By Jessica Pryce-Jones
September 18, 2011, 2:40 PM GMT.
1. Contribution.
2. Conviction.
3. Culture.
4. Commitment.
5. Confidence.
The Source has teamed up with the iOpener Institute iOpener Institute for People and Performance to find out how happy and fullfilled our readers are at work. The Institute has a specially designed survey to help you establish how happy you are at work and along with the article below you can figure out how you can increase your happiness. Complete the questionnaire now.
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http://blogs.wsj.com/source/2011/09/18/the-five-drivers-of-happiness-at-work/?mod=google_news_blog
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Friday, September 30, 2011
Moods on Twitter Follow Biological Rhythms, Study Finds - NYTimes.com
September 29, 2011
Twitter Study Tracks When We Are :)By BENEDICT CAREY
However grumpy people are when they wake up, and whether they stumble to their feet in Madrid, Mexico City or Minnetonka, Minn., they tend to brighten by breakfast time and feel their moods taper gradually to a low in the late afternoon, before rallying again near bedtime, a large-scale study of posts on the social media site Twitter found.
Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.
The report, by sociologists at Cornell University and appearing in the journal Science, is the first cross-cultural study of daily mood rhythms in the average person using such text analysis. Previous studies have also mined the mountains of data pouring into social media sites, chat rooms, blogs and elsewhere on the Internet, but looked at collective moods over broader periods of time, in different time zones or during holidays.
“There’s just a torrent of new digital data coming into the field, and it’s transforming the social sciences, creating new lenses to look at all sorts of behaviors,” said Peter Sheridan Dodds, a researcher at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the new research. He called the new study “very exciting, because it complements previous findings” and expands on what is known about how mood fluctuates.
He and other outside researchers also cautioned that drawing on Twitter had its hazards, like any other attempt to monitor the fleeting internal states labeled as moods. For starters, Twitter users are computer-savvy, skew young and affluent, and post for a variety of reasons.
“Tweets may tell us more about what the tweeter thinks the follower wants to hear than about what the tweeter is actually feeling,” said Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, in an e-mail. “In short, tweets are not a simple reflection of a person’s current affective state and should not be taken at face value.”
The study’s authors, Scott A. Golder and Michael W. Macy, acknowledge such limitations and worked to correct for them. In the study, they collected up to 400 messages from each of 2.4 million Twitter users writing in English, posted from February 2008 through January 2010.
They analyzed the text of each message, using a standard computer program that associates certain words, like “awesome” and “agree,” with positive moods and others, like “annoy” and “afraid,” with negative ones. They included so-called emoticons, the face symbols like “:)” that punctuate digital missives.
The researchers gained access to the messages through Twitter, using an interface that allows scientists as well as software developers to work with the data.
The pair found that about 7 percent of the users qualified as “night owls,” showing peaks in upbeat-sounding messages around midnight and beyond, and about 16 percent were morning people, who showed such peaks very early in the day.
After accounting for these differences, the researchers determined that for the average user in each country, positive posts crested around breakfast time, from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.; they fell off gradually until hitting a trough between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., then drifted upward, rising more sharply after dinner.
To no one’s surprise, people’s overall moods were lowest at the beginning of the workweek, and rose later, peaking on the weekend. (The pattern of peak moods on days off held for countries where Saturday and Sunday are not the weekend.)
The pattern on weekend days was shifted about two hours later — the morning peak closer to 9 a.m. and the evening one past 9 p.m., most likely because people sleep in and stay up later — but the shape of the curve was the same.
“This is a significant finding because one explanation out there for the pattern was just that people hate going to work,” Mr. Golder said. “But if that were the case, the pattern should be different on the weekends, and it’s not. That suggests that something more fundamental is driving this — that it’s due to biological or circadian factors.”
The researchers found no evidence for the winter blues, the common assumption that short winter days contribute to negative moods. Negative messages were as likely during the winter as in the summer.
But positively rated messages tracked the rate at which day length changed: that is, they trended upward around the spring equinox in late March, and downward around the fall equinox in late September. This suggests that seasonal mood changes are due more to a diminishing of positive emotions in anticipation of short days, the authors say.
Dr. Dodds, the University of Vermont researcher, has been doing text analysis of Twitter messages worldwide as well, to get a reading on collective well-being, among other things. He said the new study comported well with his own recent analysis. “We find that swearing goes up with negative mood in the very same way,” he said. “It tracks beautifully with the pattern they’re showing.”
Social scientists analyzing digital content agree that, for all its statistical appeal, the approach still needs some fine-tuning. On Twitter, people routinely savage others with pure relish and gush sarcastically — and the software is not sophisticated enough to pick up these subtleties.
“I suspect that if you counted the good and bad words people said during intercourse, you’d mistakenly conclude that they were having an awful time,” Dr. Gilbert said.
Access Source And It's Great Content: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/science/30twitter.html
Twitter Study Tracks When We Are :)By BENEDICT CAREY
However grumpy people are when they wake up, and whether they stumble to their feet in Madrid, Mexico City or Minnetonka, Minn., they tend to brighten by breakfast time and feel their moods taper gradually to a low in the late afternoon, before rallying again near bedtime, a large-scale study of posts on the social media site Twitter found.
Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.
The report, by sociologists at Cornell University and appearing in the journal Science, is the first cross-cultural study of daily mood rhythms in the average person using such text analysis. Previous studies have also mined the mountains of data pouring into social media sites, chat rooms, blogs and elsewhere on the Internet, but looked at collective moods over broader periods of time, in different time zones or during holidays.
“There’s just a torrent of new digital data coming into the field, and it’s transforming the social sciences, creating new lenses to look at all sorts of behaviors,” said Peter Sheridan Dodds, a researcher at the University of Vermont who was not involved in the new research. He called the new study “very exciting, because it complements previous findings” and expands on what is known about how mood fluctuates.
He and other outside researchers also cautioned that drawing on Twitter had its hazards, like any other attempt to monitor the fleeting internal states labeled as moods. For starters, Twitter users are computer-savvy, skew young and affluent, and post for a variety of reasons.
“Tweets may tell us more about what the tweeter thinks the follower wants to hear than about what the tweeter is actually feeling,” said Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist, in an e-mail. “In short, tweets are not a simple reflection of a person’s current affective state and should not be taken at face value.”
The study’s authors, Scott A. Golder and Michael W. Macy, acknowledge such limitations and worked to correct for them. In the study, they collected up to 400 messages from each of 2.4 million Twitter users writing in English, posted from February 2008 through January 2010.
They analyzed the text of each message, using a standard computer program that associates certain words, like “awesome” and “agree,” with positive moods and others, like “annoy” and “afraid,” with negative ones. They included so-called emoticons, the face symbols like “:)” that punctuate digital missives.
The researchers gained access to the messages through Twitter, using an interface that allows scientists as well as software developers to work with the data.
The pair found that about 7 percent of the users qualified as “night owls,” showing peaks in upbeat-sounding messages around midnight and beyond, and about 16 percent were morning people, who showed such peaks very early in the day.
After accounting for these differences, the researchers determined that for the average user in each country, positive posts crested around breakfast time, from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m.; they fell off gradually until hitting a trough between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m., then drifted upward, rising more sharply after dinner.
To no one’s surprise, people’s overall moods were lowest at the beginning of the workweek, and rose later, peaking on the weekend. (The pattern of peak moods on days off held for countries where Saturday and Sunday are not the weekend.)
The pattern on weekend days was shifted about two hours later — the morning peak closer to 9 a.m. and the evening one past 9 p.m., most likely because people sleep in and stay up later — but the shape of the curve was the same.
“This is a significant finding because one explanation out there for the pattern was just that people hate going to work,” Mr. Golder said. “But if that were the case, the pattern should be different on the weekends, and it’s not. That suggests that something more fundamental is driving this — that it’s due to biological or circadian factors.”
The researchers found no evidence for the winter blues, the common assumption that short winter days contribute to negative moods. Negative messages were as likely during the winter as in the summer.
But positively rated messages tracked the rate at which day length changed: that is, they trended upward around the spring equinox in late March, and downward around the fall equinox in late September. This suggests that seasonal mood changes are due more to a diminishing of positive emotions in anticipation of short days, the authors say.
Dr. Dodds, the University of Vermont researcher, has been doing text analysis of Twitter messages worldwide as well, to get a reading on collective well-being, among other things. He said the new study comported well with his own recent analysis. “We find that swearing goes up with negative mood in the very same way,” he said. “It tracks beautifully with the pattern they’re showing.”
Social scientists analyzing digital content agree that, for all its statistical appeal, the approach still needs some fine-tuning. On Twitter, people routinely savage others with pure relish and gush sarcastically — and the software is not sophisticated enough to pick up these subtleties.
“I suspect that if you counted the good and bad words people said during intercourse, you’d mistakenly conclude that they were having an awful time,” Dr. Gilbert said.
Access Source And It's Great Content: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/science/30twitter.html
Good at Chess? A Hedge Fund May Want to Hire You - NYTimes.com
September 29, 2011, 6:56 pm
Good at Chess? A Hedge Fund May Want to Hire You
For a number of hedge fund managers and traders, playing chess well has been among their better career moves.
By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN
Boaz Weinstein’s opening move on Wall Street came as a result of chess.
Mr. Weinstein, now a star hedge fund manager, was trying to get a summer job at Goldman Sachs in 1991, when he was just 18. After being told there was nothing available, he stopped in a bathroom on the way out and ran into David F. Delucia, then the head of corporate bond trading.
Mr. Delucia, who is ranked as an expert by the United States Chess Federation, had played Mr. Weinstein, ranked as a master by the federation, many times. He arranged for a series of interviews until Mr. Weinstein got an internship on a Goldman trading desk.
Mr. Weinstein is not alone among Wall Streeters who have a chess connection.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal who now runs the hedge fund Clarium Capital, is also a chess master, and Douglas Hirsch, the founder of Seneca Capital, while not an expert, has become an ardent chess enthusiast.
Chess helps in trading, Mr. Weinstein said. To become a good chess player, he learned to focus on how he made decisions because he could not calculate the results of all his possible moves. Learning to deal with that uncertainty or risk has been useful. When you make an investment, “you can have an 80 percent chance of being right. And then the 20 percent comes up,” he said. “But really it is the process that you used to make the decision.”
Other games of strategy are prominent in finance. Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, is an accomplished bridge player; and David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital, who bet against Lehman Brothers in 2008, finished 18th in the main event of the 2006 World Series of Poker.
But being skilled at games is no guarantee of success. James E. Cayne, the former chief executive of Bear Stearns, which collapsed in March 2008, is a world-class bridge player who has won many international bridge tournaments.
Still, the idea that gaming skills may be adaptable to investing spurred a hiring program in the early 1990s at Bankers Trust. At the time, the bank had a successful trader named Norman Weinstein (no relation to Boaz Weinstein), who had earned the title of international master from the World Chess Federation. In an effort to replicate his success, the bank hired a small group of people who had little or no trading experience, but were world-class chess and bridge players.
David Norwood, a World Chess Federation grandmaster (the highest ranking a player can obtain), was one of the recruits. “I was studying history at Oxford,” Mr. Norwood said. “Right out of the blue, I got contacted by Bankers Trust who said, ‘You would really make a good trader.’ I had no idea what trading was.”
Mr. Norwood took the job and was soon put on a trading desk, but it was too sudden. “It was like being stuffed into a world-class chess match without knowing the moves,” Mr. Norwood said. He quit after only a few months.
Despite the setback, Mr. Norwood said the experience “kind of planted a seed in me.” After a year, he found a job at Duncan Lawrie, a British private bank, and began learning trading and investing. In 2008, at the age of 40, he retired a multimillionaire.
Mr. Norwood said that he definitely believed that his skills in chess helped make him a success in business. “So many people in the investment world have bull-market mentalities. They do well when things are going well,” Mr. Norwood said. In chess, he said, you are constantly facing setbacks, and the people who become great players learn to overcome them.
Other companies have followed the Bankers Trust example. The Web site of the hedge fund manager D. E. Shaw Group lists among its employees a life master at bridge, a past “Jeopardy!” champion and Anna Hahn, the 2003 United States women’s chess champion.
Ms. Hahn, who joined the company shortly after winning the championship, is a senior trader, focusing mostly on commodities. Her chess background “definitely got our attention,” said Michelle Toth, who oversees human resources. “We prize analytical rigor here,” she said. “Someone who achieves this level definitely stands out.”
Boaz Weinstein rebounded from a trading loss of more than $1 billion at Deutsche Bank during the financial crisis to found the $4 billion hedge fund Saba Capital Management, whose flagship fund is up more than 7 percent for the year. He said he often considered chess players when hiring.
At Deutsche Bank, which he left in early 2009, Mr. Weinstein said he helped recruit Elina Groberman, who was the 2000 United States women’s co-champion. He also hired Anatoly Nakum, a master. Mr. Nakum eventually left to head credit trading at Barclays Capital before moving on to UBS, where he was co-head of North American credit trading operations. He left in June and said that he was currently pursuing opportunities in investment management.
In 2005, Mr. Thiel hired Patrick Wolff, a two-time United States champion, as an analyst. Mr. Wolff rose to become one of the managing directors at Clarium. This year, he set up his own fund, and, in a reference to his chess background, named it Grandmaster Capital. He said the fund had about $50 million under management, much of the money from Mr. Thiel.
Mr. Hirsch, the founder of Seneca Capital, became interested in chess when his children started studying it. Eighteen months ago, he began taking lessons. As his understanding has grown, he has noticed analogies between chess and investing.
For example, he said, memory, pattern recognition and the order in which you play moves are important in chess, and the same is true in investing.
Mr. Hirsch said that when he first started playing chess, he just wanted to enjoy the game. He has improved rapidly, he said, and now his goal is to become a master by raising his official numerical rating through participation in tournaments.
But his new obsession has not come without a cost, at least to one of his other passions. When he is playing golf, Mr. Hirsch said, he often thinks about chess positions. Strangely, he said, the reverse is not true.
At Talpion, the hedge fund started earlier this year by the billionaire investor Henry Swieca, one of the fund’s senior traders, Matthew Herman, is also a senior chess master, a rank above an ordinary master.
“I don’t think chess is usually going to get someone a job in finance,” said Mr. Herman, who worked at Goldman Sachs for six years before joining Talpion. But the ability to play chess at a high level “is perhaps reflective of your approach to everything.”
Access Source And It's Great Content: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/good-at-chess-a-hedge-fund-may-want-to-hire-you/
Good at Chess? A Hedge Fund May Want to Hire You
For a number of hedge fund managers and traders, playing chess well has been among their better career moves.
By DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN
Boaz Weinstein’s opening move on Wall Street came as a result of chess.
Mr. Weinstein, now a star hedge fund manager, was trying to get a summer job at Goldman Sachs in 1991, when he was just 18. After being told there was nothing available, he stopped in a bathroom on the way out and ran into David F. Delucia, then the head of corporate bond trading.
Mr. Delucia, who is ranked as an expert by the United States Chess Federation, had played Mr. Weinstein, ranked as a master by the federation, many times. He arranged for a series of interviews until Mr. Weinstein got an internship on a Goldman trading desk.
Mr. Weinstein is not alone among Wall Streeters who have a chess connection.
Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal who now runs the hedge fund Clarium Capital, is also a chess master, and Douglas Hirsch, the founder of Seneca Capital, while not an expert, has become an ardent chess enthusiast.
Chess helps in trading, Mr. Weinstein said. To become a good chess player, he learned to focus on how he made decisions because he could not calculate the results of all his possible moves. Learning to deal with that uncertainty or risk has been useful. When you make an investment, “you can have an 80 percent chance of being right. And then the 20 percent comes up,” he said. “But really it is the process that you used to make the decision.”
Other games of strategy are prominent in finance. Warren E. Buffett, the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, is an accomplished bridge player; and David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital, who bet against Lehman Brothers in 2008, finished 18th in the main event of the 2006 World Series of Poker.
But being skilled at games is no guarantee of success. James E. Cayne, the former chief executive of Bear Stearns, which collapsed in March 2008, is a world-class bridge player who has won many international bridge tournaments.
Still, the idea that gaming skills may be adaptable to investing spurred a hiring program in the early 1990s at Bankers Trust. At the time, the bank had a successful trader named Norman Weinstein (no relation to Boaz Weinstein), who had earned the title of international master from the World Chess Federation. In an effort to replicate his success, the bank hired a small group of people who had little or no trading experience, but were world-class chess and bridge players.
David Norwood, a World Chess Federation grandmaster (the highest ranking a player can obtain), was one of the recruits. “I was studying history at Oxford,” Mr. Norwood said. “Right out of the blue, I got contacted by Bankers Trust who said, ‘You would really make a good trader.’ I had no idea what trading was.”
Mr. Norwood took the job and was soon put on a trading desk, but it was too sudden. “It was like being stuffed into a world-class chess match without knowing the moves,” Mr. Norwood said. He quit after only a few months.
Despite the setback, Mr. Norwood said the experience “kind of planted a seed in me.” After a year, he found a job at Duncan Lawrie, a British private bank, and began learning trading and investing. In 2008, at the age of 40, he retired a multimillionaire.
Mr. Norwood said that he definitely believed that his skills in chess helped make him a success in business. “So many people in the investment world have bull-market mentalities. They do well when things are going well,” Mr. Norwood said. In chess, he said, you are constantly facing setbacks, and the people who become great players learn to overcome them.
Other companies have followed the Bankers Trust example. The Web site of the hedge fund manager D. E. Shaw Group lists among its employees a life master at bridge, a past “Jeopardy!” champion and Anna Hahn, the 2003 United States women’s chess champion.
Ms. Hahn, who joined the company shortly after winning the championship, is a senior trader, focusing mostly on commodities. Her chess background “definitely got our attention,” said Michelle Toth, who oversees human resources. “We prize analytical rigor here,” she said. “Someone who achieves this level definitely stands out.”
Boaz Weinstein rebounded from a trading loss of more than $1 billion at Deutsche Bank during the financial crisis to found the $4 billion hedge fund Saba Capital Management, whose flagship fund is up more than 7 percent for the year. He said he often considered chess players when hiring.
At Deutsche Bank, which he left in early 2009, Mr. Weinstein said he helped recruit Elina Groberman, who was the 2000 United States women’s co-champion. He also hired Anatoly Nakum, a master. Mr. Nakum eventually left to head credit trading at Barclays Capital before moving on to UBS, where he was co-head of North American credit trading operations. He left in June and said that he was currently pursuing opportunities in investment management.
In 2005, Mr. Thiel hired Patrick Wolff, a two-time United States champion, as an analyst. Mr. Wolff rose to become one of the managing directors at Clarium. This year, he set up his own fund, and, in a reference to his chess background, named it Grandmaster Capital. He said the fund had about $50 million under management, much of the money from Mr. Thiel.
Mr. Hirsch, the founder of Seneca Capital, became interested in chess when his children started studying it. Eighteen months ago, he began taking lessons. As his understanding has grown, he has noticed analogies between chess and investing.
For example, he said, memory, pattern recognition and the order in which you play moves are important in chess, and the same is true in investing.
Mr. Hirsch said that when he first started playing chess, he just wanted to enjoy the game. He has improved rapidly, he said, and now his goal is to become a master by raising his official numerical rating through participation in tournaments.
But his new obsession has not come without a cost, at least to one of his other passions. When he is playing golf, Mr. Hirsch said, he often thinks about chess positions. Strangely, he said, the reverse is not true.
At Talpion, the hedge fund started earlier this year by the billionaire investor Henry Swieca, one of the fund’s senior traders, Matthew Herman, is also a senior chess master, a rank above an ordinary master.
“I don’t think chess is usually going to get someone a job in finance,” said Mr. Herman, who worked at Goldman Sachs for six years before joining Talpion. But the ability to play chess at a high level “is perhaps reflective of your approach to everything.”
Access Source And It's Great Content: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/good-at-chess-a-hedge-fund-may-want-to-hire-you/
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