Could You Resist “The Marshmallow”?

I am a “wee” bit behind on my stack of New Yorkers.  However, on the plane this past weekend, I finally had a chance to read a few.

Jonah Lehrer’s article,  “Don’t! The secret of self-control,” about Stanford Prof. Walter Mischel’s Marshmallow Experiment was really interesting.

In a nutshell, Mischel told a bunch of unsuspecting 4 year:

You can eat ONE marshmallow now.  Or, if you sit here quietly while I leave the room for a bit, you can eat TWO when I get back.

Turns out, kids only lasted on average 3 minutes before they gave in and ate (the damn) marshmallow.  Only 30% of them successfully waited the 15 minutes until the researcher’s return.

Lehrer eventually discovered a “marshmallow resistance correlation” (my term) between those who withstood the treat temptation at 4 years old… and those who had good self-control later in life.

 

Would your 4 year old self have resisted the initial marshmallow and waited for the larger payout?

 

Note: I think I probably would have held out for the second marshmallow… but not sure how my current self would do with the “wine + really good cheese” experiment.  :)

Memorial Day

I don’t know about you… but I will admit to often forgetting the importance of Memorial Day.  It’s not just another 3 day weekend – especially given the current state of the world.

While in Miami this past weekend, I stumbled on an incredibly poignant memorial.  Along Ocean Drive in South Beach, thousands of paper tombstones commemorated those who have fallen in Iraq and Afghanistan (4,985 to date). 

Each tombstone had the handwritten name and age of a fallen veteran.  

Each tombstone was written by a different person.

The simple symbolism, especially with the juxtaposition of South Beach during “Urban Week”, was powerful – it was heartbreaking.

 

The memorial was set up by Veterans for Peace.

Memorial Day

 tombstones

Memorial Day

tombstones

the juxtaposition

the memorial

Napa for the Weekend

I was in wine country last weekend… Nothing beats wine + sun (unless it’s wine + sun + cheese).

 

 

Strawberries on the Side of the Road

 

Little Vid.... and the Bottle

 

 

 

 

 Daisies

 

 

 

 Wine Photo Shot

Obama’s White House, on Flickr

During the campaign, Obama created his own Flickr account.  The photos during election night were amazing – and very personal.

 

 

 

Obama now has a new Flickr account: The Official White House Photostream.  The first set – Delivering on Change – was just posted.  Here are a few of my favorites.

 

superbowl

briefing on swine flu

Michelle Obama with Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, wife of french president

 

a day in the office

Scary Diagrams

Just saw this on the NPR Planet Money blog.

It depicts the inter-connectedness of credit default swaps. 

Kinda reminds you of a really complicated “who hooked up with who” diagram… 

Silverlight 3 Beta!

Here are all the Silverlight 3 Beta links, if you’re interested in digging in.

As a callout:  This is a developer beta release only! This means there is no “go-live” licensing available and the end-user runtime of Silverlight 3 is not available.

A full list of the new features can be found here.

If you’re curious, some of the new framework features inside of the core runtime are:

  • BasedOn Styles
  • Merged ResourceDictionaries
  • Ability to listen to handled routed events
  • Data Binding to DependencyProperty sources
  • Binding supports RelativeSource syntax
  • Explicit update for Bindings
  • Validation UI supported by VSM
  • MultiSelection for ListBox

Mix 09: Building Microsoft Silverlight Controls

Thank you to everyone to who came to my talk at Mix09! 

I’m always a bit nervous having talks on the last day of a conference. (After all, you work really hard to pull a session together – and it can kinda be a bummer talking to mostly empty chairs.)  But my room was full, and the audience’s vibe felt great from stage.  :)

If you missed the session, you can watch the video here:

Also, as promised, here are links to…

  • Sample source code
  • Deck

    The final WishExplorer demo uses Wishpot’s 3rd party web service

    Wishpot is a great site for wishlisting – it’s aimed at avoiding “random” (note quotations) presents on your birthday and holidays. :)  Anyways, in order to compile & run the demo locally, you’ll need to request a developer key from them here.

    Also, here’s a link to two other demos, if you’d link to click around them:

    A few callouts:

    • Thank you to Wishpot’s CTO Tom Lianza and  Senior Designer John Hildenbiddle for all their help on the backend and visuals for the demos.
    • Dave – your radial panel rocked it.  Thanks!

    Any feedback you have on the session content or presentation is appreciated – I’m always trying to be a better speaker.  :)

    p.s.  I’ve posted an update to my SnippetManager – it now automatically copies the snippets to the clipboard.

  • Mix09 – So Divine!

    Yep.  That’s a rhyming blog post title.  Anyways.  :)

    Mix09 is next week.  As you can tell from the title of our talks… You’ll get to see Silverlight 3 at Mix this year!

    Here are some of the core Silverlight talks (including one by me).

    Also note the ambiguously named talk by Mike Harsh – I can’t wait for that session!

    Cheerio Loves!

    Smashing holiday in London!   More soon, long flight - quite zonked. Cheers!

    (Look Mom, I can speak British!)

     

    Parliament

    me, in front of parliament

    London Eye

    The view from the London Eye at sunset was lovely….

    London Eye

     the ferris wheel

    From the Eye

    thames river

     

     The Eye in the Sky

    eye from above

     

     Parliament from Above

    parliament

     

    From the Eye

    liane and me