SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Everyone who is part of an organization — a company, a nonprofit, a condo board — has experienced the pathologies that can occur when human beings try to work together in groups. Now the NYT reports on recent research on why some groups, like some people, are reliably smarter than others. In one study, researchers grouped 697 volunteer participants into teams of two to five members. Each team worked together to complete a series of short tasks, which were selected to represent the varied kinds of problems that groups are called upon to solve in the real world. One task involved logical analysis, another brainstorming; others emphasized coordination, planning and moral reasoning. Teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success.
Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics (PDF). First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group. Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible. Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. It appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men.
Interestingly enough, a second study has now replicated these findings for teams that worked together online communicating purely by typing messages into a browser . "Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Snotnose on Monday January 19 2015, @05:16AM
Heh, just remembered Case Study #3. It's 1991 or so, I'm working for a company that makes font cartridges for HP printers (Pacific Data Products, "pacific data products font cartridges" makes google happy). Company made their living knowing exactly how the font cartridge interface for HP printers works and designing products to fit into that slot. Our task? Make a network printer, with an ethernet interface on one end, and a font cartridge interface on the other end. Idea being you plugged this thing into your font cartridge, plugged your brand spankin new twisted pair into the other end, and you had a network printer.
We're brainstorming on how to do this, and we're also kinda worried HP comes out with a new series every year or so, and each time it takes us a few months to reverse engineer the card slot. One of us gets the bright idea of having ethernet on one side, and instead of a card slot we have regular IEE 1284 (ie: printer port) on the other end. IEE 1284 was a standard, the printer had to support it. The card slot was proprietary, HP could, and did, change it every year. We figured the hardware and software efforts would be the same and, as a benefit, we could support every fricken printer out there, not just HP.
Our VP shot us down. The company was known for using the cartridge slot (which HP intended to be used only for fonts), and if we didn't use that we were not using the company's secret sauce.
John and I left like rats from a sinking ship, and a year or two later the company shut it's doors.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 2) by pogostix on Monday January 19 2015, @07:19AM
Great stories. After looking up font cartridges I'm surprised we didn't just go back to typewriters. Ugly ugly stuff :)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday January 19 2015, @12:46PM
Some of the horror stories had upsides. I remember when my boss (who did no work, ever) and my boss's boss (who also did no work, ever) told me in my yearly appraisal that my yearly productivity of -5 KLOC was alright, they knew I was doing a good job stripping out the shit put in the codebase by the last half dozen crappy student placements, and they'd try and work out how to explain it to upper levels of management how my whole team (which was by then only 1 developer) seemed to be doing less than nothing.
void set_Nth_bit(Uint32 &i, Uint32 b)
{
Uint32 v=1, l;
for (l=1; l<b; ++l)
v <<= 1;
i|=v;
}
After seeing that, whenever I mentioned encountering bad code to my g/f, she used to enquire if it was just "bad" code or actual "Thierry" code.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 19 2015, @04:46PM
That code clearly could be improved:
SCNR ;-)
On a more serious note: Was the "l=1" instead of "l=0" intentional?