“According to the authors’ analysis, overall mortality is unchanged by overweight, but increased by 20% by obesity, while extreme obesity raises it by up to 200%.”

Apart from the fact that the study was done using Body Mass Index (BMI) as the indicator with all its attendant problems as a measurement system including the fact that it was developed in the 19th century (read more at Wikipedia) the study raises some interesting issues.

Paul Campos wrote The Obesity Myth (Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to your Health) in 2004 where he suggested that the media and public attention on obesity issues is driven in part by self interest from diet companies and researchers. He also suggested that going up and down in weight is more hazardous to your health than being at a stable overweight level and it is obvious that many people who struggle with their weight experience fluctuations if they try to lose weight.

The real issue for our society is that if being in the overweight category is not generally hazardous to your health then we should stop obsessing about it because it wastes a lot of time , and energy and clearly has negative effects on our self image.

More widely it raises issues that are constantly coming up in our work when we are assisting organisations to look at what they believe to be true and why. For example:

• Do we only look at information that confirms our view (confirmation bias).
• Are we overly influenced by our own situation as compared to “facts”. For example When I left University my body mass index would would have been in the overweight category and yet pictures from that time (sigh) would show someone who was fit and skinny with a low body fat percentage (and had hair) . If I had a BMI of 23 at that time instead of 25.5 would I be less concerned about these issues?
• How are we influenced by the herd and prevailing views that are reinforced because they are sensational or driven by self interested groups with money and power to push their view?

All questions we should be constantly asking when we are thinking of forward strategy

Paul Higgins

October 17th 2009

PS  – my own biased view for what is worth is that regular exercise and a reasonable diet (as opposed to dieting) with all things in moderation is a perfectly sensible approach for most people to adopt. It is a lot hard to measure by doctors and the health system in general so an easy index is used as a measure instead. It is clear that severe obesity is a very high risk factor.

PPS – my partner runs a weight loss clinic that I will not name for reasons of this not being an advertisement.

ZDNET has post HERE :

Android opens doors for Google’s next-gen search, ads and tools

“A year ago, there was only one Android device out there – the T-Mobile G-1. Today, Android is powering 12 devices in 26 countries with 32 carriers – and there’s more on the way.”

I am hanging out for a new Android phone because I think the operating system will work much better in the long term and the “ecosystem” will be less limited than the iPhone which is restricted by the Apple attitude. The trouble is that the value of these sorts of devices is now way beyond the value of the individual technology or device because the community of users and developers that grows up around the device is as important as the technology. That was why I was wary about purchasing new new Pre device. It looked form the reviews to be a pretty good device but the big question in my mind was would the applications, the support and the community be there and I very much doubted it. I think that sort of attitude is pretty wide spread and it gives a huge advantage to the first movers in the space that build a community and wide set of applications. I think that the Android system is on the verge of moving to the poin point where the explosion can happen and with the influence and coverage of Google it has a great chance of success. So I have started looking at reviews of phones.

I am in the same frame of mind about an e-reader that I can have books and documents on but I think that space is also on the verge of an explosion of models and offerings and I really want one that I can notate using pdf documents, will pass seamlessly to other devices and systems such as Evernote.

My more general question and one for readers to think about is how do the principles of what is happening around this market transalte into your business or not for profit model? One of the best ways to innovate in strategy is to look at other systems way outside of your normal business model and see what can apply with an open mind and a radical outlook.

Paul Higgins

From banking to baseball, winning streaks owe much to the laws of chance

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204556804574261942466979118.html

This is a great article from the Wall St Journal about how chance and randomness plays a huge part in our lives but we all want to see patterns and believe success is due to hard work and talent rather than randomness because it makes us feel better. Example is the “sporting streak” which is much more likely to be from chance than anything else but that story does not resonate with us:

This holiday weekend—the Fourth of July—kicks off the home stretch of a two-month period that made Joe DiMaggio Sr. an icon of American culture. In 1941, a few months before Joe Jr. was born, and sandwiched between the day Hitler’s insane deputy Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland on an unauthorized peace mission and the day a secret British report concluded that the Allies could complete an atomic bomb ahead of Germany, there was a period of 56 successive Yankee games in which Joltin’ Joe had at least one hit.

DiMaggio’s hitting streak was an inspiration in troubled times. The pursuit of any record comes with pressure—Roger Maris lost some of his hair during his attempt to break Babe Ruth’s home-run record in 1961—but most records forgive you an off day as long as you compensate at other times. Not so with a streak, which demands unwavering performance. And so DiMaggio’s streak has been interpreted as a feat of mythic proportion, seen as a heroic, even miraculous, spurt of unrivaled effort and concentration.

But was it? Or was this epic moment simply a fluke?………………….

“The analyses can get long and the number of data needed unwieldy, so the jury is still out, but one of the studies, by Samuel Arbesman and Stephen H. Strogatz of Cornell University, attacked the problem by having a computer generate a mock version of each year in baseball from 1871 to 2005, based on the players’ actual statistics from that year. The scientists had the computer repeat the process 10,000 times, generating in essence 10,000 parallel histories of the sport.

The researchers found that 42% of the simulated histories had a streak of Di Maggio’s length or longer. The longest record streak was 109 games, the shortest, 39. In those 10,000 universes, many other players held the record more often than DiMaggio. Ty Cobb, for example, held it nearly 300 times.

So much of our thinking about the future is coloured by our view of the past and we need to better understand how our minds works when thinking about things to think better about the future

It covers some interesting areas but I was particularly struck in his answer to a follow up question on whether the economy has fundamentally changed. His answer was ” I would like it to be true but my question to you is where is the data?”.

Now we are involved in looking to the future so to some extent data is historical but we cannot just make up things.  This is a question that everybody should keep in their mind – where is the data, where is the evidence. At the very least a view about the future needs to tell a cogent and compelling story that both points out where the narrator thinks things are going but also explains the underlying assumptions and drivers so that the person listening to the story can look to see whether the data is following the narrative as the future unfolds but also adjust their own thinking as things change from the predicted path as they most certainly will. I think there is a lot of hype around the “new economy” at the moment just as there was in stock markets five years ago and in the oil markets 2-3 years ago.. Reality has a way of settling things down and sitting you back on your heels. Things are changing but old models and systems die hard and change is commonly slower than we think, with important but rare exemptions to the rule

As Fred Wilson the New York Venture Capitalist and Blogger (http://www.avc.com/)  says says :

“Every investment I’ve ever made that has worked out fabulously is always a case that the investment played out in a way that we didn’t imagine.”

You can watch the video here:

Aspen ideas festival – Eric Schmidt answer to the Buzz Machine\’s Jeff Jarvis

In a sad indictment of my life this left me feeling edgy all day (on top of the adrenaline from the show itself – you will have to watch to see if I won or not as they made us sign confidentiality agreements for until after the show airs). This had me thinking about a few things, first of all how integrated into our way of life mobile phones and the internet have become in such a short time frame; and secondly the possibility of companies supplying premium services to “connected” people so that they can “get off the grid” for a while. I am sure that there are services ike this available but I can only see them growing over time as mobile services and internet connectivity become more ubiquitous.

Meanwhile I will do what I can for my own addiction.

Paul

Philip Zimbardo in an interesting talk at TED. Part of the talk looks at a study on children who were tested to see if they would take an immediate treat or wait for twice the treat. 2/3 went for the immediate treat and a follow up study 14 years later saw huge differences between the two groups – those that resisted and those that did not with the resist group having higher test scores, getting in less trouble, and being far more future focused. The video goes on to talk about optimal time perspectives for success.

The message is similar to that of situational leadership. That you need to have balance between the perspectives and you need to learn to be more fluid and move between perspectives dependent on the situation. He says that past gives you roots, the future gives you wings and the present gives you energy and you need that balance. Interesting perspective

http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time.html?awesm=on.ted.com_17