Here are the printable notes from Week .

Here are printable notes from week 4

Here is the Video of Stephen Wiltshire – the Human Camera who draws Rome from Memory. This is the video I used in class on Week 3.

Here are the printable notes

Working on the class for this Wednesday and I’m marinating on the idea of light and heat. It seems like the two always go together, but people like bright yet dislike hot. So this has got me studying thermodynamics this week. Interesting thought – objects that are hot are referred to as being in possession of a large amount of thermal energy, whereas cold objects possess little thermal energy. Thermal energy then is often mistakenly defined as being synonym for the word heat. This, however, is not the case: an object cannot possess heat, but only energy.

Here are the notes as a PDF. I made them in black in white so they’ll use less ink on your printer. This was according to one request. You will also find below the Slides from the Powerpoint presentation.

The following is an excerpt from Roy H. Williams Monday Morning Memo. It was the catalyst and inspiration for the Marshmallow Video.

Consider the following:

A large group of 4-year old children are led into a room, one at a time. The room is equipped with a two-way mirror. Each child is seated and given a marshmallow.  “You can eat the marshmallow right now if you want. But if you wait until I come back to eat your marshmallow, I’ll give you a second marshmallow to go with it.” The giver of marshmallows then leaves the child alone in the room.

Is there anything we could learn from such a test? Could it tell us anything important about a child’s future?

One third of the children ate the marshmallow immediately.
One third held out for a short time, then ate the marshmallow.
One third waited 15 to 20 minutes until the giver of marshmallows returned with the promised, second marshmallow.

Small indicators are valuable to a savvy consultant, just as they were valuable to Walter Mischel*, a scientist at Stanford 40 years ago.

Fourteen years later, at the age of eighteen, each of the original 216 children was located. Those who didn’t eat the marshmallow scored an average of 210 points higher on the SAT (610 verbal and 652 math versus 524 verbal and 528 math.)

At age 40, the group that didn’t eat their marshmallows had more successful marriages, higher incomes, greater career satisfaction and better health than the marshmallow eaters.

The 4 year-old who eats the marshmallow is oriented toward the present.
The 4 year-old who waits is oriented toward the future.

Yes, we can learn big things from small indicators.

Read the Complete Memo

Hey Folks, here is the full 9 minute clip from the video I showed on Benoit Mandelbrot and Mandelbrot sets. Its from a documentary called “The Colors of Infinity” narrated by Arthur C. Clarke who wrote the book 2001: A Space Odyssey.