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Ten Golden Rules for Networking
You make the biggest mistake if you think you should find the person which is the upper most useful for you yourself. Thus number one: have in mind to find out to which person you are most useful. Anyway, I will present the Ten Golden Rules the other way around:
10 There are no such rules.
09 Try to use some of the rules 01-09.
08 Networking is like playing billiard where you experience unimagined long range effects by an incredible indirect shot.
07 Try to take experience from your private life (cum grano salis) into your networking action field.
06 Do not tolerate intolerance.
05 Be authentic.
04 Do not play to much with emotions.
03 Seek to see the win-win situations.
02 Think, speak and act positive.
01 Be kind and try to help the other as much as you can.
Kenneth Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem | Unmöglichkeitstheorem bei Gruppenentscheiden
(English below)
Gibt es eine echte Regel für das Konstruieren einer sozialen Präferenz aus individuellen Präferenzen? Mit anderen Worten: Existiert überhaupt eine faire Prozedur für Gruppenentscheide?
Kenneth Arrow untersuchte diese Frage, indem er Kriterien aufstellte, welche berücksichtigt werden sollten, um ein akzeptables Regelwerk beim identifizieren von sozialen Präferenzen aus individuellen Präferenzen zu konstruieren:
1 Soziale Präferenzen sollten komplett sein. D.h., zwischen zwei Alternativen, A und B, können drei Fälle auftreten: A wird B vorgezogen (oder umgekehrt) oder es besteht Indifferenz in der Wahl.
2 Soziale Präferenzen sollten transitiv sein. D.h., wenn A gegenüber B vorgezogen wird und B gegenüber C, dann wird auch A gegenüber C vorgezogen.
3 Wenn jedes einzelne Individuum die Alternative A gegenüber B bevorzugt, dann sollte die gesamte Gesellschaft A favorisieren (schwaches Pareto Prinzip).
4 Soziale Präferenzen sollten unabhängig von einzelnen Individuen sein (Kein Diktator).
5 Soziale Präferenzen sollten unabhängig von irrelevanten Alternativen sein. D.h., Wenn die Gesellschaft die Alternative A gegenüber B vorzieht, dann sollte das unabhängig aller anderen Alternativen sein.
Ok, Kenneth Arrow hat mathematisch bewiesen, dass es kein Regelwerk geben kann, welches eine gesellschaftliche Präferenz aus individuellen Präferenzen, unter den aufgestellten Kriterien, herleitet. Mit anderen Worten: Sowie das Majorz-System, als auch das Proporz-Prinzip, oder irgendein-Prinzip, verletzt mindestens, unter gegebenen aber möglichen Umständen, eine der obigen Regeln, wenn eine Gruppe zu einer Entscheidungspräferenz kommen will.
Übrigens hat sich Kenneth Arrow hauptsächlich mit dieser Erkenntnis den Nobel Preis in Ökonomie geholt.
Den Ausweg gibt es nur durch den politischen Prozess. Wenn die individuellen Meinungen Gemeinsamkeiten aufweisen, können durchwegs Gruppenentscheide getroffen werden.
Trotzdem, Arrows „General Impossibility Theorem“ stellt nach wie vor für Sozialphilosophien ein Problem dar, bei denen – wie in der Demokratie – die sozialen Entscheidungen aus dem Willen der Einzelnen abgeleitet werden.
Ist es nicht so, dass wir ebensoviel Zeit brauchen um das Wahlsystem zu bestimmen, wie die eigentliche Wahl zu treffen?
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Is there a rule for constructing social preferences from individual preferences? In other words, does a fair procedure for group decisions even exist?
Kenneth Arrow examined the problem rigorously by specifying a set of requirements that should be satisfied by an acceptable rule for constructing socially preferences from individual preferences; i.e.,
* Social preferences should be complete in that given a choice between alternatives A and B it should say whether A is preferred to B, or B is preferred to A or that their is a social indifference between A and B.
* Social preferences should be transitive; i.e., if A is preferred to B and B is preferred to C then A is also preferred to C.
* If every individual prefers A to B then socially A should be preferred to B.
* Socially preferences should not depend only upon the preferences of one individual; i.e., the dictator.
* Social preferences should be independent of irrelevant alternatives; i.e., the social preference of A compared to B should be independent of preferences for other alternatives.
What Kenneth Arrow was able to prove mathematically is that there is no method for constructing social preferences from arbitrary individual preferences. In other words, there is no rule, majority voting or otherwise, for establishing social preferences from arbitrary individual preferences.
This was a major result and for it and other work Kenneth Arrow received the Nobel prize in economics.
There is one way out of this impasse for making social decisions through the political process. If the individual preferences have some commonality then social preferences can be constructed. If the alternatives can be represented as being elements of a spectrum and the preferences of the individuals exhibit single peakedness then social preferences can be constructed.
20/80 | Pareto Principle | An Unconvenient Observation
Originally, the Pareto Principle referred to the observation that 80% of Italy’s wealth belonged to only 20% of the population. Further deviations are:
- 20% of the input creates 80% of the result
- 20% of the workers produce 80% of the result
- 20% of the customers create 80% of the revenue
- 20% of the bugs cause 80% of the crashes
- 20% of the features cause 80% of the usage
- And on and on…
But be careful when using this idea! First, there’s a common misconception that the numbers 20 and 80 must add to 100 — they don’t! Ha, to much things wont work if only 8/10 is done…
Anyway, it remains an interesting thought or (un)convenient observation, doesn’t it?
PS: Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto (IPA: [vil'fre:do pa're:to]; July 15, 1848 – August 19, 1923), born Wilfried Fritz Pareto, was an Italian industrialist, sociologist, economist, and philosopher.
PPS: 10/90 gap refers to the statistical finding of the Global Forum for Health Research that only ten per cent of worldwide expenditure on health research and development is devoted to the problems that primarily affect the poorest 90 per cent of the world’s population. The Global Forum for Health Research is located in Geneva.
2nd IBP PhD Congress | Eawag Dübendorf | Forum Chriesbach | Friday 17th of April 2009 Start: 8.30 a.m. | Program
Program
8.00-8.30 Registration
8.30-8.40 Janet Hering Eawag Director - Welcome speech
8.40-9.00 Simon-Lukas Rinderknecht Eawag Siam – Eliciting density ratio class priors
9.00-9.20 Anne Dietzel Eawag Siam – Effects of changing anthropogenic pressures on water quality and plankton dynamics in three Swiss lakes – Long-term simulations with the biogeochemical-ecological lake model BELAMO
9.20-9.40 Ilaria Stendardo ETH Environmental Physics – Long-term oxygen trends in the North Atlantic
9.40-10.00 Tonya Del Sontro Eawag Surf – Quantifying extreme methane emissions from a Swiss reservoir
10.00-11.00 Coffee break and poster session 1
11.00-12.00 EAWAG FRIDAY SEMINAR – Johan Rockström, Stockholm Environment Institute and Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden – Building water resilience in the face of Global Environmental Change: The need for a green-blue water paradigm
12.00-13.40 Lunch
13.40-14.00 Guido Bronner ETH Environmental Chemistry – Sorption of multifunctional and polar compounds (incl.pesticides) to peat and soils: Experimental findings and LFER-modeling
14.00-14.20 Michael Aeschbacher ETH Environmental Chemistry - Redox properties of humic substances: Electrochemical characterization
14.20-14.40 Michael Madlinger ETH Environmental Chemistry – Adsorption of transgenic Cry proteins to mineral and organic soil surfaces: Effects of soil composition and solution chemistry
14.40-15.50 Coffee break and poster session 2
15.50-16.10 Jakob Frommer ETH Soil Chemistry - Chromium in the environment: an X-ray absorption study
16.10-16.30 Irene Wittmer Eawag Utox - Biocide and pesticide inputs to surface waters
16.30-16.50 Claire Farnsworth Eawag W&T – A hydrous manganese oxide doped gel probe sampler for measuring in situ reductive dissolution rates
17.00 Apéro
18.00 Dinner
Posters
1 Jafet Andersson Eawag Siam – SWAT capable of simulating smallholder food production in the Thukela River Basin, South Africa
2 Tobias Bergmiller ETH Molecular Microbial Ecology – Replacement of conserved essential functions of E. coli
3 Robert Brankatschk Eawag Umik – Succession of bacterial nitrogen transformation processes in a glacier forefield
4 Dörte Carstens & Krista Köllner Eawag Surf – Degradation and transformation of lacustrine organic nitrogen compounds: microbiology and biogeochemistry
5 Rang Cho ETH Environmental Microbiology – Methane turnover in the rice root zone: A novel quantification concept
6 Olivier Eugster ETH Environmental Physics – Should the magnitude of water column denitrification be revised downward?
7 Claudine Hauri ETH Environmental Physics – Changes of the aragonite saturation horizon in eastern boundary upwelling systems
8 Anke Hofacker ETH Soil Chemistry – How does temperature affect colloidal trace metal release from a submerged riparian soil?
9 Susanne Kern Eawag Uchem – Identification of transformation products of organic contaminants in natural waters by computer-aided prediction and high-resolution mass spectrometry
10 Andreas Kretschmann Eawag Uchem – Time resolved effect model for Daphnia magna – Measurement and modeling of the toxicokinetic of Diazinon
11 Claudia Lorrai Eawag Surf – Aquatic eddy correlation
12 Danielle Madureira Eawag Utox – Strategy to analyze gene expression profiles in Hepa cells exposed to BaP as a prerequisite for a cell-wide understanding of BaP-cell interactions
13 Holger Nestler Eawag Utox – Profiling the proteome of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii exposed to herbicides
14 Judith Neuwöhner Eawag Utox – Physiological modes of action of fluoxetine and its human metabolites in algae
15 Nela Nikolic ETH Molecular Microbial Ecology – Phenotypic variation of genetically identical bacteria growing in various sugars
16 Simone Peter Eawag Surf – Restoration of riverine floodplains: Effect of increased environmental heterogeneity on transformations of organic matter and nutrients
17 Flavio Piccapietra Eawag Utox – Physicochemical characterization of silver nanoparticles: effect of pH and ionic strength on aggregation
18 Maaike Ramseier Eawag W&T – Formation of assimilable organic carbon by different oxidants
19 Christian Scheidegger Eawag Utox – Chracterization of metal-phytochelatin complexes induced by lead in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii
20 Yvonne Scheidegger Eawag W&T – Air and water inclusions in stalagmites as new climate proxies
21 Marita Skarpeli-Liati ETH Environmental Chemistry – Nitrogen isotope fractionation during the oxidation of substituted anilines at manganese oxide surfaces
22 Friedhelm Steinhilber Eawag Surf – Reconstruction of solar activity during the Holocene
23 Kay Steinkamp ETH Environmental Physics – Oceanic constraints on terrestrial carbon fluxes
24 Tobias Vogt Eawag W&T – Investigation of bank filtration in gravel and sand aquifers using time-series analysis
25 Jannis Wenk Eawag W&T – Inhibition of triplet-induced oxidation reactions by different types of dissolved organic matter
26 Roland Zurbrügg Eawag Surf – Exploring dam impacts on tropical floodplain biogeochemistry
Note: Talks will be held in the room Forum Chriesbach C20
Registration, coffee breaks, poster sessions and lunch will take place on the ground floor (Forum Chriesbach, B-floor)
Apéro and dinner will be served at aqa (Forum Chriesbach, A-floor)
How to Solve It | George Polya
Solving a problem is easy. Sometimes not and if I have serious problems in mathematics, I try to follow the guidelines by George Polya:
- UNDERSTANDING THE PROBLEM
- First. You have to understand the problem.
- What is the unknown? What are the data? What is the condition?
- Is it possible to satisfy the condition? Is the condition sufficient to determine the unknown? Or is it insufficient? Or redundant? Or contradictory?
- Draw a figure. Introduce suitable notation.
- Separate the various parts of the condition. Can you write them down?
- DEVISING A PLAN
- Second. Find the connection between the data and the unknown. You may be obliged to consider auxiliary problems if an immediate connection cannot be found. You should obtain eventually a plan of the solution.
- Have you seen it before? Or have you seen the same problem in a slightly different form?
- Do you know a related problem? Do you know a theorem that could be useful?
- Look at the unknown! And try to think of a familiar problem having the same or a similar unknown.
- Here is a problem related to yours and solved before. Could you use it? Could you use its result? Could you use its method? Should you introduce some auxiliary element in order to make its use possible?
- Could you restate the problem? Could you restate it still differently? Go back to definitions.
- If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem? Keep only a part of the condition, drop the other part; how far is the unknown then determined, how can it vary? Could you derive something useful from the data? Could you think of other data appropriate to determine the unknown? Could you change the unknown or data, or both if necessary, so that the new unknown and the new data are nearer to each other?
- Did you use all the data? Did you use the whole condition? Have you taken into account all essential notions involved in the problem?
- CARRYING OUT THE PLAN
- Third. Carry out your plan.
- Carrying out your plan of the solution, check each step. Can you see clearly that the step is correct? Can you prove that it is correct?
- LOOKING BACK
- Fourth. Examine the solution obtained.
- Can you check the result? Can you check the argument?
- Can you derive the solution differently? Can you see it at a glance?
- Can you use the result, or the method, for some other problem?
Summary taken from G. Polya, “How to Solve It”, 2nd ed., Princeton University Press, 1957, ISBN 0-691-08097-6.
How to write a Blog ? | Sebastian Lange | Motion Graphics
If I could I created my Blog in this way. Take your time and load the extended version. It an animated font flow with the precise music or vice versa. And yes, do not forget to pump up your volume because it is gorgeous. Sebastian Lange – thanks.