Dilbert on Outsourcing, Powerpoint and other mumbo-jumbo :)

Love this!  Shows how silly some outsourcing plans can really be.

http://dilbert.com/strip/2010-01-18

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-12-20

Going the Extra Mile Will Give You an Advantage

https://lifehacker.com/the-extra-mile-is-never-crowded-1748474610

https://lifehacker.com/consider-going-the-extra-inch-instead-of-the-extra-mile-1749321685

The Serenity Prayer

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference

The future of Trading & Regulation

https://www.ubs.com/microsites/trading-and-regulation/en/home.html

FX technology bets to drive dealer market shares

http://www.euromoney.com/Article/3478521/FX-technology-bets-to-drive-dealer-market-shares.html

You Snooze, You Win: How a Lack of Sleep Can Hold Back Your Weight Loss

http://vitals.lifehacker.com/you-snooze-you-win-how-a-lack-of-sleep-can-hold-back-1736338596

Sleep Deprivation Leads to Greater Hunger and Appetite

sleep deprivation adversely affected dieting efforts by decreasing leptin and increasing ghrelin levels

Less Sleep Means Less Willpower

Lack of Sleep Makes It Harder For You to Lose Fat

Lack of sleep also makes it harder for your body to lose fat... At the end of the study, both groups lost about the same amount of weight, but the difference is in what type of weight was lost. Those in the group that slept 8.5 hours lost about half of the total weight in fat mass, and the 5.5-hour group only lost a quarter of their weight from fat mass. To add insult to injury, those in the 5.5-hour group actually lost more lean mass. 

The happy secret to better work - Shawn Achor

Java Garbage Collection Distilled

Good GC summary at http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/java-garbage-collection-distilled.html

Simple Binary Encoding

http://mechanical-sympathy.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/simple-binary-encoding.html

‘Give Away Your Legos’ and Other Commandments for Scaling Startups

http://firstround.com/review/give-away-your-legos-and-other-commandments-for-scaling-startups/

Here, Graham explains why scaling companies and teams is, in her words (and she’s putting it lightly), “crazy hard” and what you can do as an early employee or a startup founder to make it easier on yourself and your team. She covers what rapid scaling actually feels like as an experience (something too few people talk about), the toughest phases of growth and how to survive them, and — most importantly — how you can anticipate the biggest challenges before they really hurt your momentum and your chances for long-term success.

Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy

http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html

Lifehacker: Focus On What You Can Do, Not What You Should Do

http://vitals.lifehacker.com/focus-on-what-you-can-do-not-what-you-should-do-1720078724

You know those moments when you’ve gobbled up an entire pizza and you mutter, with sauce still dribbling down your lips, “I shoulda ate only one slice?” But you didn’t, and the regret of bygone decisions only further undermines your drive to achieve your health goals. Here’s how you can pick yourself up, stop worrying about what you should’ve done, and focus on what you can do.

It will take time to develop this level of self-awareness and you have to realise that you will sometimes make “bad” choices. Put better, you won’t always make choices that are in line with your goals. That’s okay. Accept it. It’s part of being human.

Remember: When you focus on what you “should” have done, you lose focus on what you “can” currently do to make the situation better. Focusing on what you CAN do is the most important game you can play.

Lifehacker: How I Built Better Habits With Calendar Appointments

http://vitals.lifehacker.com/how-i-built-better-habits-with-calendar-appointments-1721459016

The Truth About Dishonesty

A very insightful video on on honesty and dishonesty.  Can be watched on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBmJay_qdNc.

FX algos revive US rates trading at UBS

A European bank with a slimmed-down product line is making waves in the US Treasury market and the unlikely secret of its success is an algorithm borrowed from its foreign exchange business....

http://www.fxweek.com/fx-week/news/2408775/fx-algos-revive-us-rates-trading-at-ubs

Carol Dweck: The power of believing that you can improve

Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain's capacity to learn and to solve problems. In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great introduction to this influential field.

Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/why-some-teams-are-smarter-than-others.html

Interesting article, they key comments being:

...

"but teams with higher average I.Q.s didn’t score much higher on our collective intelligence tasks than did teams with lower average I.Q.s. Nor did teams with more extroverted people, or teams whose members reported feeling more motivated to contribute to their group’s success"

"Instead, the smartest teams were distinguished by three characteristics.

First, their members contributed more equally to the team’s discussions, rather than letting one or two people dominate the group.

Second, their members scored higher on a test called Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.

Finally, teams with more women outperformed teams with more men. Indeed, it appeared that it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at “mindreading” than men."

...

 

"This last finding was another surprise. Emotion-reading mattered just as much for the online teams whose members could not see one another as for the teams that worked face to face. What makes teams smart must be not just the ability to read facial expressions, but a more general ability, known as “Theory of Mind,” to consider and keep track of what other people feel, know and believe."

How to Overcome Your Own Laziness

https://lifehacker.com/how-to-overcome-your-own-laziness-1676371259

A technologists approach to self-improvement

http://www.lifeoptimizer.org/2014/12/16/self-improvement-lessons/

1. Always work on a new version of yourself.

2. Add new “features” to yourself... new skills, new good habits, new experiences

3. Fix “bugs” in your life... work on reducing bad habits

4. Think about what “major upgrade” you could have. Most of the time, your improvements will be incremental. But every now and then, you should do a major upgrade of yourself. This usually involves a big change in your life.