Biweekly links for 02/23/2009

  • Cathemeral Thinking: Blurts: The value of short, rapid, open communication to collective creativity
  • Parent of gamer asks his son to honor the Geneva Conventions – Boing Boing
    • “I asked Evan to google the Geneva Convention. Then he had to read it and then we had to discuss it. This we did. So the deal is that Evan has to fight according to the rules of the Geneva Convention. If his team-mates violate the Convention then play stops and Call of Duty goes away for a while.

      We’ll see how it goes, but Evan keeps his word. Especially about his games. “

  • Coding Horror: The Bad Apple: Group Poison
    • “Groups of four college students were organized into teams and given a task to complete some basic management decisions in 45 minutes. To motivate the teams, they’re told that whichever team performs best will be awarded $100 per person. What they don’t know, however, is that in some of the groups, the fourth member of their team isn’t a student. He’s an actor hired to play a bad apple… Invariably, groups that had the bad apple would perform worse. And this despite the fact that were people in some groups that were very talented, very smart, very likeable. Phelps found that the bad apple’s behavior had a profound effect — groups with bad apples performed 30 to 40 percent worse than other groups.”

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