Tyger Tyger Burning Bright

TimesPeople
The New York Times

September 29, 2008
Letters
Ups, Downs and America’s Mind-Set

To the Editor:

Re “The Power of Negative Thinking,” by Barbara Ehrenreich (Op-Ed, Sept. 24):

The blind belief that everything is always O.K. is, as Ms. Ehrenreich argues, delusional.

But that’s not optimism. Optimism is the ability to clearly see a bad situation — like the climate, energy and financial threats we simultaneously face — and work diligently for the best possible solution, even though these threats are enormous, complex and deeply unfair. Optimism is the ability to reframe crises as opportunities.

Optimism is attacking a problem with vigor instead of tuning out or laying blame elsewhere.

I agree that positivity-at-all-costs blinded us as a culture. But at this time, when Americans need real optimism more than ever, Ms. Ehrenreich would truly serve us all if she didn’t collapse into good vs. bad and instead probed the difference between blind positivity and real optimism.

Deborah Fisher
Brooklyn, Sept. 25, 2008

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To the Editor:

We are a nation of adolescents addicted to feeling good. When President Jimmy Carter talked tough about our oil needs and other serious issues, voters wanted no part of his reality. They chose instead to feel good with Ronald Reagan’s optimistic “morning in America” message.

Now that Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has removed our rose-colored glasses so we can see the results of our unregulated markets governed by feel-good greed, our adolescent nature is to deny, or at least doubt, the reality of what has been happening.

It’s time for us to grow up, deal with reality, and get into recovery — financially and in every other way.

Josephine H. Corning
Dripping Springs, Tex., Sept. 25, 2008

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To the Editor:

The positive thinking that Barbara Ehrenreich identifies at the root of Wall Street’s delusional optimism has a parallel in the early part of the last century, and it illustrates why her call for realism will be a hard sell.

Self-help books and success gurus in the 1920s promoted the belief that attaining prosperity was simply a matter of cultivating the proper mind-set. The Depression mostly discredited those claims by revealing that external conditions played a significant role in determining happiness.

Nonetheless, it did not take long for the empowering message of positive thinking to reappear. In 1937, Napoleon Hill published his best-selling “Think and Grow Rich,” a guide to wealth still popular among today’s corporate motivators.

Peter S. Cahn
Cambridge, Mass., Sept. 24, 2008

The writer, a sociocultural anthropologist, is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

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To the Editor:

Positive thinking is not about always getting what you want; it is making the best of what you have while planting seeds to create opportunities in the future.

My role as an educator and parent is to empower the learner with independence, knowledge, skills and attitude to achieve personal, professional and academic success.

Motivational speakers like Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn and Stephen R. Covey have helped millions of people stay on course, some of whom might have turned to other coping mechanisms, like alcohol. Their messages may not resonate with all audiences, but they help to motivate and inspire millions of people to persevere through life’s (and the financial markets’) inevitable ups and downs.

Robin A. Schwartz
Bronx, Sept. 25, 2008

The writer is the founder of mathconfidence.com.

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To the Editor:

While I agree that the everyday thinking of many Americans is self-delusional, it may well be that such a mind-set is what made your country great. After all, where else is the right to the pursuit of happiness guaranteed in a country’s founding documents?

Although the American “self-made man” may largely be a myth created by those in positions of power and influence, it has certainly been a most effective myth, inspiring countless millions to work long and hard in the service of the corporate elite.

David J. Martin
Ottawa, Sept. 25, 2008

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To the Editor:

Barbara Ehrenreich rightly identifies the American delusion of “positive thinking” promoted by motivational speakers and “megachurch pastors.” But “negative thinking” does not accurately describe the mind-set of America’s Protestant settlers.

She cites “a grim Calvinism that offered wealth only through hard work and savings, and even then made no promises at all.” While it is true the settlers’ theology made no promises for this life, it made many promises for the future, like resurrection and peace with God.

As a Protestant seminary student who actually still believes this theology, I see that Calvinism is not delusional pessimism but rather fits the category Ms. Ehrenreich wants to embrace — realism, “seeing the risks, having the courage to bear bad news and being prepared for famine as well as plenty.”

Kevin McFadden
Louisville, Ky., Sept. 25, 2008

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To the Editor:

There’s plenty of blame to be cast at the C.E.O.’s, but not enough criticism has been leveled at the “average” American dreamer.

In Britain, we have an expression, “kippers and curtains,” for status-seekers who would bankrupt, even starve themselves, in order to project an image of affluence. Millions of people in your country were Tony Robbins-ed into believing that all the riches of the world would fall at their feet if they only believed it would happen.

Lindsay Gray
Owen Sound, Ontario, Sept. 25, 2008

TimesPeople
The New York Times

September 28, 2008
Prototype
We’ll Fill This Space, but First a Nap
By LESLIE BERLIN

“WASTE not life,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, patron saint of American entrepreneurs. “In the grave will be sleeping enough.”

Centuries later, the attitude toward sleep in America — and in American business, in particular — has scarcely changed. Corporate culture reveres the e-mail message sent at 3 a.m., the executive who rushes directly into a meeting from a red-eye flight. Bumper stickers offer an updated version of Franklin’s dictum: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

“There is a cultural bias against sleep that sees it as akin to shutting down, or even to death,” explains Dr. Jeffrey Ellenbogen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and director of the Sleep Laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Most people, Dr. Ellenbogen says, think of the sleeping brain as similar to a computer that has “gone to sleep” — it does nothing productive. Wrong. Sleep enhances performance, learning and memory. Most unappreciated of all, sleep improves creative ability to generate aha! moments and to uncover novel connections among seemingly unrelated ideas.

Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, once defined creativity as “just connecting things.” Sleep assists the brain in flagging unrelated ideas and memories, forging connections among them that increase the odds that a creative idea or insight will surface.

While traditional stories about sleep and creativity emphasize vivid dreams hastily transcribed upon waking, recent research highlights the importance of letting ideas marinate and percolate.

“Sleep makes a unique contribution,” explains Mark Jung-Beeman, a psychologist at Northwestern University who studies the neural bases of insight and creative cognition.

Some sort of incubation period, in which a person leaves an idea for a while, is crucial to creativity. During the incubation period, sleep may help the brain process a problem.

“When you think you’re not thinking about something, you probably are,” says Dr. Jung-Beeman, who has a doctorate in experimental psychology.

Another theory is that typical approaches to problem-solving may decay or weaken during sleep, enabling the brain to switch to more innovative alternatives. A classic switching story, recounted in “A Popular History of American Invention” in 1924, involves Elias Howe’s invention of the automated sewing machine: after much frustration with his original model, which used a needle with an eye in the middle, Howe dreamed that he was being attacked by painted warriors brandishing spears with holes in the sharp end. He patented a new design based on the dream spears; by the time the patent expired in 1867, he had earned more than $2 million in royalties.

Spear-wielding savages make for compelling stories, but creative insights directly induced by dreams are rare. In general, people are unaware of sleep’s effects on their performance.

Dr. Ellenbogen’s research at Harvard indicates that if an incubation period includes sleep, people are 33 percent more likely to infer connections among distantly related ideas, and yet, as he puts it, these performance enhancements exist “completely beneath the radar screen.”

In other words, people are more creative after sleep, but they don’t know it.

This lack of awareness makes it hard to identify specific aha! insights that have been prompted by sleep.

“It’s more that sleep brings a change of approach,” explains Mark Holmes, an art director at Pixar Animation Studios who worked on the film “Wall-E.” “You can get tunnel vision when you’re hammering away at a problem. You keep going down this same path, again and again, just tweaking, making incremental changes at best. ” He continues: “Sleep erases that. It resets you. You wake up and realize — wait a minute! — there is another way to do this.”

Business attitudes toward sleep may be starting to shift. Claire Stapleton, a spokeswoman for Google, says “grassroots” interest in sleep led to an on-campus talk by Sara C. Mednick a napping expert. Google also installed EnergyPods, leather recliners with egglike hoods that block noise and light, for employees to take naps at work.

Other companies that have installed EnergyPods include Cisco Systems and Procter & Gamble.

Vinayak Sudame, an engineer at the Research Triangle Park campus of Cisco, says he uses an EnergyPod to “shut my eyes and shut myself off for 10 or 15 minutes” when he is working on a problem or needs some quiet time. More than a walk or a coffee break, he says, this type of “total mental rest” helps him return to work with what he calls a “reorganized” perspective.

Alertness Solutions, a sleep consulting company in Cupertino, Calif., provided consultations and recommendations to a number of United States Olympic teams before the Beijing games and also works with corporate clients. Bob Agostino, vice president of operations at L. J. Aviation, in Latrobe, Pa., worked with Alertness Solutions at a previous employer and says that employees learned specific strategies to improve performance. These included when and how long to nap, how to determine the amount of sleep one needs, and how to recognize signs of fatigue and symptoms of sleep disorders.

Acting on this knowledge, Mr. Agostino says, “gives you an edge.”

In general, West Coast companies are more concerned about sleep issues than their East Coast counterparts, says Arshad Chowdhury, co-founder and chief executive of MetroNaps, which developed the EnergyPods.

“Particularly in New York, where financial services play such a big role, people are consistently sleep-deprived and consistently in denial,” he says.

Mr. Chowdhury — who says the idea for EnergyPods came to him in a nap — recalls a seminar in which one banker responded to a survey question with a note saying she knew she had no fatigue-related problems at work because the only time she fell asleep was when she sat still. Mr. Chowdhury laughs a bit ruefully: “Maybe we could have avoided the crisis we are in now if these people had just gotten proper sleep.”

Leslie Berlin is project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford.

The New York Times

September 25, 2008
How to Treat a ‘Money Disorder’
By SARAH KERSHAW

THE country music star Wynonna Judd had essentially “won the lottery” at age 17, she said. But after amassing a fortune from her career, she squandered much of it, throwing money at her children out of guilt for missing hockey practices, and buying more cars than she could ever drive. Having grown up poor in Appalachia, Ms. Judd found herself with “everything and nothing at all,” she said.

Amy Sprague Champeau was destitute following a divorce, and with no college education or job opportunities, wound up living in her car. When she finally rented a room, her only furniture was a piece of foam for a bed. Soon after she began earning some money, she ran up large credit card debts and became choked by fear.

The two women, a global celebrity and a Wisconsin divorcee trying to climb out from under a pile of bills, sought help in the budding field of financial therapy, where budget planning meets psychological counseling. They even went to a kind of money rehab, where, in six days of group therapy they dug deep into the roots of what psychologists call “money disorders,” the slew of unhealthy and self-destructive behaviors that are not as extreme as pathological gambling, kleptomania or compulsive shopping, but nevertheless afflict large numbers of people.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the number of patients or practitioners, experts in psychology and financial planning say the number of professionals offering to treat money disorders has multiplied in the last few years.

Although there are many self-help books on how to become rich, the fields of psychology and financial planning have been slow to link money and emotion. And money is still a great cultural taboo that is rarely discussed openly in this country, experts say.

“I’m still working on my money issues and I will be for a long time,” said Ms. Champeau, 57, who went to night school and eventually became a psychotherapist herself, allowing her to earn a living. But her fear of debt is still an issue: she buys much of her wardrobe at Goodwill. “I have always felt alone and a lot of shame around money,” she said.

Among the problem financial behaviors identified by psychologists in recent years are: overspending, underspending (a k a Depression mentality), serial borrowing, financial infidelity (“cheating” on a spouse by spending and lying about it), workaholism, financial incest (lording money over relatives to control them), financial enabling (throwing large sums at, say, adult children who then are not motivated to support themselves), hoarding, and plenty of guilt and shame around poverty and wealth.

The financial storm thundering from Wall Street is likely to force many people to examine their relationships with money well beyond their portfolios and bank accounts, some psychologists say. Even before this month’s dire news, an online survey by the American Psychological Association in June found that 75 percent of the more than 2,500 adults said money was the No. 1 source of stress in their lives.

“This is a dangerous time,” said Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist who is one of the authors of a study published this month in the journal Psychological Services that examines the state and treatment of money disorders. “And when people come for help around money, it goes so much deeper than what is in their bank accounts. It’s a portal into unresolved family histories and generational history patterns.”

Dr. Klontz’s study looked at various money disorders and at a treatment center, Onsite, in Nashville, which was owned until recently by his father, Ted Klontz, a psychologist and life coach who still leads the “healing money issues” program there, along with a financial planner.

Under the American Psychological Association’s professional code of ethics, therapists should not enter into outside relationships with clients, including business arrangements like financial planning. With the field of financial therapy so new, Dr. Brad Klontz and others said that when it came to financial planners who are also therapists, the ethics were still murky. He said “it could violate the ethical standards of the mental health field if a financial planner who was also trained as a therapist crossed the boundary from asset management or coaching into the realm of providing therapy.”

Onsite is one of a number of programs and workshops devoted to problem money behaviors that fall short of psychiatric disorders like gambling and compulsive buying (which are treated at more traditional rehab facilities). It costs $2,650 and involves six days of group therapy and financial counseling.

Both Ms. Judd, who attended the program when it started in 2004, and Ms. Champeau, who was there in July, said that they have been able to begin transforming their destructive financial behaviors. “If I can do it, anyone can,” Ms. Judd said in an interview. “I’m in absolute financial recovery. I live by cash only, by cash budget. I’ll go into Target with a money envelope.”

“I’ve liquidated all the vehicles down to the ones we actually use,” she added. “Instead of five Harleys, I have two.”

Ms. Champeau, who lives in Racine, Wis., said that since she attended the program she has hired a financial planner who also has a master’s degree in counseling. She is developing a specialty in money issues in her own psychotherapy practice and is speaking with a financial planner about teaming up to see clients.

At a time when the economy is stagnating and consumers are fearful about unemployment and retirement savings, it is easy to imagine that being rich or coming upon a windfall is a panacea, and that anyone who has money is feeling secure and serene. But plenty of people struggling with money issues are not poor. Research has shown a significant level of depression, for example, among lottery winners. Other research has shown that above a household income of $50,000, there is little or no correlation between income and happiness.

A 35-year-old woman in Los Angeles said that after inheriting almost $500,000 five years ago, she was often panicked and struggled with insomnia. She was ashamed, she said, to have so much money, which allowed her to start a production company and made her feel as if she was buying a career, not earning one. She spent three quarters of her inheritance, realizing later that she was trying to get rid of it because she thought she was undeserving.

“I was feeling shame that people around me think I’m successful and I haven’t earned it,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be used so her family would not know she was speaking about her financial problems. “Everybody wants a windfall, and I’ve experienced that in my life. What I have to say about that is: you pay. I didn’t pay in money, but I paid in lots of years of my life.”

She said she sees a financial planner who has also trained as a therapist — but the services are only for financial planning.

Financial planners, including Rick Kahler, who has teamed up with Dr. Ted Klontz to provide financial advising and therapy to clients, say the combination of both specialties is highly effective. “I’ve never seen clients make progress faster than when they are working with me and a psychologist, preferably in the same meeting,” he said.

But many financial planners interviewed said they saw no need to have a therapist on their team. In their meetings with clients, they said, they often heard about problems with spending, families and marriages, and as years-long professional relationships developed, they became adept at offering informal life advice. “I do believe that you can refer clients to other professionals when there’s the need,” said Morris Armstrong, a financial planner in Danbury, Conn. “But I don’t necessarily think that everybody needs to have the Dr. Phil of financial planning.”

Among marital therapists, money is recognized as a source of stress between couples and in families; it is among the leading triggers of divorce. “People express other problems by arguing about money,” said Jonathan Rich, a psychologist in Irvine, Calif., who specializes in couples and money. “Issues of control and anger over other things in a relationship come out as money. And right now with the economy, there is so much money stress, more arguing and more tension over money.”

Another source of stress intertwined with money arises when adult children live with their parents, which is more common than in previous generations. “Boomer parents, the last thing they ever wanted to do was to live with their mother and father,” said Jeanne Fleming, a sociologist and columnist for Money magazine. “But when their kids want to come home, they often have two very conflicting reactions. They feel on the one hand really unsettled and they view their kids as a little spiritless. But on the other hand they are pleased that their kids view them as acceptable people to live with and tolerable housemates.”

But even as many psychologists say the current economic crisis is bound to worsen money disorders, some also say that it provides an opportunity. In some cases, it could help rein in overspenders and compulsive shoppers, they say, or make those with ample resources more grateful, and less stingy.

“The wave has come and it’s really a tsunami,” said Rosalind S. Dorlen, a psychologist in Summit, N.J. “The bottom may be falling out, but we do have some control over our thinking. We do have control over our hopelessness. There are people who are going to take fantastic creative steps during this time.”

Jack Kerouac was one of those writers who reinvented literature. He climbed in James Joyce’s stream of consciousness car then careened down the streets of Beat poetry and the alleyways of Bebop jazz, creating such novels as The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, and the landmark On the Road. He influenced countless writers and, some say, helped usher in the 1960s counter-culture movement.

Fellow writers were always asking Kerouac how he did what he did. So Kerouac set down 30 essentials in something he called “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.” These tips may or may not make sense to you, but that’s Kerouac, man:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Don't think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

The New York Times

September 21, 2008
The College Issue
The Camera-Friendly, Perfectly Pixelated, Easily Downloadable Celebrity Academic
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Some Japanese have an expression for a charming professor: a charisma-sensei. You know the type. He’s actorly, perhaps a little too smooth; he enthralls students. Not too long ago, university authorities considered him suspect. He was cool, sure, but was he scholarly enough? A charisma-sensei’s tenure battle, during which dour publish-or-perish administrators disparaged his sweetness and light, might be a freshman’s or sophomore’s first exposure to intellectual and moral injury. He was Professor Chips; he was Prof. Jean Brodie.

Oh, but those days are long gone. Now a charisma-sensei — lucid, affable, groomed for “The Charlie Rose Show” — is all but a tenure shoo-in, an asset no blue-chip university can be without. On TV or billboarded on the Barnes & Noble front table, the charisma-sensei is an emissary for the relevance and exuberance of the brand, be it Harvard, Yale or Chaucer. Best of all, his online lectures now might go viral, playing around the world — beyond the reach even of Charlie Rose! — alongside clips of the Chinese Olympian Qiu Jian or the Lebanese singer Fairuz in concert. What better way to prove an institution’s embrace of globalism, new technology and populist models of information dissemination?

Last December, The Times chronicled the rise to international glory of Walter H. G. Lewin, a physics professor at M.I.T. whose lectures, available free on the Web using the university’s proprietary OpenCourseWare software (developed in 2002), are among the Internet’s most downloaded. They also regularly inspire e-raptures: “Through your inspiring video lectures I have managed to see just how beautiful physics is, both astounding and simple,” wrote one commenter, a 17-year-old from India.

M.I.T. had a head start with its software, but in short order other universities began clamoring to broadcast their lectures free. Duke, Yale and Stanford now serve as “providers” on iTunes U, which appeared in May of last year to make lectures available to download (under one Apple roof). Then, several months later, a lightweight Web site called Big Think started: an ad-driven forum for videos of lectures by intellectuals, some with university appointments.

Many online lectures are now listed on various platforms, including iTunes U, university sites (OYC.yale.edu, ocw.mit.edu, bu.edu/today/buniverse), all-purpose instruction sites (Rice University’s Cnx.org and OERCommons .com) and general-interest video clearinghouses like YouTube.

Given the difficulty of calculating ratings Webwide, the viewership for these lectures is typically gauged by how they perform on iTunes U, where each video must be fully downloaded (and not merely clicked on) before it earns a popularity point. The top of the iTunes U chart features some self-help fluff on abs and guitar instruction, but it also brims with provocative titles like “How Did Hannibal Cross the Alps?” by Patrick Hunt of Stanford (audio only); “String Theory: What Is It Good For?” by Sera Cremonini of the University of Michigan; and “What Makes a Terrorist?” by Alan B. Krueger of Princeton (also audio only).

Recently, I set out to learn something — anything, as long as it was a little bit impressive — from lecture videos online. Though some of the audio-only tracks on iTunes U interested me, I chose to focus on lectures I could also watch. I didn’t know how to be systematic, so I wasn’t. Instead, I watched lectures that seemed prestigious, popular, both and neither; I followed my interests and I followed other peoples’ interests. I got a particular kick out of seeing lecturers — like Harvey Mansfield of Harvard — that I’d heard were legendary and whose disquisitions I’d insecurely imagined as conspiratorial meetings in which it was formally decided that those present were truly educated and the rest of us weren’t. And so, finally, I would be in on the secrets! And truly educated! Herewith, the five charisma-senseis that no online student should miss.

Walter H. G. Lewin, Powers of 10, M.I.T. (Video)

Why lecture at all? Why not just make students buy your book? Take one look at Walter H. G. Lewin, a professor of physics at M.I.T., and you’ll never ask again. Lewin, a prizewinning teacher, has proved to be box-office gold since his courses went online in 2003, as part of M.I.T.’s pioneering OpenCourseWare project. And it’s no accident that he’s a virtuoso at teaching: he evidently refines those lectures — on subjects like rainbows, pendulums and rocketry — as if they were mathematical proofs. He cuts every extraneous word and streamlines the stagecraft until what’s left is a 50-minute pedagogical masterpiece.

Replete with seemingly off-the-cuff asides and anecdotes, each Lewin lecture is actually 25 hours in the making, during which Lewin decides when exactly to write on the board, to physically demonstrate something, to recruit a student or to make a joke. The series is a sharp, potent teaching weapon, one that sliced to ribbons even this humanities student’s resistance to physics, mathematics and hard science.

Lewin, a rangy and good-looking 70-something who onstage has the physicality of a much younger man, could be played by Ralph Fiennes or Ed Harris. His decisive chalk strokes on the rolling, multilayer M.I.T. chalkboards alone manage to turn high-level numeracy into a tennislike sport: something requiring aggression, hand-eye coordination and laserlike focus. But not only does Lewin convey enthusiasm for his subject — a “Dead Poets Society” talent that perhaps ought to be superfluous in a nuclear physicist speaking to the best and the brightest — but he also empowers his students by demonstrating the way of the physicist and assuming you can walk it with him. Watching the lectures, I keenly wanted to rise to Lewin’s confidence; I dredged up anything I could possible remember about high-level math and used it to follow his demonstrations. Sometimes, I got lost. But always I felt both smart and challenged. And prepared, as the next lecture rolled, to try again.

Randy Pausch, Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, Carnegie Mellon (Video)

For months I resisted the hugely popular “Last Lecture” of Randy Pausch, who was a computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon until he died of pancreatic cancer in July. I worried that the spiel, which later became a book called “The Last Lecture,” would be too inspirational, too elegiac, too sad. Too Tony Robbins. It wouldn’t qualify, in short, as an academic lecture. But once I set the video rolling, I changed my mind before Pausch finished his opening thank-yous.

Most striking, Pausch embodies a particularly American professorial ideal. Looking like an off-duty fighter pilot in a polo shirt, early on he drops and gives the audience some one-armed push-ups. No lecture in a cultural-studies course could sum up as succinctly the American charisma-sensei with his real-world experience, his conversational style and his commitment to “fun.” (That holy word turns up so many times I lost count. Toward the end, Pausch, who knew at the time he had only months to live, sums up his approach to computer science, saying, “I’m dying and I’m having fun.”)

What’s more, the image of the American educator-salesman is a great global export. Students in Asia, facing the riddle of admission to good college and post-collegiate programs, especially in the sciences, may well find Pausch’s combination of bona fide academic achievement, nerdy humor, personal disclosure and tech evangelism inspiring in the way of George Lucas or Bill Gates — other highly decorated mavericks who talk without irony about following dreams. (At least one of Pausch’s lectures is already available in Chinese translation.)

In Pausch’s case, however, the American idea of dreams-becoming-reality takes on a curiously nonmetaphorical dimension, since his academic specialty was virtual reality, the literal encoding and reification of fantasies. His enthusiastic tales of working at Disney designing rides and starting a course at Carnegie Mellon called “Building Virtual Worlds” are at bottom little more than adventures in alliance building and bureaucracy avoiding. But his capacity to find opportunities for heroism in institutional politics is surprisingly moving — and quite enough to make an aspiring engineer, here or abroad, resolve to vanquish naysayers or software bugs and turn his most arcane mental pleasures into chances for profit and laurels.

Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, Duke and M.I.T. (Video)

Dan Ariely had a revelation while bedridden after a horrible accident that burned 70 percent of his body. His nurses, wonderfully caring people who knew well the science of burns, nonetheless subjected him to unnecessary agony, he decided, because they believed that bandages ought to be torn off quickly, when — as his subsequent research showed — most people prefer low-grade pain at length to high-intensity pain for short spurts. This revelation, and the subsequent making of a “behavioral economist,” which is what Ariely now is — he teaches at both Duke and M.I.T. — is the subject of Ariely’s first bite-size lecture online, “How an Injury Led Me to Irrationality.”

The installments in his “Predictably Irrational” series are short — the length of pop songs — and padded with too many credits, titles and promotions for both Duke and Ariely’s book. They are, however, enjoyable and thought-provoking. Ariely appears half-lighted in a tuxedo, sometimes with jacket and sometimes without, as he tells of small insights into seemingly ordinary events. Montages of contemporary images play to illuminate his insights. The placebo effect, procrastination and the allure of free things come in for analysis and are brightly put into context. (An example: making the registry of a hybrid car free would be a way for the government to encourage their purchase, he argues.)

Even for those of us who are not sure that individual marketing breakthroughs — which admittedly follow a satisfying narrative arc — ought to be taught as economics have to concede that this guy is cool. Furthermore, his willingness to factor human wackiness into macroeconomic phenomena demonstrates intellectual ingenuity and a gift — like Pausch’s — for having fun. While presenting how to design research projects and moreover how to package insights, Ariely makes the potent case that the brain can be an organ of survival.

Langdon Hammer, Modern Poetry, Yale (Video)

It’s hard not to be biased in favor of the Open Yale courses at OYC.yale.edu simply because they are presented in such a frank, unfussy way. The silky audiovisuals start without graphic rigamarole and don’t stall till they’re over. Professors wear clip-on microphones but otherwise seem to conduct the classes just for the students, as in the case of Langdon Hammer, whose set of lectures on modern poetry are weak on sizzle but strong on steak. Hammer can also be seen distributing handouts and encouraging students to do their homework; he’s not playing to the online bleacher seats or would-be book buyers. This is the real New Haven stuff.

I chose one of Hammer’s first lectures on Hart Crane, as Crane is the subject of several of Hammer books, including “Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism.” Indeed, he appears to take great satisfaction in simply reading Crane aloud. His signature gesture is an outstretched arm from which he twists his hand as if turning a stiff dial on the elaborate dashboard of a spaceship. With this, he suggests how well a poet encapsulates or compresses an idea. His voice is neither blasé nor sporty, like Ariely’s or Pausch’s. Instead, it’s suave and nervous at once: call it the humanities voice. Pausch stumbles as he ad-libs — unlike the others, he evidently keeps no notes, only poems, in front of him — but picks up fluency, tellingly, when he reads from Crane (or Eliot or Pound; it’s a canonical syllabus of modernists).

Hammer stresses that his course is not specifically for English majors. The poets under discussion knew something about economics, science, mathematics and other fields — and didn’t consider poetry a discipline apart from the rest of the world. As a consequence of Hammer’s emphasis, his poets come across as much more than emotional crooners (as might the adolescent-friendly Romantics); they’re sophisticated, canny practitioners of translation and quotation.

This seems like the right tack to take with these urbane modernists, who slip in and out of languages and dialects and cities and who are impressive not so much as followers of dreams but as boulevardiers in bowlers — or open-collared shirts and cashmere, which is what Hammer seems to opt for. Keen, witty, cold-eyed observers of the turning world: what undergraduate doesn’t like to see himself in the Eliot paradigm?

Christine Hayes, Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), Yale (Video)

In Christine Hayes’s first lecture, she breezes into her subject — wearing an open aqua blue shirt and matching tank top, as if on a cruise — and quickly becomes, personally, a compelling enigma. Maybe it’s immature to wonder, but what’s her story?

Here is a specialist in Talmudic-Midrashic studies, who is the Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis professor of religious studies in classical Judaica at Yale. As she lays out for a crowd of students how tenacious the monotheism of the early Israelites has been, how influential, how really miraculous, she shows a rousing philo-Semitism. It seems to kindle a warm glow in anyone raised as Jewish, Christian or Muslim.

Her enthusiasm for the concept of one God might make more sense coming from a kindly rabbi or Sunday-school teacher. Delivered by a professor at Yale, where you might expect more cultural relativism and frank atheism, Introduction to the Old Testament seems at first a little off — a high-toned monotheism infomercial.

Except that it’s not. Hayes’s seemingly simple formulations twinkle with fascinating implications for contemporary religious life. In the last two centuries, she says, with the help of archaeology, we first glimpsed the ancient world; that world included many extinct cultures and one that had curiously survived; the survival of the Jews is testament to the versatility and might of the Bible. While the course sidesteps theological issues and Hayes stresses that questions about the Bible’s divine inspiration will be tabled, she nonetheless reveals that the Hebrew Bible stirs in her a special kind of longing and delight. Students with even a passing familiarity with the Bible will find it hard to keep aloof from Hayes’s affection.

Intellectual pursuits can satisfy religious longings: that’s a powerful lesson, and one that Hayes unfolds and demonstrates with patience and spirit.

The New York Times

September 18, 2008
Fitness
I Put in 5 Miles at the Office
By MANDY KATZ

TERRI KRIVOSHA, a partner at a Minneapolis law firm, logs three miles each workday on a treadmill without leaving her desk. She finds it easier to exercise while she types than to attend aerobics classes at the crack of dawn.

Brad Rhoads, a computer programmer and missionary in Princeton, Ill., faces a computer monitor on a file cabinet and gets in about five miles a day on a treadmill while working in his home office.

“After a while, your legs do get kind of tired,” said Mr. Rhoads, 40, who started exercising in March, when doctors advised him to lose weight after open-heart surgery.

Ms. Krivosha and Mr. Rhoads are part of a small but growing group of desk jockeys who were inspired by Dr. James Levine, an endocrinologist at the Mayo Clinic. In 2005, Dr. Levine led a study showing that lean people burn about 350 more calories a day than those who are overweight, by doing ordinary things like fidgeting, pacing or walking to the copier.

To incorporate extra movement into the routines of sedentary workers (himself included), Dr. Levine constructed the first known treadmill desk by sliding a bedside hospital tray over a $400 treadmill. With a laptop and a phone headset, he said he can go all day at a leisurely 1.4 miles an hour.

Without breaking a sweat, the so-called work-walker can burn an estimated 100 to 130 calories an hour at speeds slower than two miles an hour, Mayo research shows.

Enthusiasts began following Dr. Levine’s example, constructing treadmill desks that range from sleekly robotic set-ups to rickety mash-ups that could be Wall-E’s long-lost kin. But the recent introduction of an all-in-one treadmill desk from Details may inch work-walking into the mainstream, as dozens of businesses invest in the hardware to let their employees walk (and, ideally, lose a little weight) at work.

Since last November, about 335 Walkstations, have been sold nationwide to companies including Humana, Mutual of Omaha, GlaxoSmithKline and Best Buy.

The Walkstation, which Dr. Levine helped develop, costs about $4,000 and comes in 36 laminate finishes with an ergonomically curved desktop. Its quiet motor is designed for slow speeds, said David Kagan, director of marketing communications at Details, a division of Steelcase.

STILL, to most, work-walking is “a freaky thing to do,” said Joe Stirt, 60, an anesthesiologist in Charlottesville, Va., who works and blogs in his off hours while walking up to six hours a day in his home office.

Mr. Stirt’s site, www.bookofjoe.com/2007/10/treadmill-works.html, is one of some dozen work-walking blogs, including www.treadmill-desk.com and treadmill-workstation.com.

“I know lots of people who are using them,” Dr. Stirt said of the treadmill desks. “But there are probably a hundred times more who we don’t read about on the Internet.”

There is even a burgeoning social network (officewalkers.ning.com), with around 30 members, that Mr. Rhoads started in March.

To the uninitiated, work-walking sounds like a recipe for distraction. But devotees say the treadmill desks increase not only their activity but also their concentration.

“I thought it was ridiculous until I tried it,” said Ms. Krivosha, 49, a partner in the law firm of Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand.

Ms. Krivosha said it is tempting to become distracted during conference calls, but when she is exercising, she listens more intently.

“Walking just takes care of the A.D.D. part,” she said.

Still, work-walking can require crafty maneuvering. When colleagues drop in on Bruce Langer, another work-walker, he pivots, then keeps striding backward while facing them.

“It’s more polite and, from a workout standpoint, it works different muscles,” said Mr. Langer, a vice president of Tealwood Asset Management in Minneapolis.

In 2005, Salo, a professional placement firm in Minneapolis, contacted Dr. Levine after fashioning its first treadmill unit. (Employees called the cobbled-together unit “the Frankendesk.”) By 2007, Salo had become a test site for early Walkstation models and now has 16.

At Mutual of Omaha’s 150-person call center in Omaha, four Walkstations have been in use since July as part of a small company study to figure out whether work-walking could maintain productivity while reducing employees’ cholesterol, weight and blood-sugar levels. Sixteen subjects of different ages, weights and fitness levels work-walk two hours a day, said Peggy Rivedal, the manager of employee health services. A similarly diverse control group works the old-fashioned way.

After leaving the military two years ago, Kirk Hurley, 40, a customer service representative at Mutual of Omaha, gained 75 pounds. In two months of work-walking two hours a day, he has lost 16 pounds.

“You don’t really feel the physical strain on your body because your mind’s occupied with your work,” he said.

Treadmill desks will not likely replace the sit-down kind any time soon. In corporate settings, they are usually in open areas where employees can just jump on. At a few firms, including Salo, they have replaced conference tables.

SOME business colleagues arrive at meetings with walking shoes in hand, said Amy Langer, a Salo founder (and Mr. Langer’s wife).

But not every employee has the enthusiasm to keep work-walking day after day. Take the trial Walkstation at Humana, a health insurer in Louisville, Ky.

After a year on site, the treadmill is in use about 60 percent of the workday, mostly for conference calls, said Grant Harrison, the vice president of consumer innovation. Many workers, he said, may “try it out, but they don’t make it a part of their daily life.”

Nor does everyone have the coordination to walk and work, said Andrew Wood, the director of ergonomics and corporate services for Muve, a weight-management consultancy affiliated with the Mayo Clinic.

“If you can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, this may not be the workstation for you,” Mr. Wood said. But it should be a piece of cake for most people, he added.

James O. Hill, an obesity researcher and the director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Human Nutrition in Denver, shares this opinion: “There are not very many people who can’t walk,” he said. “You should have a doctor’s note to not walk.”

Will work-walking free you from the gym forever? Not if you’re seeking serious weight loss or peak cardio-respiratory fitness. “Walking on the treadmill could be enough to prevent weight gain, but it’s not going to melt the pounds off,” Dr. Hill said.

Still, something is better than nothing, say workwalkers like Mr. Rhoads.

“At least a little bit of exercise will just be part of my day and part of my working,” he said. “The one thing I always do is work.”

The New York Times

September 15, 2008
Training Young Brains to Behave
By BENEDICT CAREY

AFTER inflicting months of sleep deprivation on their parents, young children often switch course and begin what could be called a thought-deprivation campaign.

This is the stage, around age 2 or 3, when their brains seem to send multiple messages to the body at once — eat, scream, spill juice, throw crayons — and good luck to anyone trying to form a complete sentence or thought in their presence. Toddlers are interruption machines, all impulse and little control.

One reason is that an area of the brain that is critical to inhibiting urges, the prefrontal cortex, is still a work in progress. The density of neural connections in the 2-year-old prefrontal cortex, for instance, is far higher than in adults, and levels of neurotransmitters, the mind’s chemical messengers, are lower. Some children’s brains adapt quickly, while others’ take time — and, as a result, classmates, friends and adults are interrupted for years along the way.

But just as biology shapes behavior, so behavior can accelerate biology. And a small group of educational and cognitive scientists now say that mental exercises of a certain kind can teach children to become more self-possessed at earlier ages, reducing stress levels at home and improving their experience in school. Researchers can test this ability, which they call executive function, and they say it is more strongly associated with school success than I.Q.

“We know that the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until the 20s, and some people will ask, ‘Why are you trying to improve prefrontal abilities when the biological substrate is not there yet?’ ” said Adele Diamond, a professor of developmental cognitive science at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “I tell them that 2-year-olds have legs, too, which will not reach full length for 10 years or more — but they can still walk and run and benefit from exercise.”

Executive function involves three important skills. The first is the ability to resist distractions or delay gratification to finish a job: to finish the book report before turning on the television. The second is working memory, the capacity to hold multiple numbers or ideas in the mind, — for example, to do simple addition or subtraction without pencil and paper. The third is cognitive flexibility, the presence of mind to adapt when demands change — when recess is canceled, say, and there’s a pop quiz in math.

Researchers can rate these abilities with some precision by giving young children several straightforward mental tests. In one, youngsters sit in front of a computer and when a red heart appears on the left side of the screen, they strike a key on the left, and when it appears on the right screen they strike a key on the right. Most of them do well on this.

But when scientists change the rules, and have the children strike a key on the right when the symbol appears on the left, and vice versa, the test gets harder. The number of errors they commit, and the time it takes the children to answer, are considered measures of their ability to regulate themselves. Other similar kinds of tests can track improvements in working memory and intellectual flexibility. Researchers have designed school-based curriculums intended to improve each of these abilities. In a study published in 2007, Dr. Diamond led a team that compared one of these programs — called Tools of the Mind — to a standard literacy curriculum, in several preschools in the Northeast. The Tools program features a variety of exercises, including a counting activity in which children pair off. One child counts a given number of objects from a pile and separates them, and then the other child checks the sum. The “checker” has a sheet of paper with a list of numbers, each beside a corresponding number of dots: for example, four dots line up beside the No. 4. By placing the objects on the dots, the child can see whether the count was accurate. This double-checking is intended to force the “counter” to be more careful and to stall the other child’s impulse to grab an object.

In another activity, also done in pairs, one child tells a partner a story based on pictures in a book while the other child listens. The listener holds a drawing of an ear — a visual reminder that his role is to listen and not to interrupt. The child telling the story holds a drawing of a mouth — a reminder of her role as the speaker. After about two months, children didn’t need the props anymore: they had internalized the rules, namely that the listener listens until it’s his or her turn to speak.

“The activities are specifically designed to promote self-regulation, and they are embedded in the teaching,” said Deborah J. Leong, an educational psychologist and professor emerita at Metropolitan State College of Denver, who designed the Tools program with Elena Bodrova, principal researcher at McREL, an educational research group in Denver. The program also focuses on pretend play with a purpose, namely dramatic role-playing in which children decide beforehand what their roles are and must stay in character — an exercise that draws on all aspects of self-regulation.

The 2007 preschool study tracked 85 preschoolers in the Tools program and 62 in the basic literacy curriculum. After one year, teachers in one school judged that the children in the special program were doing so well that all students were moved into it. After two years, and factoring out the effects of gender and age, the researchers found that the students in the special program scored about 20 percent higher on all of the demanding measures of executive function. “Although play is often thought frivolous, it may be essential,” the study authors concluded.

Parents, too, can help their children become more self-possessed in this way. Jessica Fanning and Helen J. Neville, who are neuroscientists at the University of Oregon, are testing how parent training classes affect the same kind of executive skills in youngsters. Their preliminary finding is that the children of parents taking the training have developed significantly better concentration and self-discipline than the others.

Researchers say that parents can use a variety of home activities to help children sharpen executive skills. Some of these are obvious: reading to a child while continually establishing eye contact. By tilting the book so pictures are obscured, parents force youngsters to follow the words carefully, holding more of them in mind at one time — a function of working memory.

Singing a bedtime song or a cleanup song can keep children focused on the chore at hand, resisting distractions. The familiar verses tell them how much time they have to finish a chore.

The New York Times

September 11, 2008
The Next Little Thing?
By STEVEN KURUTZ

IN his 20s, Michael Janzen made pottery and lived in a cabin in rural California that he estimates was “about the size of a two-car garage.” After he married, he went into Web design for a bank, and now at 40 has all the trappings of a successful homeowner: in-ground pool, maid service, a yard landscaped with Japanese black pine bonsai trees. His 1,800-square-foot home in Fair Oaks, Calif., a one-story model by Streng Brothers, midcentury builders in the Eichler mold, is of a kind coveted by fans of modern design.

So why has Mr. Janzen spent the summer building an 80-square-foot “tiny house” out of free stuff he found on Craigslist?

There he is on nights and weekends, designing a floor plan whose dimensions are measured not in feet but inches, nailing scavenged wood pallets together for the frame, or fixing up an old trailer to serve as the foundation. The initial reaction from his wife, Julia: “Is this a Unabomber building?”

Not exactly. According to Mr. Janzen, he came to the realization that “I don’t want this life — the life of someone who’s working too hard to pay a large mortgage to live in this house.” The catalyst, he said, was watching the value of his home plummet with the rest of the real estate market, while the time and money required to maintain the property only increased. “The energy cost is enormous,” he said, “and the bigger your property gets, the more there is to do.”

Which is why Mr. Janzen has become interested in the small house movement, whose adherents believe in minimizing one’s footprint — structural as well as carbon — by living in spaces that are smaller than 1,000 square feet and, in some cases, smaller than 100. Tiny houses have been a fringe curiosity for a decade or more, but devotees believe the concept’s time has finally arrived.

“It’s a very exciting moment,” said Shay Salomon, a green builder in Tucson, Ariz., and the author of “Little House on a Small Planet” (Lyons Press, 2006), “because it feels like a chapter of American history might be ending, the chapter called ‘Bigger is Better.’ I’m not the Gallup poll, but I hear the same story over and over: We got rid of that big house, and now I have time to see my husband. Before, we used to work all week and then we’d spend the weekend on the house.”

Gregory Paul Johnson, a founder of the Small House Society in Iowa City, said that the notion of very small houses becoming popular was “an absurdity” five years ago. “But there are so many powerful forces at work right now,” he added, “like rising energy costs and the mortgage crisis. I think people want small homes because they cost less to purchase, maintain, heat.”

In July, Mr. Johnson, who lives in a 140-square-foot house made by the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company of Sebastopol, Calif., took to the road to promote his vision of living small, along with Jay Shafer, Tumbleweed’s founder. The two men drove from Victoria, British Columbia, to San Diego, pulling Mr. Shafer’s house behind them on a trailer. (Tiny houses, which rarely have foundations, are often built on trailers.)

Along the way they stopped to hold workshops and give (very brief) home tours. Some events drew hundreds of people. “It seems like everybody is fascinated by the idea of living in a tiny house,” said Mr. Shafer, who started Tumbleweed eight years ago. “But for a long time, I was just selling the dream.”

His business is still modest, but in the past year Mr. Shafer has sold five houses and 50 sets of plans, up from a yearly average of one house. The houses range in size from about 70 to nearly 800 square feet, cost $20,000 to $90,000 to build, and resemble birdhouses: boxy shape, wood siding and high, pitched roof.

Other builders also report increased demand. Brad Kittel, owner of Tiny Texas Houses in Luling, Tex., said he had built 10 homes this year, up from four in all of 2007.

In recent years, small dwellings have begun to get the high-design treatment, which could attract more people. The London-based designer Nina Tolstrup built the 388-square-foot Tiny Beach Chalet, which has drawn attention on design blogs. One of the stars of the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibit on prefabricated houses is the Micro Compact Home, a 73-square-foot cube by the British architect Richard Horden.

“When you build small you can spend money on higher-quality materials,” said Jared Volpe, a Web designer in North Ferrisburgh, Vt., who runs the blog smallhousestyle.com. Mr. Volpe said he is often amazed at how aesthetically pleasing many of the latest small homes are. In the year since he started his blog he has received increasing numbers of e-mail messages from people interested in small homes — a trend he attributes in part to the poor economy. “People will need to heat their 3,000-square-foot house this winter, and it’s going to cost double of what it did a few years ago,” he said.

For Mr. Janzen, a tiny house is not an immediate solution to his frustrations with large-scale living; he has no intention of cramming his wife and young daughter into 80 square feet. Instead, he plans to use the structure as an office, or park it on his in-laws’ farm as a weekend retreat, a more traditional use for tiny houses. But he will treat it as an “intellectual exercise,” he said, that will allow him to develop “an idea of the other extreme of size.”

“I’ll have a sense of where the balance is,” he added — a sense that he hopes will help his family decide on a reasonable goal for downsizing, something he is eager to do soon. “We bought this house, I think, for prestige,” he said, sounding chastened.

But while Mr. Janzen is dabbling with tiny living, others are plunging in. Tara Flannery, a 25-year-old college student in Seattle, plans to move within the next few months from the Craftsman-style two-story house she shares with roommates into a Tumbleweed house. The decision was largely financial.

“I wanted to buy my own place by 30, and the way the housing market is going that’s not going to happen,” she said, referring to the tightening credit market and the fact that home prices remain high in Seattle, despite the mortgage crisis.

In a way, Ms. Flannery’s tiny house, which will be about 100 square feet with a sleeping loft and will cost roughly $40,000, is a modern twist on the starter homes of the 1950s suburbs; it offers her a way into home ownership, of a sort, without the debilitating costs. “I can spend my money traveling instead,” she said.

It’s an unencumbered lifestyle that Dee Williams, a hazardous waste inspector an hour away in Olympia, Wash., has embraced. Four years ago, she sold her 1,500-square-foot bungalow in Portland, Ore., and downsized to an 84-square-foot house made of knotty pine that she built herself for $10,000 and parked in a friend’s backyard, where she lives free in exchange for helping her friend with chores. (She bathes in the friend’s house because her bathroom doesn’t have a shower, though most tiny houses do have both a shower and a toilet.)

Ms. Williams, 45, said that before the move, “I was an environmentalist, but not a very dedicated one.” She built her house, which she outfitted with solar panels and propane heating, both to “walk the talk” of eco-consciousness and “to unshackle myself from a mortgage and doing repairs.” Although last year, like most Americans, she saw a sharp rise in her monthly energy bill, the increase — from $4 to $8 — didn’t exactly bankrupt her, she said.

Mr. Janzen, meanwhile, worries that an activist like Mr. Shafer, the Tumbleweed founder, “would look at someone like me and say I’m only taking a half-step.”

Asked if that were the case, Mr. Shafer said he doesn’t advocate for everyone to live as he does. “I know 100 square feet is too small for most people,” he said, including his new bride, who lives next door to Mr. Shafer in a 700-square-foot house (although he is planning to build her a 300-square-foot replacement). Instead, he wants to be a living example encouraging people to downsize, even if it’s only to a moderately smaller home.

The Janzens plan to do just that, as soon as the housing market bounces back and they can sell their current home without taking a loss. The couple wants to move back to Mendocino County, where early in their marriage they lived in that 450-square-foot cabin. “I think I would have eventually said, do we really need all this?” Mr. Janzen said. “But it probably wouldn’t have happened until retirement. Now I hope my 40s will be about having free time and doing the things I want to do.”

Welcome to sunny Wisconsin – personality-wise, that is
By BILL GLAUBER
bglauber@journalsentinel.com
Posted: Sept. 10, 2008

Feeling friendly today? Outgoing?

Then you must live in Wisconsin.

That’s the takeaway from a “personality map” of the United States, according to study released Wednesday by researchers at Cambridge University in England.

Wisconsin ranked among the top five states in America for “extraversion” — a trait associated with those who are sociable, energetic and enthusiastic — and “agreeableness” (defined as being warm, friendly and compassionate).

Looks like Wisconsin is a hotbed of nice.

“It appears people who live there are healthy, friendly, socially outgoing,” said Jason Rentfrow, a Louisiana-born, English-based lecturer in social and political sciences at Cambridge. “It looks like people are calm, even-tempered, down-to-earth and practical.”

That description could fit a lot of people in Wisconsin.

“My feeling is, gosh, it’s just the nature of the people you live around and become friends with,” said Mary Van Derven, who leads the Neighborhood Association Council in Wauwatosa. “I know people who move away and then come back to the state because they miss it.”

Bruce Cameron, a community organizer in the Enderis Park neighborhood in Milwaukee, said the state’s strength is the friendliness of its people. But more important, it’s in how people interact with one another, joining civic and religious groups, pitching in for neighborhood watches, block parties, even mulch parties to recycle old Christmas trees.

“We’re hosting an exchange student from Mexico, Raul Alvarez, a senior in high school,” Cameron said. “And he remarked to me how friendly people are here. It really stood out for him.”

And Marcus Britton, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, got a firsthand dose of Wisconsin friendliness soon after moving here in the last month.

A neighbor he just met let him borrow a bicycle, no questions asked.

“There is probably a larger proportion of Wisconsinites who live in relatively small towns or urban neighborhoods that have relatively stable populations that contributes to that sense of community,” Britton said. “People are enthusiastic for reaching out to newcomers, compared to the Northeast, where everyone lives in giant cities and it’s hard to reach out.”
Personality profiles

The six-year national online study was based on tests taken by 619,397 people from across the United States, including 15,863 from Wisconsin.

People were asked to read 44 short statements — such as, “I see myself as very outgoing” — and rate their level of agreement on a scale of one to five.

And there’s more than just being warm and friendly.

Researchers used a “Five Factor Model” of personality types. Besides “extraversion” and “agreeableness,” the other categories included “conscientiousness” (responsible and self-disciplined); “neuroticism” (anxious, stressful and impulsive); and “openness” (curious, intellectual and creative).

Wisconsin ranked second for “extraversion” behind North Dakota and fifth for “agreeableness,” again, behind No. 1 North Dakota, Minnesota, Mississippi and Utah. The state ranked 20th for conscientiousness, 35th for neuroticism and 47th for openness.

Researchers, who published their findings in Perspectives on Psychological Science, said they were looking for geographic trends. They said they detected a “stress belt” on a line that stretched from Maine to Louisiana, where they noted “neuroticism” was highest. They also said personality traits can impact socio-cultural trends and can be self-reinforcing.

“Life expectancy is shorter where neuroticism is higher,” Rentfrow said. “Openness is related to the number of patents in a state, more innovative entrepreneurship.”

Samuel D. Gosling, a co-author of the study, said the researchers are “not saying high neuroticism leads to, say, higher cancer rates or that higher cancer rates lead to neuroticism. We’re saying, ‘Hey, these things are associated, but we don’t know yet why they’re associated.’ ”

Gosling said the study also suggests that there really is some truth to regional stereotypes.

“We’re not asking people, ‘What are your perceptions of Californians or New Yorkers?’ We’re measuring the personalities of the people in these places,” he said.

The New York Times

September 11, 2008
Instead of Trading Up, Adding a High-Style Shed
By MICHAEL CANNELL

THREE years after renovating their 1903 brownstone in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, Greg and Cheyenne Morris turned their attention to their backyard, which contained an odd assortment of disused items — sinks, toilets, Virgin Mary statuettes, wheels from street vendor carts and a moldering stucco garden shed. They cleaned up the yard, made preparations to demolish the shed and asked an architect to draft plans for a free-standing studio to be used as a bedroom and office.

The plans were drafted, but faced with the prospect of more construction, they chose to buy a Kithaus K4, an 11-by-17-foot prefabricated room designed by Tom Sandonato and Martin Wehmann. It arrived within three weeks of their mailing a deposit check, and took a week to assemble, without the hassle of permit applications or unexpected construction costs.

By late July, it sat handsomely beneath maple and pine trees at the end of the yard, a miniature modern pavilion. They celebrated on the evening of its completion by stepping inside to eat popcorn and watch “Freaks,” the 1930s cult classic.

“It was expensive,” said Mr. Morris, a photographer, who spent $76,000 for a Kithaus with a bathroom, ipe wood deck and louvers, “but it was worth it to not have any more contractors and electricians traipsing through my house.”

Tiny, high-style prefabricated sheds like the Kithaus have received a great deal of attention over the last year, with admiring coverage in design blogs and magazines, and roughly four times more companies producing them now than five years ago. So far, the market is still small, though a tipping point of sorts may have been reached this year, when Design Within Reach began selling the Kithaus, along with furnishing packages to turn it into an instant office, bedroom, pool house or den.

“In terms of popularity, these sheds are roaring ahead, in part because of their innate simplicity,” said Michael Sylvester, publisher of fabprefab.com, a clearinghouse of information about contemporary prefab homes. “They’re mobbed whenever they’re exhibited at design shows.”

In fact, the shed threatens to upstage full-scale modernist prefab homes, which have begun to lose their bargain appeal after years of hype. According to Mr. Sylvester, the most popular cost from $250 to $400 a square foot including installation, which is more than a frugal consumer would pay for a home built by an architect and contractor.

And for homeowners drawn to the kind of warm, willfully friendly modernism put forth by Design Within Reach, the new sheds represent a chance for flirtation without commitment. Buyers who would not choose to live in a full-scale prefab home might indulge in a small-scale fantasy of the California-modern lifestyle such houses represent.

Beyond that, there are plenty of practical reasons for the shed surge. As of 2004, more than 20 million Americans worked at least partially from home, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and a 2006 Census study showed that more than five million Americans did so full time; for some, the shed provides an instant office at a convenient remove from household distractions.

“People are comfortable with the idea of working from home in a way that they weren’t just a few years ago,” said Ryan Grey Smith, founder of Modern-Shed, a small Seattle-based firm that has sold 130 room-size structures since it was founded in 2003, half of them in the last year. “Houses built 50 years ago don’t work for us that well today. People need offices more than they need, say, formal dining rooms.”

Whether homeowners use the shed for work, guest lodging or cocktails, the add-on space may be preferable to the dubious prospect of trading up in a housing slump.

There is also an element of immediate gratification. Sheds generally do not need foundations, and almost all are less than 120 square feet, which means they do not require permits in most states. Buying one is more like buying a car than a house.

But the new sheds have an appeal that goes beyond the practical: Like architectural follies in the Victorian garden, they draw people away from the distractions of home life to the tranquillity of the backyard. “It’s transformative,” said Matilda McQuaid, deputy curatorial director of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. “You cross a threshold into another realm just a few steps from your home.”

The high-design shed appears to hold particular appeal for women, who rarely have much dedicated space of their own in the American home (unlike men, who have historically laid claim to home offices and dens). Roughly 60 percent of Modern-Shed’s customer inquiries, for example, come from women, according to Mr. Smith.

“The women are left out,” said Casper Mork-Ulnes, a founder of Modern Cabana, a San Francisco firm that has sold roughly 60 sheds in four years of operation, more than half to women. “They need a space away from the kids and television.” Nearly 80 years after Virginia Woolf described the need for a room of one’s own, these miniature buildings may be starting to address it.

Two years ago, Marie Delahaye bought a $15,000 shed from Modern Cabana as a personal retreat, tucking it behind the ranch house in Walnut Creek, Calif., that she shares with her husband and two children. “My husband isn’t consciously aware that he’s doing it, but he’s claiming more and more space in our home,” she said. “It was hard for me to even maintain my stuff in a corner.”

She got the shed a few months after turning 50, which she says was not a coincidence, and uses it for meditation and as a studio for art projects with friends. “It beats getting divorced,” she said.

For certain buyers, the shed may be an outlet for baby boomer remorse. Encumbered by mortgages and 5,000-square-foot homes, some Americans of means are looking for ways to reconnect with lost values of simplicity, sustainability and forthrightness — values that seem to be embodied by the sheds’ basic materials and designs. “For people my age, in their 50s, the dreams of their youth didn’t hold up, but now they have some resources and a little bit of land,” said Will Bruder, a Phoenix architect whose small, lightweight structures were one inspiration for today’s modernist sheds. “It’s about what could have been,” he added, “or what should have been.”

For others, though, the allure of modernist shed all comes down to looks. “From the moment I saw the pictures I fell in love with it,” said Christina Simon of the 12-by-16-foot Modern-Shed she and her husband installed behind their Los Angeles home last year. They ended up using it as playroom for their children, ages 5 and 8. But, she said, “we could have turned it into anything. What matters is that it’s cool, and we love looking at it.”

The New York Times

September 7, 2008
Brave New World of Digital Intimacy
By CLIVE THOMPSON

On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt.

Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music they had in rotation and the various ad hoc “groups” they had joined (like “Sex and the City” Lovers). All day long, they’d post “status” notes explaining their moods — “hating Monday,” “skipping class b/c i’m hung over.” After each party, they’d stagger home to the dorm and upload pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became the de facto public commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing.

But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It required a lot of active surfing on the part of its users. Sure, every day your Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new tidbits; it might even be something particularly juicy, like changing their relationship status to “single” when they got dumped. But unless you visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely. Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone’s room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical number — there weren’t enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.

“It was very primitive,” Zuckerberg told me when I asked him about it last month. And so he decided to modernize. He developed something he called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user’s page to every one of his or her friends. Students would no longer need to spend their time zipping around to examine each friend’s page, checking to see if there was any new information. Instead, they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed would appear: a single page that — like a social gazette from the 18th century — delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. “A stream of everything that’s going on in their lives,” as Zuckerberg put it.

When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news — Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with Matthew — and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.

“Everyone was freaking out,” Ben Parr, then a junior at Northwestern University, told me recently. What particularly enraged Parr was that there wasn’t any way to opt out of News Feed, to “go private” and have all your information kept quiet. He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide privacy options. “Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet, recording every single move,” a California student told The Star-Ledger of Newark. Another chimed in, “Frankly, I don’t need to know or care that Billy broke up with Sally, and Ted has become friends with Steve.” By lunchtime of the first day, 10,000 people had joined Parr’s group, and by the next day it had 284,000.

Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they’d like it.

He was right. Within days, the tide reversed. Students began e-mailing Zuckerberg to say that via News Feed they’d learned things they would never have otherwise discovered through random surfing around Facebook. The bits of trivia that News Feed delivered gave them more things to talk about — Why do you hate Kiefer Sutherland? — when they met friends face to face in class or at a party. Trends spread more quickly. When one student joined a group — proclaiming her love of Coldplay or a desire to volunteer for Greenpeace — all her friends instantly knew, and many would sign up themselves. Users’ worries about their privacy seemed to vanish within days, boiled away by their excitement at being so much more connected to their friends. (Very few people stopped using Facebook, and most people kept on publishing most of their information through News Feed.) Pundits predicted that News Feed would kill Facebook, but the opposite happened. It catalyzed a massive boom in the site’s growth. A few weeks after the News Feed imbroglio, Zuckerberg opened the site to the general public (previously, only students could join), and it grew quickly; today, it has 100 million users.

When I spoke to him, Zuckerberg argued that News Feed is central to Facebook’s success. “Facebook has always tried to push the envelope,” he said. “And at times that means stretching people and getting them to be comfortable with things they aren’t yet comfortable with. A lot of this is just social norms catching up with what technology is capable of.”

In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. Facebook is no longer alone in offering this sort of interaction online. In the last year, there has been a boom in tools for “microblogging”: posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing. The phenomenon is quite different from what we normally think of as blogging, because a blog post is usually a written piece, sometimes quite long: a statement of opinion, a story, an analysis. But these new updates are something different. They’re far shorter, far more frequent and less carefully considered. One of the most popular new tools is Twitter, a Web site and messaging service that allows its two-million-plus users to broadcast to their friends haiku-length updates — limited to 140 characters, as brief as a mobile-phone text message — on what they’re doing. There are other services for reporting where you’re traveling (Dopplr) or for quickly tossing online a stream of the pictures, videos or Web sites you’re looking at (Tumblr). And there are even tools that give your location. When the new iPhone, with built-in tracking, was introduced in July, one million people began using Loopt, a piece of software that automatically tells all your friends exactly where you are.

For many people — particularly anyone over the age of 30 — the idea of describing your blow-by-blow activities in such detail is absurd. Why would you subject your friends to your daily minutiae? And conversely, how much of their trivia can you absorb? The growth of ambient intimacy can seem like modern narcissism taken to a new, supermetabolic extreme — the ultimate expression of a generation of celebrity-addled youths who believe their every utterance is fascinating and ought to be shared with the world. Twitter, in particular, has been the subject of nearly relentless scorn since it went online. “Who really cares what I am doing, every hour of the day?” wondered Alex Beam, a Boston Globe columnist, in an essay about Twitter last month. “Even I don’t care.”

Indeed, many of the people I interviewed, who are among the most avid users of these “awareness” tools, admit that at first they couldn’t figure out why anybody would want to do this. Ben Haley, a 39-year-old documentation specialist for a software firm who lives in Seattle, told me that when he first heard about Twitter last year from an early-adopter friend who used it, his first reaction was that it seemed silly. But a few of his friends decided to give it a try, and they urged him to sign up, too.

Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like “I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus”; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.

But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.

“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.

Facebook and Twitter may have pushed things into overdrive, but the idea of using communication tools as a form of “co-presence” has been around for a while. The Japanese sociologist Mizuko Ito first noticed it with mobile phones: lovers who were working in different cities would send text messages back and forth all night — tiny updates like “enjoying a glass of wine now” or “watching TV while lying on the couch.” They were doing it partly because talking for hours on mobile phones isn’t very comfortable (or affordable). But they also discovered that the little Ping-Ponging messages felt even more intimate than a phone call.

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.

You could also regard the growing popularity of online awareness as a reaction to social isolation, the modern American disconnectedness that Robert Putnam explored in his book “Bowling Alone.” The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind, and members of the growing army of the self-employed often spend their days in solitude. Ambient intimacy becomes a way to “feel less alone,” as more than one Facebook and Twitter user told me.

When I decided to try out Twitter last year, at first I didn’t have anyone to follow. None of my friends were yet using the service. But while doing some Googling one day I stumbled upon the blog of Shannon Seery, a 32-year-old recruiting consultant in Florida, and I noticed that she Twittered. Her Twitter updates were pretty charming — she would often post links to camera-phone pictures of her two children or videos of herself cooking Mexican food, or broadcast her agonized cries when a flight was delayed on a business trip. So on a whim I started “following” her — as easy on Twitter as a click of the mouse — and never took her off my account. (A Twitter account can be “private,” so that only invited friends can read one’s tweets, or it can be public, so anyone can; Seery’s was public.) When I checked in last month, I noticed that she had built up a huge number of online connections: She was now following 677 people on Twitter and another 442 on Facebook. How in God’s name, I wondered, could she follow so many people? Who precisely are they? I called Seery to find out.

“I have a rule,” she told me. “I either have to know who you are, or I have to know of you.” That means she monitors the lives of friends, family, anyone she works with, and she’ll also follow interesting people she discovers via her friends’ online lives. Like many people who live online, she has wound up following a few strangers — though after a few months they no longer feel like strangers, despite the fact that she has never physically met them.

I asked Seery how she finds the time to follow so many people online. The math seemed daunting. After all, if her 1,000 online contacts each post just a couple of notes each a day, that’s several thousand little social pings to sift through daily. What would it be like to get thousands of e-mail messages a day? But Seery made a point I heard from many others: awareness tools aren’t as cognitively demanding as an e-mail message. E-mail is something you have to stop to open and assess. It’s personal; someone is asking for 100 percent of your attention. In contrast, ambient updates are all visible on one single page in a big row, and they’re not really directed at you. This makes them skimmable, like newspaper headlines; maybe you’ll read them all, maybe you’ll skip some. Seery estimated that she needs to spend only a small part of each hour actively reading her Twitter stream.

Yet she has, she said, become far more gregarious online. “What’s really funny is that before this ‘social media’ stuff, I always said that I’m not the type of person who had a ton of friends,” she told me. “It’s so hard to make plans and have an active social life, having the type of job I have where I travel all the time and have two small kids. But it’s easy to tweet all the time, to post pictures of what I’m doing, to keep social relations up.” She paused for a second, before continuing: “Things like Twitter have actually given me a much bigger social circle. I know more about more people than ever before.”

I realized that this is becoming true of me, too. After following Seery’s Twitter stream for a year, I’m more knowledgeable about the details of her life than the lives of my two sisters in Canada, whom I talk to only once every month or so. When I called Seery, I knew that she had been struggling with a three-day migraine headache; I began the conversation by asking her how she was feeling.

Online awareness inevitably leads to a curious question: What sort of relationships are these? What does it mean to have hundreds of “friends” on Facebook? What kind of friends are they, anyway?

In 1998, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar argued that each human has a hard-wired upper limit on the number of people he or she can personally know at one time. Dunbar noticed that humans and apes both develop social bonds by engaging in some sort of grooming; apes do it by picking at and smoothing one another’s fur, and humans do it with conversation. He theorized that ape and human brains could manage only a finite number of grooming relationships: unless we spend enough time doing social grooming — chitchatting, trading gossip or, for apes, picking lice — we won’t really feel that we “know” someone well enough to call him a friend. Dunbar noticed that ape groups tended to top out at 55 members. Since human brains were proportionally bigger, Dunbar figured that our maximum number of social connections would be similarly larger: about 150 on average. Sure enough, psychological studies have confirmed that human groupings naturally tail off at around 150 people: the “Dunbar number,” as it is known. Are people who use Facebook and Twitter increasing their Dunbar number, because they can so easily keep track of so many more people?

As I interviewed some of the most aggressively social people online — people who follow hundreds or even thousands of others — it became clear that the picture was a little more complex than this question would suggest. Many maintained that their circle of true intimates, their very close friends and family, had not become bigger. Constant online contact had made those ties immeasurably richer, but it hadn’t actually increased the number of them; deep relationships are still predicated on face time, and there are only so many hours in the day for that.

But where their sociality had truly exploded was in their “weak ties” — loose acquaintances, people they knew less well. It might be someone they met at a conference, or someone from high school who recently “friended” them on Facebook, or somebody from last year’s holiday party. In their pre-Internet lives, these sorts of acquaintances would have quickly faded from their attention. But when one of these far-flung people suddenly posts a personal note to your feed, it is essentially a reminder that they exist. I have noticed this effect myself. In the last few months, dozens of old work colleagues I knew from 10 years ago in Toronto have friended me on Facebook, such that I’m now suddenly reading their stray comments and updates and falling into oblique, funny conversations with them. My overall Dunbar number is thus 301: Facebook (254) + Twitter (47), double what it would be without technology. Yet only 20 are family or people I’d consider close friends. The rest are weak ties — maintained via technology.

This rapid growth of weak ties can be a very good thing. Sociologists have long found that “weak ties” greatly expand your ability to solve problems. For example, if you’re looking for a job and ask your friends, they won’t be much help; they’re too similar to you, and thus probably won’t have any leads that you don’t already have yourself. Remote acquaintances will be much more useful, because they’re farther afield, yet still socially intimate enough to want to help you out. Many avid Twitter users — the ones who fire off witty posts hourly and wind up with thousands of intrigued followers — explicitly milk this dynamic for all it’s worth, using their large online followings as a way to quickly answer almost any question. Laura Fitton, a social-media consultant who has become a minor celebrity on Twitter — she has more than 5,300 followers — recently discovered to her horror that her accountant had made an error in filing last year’s taxes. She went to Twitter, wrote a tiny note explaining her problem, and within 10 minutes her online audience had provided leads to lawyers and better accountants. Fritton joked to me that she no longer buys anything worth more than $50 without quickly checking it with her Twitter network.

“I outsource my entire life,” she said. “I can solve any problem on Twitter in six minutes.” (She also keeps a secondary Twitter account that is private and only for a much smaller circle of close friends and family — “My little secret,” she said. It is a strategy many people told me they used: one account for their weak ties, one for their deeper relationships.)

It is also possible, though, that this profusion of weak ties can become a problem. If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships. Psychologists have long known that people can engage in “parasocial” relationships with fictional characters, like those on TV shows or in books, or with remote celebrities we read about in magazines. Parasocial relationships can use up some of the emotional space in our Dunbar number, crowding out real-life people. Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society who has studied social media for 10 years, published a paper this spring arguing that awareness tools like News Feed might be creating a whole new class of relationships that are nearly parasocial — peripheral people in our network whose intimate details we follow closely online, even while they, like Angelina Jolie, are basically unaware we exist.

“The information we subscribe to on a feed is not the same as in a deep social relationship,” Boyd told me. She has seen this herself; she has many virtual admirers that have, in essence, a parasocial relationship with her. “I’ve been very, very sick, lately and I write about it on Twitter and my blog, and I get all these people who are writing to me telling me ways to work around the health-care system, or they’re writing saying, ‘Hey, I broke my neck!’ And I’m like, ‘You’re being very nice and trying to help me, but though you feel like you know me, you don’t.’ ” Boyd sighed. “They can observe you, but it’s not the same as knowing you.”

When I spoke to Caterina Fake, a founder of Flickr (a popular photo-sharing site), she suggested an even more subtle danger: that the sheer ease of following her friends’ updates online has made her occasionally lazy about actually taking the time to visit them in person. “At one point I realized I had a friend whose child I had seen, via photos on Flickr, grow from birth to 1 year old,” she said. “I thought, I really should go meet her in person. But it was weird; I also felt that Flickr had satisfied that getting-to-know you satisfaction, so I didn’t feel the urgency. But then I was like, Oh, that’s not sufficient! I should go in person!” She has about 400 people she follows online but suspects many of those relationships are tissue-fragile. “These technologies allow you to be much more broadly friendly, but you just spread yourself much more thinly over many more people.”

What is it like to never lose touch with anyone? One morning this summer at my local cafe, I overheard a young woman complaining to her friend about a recent Facebook drama. Her name is Andrea Ahan, a 27-year-old restaurant entrepreneur, and she told me that she had discovered that high-school friends were uploading old photos of her to Facebook and tagging them with her name, so they automatically appeared in searches for her.

She was aghast. “I’m like, my God, these pictures are completely hideous!” Ahan complained, while her friend looked on sympathetically and sipped her coffee. “I’m wearing all these totally awful ’90s clothes. I look like crap. And I’m like, Why are you people in my life, anyway? I haven’t seen you in 10 years. I don’t know you anymore!” She began furiously detagging the pictures — removing her name, so they wouldn’t show up in a search anymore.

Worse, Ahan was also confronting a common plague of Facebook: the recent ex. She had broken up with her boyfriend not long ago, but she hadn’t “unfriended” him, because that felt too extreme. But soon he paired up with another young woman, and the new couple began having public conversations on Ahan’s ex-boyfriend’s page. One day, she noticed with alarm that the new girlfriend was quoting material Ahan had e-mailed privately to her boyfriend; she suspected he had been sharing the e-mail with his new girlfriend. It is the sort of weirdly subtle mind game that becomes possible via Facebook, and it drove Ahan nuts.

“Sometimes I think this stuff is just crazy, and everybody has got to get a life and stop obsessing over everyone’s trivia and gossiping,” she said.

Yet Ahan knows that she cannot simply walk away from her online life, because the people she knows online won’t stop talking about her, or posting unflattering photos. She needs to stay on Facebook just to monitor what’s being said about her. This is a common complaint I heard, particularly from people in their 20s who were in college when Facebook appeared and have never lived as adults without online awareness. For them, participation isn’t optional. If you don’t dive in, other people will define who you are. So you constantly stream your pictures, your thoughts, your relationship status and what you’re doing — right now! — if only to ensure the virtual version of you is accurate, or at least the one you want to present to the world.

This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business. Young people at college are the ones to experience this most viscerally, because, with more than 90 percent of their peers using Facebook, it is especially difficult for them to opt out. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has closely studied how college-age users are reacting to the world of awareness, told me that athletes used to sneak off to parties illicitly, breaking the no-drinking rule for team members. But then camera phones and Facebook came along, with students posting photos of the drunken carousing during the party; savvy coaches could see which athletes were breaking the rules. First the athletes tried to fight back by waking up early the morning after the party in a hungover daze to detag photos of themselves so they wouldn’t be searchable. But that didn’t work, because the coaches sometimes viewed the pictures live, as they went online at 2 a.m. So parties simply began banning all camera phones in a last-ditch attempt to preserve privacy.

“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”

Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor — a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties. We now have precisely the opposite problem. Indeed, our modern awareness tools reverse the original conceit of the Internet. When cyberspace came along in the early ’90s, it was celebrated as a place where you could reinvent your identity — become someone new.

“If anything, it’s identity-constraining now,” Tufekci told me. “You can’t play with your identity if your audience is always checking up on you. I had a student who posted that she was downloading some Pearl Jam, and someone wrote on her wall, ‘Oh, right, ha-ha — I know you, and you’re not into that.’ ” She laughed. “You know that old cartoon? ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’? On the Internet today, everybody knows you’re a dog! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dog, you’d better stay away from a keyboard.”

Or, as Leisa Reichelt, a consultant in London who writes regularly about ambient tools, put it to me: “Can you imagine a Facebook for children in kindergarten, and they never lose touch with those kids for the rest of their lives? What’s that going to do to them?” Young people today are already developing an attitude toward their privacy that is simultaneously vigilant and laissez-faire. They curate their online personas as carefully as possible, knowing that everyone is watching — but they have also learned to shrug and accept the limits of what they can control.

It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

Laura Fitton, the social-media consultant, argues that her constant status updating has made her “a happier person, a calmer person” because the process of, say, describing a horrid morning at work forces her to look at it objectively. “It drags you out of your own head,” she added. In an age of awareness, perhaps the person you see most clearly is yourself.