“…for many years, scientists weren’t sure how to go about studying the mental life of babies. It’s a challenge to study the cognitive abilities of any creature that lacks language, but human babies present an additional difficulty, because, even compared to rats or birds, they are behaviorally limited: they can’t run mazes or peck at levers. In the 1980s, however, psychologists interested in exploring how much babies know began making use of one of the few behaviors that young babies can control: the movement of their eyes. The eyes are a window to the baby’s soul. As adults do, when babies see something that they find interesting or surprising, they tend to look at it longer than they would at something they find uninteresting or expected. And when given a choice between two things to look at, babies usually opt to look at the more pleasing thing. You can use “looking time,” then, as a rough but reliable proxy for what captures babies’ attention: what babies are surprised by or what babies like.

The studies in the 1980s that made use of this methodology were able to discover surprising things about what babies know about the nature and workings of physical objects — a baby’s “naïve physics.” Psychologists — most notably Elizabeth Spelke and Renée Baillargeon — conducted studies that essentially involved showing babies magic tricks, events that seemed to violate some law of the universe: you remove the supports from beneath a block and it floats in midair, unsupported; an object disappears and then reappears in another location; a box is placed behind a screen, the screen falls backward into empty space. Like adults, babies tend to linger on such scenes — they look longer at them than at scenes that are identical in all regards except that they don’t violate physical laws. This suggests that babies have expectations about how objects should behave. A vast body of research now suggests that — contrary to what was taught for decades to legions of psychology undergraduates — babies think of objects largely as adults do, as connected masses that move as units, that are solid and subject to gravity and that move in continuous paths through space and time.”

Jack Sim calls himself the Toiletman. For one reason, he is the founder of the World Toilet Organization (WTO), a 9-year old I-NGO based in Singapore that currently has 235 members in 58 countries. That, and also, he himself and WTO have done a phenomenal job of bringing toilets specifically, as well as the topic of hygiene and sanitation in general, to the center stage of  more recent developmental efforts, generating global discussions, drawing media coverage, and ultimately attracting more funding into sanitation projects in developing countries.  Concisely speaking, Jack Sim has transformed “toilet” from a taboo into a buzz word.

It takes a lot of marketing ingenuity to convince world leaders to pay attention to toilets, and it probably requires a couple of hundred times more effort and creativity to persuade the larger population to do the same thing. For Jack Sim, it all boils down to “marketing toilet as a status symbol.” His reasoning goes like this, in many places in the world, people do not use toilets or latrines not because they can’t afford such facilities. The norm is to use other, let’s say, more natural or more basic means, so technically people see no need to invest money in building a well-constructed bathroom. That’s why sometimes constructing latrines, even at *no* cost to a community, doesn’t prove effective at all, since adding a facility doesn’t automatically create a demand for the ‘new’ product.  In order to change people’s behavior and basically open a market for bathrooms, Sim aims at promoting a sense of jealousy. Just like you’d be jealous of your neighbor’s big house, nice car, or a new fancy cell phone, Sim expects to cultivate the same sense of desire for owning a toilet, by making them all colorful and fancy without adding on more costs of construction. (This idea would not apply to poorer population who can’t afford to have a toilet built at all, in addition to not having an immediate desire  for one.)

I actually bummed into that article about Jack Sim while looking up stuff about menstruation management & practices in some developing countries.  I had a brief chat in the library with two friends from Nepal this evening, and rumors were confirmed — girls in some Western parts of the country sit in the cow shed for days during their period. They also said women, even those in urban areas, adopt a habit (well maybe a tradition or ritual) of not touching men while menstruating, not their grandfathers, not even their husbands, and in some cases, they don’t even go into the kitchen since they can’t touch/prepare the food.  And then there are other stories: girls have to go out to a hut and stay there until their period ends, people say menstruating women make crops wither, are religiously unclean, a source of pollution etc etc…

…..See how much (psychological and material) returns you can get out of 15 minutes of sweeping the floor or folding the laundry?

Just so you know, the rest of this post does not offer any other catchy news.

My prof studies how husbands and wives share housework and childcare equally. By equally, she always means a 50-50 division, or something close to that. Idealist, isn’t it? I had my doubts about that when I started, and I have doubts now.

When I brought it up to a friend, she said something that I thought was reasonable: if the woman makes less than the man, the man wouldn’t ask her to bring home as much financial resource; then why would a woman ask a man to do exactly half the amount of housework and childcare? But then again, the woman works 40 hours a week, just as hard as the man does anyway. It’s not always possible to bring home the same amount of income, because different occupations and position pay differently, but sharing housework and childcare is something that the husband and wife can have some control over.

I wouldn’t rest on the 50-50 division. But I think everyone, men or women, would appreciate their partner’s willingness to shoulder part of the work that goes on within the home. Yes, the majority of women are more detail-oriented and take a great interest in how specifically the meals should be cooked, how the table should be laid, in what way the kitchen should be organized, or what steps to follow and in what order are you to change the baby’s diapers. And yes, the house could be more organized in the hands of women, but that does not necessarily mean that everyone would be equally better off in such case.

Assume that we all want a tidy home, and get 50 units of happiness from that. Cleaning up the house takes quite a number of hours of tedious, repetitive work, and so that produces about, say, 20 units of unhappiness.

If all the work falls on the wife, that gives her a total payoff of 30 units of happiness, and her husband 50 units of happiness in the beginning. Across time, since she can see that she is much less happy than her husband, she may become more crappy, she argues more with the husband, she gets angry quickly when the kids do not listen, she talks more, complains more, spends more money to de-stress.

And so all in all, the husband’s total happiness would actually be something like (50 – financial loss – stress from a talkative wife – more trivial quarrels with his wife – more nagging from his kids because they’re more scared of their mother etc etc..), which could be a small positive, or could be a negative number, i don’t know. of course, this is total BS but you get the idea.

I guess not all husbands slack off 100% and let the wife does all the work like that, since he knows he’d end up in a bad, very negative place. When his “happiness” level is approaching the bad place, he’d throw in some extra help around the house, boost each person’s payoff to a mildly good level for a short while.

However, if from the very beginning, he could just take up, say, 10 or 7 units of unhappiness from the housework, he’d end up with about 40-43 units of happiness, his wife’s got 37 – 40 units of happiness, and everyone would be in a long-term, stable happy situation!

I haven’t had much of a positive experience doing that yet, so I’m trying to make use of the internet, blogs, sometimes forum, emailing people and such, to get in touch with potential participants. Honestly it has always been a bit of a struggle. I can do phone interviews, those are fine. Of course I sucked at first but I’ve got a lot more comfortable with it now through practice (aka screwing up a couple of first interviews). I know that I can speak pretty fast, I have always been. Probably fast speakers are not so bad, it’s the fact that when you speak too quickly, you tend to get words all jumbled up that kind of makes communication less of an advantage for yourself. I appreciate it so so much that despite that, my prof has pushed me, and basically just threw me into the water and gave me the chance to work on what I needed to work on.

I wrote that a few days ago, and I post it here today because I think truthful cheesiness can be excused on one’s birthday Thank you <3

Talk to Me. I’ll Turn Off My Phone.

This interview with Tachi Yamada, M.D., president of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. How did you first learn to become a manager?

A. I think the most difficult transition for anybody from being a worker bee to a manager is this issue of delegation. What do you give up? How can you have the team do what you would do yourself without you doing it? If you’re a true micromanager and you basically stand over everybody and guide their hands to do everything, you don’t have enough hours in the day to do what the whole team needs to do.

Learning how to delegate, learning how to let go and still make sure that everything happened, was a very important lesson in my first role in management. And that’s where I learned a principle that I apply today — I don’t micromanage, but I have microinterest. I do know the details. I do care about the details. I feel like I have intimate knowledge of what’s going on, but I don’t tell people what to do.

Q. How do you have a granular understanding of what somebody’s working on without actually doing the work?

A. Every day, I read about 1,000 pages of documents, whether grants or letters or scientific articles, or whatever. I have learned what the critical things to read are. If there are 10 tasks in an overall project, what is the most critical task among those 10? What is the one thing that everything else hinges on? And what I’ll do is I’ll spend a lot of time understanding that one thing. Then, when the problem occurs, it usually occurs there, and I can be on top of what the problem is.

Q. How do you develop that ability to understand the key thing?

A. It’s just having enough experience to understand when problems do occur and how they occur, why they occur, and being prepared for that particular problem. Problems can occur in the other 10 areas, but they won’t determine the outcome of the overall project. But there may be one or two points where the outcome of the entire project is at stake, and there you’d better be on top of it.

Q. What other leadership lessons have you learned?

A. One very important partner I had in life was my father. He was a senior managing director of Nippon Steel Corporation and was one of the architects of the reconstruction of Japan after the war. He negotiated the first World Bank loan to Japan after the war to the steel industry, and it helped develop heavy industries in Japan. His outlook was always international. Very early, he sent me to the United States. I was 15. He sent me to a boarding school, Andover.

His whole idea was that you can’t possibly be competitive in the world unless you actually go outside your own geography and learn the way other people live and think. That probably was the most important lesson I learned — that what’s out there is more important than what you already know, and that you’d better go out and learn what it is out there that you don’t know.

Q. What else?

A. A second key lesson was from a doctor named Marcel Tuchman. He was the most compassionate person I have ever met in my life — I mean, full of human kindness. And every time he met somebody, you had the sense that he cared more about them than anything else in the world.

So what I learned from him is that when you actually are with somebody, you’ve got to make that person feel like nobody else in the world matters. I think that’s critical.

So, for example, I don’t have a mobile phone turned on because I’m talking to you. I don’t want the outside world to impinge on the conversation we’re having. I don’t carry a BlackBerry. I do my e-mails regularly, but I do it when I have the time on a computer. I don’t want to be sitting here thinking that I’ve got an e-mail message coming here and I’d better look at that while I’m talking to you. Every moment counts, and that moment is lost if you’re not in that moment 100 percent.

Q. Any other important mentors?

A. Morton Grossman. He was one of the founders of modern gastroenterology. I remember he once gave me a paper to review. I was young at the time. He said, “I want you to review this paper.” So I spent a couple of evenings reading the paper and wrote a six-page review of it. I shredded the analysis. And I showed it to him, to show how smart I was.

He looked at it and said, “O.K., now I want you to write me a report and give me a reason why it’s a fantastic paper and how we could make it even better.” And I did. And from that viewpoint, actually, the paper wasn’t bad.

This applies to people, too. It always comes down to people. One of the things I’ve learned is that you can’t go into an organization, fire everybody and bring in everybody you want. You have to work with the people you have. I’ve gone into different organizations in completely different walks of life several times, and you walk into the organization and you realize that some people are very good, some people are average and some people are not so good. And if I spend my time focusing on everything that’s bad, I’ll get nothing done.

Or I could say, what are really the best things about the people I have? What makes them great, and how can I really improve them one or two notches? And if I spend my time on that, then I’ll have a great organization. Everybody has their good points. Everybody has their bad points. If you can bring out the best in everybody, then you can have a great organization. If you bring out the worst in everybody, you’re going to have a bad organization.

So that lesson, while it was about reviewing papers, has been a critical element of my management style.

Q. Talk about how you hire.

A. You have to have people in an organization who are willing to truly embrace change, because if they don’t, then what you have is an organization that’s constantly fighting to stay at the status quo. And, of course, that leads to stagnation. It’s also an unsustainable model.

I’ve made an observation about people. There are people who have moved. Take somebody who’s a child of an Army officer — they will have moved 10 times in their lives. And then there are people who’ve been born and raised and educated and employed in one town their whole lives. Who do you think is willing to change? I think, in this modern world, you really have to be sure that your work force has the experience of being elsewhere. That experience then has the ability to ensure that you will be comfortable with change.

The biggest problems I see in a group of people who don’t embrace change is that they will always fight anything new, any new idea, any new concept, any outside point of view. And, of course, there are many examples of companies that have failed because of that. So I think that’s a critical point. Almost all of the people on our staff have traveled all around the world, have lived everywhere.

Q. What else are you looking for when you hire?

A. Native intelligence is critically important. I don’t think you can train people to be more intelligent.

Q. How do you test for that?

A. I really try to understand people, what their values are. So it’s usually quite an unstructured interview — where they come from, their family members. And then I try to understand how they deal with difficult interpersonal issues.

Q. Why?

A. Intelligence is often more displayed in what I would call complex abstract thinking, and there’s nothing more complex and abstract than human relationships. And if they can work their way through a human relationship problem intelligently, my guess is that they’re very smart people. Not that they can’t add and subtract six-figure numbers multiplied by whatever, but that they can take a complex problem, break it down into its pieces and figure out the best way forward.

I also look for people who’ve moved. Did you move when you were a kid? When you went from one high school to another, what was it like? How did you deal with it? This kind of thing is often very informative about how people have had to deal with crisis, different circumstances and how they’ve had to adapt or change.

I like people who are very confident but who understand the value of other people. Often, in interviews, people will say, “Well, I did this, I did that.” But who were your teammates? What did they do and how did you get them involved?

Q. Anything else?

A. One underestimated and important value, I think, is a sense of humor. It’s engaging, it’s delightful, but it’s also a reflection on not taking yourself so seriously — especially if the sense of humor is self-deprecating. It gives you a sense that they understand that they’re not so important.

Q. How has your leadership style evolved?

A. One of the things that I learned is that you have to give more of yourself than you’re used to. I’m Japanese. We’re very reserved people. It was very difficult for me to learn that, in order to connect with groups of people, you have to give of yourself. You have to tell people about yourself in a self-deprecating way in order to get people to hear you. And that was a very difficult thing for me early on. I just didn’t know how to do that without seeming a little uncomfortable. But I learned that, too.

Q. You’ve worked in organizations of very different sizes. Talk about that.

A. I went from having a small lab with four or five people to a department of medicine with 2,500 people to an R.& D. organization that I was running with 15,000 people. Each step was a huge step. But the lessons I learned at the job with thousands of people are really, really useful in learning how to deal with the 250 people we have now.

Q. What are those lessons?

A. Well, it’s how do you turn a battleship? You turn a battleship by making a directional commitment and staying the course, not wavering from it. When you’re down to 250, you could turn this like a motorboat, but your organization is much better if you treat it like a battleship and you stay the course.

Q. How do you give feedback?

A. One of the things I’ve learned is that it doesn’t matter how many good things you say, the one bad thing is what sticks. So. therefore, feedback should be viewed in the context of time, not in any one specific episode. So if I have something negative to say, I will say it. I will be clear about it. But I won’t try to couch it in a lot of positives, because people have a natural tendency to not want to hear a negative message. So I try to do it as quickly as I can, and I try to do it in the moment. But I also try to give positive feedback in other moments. To try to mix the two is often very hard, because the positive messages get lost in the one negative message, and the negative message gets garbled.

Q. What is your best career advice for young people?

A. I think one of the hardest things to do is to figure out what your North Star is. What is it that you really are interested in? This helps you to weigh one option versus another. And then keep your eyes and ears open.

Be open to new challenges. I don’t think anyone should do one job for too long a time. I think every five to eight years you should be willing to take on some different challenges. It’s so easy to get stale. Every time I’ve left a job, I was loving the job that I left. But I never regretted the next move that I made.

If, well, When I have my inspiration back to continue shooting, I’ll focus on people and expressions. I’ve had that thought in mind since the past summer, after a brief visit to the National Museum of Arts in DC while they were holding a portrait exhibition. You probably have seen it on the walls in my room, too — all of the pictures I put up are portraits. Some are rather odd. All except for two of them capture people in interactive situations. For example, one has a man and a woman sunbathing and reading newspaper (by Martin Parr, who seems to have a taste for ordinary oddities), another has a bunch of people in their bathing suits, exercising on the beach while a kid is watching on,  yet another has 2 men wearing giant flower hats as part of their costumes for some sort of festival, and a few more show people  jumping in the air looking very happy — those last ones are by Philippe Halsman.  And the reason interactive photos are preferred is that they are much more optimistic and life-loving than the portraits of head-holding, thought-overdosed, lonely individuals, and they make me believe that the world has more to offer than pretty girls in the middle of a flower field .