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Jason Fried is a founder and CEO of 37signals, a software company based in Chicago. Fried also treats 37signals as something of a laboratory for innovative workplace practices–such as a recent experiment in shortening the summer workweek to just four days. We caught up with Fried to learn how employees are like fossil fuels, how a business can be like a cancer, and how one of the entrepreneurs he admires most is his cleaning lady.

I’m a fan of growing slowly, carefully, methodically, of not getting big just for the sake of getting big. I think that rapid growth is typically of symptom of… there’s a sickness there.

I take my inspiration from small mom-and-pop businesses that have been around for a long time. There are restaurants all over the place that I like to go to that have been around a long time, 30 years or more, and thinking about that, that’s an incredible run. I don’t know what percentage of tech companies have been around 30 years. The other interesting thing about restaurants is you could have a dozen Italian restaurants in the city and they can all be successful. It’s not like in the tech world, where everyone wants to beat each other up, and there’s one winner. Those are the businesses I find interesting–it could be a dry cleaner, a restaurant, a clothing store. Actually, my cleaning lady, for example, she’s great.

I admire the way 37signals has grown organically, with a proper business model from day one, and without relying on venture capital. It is also responsible for Ruby on Rails.

In Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (public library), neuroscientist Christof Koch — “reductionist, because I seek quantitative explanations for consciousness in the ceaseless and ever-varied activity of billions of tiny nerve cells, each with their tens of thousands of synapses; romantic, because of my insistence that the universe has contrails of meaning that can be deciphered in the sky about us and deep within us”— explores how subjective feelings, or consciousness, come into being. Among Koch’s most fascinating arguments is one that bridges philosophy, evolutionary biology and technofuturism to predict a global Übermind not unlike McLuhan’s “global village,” but one in which our technology melds with what Carl Jung has termed the “collective unconscious” to produce a kind of sentient global brain […]

The rest of Consciousness traces Koch’s groundbreaking work with physical chemist Francis Crick (who, along with james Watson, discovered the double-helix structure of DNA) and explores how science has attempted to reconcile the hard physicality of the brain, the most complex object in the known universe, with the intangible world of awareness, populated by our senses, our emotions, and our very experience of life.

The game works like this: the puppet (with the aid of an adult puppeteer) and a three-year-old participant gather their hauls of little buckets. Then the child/puppet team is rewarded with stickers - one for each coin they have collected.

At this point the child has to decide how to share his or her prized stickers with their puppet partner.

This simple game revealed that, by the age of just three, children choose to reward their peers based on merit. The children gave the puppet more stickers if it had “worked harder” - gathering more coins.

This and other similar studies, Dr Shultz said, demonstrated that “co-operation and fairness are fundamental aspects of human behaviour”.

“[This study] also reframes social intelligence in terms of cooperation rather than deception,” she added. “I think that’s really nice.”

Deception has played a large part in the scientific study of fairness. While this experiment asked children to share the rewards with a partner after completing a shared task, many studies focus on whether humans, and other primates, choose to cheat a partner or to punish others for treating them unfairly.

A classic example of this type of test is known as the ultimatum game.

This is where one participant is tasked with making an offer to share something of value - for example, an amount of money - with a partner.

The partner then has the opportunity to either accept or reject this offer. And this is where the punishment comes in.

If the recipient decides to reject an apparently unfair offer, both participants receive nothing.

It’s not everyone who manages to design new modes of storytelling. Jad, with his pal Robert Krulwich, have invented ways of blending sound and voice into something musical–both familiar and strange, primal and sophisticated. In his Transom Manifesto, Jad reflects on the birth of Radiolab, the ways we discover things without realizing it, the difficulty of changing, and the burdens of geniushood. You can hear early mock-ups, seminal conversations, inspirational moments, and thoughts about what to do next. Jad recently won a MacArthur Fellowship and it’s brave of him to speak publicly, since all expectations from now on will be unreasonable, but this is very good stuff.

Interesting behind-the-scenes piece by Jad Abumrad, one of the voices behind the great Radiolab podcast.

Outline:

1. So how did Radiolab actually happen?
     • What kind of host should I be?
     • Who am I?
     • Fast forward six months, another pointing arrow appears.

2. So how do you recognize change?
     A) Get comfortable with the idea that you won’t know what’s good until it’s already happened.
     B) …you have to selectively tune out listeners. The “how dare you” instinct is strong in public radio listeners, and you just have to ignore it.

3. What now?
     A) We’ve decided to widen the subjects we cover.
     B) We’ve decided that the best way to reimagine yourself is to collaborate promiscuously.
     C) We decided that the ultimate experiment might be to take this show, which is so heavily edited that our sessions…and we decided to make it a stage show.

There’s a revolution underway in economics. It’s not due to the financial crisis, but rather something more mundane: Data, and computing power. At least that’s the claim that Betsey Stevenson and I make in our latest Bloomberg View column.

This empirical revolution is reshaping economics in at least four important ways:

1. The role of economic theory is changing:

“The shift toward an even more empirically grounded economics doesn’t mean theory is less important. When facts were expensive and scarce, the role of theory was to “fill in” for missing data. Now, its purpose is to make sense of the vast, sprawling and unstructured terabytes on our hard drives.

1. Empirical economics is a natural bedfellow for behavioral economics:

“The data revolution is, however, changing our theories — specifically the way we choose to model how people behave. For decades, economists assumed that people made calculated, rational decisions. Without better data to help structure our understanding of people’s preferences, it was a safe and convenient choice, even if it was often wrong. With new data on everything from how we choose our retirement savings plans to how NBA referees call fouls, we have learned to look beyond “homo economicus.” We have a much better grasp of the systematic flaws in reasoning that often get people into trouble. We know they have a hard time committing to do difficult things in the future — to go to the gym, to lose weight, to save. So we know people can benefit from policies, such as making 401(k) contributions automatic unless they opt out, that help them commit to good behavior.”

1. Individual-level data meant that we can say more about individual differences:

“In the mathematical models they build to help them understand the world, economists have also long made another peculiar assumption: that the behavior of an entire group of individuals — say, U.S. consumers — can be modeled as if it were a single “representative agent.” Today, we have much better data describing the decisions of individuals, and the power of our computers allows us to populate our models with millions of such people, rather than just one.”

1. And a theme that will be familiar to readers of this blog: Economics has become a much broader social science.

“Perhaps the broadest insight that has come with the explosion in data is the understanding of how economic reasoning suffuses almost every aspect of our lives. The economic lens can be very helpful in parsing strategic interactions, the causes of discrimination, patterns of marriage and divorce, and how our political machinery operates.”

The bottom line:

“Technological change has brought opportunities to do economics in a way that our predecessors could only have dreamed about. Those opportunities have, in turn, yielded a field that is more connected to reality. Our hope is that these insights will improve our understanding of the economy and give us a better shot at avoiding the next crisis.”

25 years ago, a group of writers and scientists offered their visions of today’s world. What did they get right? And what did they miss? […]

The full collection of letters Hubbard got for his time capsule is here. A lot of the greats offered their thoughts. There’s Fredrick Pohl, the genre’s legendary editor (who’s still at it, after 70 years in the business); Jerry Pournelle, writer of political and military SF, who also did some speechwriting for President Reagan; Roger Zelazny, who mined the world’s great mythologies for his stories; Gregory Benford, astrophysicist-turned-Hugo winner; Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow; and Isaac Asimov, arguably the greatest of them all.

Sara Robinson from Alternet has summarised and categorised some of the predictions. Topics covered include: population, technology, health, energy, the environment, education, culture, nuclear war, global politics and economics. There’s also a lighthearted, catch-all category “hopes, fears and foolishness”.

As expected, the predictions range from those that are way off the mark (e.g. most said we would have space colonies on the Moon and Mars), to some that are eerily accurate. This is how Sheldon Glashow imagined the economic situation: “Our children will not live such comfortable lives as we do. The spread between the rich and the poor will have grown … Most automobiles and heavy machinery will be manufactured in Japanese owned planets located in America.”

The temperature-regulation research of Stanford biologists H. Craig Heller and Dennis Grahn has led to a device that rapidly cools body temperature, greatly improves exercise recovery, and could help explain why muscles get tired. […]

This is the sort of claim you see in spam email subject lines, not in discussions of mammalian thermoregulation. Even the man making the statement, Stanford biology researcher Dennis Grahn, seems bemused. “We really stumbled on this by accident,” he said. “We wanted to get a model for studying heat dissipation.”

But for more than a decade now, Grahn and biology Professor H. Craig Heller have been pursuing a serendipitous find: by taking advantage of specialized heat-transfer veins in the palms of hands, they can rapidly cool athletes’ core temperatures – and dramatically improve exercise recovery and performance.

CultureLab has posted brief reviews of three new science-related books.

1. Curious Behavior: Yawning, laughing, hiccupping, and beyond by Robert Provine

In Curious Behavior , neuroscientist Robert Provine discusses common yet seemingly strange actions, such as crying, tickling and yawning - subjects often overlooked by science. Beyond explaining how each of these actions work anatomically, Provine explores their functions, similarities and whether they might be linked by some higher, social purpose.

The most fascinating chapters involve descriptions of what happens when these behaviours become extreme. Take the 1962 outbreak of contagious laughter in Tanganyika, now Tanzania, which affected around a thousand people over several years. Then there is the story of a woman with an itch so severe she scratched through to her brain in her sleep.

1. An Epidemic of Absence: A new way of understanding allergies and autoimmune diseases by Moises Velasquez-Manoff

In An Epidemic of Absence , Velasquez-Manoff chronicles his experience with worm treatment. Eventually his allergies dwindle, fine hairs sprout and his eczema disappears. He also explores the underground community using parasites to try to treat asthma, Crohn’s disease and autism.

1. Science Set Free by Rupert Sheldrake

With the Higgs in the bag and a NASA rover on Mars, all would seem to be tickety-boo in the house of science. But if Rupert Sheldrake is to be believed, these triumphs are merely final hurrahs. Despite all of its achievements, science - or the materialist world view that underpins it - is at crisis point.

Sheldrake’s main argument is that while materialism was once useful, it has hardened into dogmas that are holding knowledge back. If science wants to become “freer, more interesting and more fun” it needs to abandon assumptions that, for example, matter is unconscious, the laws of nature are fixed, minds are confined to brains and psychic phenomena don’t exist.