the Pullquote wheel
Up until now you had to highlight the text you wanted, take a screenshot, go find the screenshot, and finally attach it to the tweet. Whew! Hope you still remember what you wanted to tweet in the first place.Now there’s no need for all that rigmarole. Just highlight any sentence on Medium and click the tweet button.
Students use Pullquote to improve online research
“It ended up being a lot faster for them than ‘taking notes,’” said KayCee Butcher, who taught the Honors English sophomore classes. “They were pulling quotes that they thought would be helpful to include in their paper (the direct quote) and also ideas that they wanted to paraphrase/information they needed to include.”
Pullquote = wow.
I saved the best for last, as Pullquote goes into my “wow” folder. […] if you see a quote which hits you over the head, and you think “I MUST show this to my Twitter followers!“, then simply use your mouse and highlight the words you want to quote. This will open up a black horizontal menu where you can choose “tweet”[…] now you have a lovely box with your quote in it which will impress the hell out of your followers.[…]
This.com beats Twitter's clutter and FB's goopy randomness
The hook is that users can only share one link a day. So assuming you follow smart, curious, well-read folks, your This feed will be more streamlined than the chaos of Twitter and more finely-curated than Facebook, which for me has basically become a sad social version of America’s Funniest Home Videos.
This is the brainchild of Andrew Golis, who served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Atlantic Media and later became General Manager of the soon-to-be-defunct (Atlantic) Wire. Golis tells me that while Atlantic Media funded This, he thinks of the parent company as merely an “incubator” for the project.
