From the category archives:

Mastery

Can you win in Teal?

So it is official. The Philly Flyers will play the Chicago Blackhawks for the Stanley Cup. Montreal, the third “Original Six” in the conference finals was axed by the Flyers tonight. Wow. Montreal has a losing streak a mile long (last won the cup in 1986, quarter century itch?). . . but guess who’s streak [...]

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Crush Your Competition – the Superstar Effect

The best way to win? Be better. How much better? Soul crushingly better. Sound cruel? The Weekend Journal shared a great piece about the Superstar effect – how some stars are so much better than everyone else in the field that they literally crush their competition before the game/match/negotiation begins. Boris Spassky, Bobby Fishcher’s rival [...]

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Superstar Effect

Everyone’s favorite Intimidators The Weekend Journal recently published an article on one of my favorite topics – the Superstar Effect. They also kindly included a list of the most famous intimidators. Here is that list: Muhammad Ali – noting himself as the “greatest” and following it up with a nasty punch . . . very [...]

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Freedom of Speech

As I dig through journals for interesting tidbits I often find myself far afield from the original topic at hand, which is exactly what happened the other day. I was reading a piece on the influence the color of the box that holds your local traffic signal has on traffic flow – not the color [...]

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Education Issues – Teacher Signaling

Confession: as a teacher I have challenges with the different levels of students who cycle through my classroom. I am not unbiased, and yes, I take my students’ performance personally. But this is as it has been and should be…. Some students are bright, but it’s not just the ability level of the student it [...]

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Stat of the Week – Monkeys and Medals

Lionel Tiger shares the history of monkeys and medal in his latest Op-Ed piece for the Wall Street Journal. He posits that there is a biological need for humans to have games such as the Olympics Like our primate cousins, competition is in our blood. Is this just more justification for what my less athletically-inclined [...]

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Margaret Thatcher – We Must Win

The newsletter this week includes a favorite item from Mrs. Thatcher: “Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.” A few weeks ago the Wall Street journal published an opinion piece worth a revisit. The original piece by Warren Kozak [...]

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Sports Stat of the Week: Old Guns, Young Guns

Sports Stat of the Week It’s all in the numbers…. Never mind what happened Sunday afternoon . . . I turned off the second display in my office and focused on teaching our Advanced Quant class. The students didn’t have to know the Boys were being destroyed by Future Rapper Favre. (Pants on the Ground? [...]

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Numbers for Nerds

If you get excited about numbers, today is a spetacular day. 010110 It is a rare opportunity to present the date in binary form (that’s not the actual binary date however). So just how rare is it? Have you figured out how many times in a century you can represent the date with 1s and [...]

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Mastery – how to know when to get back to basics

What do you call it when a defender “bounces” a puck into his own goal? Ready? . . . Heart Breaking. Actually I can’t believe I have yet to find the term . . . surely there is a term for this phenomenon given what my beloved Robi had to say about it, “I hope [...]

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