Body Language Tips

Here's my list of tips from The Definitive Book of Body Language that I thought were good enough to write down for later review (with the most interesting and/or useful bolded):

1. When speaking, use open palms, the "steeple," and thumb displays to show openness and confidence.
2. Mirror the other person’s body language to gain rapport.
3. Handshakes: make sure both shakers' hands are vertical and apply the same pressure.
4. Use someone's name twice immediately after meeting them.
5. The eyes are the key to a real smile as opposed to a fake smile.
6. Tight-lipped smile signals a withheld opinion or attitude; the drop-jaw smile (often used by Bill Clinton) signals playfulness.
7. Smiling is a submission signal--sometimes desirable and sometimes not.
8. Generally, keep your hands and arms at your side. Crossing your body or touching yourself signals negative attitudes and/or nervousness.
9. Same with legs and feet.
10. Thumb displays signal confidence/superiority/aggressiveness.
11. When someone is making a decision, they often stroke their chin. Their body language immediately following a chin stroke signals their choice.
12. On where to direct your eyes. For casual social conversation, the triangle made by the eyes and mouth. For intimate/romantic conversation, the triangle from the two eyes to the floor. To be intimidating, the triangle between the middle of the forehead and the eyes.
13. A persons lead foot points in the direction they want to go. This can signal someone wants to leave, romantic interest, etc.
14. Speak at the same speed as, or slower than, the person you are speaking with. On a related note, nodding is good but fast nodding can signal that you want someone to finish.
15. A head tilts signal submission. Head down signals disapproval.
16. Women, masters of communication, have too many attraction signals to list here. Men, on the other hand, use the regular confidence displays as well as accentuating their crotch.
17. Neat tip for single guys who want to know if a girl is interested. Put lint on your shoulder or wear your tie to one side and see if she fixes it for you.
18. Perceived height matters. But actions can be taken to increase perceived height.
19. Seating arrangements can greatly influence the feel and direction of a discussion. Most of this stuff is intuitive.
20. Don’t gesture too much. It signals low status.
21. When you notice someone displaying hostile/bored/undesirable body language, do something about it and their attitude might change! Their arms are crossed? Ask them to hold something. They're propping their head up with their hand? Ask them a question to get their attention. Other topics include handshaking, real smiling versus fake smiling, and other neat stuff. A very quick and easy read.

My only complaints with the book was that it tried a bit too hard to be funny and that references were rarely provided within the text. However, it contained a ton of useful information and was a fun and quick read.

Bklog #5

Fooled By Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This book was great for highlighting counter-intuitive phenomena. For example, humans are incapable of generating a random sequence of coin-flip outcomes. We alternate between heads and tails way too often whereas, probabilistically, we should sometimes observe long streaks of one or the other. My take away message was threefold. One, don't underestimate the role of randomness in explaining phenomena. Two, be aware that a large number of unlikely things happen all the time due to randomness and the shear number of things that are happening. Three, just because something is rare doesn't mean it's not important--you have to consider the potential severity of a possible outcome as well as its probability of occurring.


The Definitive Book of Body Language by Allan and Barbara Pease

I'm going to save this one for a full post.


The Art of Speed Reading People: How To Size People Up and Speak Their Language by Paul Tieger and Barbara Barron

See my previous post. I decided not to continue reading it after all. Maybe I'll pick it up again later. However, I did ask my dad all the questions to figure out his personality type and read him his profile: "ISTJs are pretty much hopeless. They are overly harsh and bossy. They're impossible to get along with so you should just avoid them altogether. And they smell bad." You should have seen the look on his face! I got him good!


The Walking Dead, Volumes 1-6 by Robert Kirkman

I heard good things about these graphic novels a while ago but I resisted--zombie stories don't generally get me too excited. However, it's hard to resist picking up a few new graphic novels at Borders over Christmas break. And thank goodness for that because these are great. They're actually quite light on the typical zombies-hunt-humans horror stuff. The thing that's so interesting about these stories is that the focus is generally on the ordinary: overprotective fathers, power struggles, sex, loneliness, fundamental morals, etc.


Y: The Last Man, Volumes 1-3 by Brian K. Vaughan

All of a sudden, every male of every species dies. Except one young man and his pet monkey. Cool premise? You bet. Good story to match? Yup. What's going to happen to the human race? I don't know but I'm going to keep reading to find out. (So far, not as interesting, deep, or original as The Walking Dead but good nonetheless.)

Speed Read This!

Earlier this week I was reading a book called The Art of Speed Reading People: How to Size People Up and Speak Their Language [amazon]. It's about the 16 personality types and explains how you can improve communication with someone after figuring out their type. I'm a sucker for relevant-to-real-life psychology (almost) as much as I am for relevant-to-real-life economics so I thought it would be interesting. After taking the test, I learned that I'm an introvert-intuitive-feeler-perceiver (INFP). The subsequent description fit astonishingly well. (I wondered if it was like astrology in the sense that all of the descriptions might fit. Nope. Color me impressed.) However, I also realized that, as an intuitive, I generally focus on the big picture and miss lots of small details. You know, the kinds of details that you have to pick up on to "speed read people." Wonderful.

In all seriousness, I never expected the book to be useful for anything more than entertainment. However, wouldn't it be nice if the book practiced what it preached? Should it not take steps to "speak my language" after it has "sized me up"?

Bklog #4

The Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell

Definitely as good as advertised. Gladwell describes the process through which social phenomena goes from non-existent to the cool kids doing it to everyone doing it. In making his case, we get a wonderful tour through all sorts of interesting empirical studies in psychology, epidemiology, marketing, education, and sociology. In my favorite chapter, he explains the psychological tests that influenced Sesame Street and Blues Clues. How anyone could not enjoy that sort of discussion is beyond me.

Also, the book is amazingly well-written. It might be fun (not to mention useful) to spend some time analyzing his writing style to figure out what makes it so effective.

Another puzzle?

There are far more children born every year with fetal alcohol syndrome than are born with autism or Down syndrome. Fetal alcohol damage is the leading cause of mental retardation, with an estimated forty thousand babies born with the syndrome annually. And yet, the condition receives far less attention and support than other disabilities.

I wonder why. (Kidding. I'm convinced that it's because it's perceived as a poor folks problem.)

Once again, the quote is from the excellent All God's Children by Rene Denfeld. I'm looking forward to reading the second half on my trip to Chicago today but I think it's safe to say that it's a great book. I admire and appreciate the author's ability to remain purely descriptive. The book is written as a series of interconnected vignettes--each street youth's story is well researched and fascinating. (If you were wondering about the context of the quote, one of the girls had FAS.)

A novel solution to the SS crisis

Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!) has a novel solution to the SS crisis.

I'm not going to win any awards for saying this, but the elderly are like rude party guests. They came early, they're always in the bathroom, and now they just won't leave. I say we do the same thing to them that I do with stragglers at my shin-digs. Put them to work cleaning the place up...Let's use 'em to shut down our porous Southern Border. One thing Old People have a knack for is keeping kids off their lawn...Plus they're suckers for heat.

As for the book on the whole, I never expected it to live up to the greatness of the show. Nevertheless, it's hit and miss. If you have a bit of time to kill in your local bookstore, chapters on old people, religion, and homosexuals are definitely the hits, in that order.

As for the misses, you quickly learn which parts you should skip: "Stephen Speaks for Me, A Chance for Average Americans to Agree With What I Think" and everything written in the margins. It really drove me nuts that every page had about 3 "parenthetical comments" in the margins (in addition to footnotes.) In general, these were the jokes that weren't funny enough to make the main text. After awhile I knew I should skip them but they were distracting.

Street kids and the internet

In the 1990s, street youth shelters began offering free computer access, and a number of Web sites either created by street kids or catering to them quickly appeared... On digihitch.com, a portal claiming five thousand members, a query about New Orleans can run to pages of answers from street kids, complete with tips on how to find good squat (ask in Jackson Square), the rules of the street (don't panhandle your first day), and how the police react to street kids (be careful "flying a sign," or using a cardboard sign to beg). A post on hippy.com about Venice Beach includes the local menus (a church that gets donated pastries from Starbucks, a cafe that delivers hot soup and cookies to the street youths)....

More great stuff from All God's Children.

My favorite quote

For land that’s dry and unfruitful will give you good crops, if you put enough manure…I mean, your grace’s words have been like manure spread on the barren ground of my dry and uncultivated mind.

Oh how I wish I could take a week off to reread this book. It's been too long and the details have faded. Yet the memory of my emotional response remains clear as day.

Bklog #3

1984 (George Orwell)
Yup, it lived up to the high expectations.


Maus (Art Spiegelman)

Stop reading. Go pick it up right now. You won't regret it.

Not convinced? Okay, let me tell you a bit more. This two volume graphic novel is about the author's father, a Polish Jew, and his experience of WWII. The structure of the story is self-reflexive in the sense that it's also about the author learning about his fathers experience so he could write this memoir. The father's story is haunting stuff as you would expect. The courage with which he protects and tries to keep contact with his wife throughout it all were especially moving. One of the interesting things the author does is in depicting the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats--I think it would have been too much to bear to see human faces attached to these events. The author describes himself, his father, and their relationship with amazing honesty--it's definitely not always flattering but its rawness makes the emotions and insecurities resonate. The second volume had me watery-eyed throughout for a wide range of reasons. I wish it didn't have to end.

Bklog #2

A Farewell to Alms (Gregory Clark)
Much has already been said about the content (see the Marginal Revolution discussions) so I won't say anything more on that front. Instead, a personal anecdote. As an undergrad, I often finished economics courses thinking "wow, economists sure know a lot about X, Y, and Z." I was convinced by these classes that economists usually thought about problems "in the right way" but there was already so much that had been done I wondered how I could ever contribute. When I took Prof. Clark's class (as an undergrad about 4 years ago), and he made many of the arguments in this book, I thought "wow, there's still so much interesting and important work to do!" I felt that excitement again reading the book.

The Game (Neil Strauss)
Yes, the book about pickup artists. Yes, I started it after watching the VH1 show The Pickup Artist which is the most entertaining thing on TV the past few weeks. (The star of the show is a lead character in the book.) Yes, the behavior is nauseating. But that's why the show and the book are so interesting--it actually seems to work. The book is worth recommending from a purely intellectual perspective. Of course, it's also interesting for the shock value of the "exploits" that are described (quite vividly, I might add.) The unexpected highlight was learning about the inner-workings of the *community* of pickup artists. Seriously. They have online discussion groups and whatnot. And many of the leaders would fly around the world to teach "the art" in workshops that cost over $1500 a person. Who knew?

Quick Thoughts on A Farewell To Alms

The most striking thing about the book to me is how much is done with a lot of a little. By that I mean that Prof. Clark has amassed a huge variety of bits of data to make his various cases. While it's frustrating that the little bits aren't bigger bits, it's hard to complain considering how far back in history we're looking at.

After arguing against a number of the conventional theories of the industrial evolution [edit: I swear I meant to write "revolution"], he argues modern growth came about because the characteristics that generate economic success were propagated throughout society by the relatively high fertility rates of the wealthy. The main piece of evidence for this hypothesis is from English wills which show that men with more surviving children tend to have more assets to bequeath. He admits that the rich are more likely to have wills but argues that this isn't a large concern since many men with modest occupations are found in the data too. But that's not quite the main concern. Kids are expensive, right? Then men with lots of kids are probably less likely to have assets to bequeath in a will. But this is probably a larger issue for poor men than rich men. So it seems like the poor men with lots of kids are most likely to be missing from the data. Put them back in and the positive relationship between wealth and children might shrink or disappear.

Bklog

Tournament Poker For Advanced Players by David Sklansky
I have not played very much and am not at all an advanced player. But I enjoy learning about the strategy. The biggest lesson I took from it: you need a better hand to call than you do to bet. I might have kind of known this before but Sklansky does a nice job explaining it.

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
This one is not about poker. It's about the crazy world of investment banking in the 1980s. Not as spectacular as Moneyball but that's to be expected since Moneyball was about sports, statistics, and valuation--I mean, it was practically written for me! Liar's Poker was still great, though. I found one passage particularly interesting in relation to Moneyball. Discussing the key to Michael Milken's success with junk bonds:

The ratings services [for bonds], like the commercial banks, relied almost exclusively on the past--corporate balance sheets and track records in--in rendering their opinions. The outcome of the analysis was determined by the procedure rather than by the analyst. This was a poor way to evaluate any enterprise, be it new and small, or old, large and shaky. A better method was to make subjective judgements about the character of management and the fate of their industry.

Milken sounds a lot like the foolish scouts who are described in Moneyball. They'd look at things like power, speed, and body type to value prospects while Billy Beane was able to beat the market by focusing exclusively on past performance and placing an immense value on on-base-percentage. So, what's the best way to beat the market?

Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Venkatesh
Venkatesh is the sociologist who (along with Steven Levitt) wrote about crack dealers living with their parents. I started this book quite a while ago and it has been sitting on my "currently reading" pile of books for some time now a little less than half-read. Well, it's time for this book to go back on the shelf. Unfinished. The subject matter was actually pretty fascinating but the writing was really repetitive. I'd love to read a nicely edited second edition.

Books, books, books

I recently finished John Scalzi's The Ghost Brigades, a sequel to Old Man's War. The major sci-fi element of the series is the technology to transfer consciousness from body to super-enhanced military body, the most important feature of which is a computer enhancement to the brain humorously called a "BrainPal." The coolest tech-fantasy idea in the book is the integration of minds via the BrainPal. I mean, can you imagine having access to another persons mind or giving someone else access to yours? And then imagine this on a greater scale. Ridiculous! And so cool! The story's neat as well. I don't know what it is about sci-fi and war drama that go so well together but they do. Scalzi peppers the story with nice touches of angst, comedy, romance, and references to other popular sci-fi books and movies. Definitely recommended for a fun and pretty easy read.

Is it safe to comment on Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows yet? Well, I don't have too much to say anyways and no spoilers of course. It was largely what I expected. Quite enjoyable. The section with Harry walking into the woods was spectacular. At the same time, modern times have seen much better fantasy fiction from Britain in the His Dark Materials Trilogy. Hopefully the upcoming movie starring Nicole Kidman will raise interest.

I also picked up the first volume of The Astonishing X-Men written by Joss Whedon (of Buffy and Firefly fame). It was good but I expected more based on the great reviews. Maybe it's supposed to get better in future volumes.

Bad Government! Bad!

Protectionism in (pre-reform) Ghana

The Ghanaians were so eager to have domestic automobile production that they imported kits with a complete set of auto parts from Yugoslavia. They then assembled the cars and sold them. But the international price at which they bought the kits was greater than the international price of the fully assembled vehicle!

Corruption and bureaucracy in Peru

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto registered a small clothing factory in Lima as an experiment and decided in advance not to pay bribes. During the time it took to get registered, government officials asked for bribes ten times. In two cases, he had to break his own rule and pay the bribes, or the experiment would have come to a halt. In the end, it took ten months to register the clothing factory. A similar procedure takes four hours in New York.

These gems are from Chapter 11 of Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth. Having finished it, my previous thoughts on the book stand. After Chapter 6, Chapter 11 is easily the second best of the book.

The Loans That Were, the Growth That Wasn't

A Halfway-through Review...

William Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth reads as much like sociology as it does economics. It explains and deconstructs the modern history of thought on why some poor countries develop and others do not including theories related to: low investment, low investment in education, high fertility, and contingent lending. More than that, it tells why outside efforts usually fail to make a difference--as a (now former) economist at the World Bank, Easterly is in a great position to provide insight.

Sometimes the detail makes it read a bit slow but that's okay as long as you don't mind skipping bits because the detail is brilliant and captivating in some parts.

You should read chapter 6. I cannot recommend it highly enough. The Marshall Plan approach characterized by attaching loans to policy reform requirements is often seen as the best way to help countries develop. Theoretically, it gives countries aid through loans and makes them adopt policies that will help them grow. In chapter 6, Easterly explains why this theoretically sound approach has often been a failure. One reason:

Most donor institutions are set up with a separate country department for each country or group of countries. The budget of this department is determined by the amount of resources it disburses to recipients. A department that does not disburse its loan budget will likely receive a smaller buget the following year...so the people in the country departments feel the incentive to disburse even when loan conditions are not met.

Sci-Fi Thriller Meets Philosophy of the Mind

She swears she wants to be a boy when she grows up; she isn't going to hit puberty for another six years, and she may change her mind when her body starts changing.

This is from Charles Stross' Glasshouse which many regard as his best work. (High praise considering he won the Hugo Award for Accelerando.) In the future Stross imagines we are no longer constrained by the bodies that we're born with. We are our minds and we can create and transfer to any kind of body we want. Of course, we also live forever since we back ourselves up just in case of an accident. This scenario raises lots of the questions I remember discussing when I took Philosophy of the Mind as an undergrad but Stross changes their focus to make a reasoned case for acceptance of same-sex relationships. In a world in which individuals can and often do change genders, it just doesn't make sense to think about same-sex relationships as anything but acceptable. How would you define a same-sex couple anyways?

While that was the most interesting aspect of the book for me, it says nothing of the plot which involves a person waking up from memory surgery, trying to figure out who he is, why he had some of his memories removed, and who's trying to kill him. Pretty interesting, right? I thought so, but at the same time, I didn't get as wrapped up in the story as I might have wished. I feel like there is a trade-off between authenticity and accessibility in sci-fi. To make the future "more authentic" the author has to include a lot of things the reader may not understand.

Overall, if you're looking for a fast-paced and accessible book to pass the time, this probably isn't your best choice. But if you're interested in exploring a new world (that just might be in our future), then you shouldn't hesitate to pick this one up.