Luck or skill?

This post is going to discuss a little of my philosophy on life. The debate about someone being truly lucky or creating their own luck through certain behaviors, i.e. skill or talent associated with hard work. This an open ended question and forgive me for this post's length. Personally, I believe it is a combination of both.

One point I want to initially make is about a certain trait that will make any and all forms of luck or skill meaningless, self-destructive individuals. Many individuals end up unnecessarily losing opportunity or squandering gains through their own actions. Often these actions are found in antisocial behavior, laziness, substance abuse, self-absorption, disregard for all rules and my favorite, chronic denial. All people have weaknesses, but most people keep their weakness in check. Win the lottery and spend every penny the following day on illicit items is not going to help any one's situation. No amount of luck or skill would end with a net gain if squandering through anti-productive behavior. What causes individuals to be self-destructive is a topic beyond this post.

Let us start with an argument for those who use skill and talent to make their own luck. In most professions, there is a minimal skill set requirement to practice. In professional sports, an individual needs to be an outstanding athlete. Musicians are musically gifted. Writers are good with language. Politicians are good at debate. In my profession, engineers need a knack for mathematics before even beginning core curriculum. It can then be argued that the best in any given field rises to the top through possession of greater skills in comparison to the pack. In our egalitarian society the best of best will find a way to achieve. From the poorest of neighborhoods up to leader of the pack. Capitalism at its best! I would like to believe this, as many of us were taught as children, "You can do any thing when you grow up." Rags to riches stories occur, but it is not that common. Hard work brought a better life, but many of their poor cohort with undeveloped talent never improved their lot in life. Here is where the skill exclusively brings success argument fails. If skill was the only reason why individuals succeed, the top tiers in all professions would have an equal representation of our society. Most of us know, this is not true.

It is an obvious statement to say that the wealthier classes have a greater representation in the higher paying professions: medical doctors, lawyers, stock brokers and corporate executive positions. Entrance into the bottom rung positions require at minimum an undergraduate college degree. Medical doctors and lawyers require advanced degrees. These all take money. If a high school student has mediocre grades, enough money and some private college would enroll them. The same deal applies if the student faces dismissal. Donate to the alumni groups. When the lackluster student eventually graduates, contact an old friend of the family who owes a favor. I could go on and on. One book of interest on this topic is The Millionaire Next Door. The vast majority of people are not wealthy. They vast majority does not possess the money or contacts. It is easy to say that skill or luck do not apply to the wealthy. I disagree. Those who are born into the privileged classes are lucky in the material sense. For any one who has the opportunity to enter a desired career, the luck was obtained from birth status or situation.

Let's be more arbitrary. Take two white, male, middle class, US citizens finishing their equivalent undergraduate degrees from a university with similar grades. Why does one end of as CEO of a company and the other at bottom of the corporate ladder? Let us say both graduates have their greatest strength as being sociable, well liked fellas. For our example, one graduate ends up being a computer programmer (grad A) and the other as a salesman (grad B). Both positions have similar potential for advancement. Grad A may do well at his programming position, but his greatest strength is not utilized. He may be capable in his work requiring skill, but his greatest attribute remains untapped. Now grad B as a salesman takes his position and excels as his greatest attribute is a vital part in his job. He becomes the best among his peers and moves on up the corporate ladder. Grad B was lucky to land the right position in comparison to grad A. Even if both grads take sales positions, many lucky characteristics take play such as a good company with upward mobility. Avoiding any devastating unlucky event (layoffs, illness) is itself a form of luck. The luck factor kicks in as an opportunity to use an individual's talents or skills.

Personally, I believe a combination of hard work and luck creates success in any endeavor. Hard work allows one to develop talents and skills leading to success. Hard work is vital, not optional. Luck on the other hand opens the doors to opportunity. Without opportunity to utilize talent, success will not follow.

Next generation shark

This posting is on a new type of ship the navy is working on. Yahoo News puts forth this article on the race for a highly anticipated, next generation warship. The ships in competition are a monohull ship versus a trimaran (three hull ship). The sailing ships that are used in the big money races like the America's Cup use trimarans as top-of-the-line designs. The three hulls have low water friction with added stability from balance and are typically advantageous to the single hull design. Neither design in this sense is new.

What is new are nontraditional propulsion systems in the two rivals.

Both versions of the Littoral Combat Ship use powerful diesel engines, as well as gas turbines for extra speed. They use steerable waterjets instead of propellers and rudders and have shallower drafts than conventional warships, letting them zoom close to shore.

Driving close to shore is going to be easy for this new generation ship. This will have the multiple advantages of going up rivers, docking in many inaccessible places and going close to shore chasing the world's unpleasant variety. Pirates, yarrrrrrrh!

The other neat thing is this boat goes automobile highway speeds.

Independence, a 418-foot warship built in Alabama, boasts a top speed in excess of 45 knots, or about 52 mph, and sustained 44 knots for four hours during builder trials that wrapped up this month off the Gulf Coast. The 378-foot Freedom, a ship built in Wisconsin by a competing defense contractor, has put up similar numbers.

Whoever wins the contract will make a mint due to the navy's rush.

Driving with the rearview mirror

One source of continuous fascination is the stock market. Why not? Put in a little money, it grows, and in the end profit without labor. How can you not like that! Billions of dollars is exchanged on the world's stock exchanges daily. Stock markets exist as an easy way for companies to raise money through a collective public ownership. Of course, the market operation is much more complex.

The psychology behind this money for nothing concept supports the main market drivers, fear and greed. Everyone who has struggled to make a dollar and put it into an online brokerage account understands this. They love when the market goes up and make money. Optimism pushes buying, the market rises. They absolutely hate when the market goes down with money evaporation. Pessimism leads to selling, the market craters. In the end, the market is a sentiment machine driven by the various kinds of investors summarized by this site.

Excluding day traders, two main kinds of investors exist: fundamentals and technical. Fundamental trading is based upon the idea that a stock is worth a certain value according to corporate size and revenues. Profitable companies are worth more than unprofitable entities. The other investors are technical traders and their trading is dependent upon derived indicators. Some of the best known indicators are:
Moving Average Convergence-Divergence (MACD)
Fast and Slow Stochastics
Relative Strength Index
Bollinger Bands.
The basic concept behind all of these indicators is to identify the point at which a stock changes momentum, i.e. stops going down in price and begins to appreciate.

The movement of the markets has thousands of traders everyday bidding prices up and down. Buying and selling stock. One school of thought has stock market movement being random. Looking over years of stock market data, patterns appear. Typically in upward movements followed with an occasional sell off forming a wave pattern. Personally, I believe the day-to-day patterns are random, but over time patterns do exist. Technical trading is supposed to clue an investor into these patterns identifying momentum changes. Honest traders admit they are lagging indicators or tools that tell investors when to buy (or sell) after the momentum has already changed. I agree, but another serious issue that is a fly in my ointment is these indicators all use past data. What happened yesterday, may not necessarily happen tomorrow. Yes, the indicators show stock price going up. If another disaster like 9/11 hits New York, will the indicators show this. NO!!!!!! As we discussed earlier, the market tends to be a sentiment indicator. One frustrated mutual fund manager has heart burn from his favorite Indian restaurant may drive down a stock. The indicators will not pick this up until it is too late. I think the best analogy is driving down the road using the rearview mirror instead of looking through the windshield. That crash ahead is pretty rough.

Devolution

Once in a while, I see something that is so ridiculous by a supposed educated individual, it just requires a little constructive criticism. This post is based upon a book published by an Australian anthropologist asserting claims about our ancient ancestor's physical abilities. The author makes outrageous claims like a normal, healthy Rwanda man jumping his own height, aboriginal Australians running faster than current world record sprinters and marathon running Roman centurions. After reading the post, only one claim has any hard evidence that is not circumstantial. I respect other branches of science that are out of my field, but come on!!! Out of curiosity, I have a few comments for our anthropologist or subjects.

Really what our author found was the use of a early super steroid. Athletes everywhere should be taking a trip to Rwanda to find this enhancing substance. An enterprising individual could make a mint off of this!

After a typical day of pillaging and plundering for the Roman empire, was the only daily form of entertainment they could find involve running about 40 miles? Was the prize an Emperor's Cup?

Ancient Neanderthal men, word of caution. When dating the ancient opposite sex, be careful. They can easily pick you up and throw you like a rag doll. That would make a bad scene, especially in the grocery store.

Dr. Coffee's Innovation Awards # 1, Have a Heart

This blog is new. I am quickly finding out that blog topics are easy to find. The amount of work required to put the ideas into words is significant though. As a way to keep the posts coming, I am going to have a blog series with common themes. This blog is the inagural post for Dr. Coffee's Innovation Awards. Basically, it will be a series of posts covering outstanding, contemporary discoveries or innovations.




This post comes from Yahoo News concerning a recent discovery involving a new type of human cardiac stem cells capable of growing heart tissue. According to the article, the stem cells can be used to create portions of working heart muscle outside of the human body within laboratory conditions. The future hope is using a heart attack patient's own cadiac stem cells to create new working heart tissue. It would then be possible to easily replace damaged tissue without biological rejection.

Now, if they could only find adult human brain stem cells.

Learning by Computer or Learning the Computer

Screen shot of Nintendo's Super Mario Brothers

My friend Joe recently posted this comment on Facebook concerning learning and suffering:

” Pathein estin mathein, mathein estin pathein.”
To learn is to suffer; to suffer is to learn.
-Aeschylus, Agamemnon (paraphrased)

Does learning have to be painful, or can it be made more pleasurable?

This brings up an old debate about calculators or computers being used for math education. When is the computer useful for learning or when is the computer doing the work for the student? Personally, I think calculators are great for math that requires tables (logs) or excessive amounts of algebra, i.e. complex differential equations. Unfortunately, basic math like multiplication tables require memorization to grasp the knowledge. Significant amounts of work is involved. Repetition is what allows students to recall values in the future. Making the repetitious process less tedious would result in students being more willing to memorize.

Taking this into consideration, I think computers could be used for basic mathematics education in an interactive manner. The program would require students to follow a programmed series of scenarios with the student controlling the action in a video game. The student could have a customized character going through a mathematical world. Think Indiana Jones running through a jungle maze. Each step of the way through the game, a student makes one of two inputs answering questions:
1) answers with exact numbers

2) multiple choice numbers.

The method in which a student answers the question depends on the

question being asked. The game based on multiplication tables would present a question on screen:

5 × 5 = ?

If the student types in the correct answer of 25, the character proceeds in the game. The next question is presented and the cycle is repeated. Wrong answers would have the same question repeated up to three times after which a new question is posed. The character remains in place until a correct answer is given. In a more advanced level, the multiple choice option would be utilized with equations. The jungle landscape would then fit the equation’s plotted shape. The final touch would be to have students compete with each other within a multiplayer game. Keep students interested by getting the competitive juices flowing.

My first blog

Hello everyone,

This is the beginning of my first blog. I am a voracious reader of economic blogs, thus, I want to contribute in my specialty area, technology. Let me introduce myself. My name is Shawn Coffee and I have my Ph D in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. The dissertation focused on nanotechnology and the similar processes that make microchips. Currently, I work at Cerium Laboratories (subsidiary of Spansion) as a Materials Engineer in Austin, TX, which I reside. We are the characterization laboratory for Spansion's fab25. Cerium performs analytical work for both internal and external customers from a whole host of industries: semiconductor, solar, automotive, military, academia and a variety of start ups. That is what inspired the name of the blog, because I sit at the crossroads of future technology. This blog will be updated about twice weekly with insightful analysis. Comments are always appreciated.

-Shawn