Study Hacks

Interesting links from around the web to help you through your weekend Study Hacks withdrawal…

A Copious Cornucopia of Productivity-Themed Contraptions

• It’s You! Able to Leap Tall Projects in a Single Bounds | Web Worker Daily
  Some advice on how to finally knock off those big projects that have been plaguing you. I’m more from the “suck it up and just get it done” school of thought, but some of these tips might prove to be that key lever you need to get the productivity boulder rolling.
• Thomas Edison versus Nikola Tesla: Who was more productive? | Lifehack.org
  The team over at Lifehack.org argue over which inventor was more productive. Gets you thinking about the meaning of the word productive. Are you en route to becoming an Edison or a Tesla?
• My Graduate Student Planner | ProtoScholar
  I can’t pass-up the occasional dose of productivity pr0n, especially when it concerns living life as a graduate student.
• Beer after sport ‘is good for the body’ | The Telegraph
  Scientists discover that a beer after exercise actually helps you hydrate faster than water alone. And those extra calories? Replenishes what you lost. Frat guys rejoice! (hat tip: The Huffington Post).
• Get Free Stuff | Hack College
  The guys (and gal) over at Hack College having a box full of schwag to give away, courtesy of the Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim programming. All you have to do is suggest a post for the site.
• How to Run Life as a Science Experiment | Scott Young
  Scott has a great idea: What would happen if you tracked the important processes in your life with hardcore, quantitative metrics? I’m fascinated, and would love to see a case study of someone giving this a try. Anyone interested?

Interesting links from around the web to help you through your weekend Study Hacks withdrawal…

An Extravaganza of Productivity-Infused Detritus

• The Art of Letting Bad Things Happen | Tim Ferriss
  An interesting post by 4-Hour Work Week author, Tim Ferriss. As he tends to do, he dropped everything for a few weeks to travel the world doing random cool things. When he returned, he discovered the absence had caused some problems with his business and book publicity. His conclusion: who cares? Thought-provoking…
• How to Overcome a Leaky Brain in Your Studies | Scott Young
  Scott offers some advanced memorization tactics.
• How to Take Notes Like Thomas Edison | LifeHack
  An interesting piece on LifeHack.org about how Thomas Edison took notes. I noticed similarities between the techniques of Edison and those of the alpha-hackers interviewed by Danny O’Brien for his famous Life Hacker talk.
• Productivity Hour | Make College Better
  Some interesting ideas for making a productive transition from being sleep to being awake, energized, and ready to face the day.
• Getting Focused 03: Certainty and Survival | David Seah
  The third part in a series on David Seah’s attempts to get more done. This installment shares some interesting insights on why some projects are so damn hard to do work on.
• Going through the motions: Is productivity the key to accomplishment | Alaeddin’s Blog
  An insightful follow-up to my guest post about how to complete projects (not just tasks). Puts the ideas in the context of the workplace.

Interesting links from around the web to help you through your weekend Study Hacks withdrawal.

Assorted Productivity Gems

• Updated Student Work Day | ProtoScholar
  Rebecca from ProtoScholar discusses how she structures her busy student schedule; good case study.
• The Four-Day Week Challenge | A List Apart
  An older article I stumbled across recently. It proposes reducing your work week (if self-employed, or, I think equivalently, a student) to only four days.
• OneNote: An Introduction | Scholastici.us
  Gideon provides a great tutorial to a note-taking program that I keep hearing good things about.
• 4 Ways to Radically Improve Your Chances of Academic Success | GearFire
  Tips 1 -3 will sound familiar to Study Hacks fans. The fourth tip, however, is new, and incredibly insightful. It involves who you surround yourself by. Want more information? Click and find out…

Cal Gets Inexplicably Prolific

• The Art of the Finish: How to Go from Busy to Accomplished | Scott Young
  A guest post I wrote for Scott’s blog. It introduces the idea of completion-centric planning — a technique for shifting your focus from tasks to projects.
• How Do the Best Professors Work? | Academic Productivity
  A guest post I wrote for Academic Productivity about how I schedule my work week as a graduate student (hint: it’s inspired by the work habits of top professors).
• Don’t Do What Johnny Don’t Does | Hack College
  A guest I wrote for Hack College about simple — yet important — prohibitions if you want to avoid becoming a terrible, terrible college student.
• The Satirist Next Door | Flak Magazine
  An article I recently published in Flak Magazine. It takes a look at a new media start-up with an interesting new model for humor writing.
• Allis on Allis | Flak Magazine
  Another article I wrote for Flak Magazine. It’s a first-person profile of Ryan Allis, a young entrepreneur who has challenged himself to accomplish a seemingly impossible goal.

The Sharp Brains blog has a fascinating post about the trainability of your brain. There was once a time when scientists thought that brain function was really only able to move one direction: inexorably downward as we age. Recent evidence shows this not to be the case. We have more control than we think.

Sharp Minds :: 11 Neuroscientists Debunk a Common Myth about Brain Training

What’s great about this post is that it pulls quotes from original interviews with 11 top neuroscientists — with links to the full interview notes also included.

Some choice sound bites:

“Learning is physical. Learning means the modification, growth, and pruning of our neurons, connections–called synapses– and neuronal networks, through experience…When we do so, we are cultivating our own neuronal networks.”

“Exercising our brains systematically is as important as exercising our bodies. In my experience, ‘Use it or lose it’ should really be ‘Use it and get more of it’”

“Individuals who lead mentally stimulating lives, through education, occupation and leisure activities, have reduced risk of developing Alzheimer’s symptoms.”

(hat tip: a blog around the clock)

There’s an interesting op-ed in the New York Times today:

The New York Times | The New College Try

Professor Jerome Karabel argues that selective college admissions is far from meritocratic. Indeed, he notes:

Just how skewed the system is toward the already advantaged is illustrated by the findings of a recent study of 146 selective colleges and universities, which concluded that students from the top quartile of the socioeconomic hierarchy (based on parental income, education and occupation) are 25 times more likely to attend a “top tier” college than students from the bottom quartile. [emphasis mine]

Why does this happen? Karabel notes that the SATs play a big role. The current definition of “merit” in the admissions process draws heavily on SAT scores, and these scores tend to correlate strongly with socioeconomic status:

Of all students nationwide who score more than 1300 on the SAT, two-thirds come from the top socioeconomic quartile and just 3 percent from the bottom quartile.

The situation is distressing. As Karabel notes:

Only a vigorous policy of class-based affirmative action that accounts for the huge class differences in educational opportunity has a chance of altering this pattern.

This sounds right. But it’s not very encouraging. What are the chances that our current congress will be engaging in “vigorous” social policy any time soon?

The Relative “Fairness” of College Admissions

College admissions is something I’ve thought a lot about. It’s a difficult issue. I think too often people are quick to either fully embrace or dismiss entirely the process. My current thoughts tend more toward additional distinction.

For example, it’s easy to claim that college admission unfairly rewards the rich because they can afford SAT prep and fancy college counselors. Maybe. My exposure to admission offices, however, seems to emphasize that SAT prep doesn’t do any more good than just taking a few timed sample tests on your own (which is free), and the efforts of college counselors are easily sniffed out on most applications (and tend to annoy admission officers).

In other words, college admissions may turn out to be more fair than we think when it comes to choosing between students from the middle class and those from the upper class. On the other hand, as revealed in today’s op-ed, the process may also turn out to be more unfair than we think when it comes to choosing between the lower class and those above.

Maybe the key is not to confuse the two? Another subtlety in a complicated issue…

A good post by Martin over at the UK-centric University Blog provides a nice compliment to our recent discussion of sleep:

University Blog :: 7 tips to top sleep, 3 tips for staying awake

He provides seven tips for getting to sleep when your body resists. I won’t give away the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

Don’t keep studying/writing/working until the last minute before bed - The more mental gymnastics you do before bed, the less likely you’re going to drop off to sleep quickly. Give yourself a few moments peace just before shutdown…

Of course, there’s always just Nyquil…

Considering graduate school? Wondering what it’s really like? I recommend the following blog:

Dissertation Bootcamp

The DB blog features a group of grad student contributors who gripe, celebrate, and mope their way through the ups and downs of the PhD hunt. Provides an insightful picture of the reality of grad student life. Trust me. I’m living it…

One of my favorite blogs is The Genius in All of Us. Written by author David Shenk, it accompanies the research process for an upcoming book that will chronicle: “How science is unveiling a rich new understanding of talent, giftedness, and brilliance.”

The topic is relevant to this blog. One of the biggest obstacles to revamping your study habits is overcoming the mistaken belief that you are simply not “smart” enough to score top grades.

Anyway, after a long break, David has returned to blogging by way of a new post on how the media often misreports the connection between genes and I.Q.:

David Brooks Gets Intelligence Right — But Genetics Wrong

The money quote:

What statistical studies like Devlin’s miss is that genes actually do not pass any complex traits down on their own. The expression and regulation of genes, biologists now understand, is entirely dependent on their interaction with the environment. You cannot separate one from the other. There is no “nature vs. nurture.”

Check him out…