The secret to performing at your peak? Deciding which of the voices in your head is talking sense

Ed Smith in The New Statesman

As a batsman in the middle of an innings, alone with my thoughts at the batting crease, a silent but urgent conversation would play out inside my head. There were two voices. The first belonged to the player, the actor on the stage, the participant. The second voice was that of a coach, mentor or critic. This observer might advise “me” to be bolder, to assert myself, to be less cautious. Another time, the voice would say the opposite: “You’re losing too much control – rein things in, be more wary.”

Both voices, of course, belonged to me. But they seemed entirely distinct, quite removed from one another, one belonging to the realm of action and the second to the sphere of reflection. One person played the shots; another called the shots.

On good days, this division of labour was co-operative. When the balance between instinct and removed self-criticism felt right, the two voices got along well. At other times the critical voice was too strong and overbearing. He needed to be sent packing, his notebook chucked away.

So there were two dimensions to this conversation that required careful attention. The first was the efficacy and wisdom of the critical advice: was the critic sending the right technical or tactical messages? After all, coaches have bad days, too. The second question was whether this was the right time to be taking advice at all. Because there are moments when you are far better off trusting your own competitiveness and instinct.

A few times in my career the internal voices turned into spoken words, and the opposition fielder at short-leg would look at me in astonishment as I said something like, “Shut up! Just play! Watch the ball! That’s all you need to do!” From my perspective, it was just a small domestic disagreement in my head, nothing more. But to the outside world it looked very eccentric – or plain mad.

So I was delighted to learn the other week that I keep good company. In a sparkling interview with Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show, Mark Rylance described how the actor on the stage, just like the batsman at the crease, has a conversation going on inside his own head:

“When you play in front of people – it may be the same for sports players, too – you have a kind of coach in your head who is monitoring whether (in my case) the passes and the different things I’m doing with the ball – if the ball is the story – whether they are real and natural and believable. You have a little voice saying, ‘Wait, wait, now; quickly, quickly, now.’ Or: ‘Too much, too much.’ And sometimes it’s too strong and you have to banish it from the stage.”

That was my experience of sport, perfectly captured by an actor.

I sometimes feel that all modes of performance – music, drama, sport – are merely variations on a theme, different expressions of the same underlying experience. The play may look different, but the stage on which the actors stand is universal.

Ten years ago, I made a series for Radio 3 called Peak Performance, in which I interviewed young classical musicians and explored the parallels between playing sport and playing music. “Acting, music, cricket – the final vocational choice was partly just chance,” the guitarist Craig Ogden told me. “If I hadn’t become a musician, I’m sure I would have done something else that put me on a stage in front of an audience.”

On The South Bank Show (24 February, Sky Arts 1), viewers watched Rylance watch himself playing Henry V. As the Rylance of today pulled on his glasses, the Rylance of the late 1990s began his version of Henry’s St Crispin’s Day speech before Agincourt. Here the critic and the performer were not sharing the stage at the same moment. Instead, they were separated by years of ex­perience and perspective. It was like watching an artist in his studio poring over his early works.

Before I’d had the chance guiltily to suppress my first reaction (“He wasn’t quite as good back then”), Rylance himself said just that. “I hadn’t yet learned to use my voice properly”: that was his assessment of his younger self. The ease and depth of his voice today, which helped make his portrayal of Thomas Cromwell in Wolf Hall so compelling, hadn’t developed fully.

So, what changed? Mastery of technique, the refinement of his craft, is surely only part of the story. There is also the question of Rylance the man: his intellectual curiosity and search for experience, his reluctance to play it safe or to repeat himself, his openness and risk-taking, his preference for the more difficult path. Because of Rylance’s temperament and his sensibility, both of his voices – the spoken voice and the coaching voice – are far more evolved than they were 15 years ago. The actor and the critic, the player and the coach, have grown up in tandem and, with age, the conversation has become more co-operative.

Here, alas, the arts generally leave sports behind. For although some lucky sportsmen may be permitted a second act, none (except in golf) gets to enjoy middle age. It’s all over by then.

So I finished watching Rylance’s South Bank Show interview pondering two parallel questions, about careers in which talent and temperament aren’t ideally matched. Which sportsmen would have been better suited, temperamentally, to a longer and more reflective race rather than the fast-forward time of professional sport? Conversely, which actors were fated to have a long-drawn-out career when a shorter one would have suited them far better?

Because although you can shape the words you tell yourself, and can even quell the voice in your head, you can’t do much about the stage you’re standing on.

Homeopathy not effective for treating any condition, Australian report finds

Report by top medical research body says ‘people who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments’

 

Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council hopes report will discourage private health insurers from offering rebates on homeopathic treatments. Photograph: Alix/Phanie/Rex Features

Melissa Davey in The Guardian

Homeopathy is not effective for treating any health condition, Australia’s top body for medical research has concluded, after undertaking an extensive review of existing studies.

Homeopaths believe that illness-causing substances can, in minute doses, treat people who are unwell.

By diluting these substances in water or alcohol, homeopaths claim the resulting mixture retains a “memory” of the original substance that triggers a healing response in the body.

These claims have been widely disproven by multiple studies, but the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has for the first time thoroughly reviewed 225 research papers on homeopathy to come up with its position statement, released on Wednesday.

“Based on the assessment of the evidence of effectiveness of homeopathy, NHMRC concludes that there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective,” the report concluded.

“People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness.”

An independent company also reviewed the studies and appraised the evidence to prevent bias.

Chair of the NHMRC Homeopathy Working Committee, Professor Paul Glasziou, said he hoped the findings would lead private health insurers to stop offering rebates on homeopathic treatments, and force pharmacists to reconsider stocking them.

“There will be a tail of people who won’t respond to this report, and who will say it’s all a conspiracy of the establishment,” Glasziou said.

“But we hope there will be a lot of reasonable people out there who will reconsider selling, using or subsiding these substances.”

While some studies reported homeopathy was effective, the quality of those studies was poor and suffered serious flaws in their design, and did not have enough participants to support the idea that homeopathy worked any better than a sugar pill, the report found.

In making its findings the NHMRC also analysed 57 systematic reviews, a high-quality type of study that assesses all existing, quality research on a particular topic and synthesises it to make a number of strong, overall findings.

Glasziou said homeopathy use declined in the UK following a House of Commons report released in 2010 which found the treatments were ineffective, and that he hoped the NHMRC report would have a similar effect in Australia.

Dr Ken Harvey, a medicinal drug policy expert and health consumer advocate, said private colleges were charging thousands of dollars for courses in homeopathy, and he hoped students would reconsider taking them.

The government’s Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency (TEQSA) should stop accrediting homeopathic courses, he said, while the private health insurance rebate should be not be offered on any policies covering homeopathy and other unproven treatments.

“I have no problems with private colleges wanting to run courses on crystal-ball gazing, iridology and homeopathy, and if people are crazy enough to pay for it, it’s their decision,” Harvey said.

“But if those courses are approved by a commonwealth body, that’s a different story and a real problem.”

Approved courses are reviewed by TESQA every seven years, with its own guidelines stating the content of a course should be “drawn from a substantial, coherent and current body of knowledge and scholarship in one or more academic disciplines and includes the study of relevant theoretical frameworks and research findings”.

A TESQA spokesperson said independent experts were used to assess whether or not a course complied with its standards. He said homeopathy courses already accredited would not be re-evaluated in light of the NHMRC’s findings, and would only be reviewed when their accreditation was next due for renewal.

In a statement responding to the NHMRC report, the Australian Homeopathic Association (AHA) claimed around a million Australians used homeopathy.

However, the NHMRC states there are no reliable estimates of Australians’ current use of homeopathic medicines, though a 2009 World Health Organisation review found Australians spent an estimated $9.59m on the industry annually.

“The Australian Homeopathic Association recommend to the NHMRC that it take a more comprehensive approach to the analysis of homeopathy’s efficacy, and consider a large-scale economic evaluation of the benefits of a more integrated system and one which respects and advocates patient choice in healthcare provision,” the AHA said.

The Curse of KP - Kevin Pietersen

Simon Barnes in Cricinfo

There will be a great deal of analysis of England's performance at the World Cup and their consequent failure to reach the knockout stage after their defeat by Bangladesh. Most of it will be concerned with England's traditional shortcomings in 50-over cricket.

People will point out that England are hopelessly out of date, still stuck in the approach they used when they played ODIs with a red ball - and it was a bit rusty then. They will talk about Joe Root and Ian Bell scoring 24 runs off 38 balls as a classic example of this fuddy-duddiness, and they will be right.

They will speak about English snobbery, the hierarchical way they view the various forms of cricket, with ODIs as the poor relation to Test cricket - even though this overlooks the fact that over the last 18 months England have been almost equally poor in Test matches.

That's not a cheap shot. England's limitations in limited-overs cricket don't matter. The real issue is that the team is broken. Broken in all the forms in which it appears. Shattered. Traumatised. Wrecked. Destroyed. And apparently incapable of healing itself.

The problems with 50-over cricket are what scientists would call the proximate cause of this disaster. If England want to set things aright, they must look to the ultimate cause.

That means checking out the Curse of the Bambino. This is a baseball story: it tells of the problems that affected the Boston Red Sox after they traded Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees. They failed to win the World Series again until 2004: a barren patch of 86 years.

England are suffering from the Curse of KP: and nearly a year after his sacking the team in all its forms is worse off than ever. Against Bangladesh the two witless run-outs, the wading-through-treacle batting, and the tendency for wickets to fall in clusters showed a deeper malaise than their inability to get their heads around a different format of cricket.

How did it begin? I watched England when they were - briefly - at the very peak of the Test match rankings. I watched them destroy Australia in Australia, I watched them hammer India in India, and in both these efforts, Kevin Pietersen was at the heart of it.

England are the team that died of a joke. It's a fact that tyrants and other kinds of egomaniac hate jokes. They don't understand them - apart from someone slipping on a banana skin and breaking his neck. It follows that jokes are often the most powerful weapons against such people.

The parody Twitter account KPGenius caused deep pain to Pietersen. It follows that it gave deep delight to people in the England team who found Pietersen difficult to deal with. The subversive giggling created a deep fissure through the team. When you have such a geology it doesn't take much to create a major landslide.

And that's what happened when England went to Australia in 2013 still fancying themselves a great cricket team. Mitchell Johnson's ferocious bowling acted like a ton of dynamite on that fault line and the team collapsed. A team of talented players found that they could do no right. It was a tour punctuated by the departure of cricketers who could take no more, and it was followed by that of coaches who felt the same.

This was bad enough, but in seeking a cure, England made it far worse. They made a great to-do of sacking Pietersen and setting up his beleaguered captain, Alastair Cook, as a moral rallying point for an England relaunch. This role was too much for Cook and the traumatised team he was leading.

Cook's own form fell away and he was replaced as one-day captain just before the World Cup. They brought in Eoin Morgan instead - not a bad plan, except that Morgan can't buy a run himself, looks like a busted flush in all forms of cricket, and in the decisive match against Bangladesh was out third ball for nought.

All this after England had shunted the Ashes series around - itself a disastrous decision - to give themselves a full winter of white-ball cricket to get ready for this tournament. And just to add another pint of bat's blood to this witch's brew, the incoming chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, Colin Graves, has just suggested that there was a way open for Pietersen's return.

Either Graves is stupid or he is deliberately destabilising Cook, Paul Downton, chief exec of the ECB, and the head coach, Peter Moores, all at once. No other interpretation is possible. Certainly it did a grand job of upsetting an already troubled team on the eve of the crucial match of the World Cup.

So the Curse of KP continues. The result is a team in mental paralysis. I remember Steve Davis, the great snooker player, telling me: "It's all right to miss a ball. You're entitled to miss a ball. It's when you start thinking wrong that you're in trouble."

And that's England. They have been thinking wrong ever since Johnson dynamited the fissure and caused England's collapse. The executive, the coaches, the captains, the players: all incapable of thinking straight in the desperately difficult times that began with defeat at the hands of Australia and continue to this day.

England can't play one-day cricket very well, but that's old news. The real problem is that right now they can't play any kind of cricket. I know they beat India in the Test matches last summer, but India, notoriously poor travellers, went out of their way to help them.

This defeat by Bangladesh, this untimely and undignified exit from the World Cup is not a new problem, nor is it a pure cricketing matter. It's the logical result of trauma. Bangladesh were good enough to prey on England's weakness and doubt, and take a famous victory.

The Curse of KP strikes again. Never mind, perhaps England will win the World Cup in 86 years' time.

Top Australian surgeon advises female doctors to allow sexual harassment to get ahead

Lucy Clarke-Billings in The Independent

A senior surgeon has triggered controversy after telling junior female doctors to go along with sexual abuse at work for the sake of their careers. 

Australian vascular surgeon Dr Gabrielle McMullin drew criticism for comments made at the launch of her book - Pathways to Gender Equality.

Speaking in an ABC radio interview after the event, she said she encouraged women in her field to protect their climb up the professional ladder by “complying with requests” for sex.

The Sydney-based surgeon said sexism is so rife among her colleagues, young women should probably just accept unwanted sexual advances because speaking out would tarnish their reputations.

Dr McMullin, who studied medicine in Dublin, Ireland, said she stands by the comments she made on Friday but that her advice was “irony”.

"What I tell my trainees is that, if you are approached for sex, probably the safest thing to do in terms of your career is to comply with the request," she said after the launch.

Her shocking comments triggered angry reactions from sex abuse and domestic violence campaigners, who claimed her remarks were “appalling” and “irresponsible”.

Dr McMullin told ABC's AM program the story of Dr Caroline Tan, a young doctor who won a sexual harassment case in 2008 against a surgeon who forced himself on her while she was training at a Melbourne Hospital.

Dr Tan didn't tell anyone what had happened until the surgeon started giving her reports that were so bad they threatened the career she had worked so hard for.

But McMullin warns complaining to the supervising body is the 'worst thing' trainees could do.

“Despite that victory, she has never been appointed to a public position in a hospital in Australasia,” she said. “Her career was ruined by this one guy asking for sex on this night.

“And realistically, she would have been much better to have given him a blow-job on that night.”

Dr McMullin's comments have been roundly criticised by others in the medical profession and in women’s rights groups. 

But she said many people had thanked her for speaking out and some had come forward with more appalling stories of their experiences.

She said her critics had misunderstood her stance.

"Of course I don't condone any form of sexual harassment and the advice that I gave to potential surgical trainees was irony, but unfortunately that is the truth at the moment, that women do not get supported if they make a complaint," she told the ABC.

"And that's where the problem is, so what I'm suggesting is that we need a solution for that problem not to condone that behaviour.

"It's not dealt with properly, women still feel that their careers are compromised if they complain, just like rape victims are victimised if they complain," she said.

One victim, who did not want to be identified for fear of losing her job, told the ABC she experienced years of sexual harassment from a senior surgeon.

The victim said if she revealed her identify, she would not be considered a safe person to work with.

"If you complain... you'll be exposed, you'll be hung up to dry, you won't be able to work," she said.

"You'd be seen as a liability, that's my opinion. You absolutely would be seen as a liability moving forward.

"It's well and good that the legislation and laws say x, y and z but that wouldn't happen in practise. It would be unlikely to."

Kate Drummond, chair of the Women in Surgery committee at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, disagreed with this suggestion.

"I think we have robust processes, not only through the college for the trainees but also through the workplace," she told the ABC'S The World Today's program.

"I mean, these are people who work in hospitals and there are clear workplace processes to deal with these kinds of problems.

"And so I think there are parallel processes that we would encourage people to use and also to take the support of people like those of us in the Women in Surgery committee and we're very happy to strongly support these people."

Ms Drummond said there had been less than one complaint per year to the Women in Surgery committee regarding sexual harassment.

Invasion of the algorithms: The modern-day equations which can rule our lives

Rhodri Marsden in The Independent

“This is a miracle of modern technology,” says dating-agency proprietor Sid Bliss, played by Sid James, in the 1970 comedy film Carry On Loving. “All we do is feed the information into the computer here, and after a few minutes the lady suitable comes out there,” he continues, pointing to a slot.

There’s the predictable joke about the slot being too small, but Sid’s client is mightily impressed by this nascent display of computer power. He has faith in the process, and is willing to surrender meekly to whatever choices the machine makes. The payoff is that the computer is merely a facade; on the other side of the wall, Sid’s wife (played by Hattie Jacques) is processing the information using her own, very human methods, and bunging a vaguely suitable match back through the slot. The clients, however, don’t know this. They think it’s brilliant.

Technology has come a long way since Sid James delivered filthy laughs into a camera lens, but our capacity to be impressed by computer processes we know next to nothing about remains enormous. All that’s changed is the language: it’s now the word “algorithm” that makes us raise our eyebrows appreciatively and go “oooh”. It’s a guaranteed way of grabbing our attention: generate some findings, attribute them to an algorithm, and watch the media and the public lap them up.

“Apothic Red Wine creates a unique algorithm to reveal the ‘dark side’ of the nation’s personas,” read a typical press release that plopped into hundreds of email inboxes recently; Yahoo, the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail and others pounced upon it and uncritically passed on the findings. The level of scientific rigour behind Apothic’s study was anyone’s guess – but that didn’t matter because the study was powered by an algorithm, so it must be true.

The next time we’re about to be superficially impressed by the unveiling of a “special algorithm”, it’s worth remembering that our lives have been ruled by them since the year dot and we generate plenty ourselves every day. Named after the eminent Persian mathematician Muhammad ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi, algorithms are merely sets of instructions for how to achieve something; your gran’s chocolate-cake recipe could fall just as much into the algorithm category as any computer program. And while they’re meant to define sequences of operations very precisely and solve problems very efficiently, they come with no guarantees. There are brilliant algorithms and there are appalling algorithms; they could easily be riddled with flawed reasoning and churn out results that raise as many questions as they claim to answer. 

This matters, of course, because we live in an information age. Data is terrifyingly plentiful; it’s piling up at an alarming rate and we have to outsource the handling of that data to algorithms if we want to avoid a descent into chaos. We trust sat-nav applications to pull together information such as length of road, time of day, weight of traffic, speed limits and road blocks to generate an estimate of our arrival time; but their accuracy is only as good as the algorithm. Our romantic lives are, hilariously, often dictated by online-dating algorithms that claim to generate a “percentage match” with other human beings.

Our online purchases of everything from vacuum cleaners to music downloads are affected by algorithms. If you’re reading this piece online, an algorithm will have probably brought it to your attention. We’re marching into a future where our surroundings are increasingly shaped, in real time, by mathematics. Mentally, we’re having to adjust to this; we know that it’s not a human being at Netflix or Apple suggesting films for us to watch, but perhaps the algorithm does a better job. Google’s adverts can seem jarring – trying to flog us products that we have just searched for – precisely because algorithms tailor them to our interests far better than a human ever could.

With data being generated by everything from England’s one-day cricket team to your central heating system, the truth is that algorithms beat us hands down at extrapolating meaning.

“This has been shown to be the case on many occasions,” says data scientist Duncan Ross, “and that’s for obvious reasons. The sad reality is that humans are a basket of biases which we build up over our lives. Some of them are sensible; many of them aren’t. But by using data and learning from it, we can reduce those biases.” 

In the financial markets, where poor human judgement can lead to eye-watering losses, the vast majority of transactions are now outsourced to algorithms which can react within microseconds to the actions of, well, other algorithms. They’ve had a place in the markets ever since Thomas Peterffy made a killing in the 1980s by using them to detect mispriced stock options (a story told in fascinating detail in the book Automate This by Christopher Steiner), but today data science drives trade. Millions of dollars’ worth of stocks change hands, multiple times, before one trader  can shout “sell!”.

We humans have to accept that algorithms can make us look comparatively useless (except when they cause phenomena like Wall Street’s “flash crash” of 2010, when the index lost  1,000 points in a day, before recovering). But that doesn’t necessarily feel like a good place to be.

The increasing amount of donkey work undertaken by algorithms represents a significant shift in responsibility, and by association a loss of control. Data is power, and when you start to consider all the ways in which our lives are affected by the processing of said data, it can feel like a dehumanising step. Edward Snowden revealed the existence of an algorithm to determine whether or not you were a US citizen; if you weren’t, you could be monitored without a warrant. But even aside from the plentiful security and privacy concerns, other stuff is slipping underneath our radar, such as the homogenisation of culture; for many years, companies working in the film and music industry have used algorithms to process scripts and compositions to determine whether they’re worth investing in. Creative ventures that don’t fit the pattern are less likely to come to fruition. The algorithms forged by data scientists, by speeding up processes and saving money, have a powerful, direct impact on all of us.

Little wonder that the Government is taking a slightly belated interest. Last year Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, announced £42m of funding for a new body, the Alan Turing Institute, which is intended to position the UK as a world leader in algorithm research.

The five universities selected to lead that institute (Cambridge, Edinburgh, Oxford, Warwick and UCL) were announced last month; they will lead the efforts to tame and use what’s often referred to as Big Data.

“So many disciplines are becoming dependent upon it, including engineering, science, commerce and medicine,” says Professor Philip Nelson, chief executive of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the body co-ordinating the institute’s output. “It was felt very important that we put together a national capability to help in the analysis and interpretation of that data. The idea is to pull together the very best scientists to do the fundamental work in maths and data science to underpin all these activities.”

But is this an attempt to reassert control over a sector that’s wielding an increasing amount of power?

“Not at all,” says Nelson. “More than anything else, it’s about making computers more beneficial to society by using the data better.”

On the one hand we see algorithms used to do pointless work (“the most-depressing day of the year” simply does not exist); on the other we’re told to fear subjugation to our computer overlords. But it’s easy to forget the power of the algorithm to do good.

Duncan Ross is one of the founder directors of DataKind UK, a charity that helps other charities make the best use of the data at their disposal.

“We’re in this world of constrained resources,” he says, “and we can ill afford for charities to be doing things that are ineffective.”

From weekend “datathons” to longer-term, six-month projects, volunteers help charities to solve a range of problems.

“For example,” says Ross, “we did some recent work with Citizens Advice, who have a lot of data coming in from their bureaux.

“They’re keen to know what the next big issue is and how they can spot it quickly; during the payday-loans scandal they felt that they were pretty late to the game, because even though they were giving advice, they were slow to take corporate action. So we worked with them on algorithms that analyse the long-form text reports written by local teams in order to spot new issues more quickly.

“We’re not going to solve all the charities’ problems; they’re the experts working on the ground. What we can do is take their data and help them arrive at better decisions.”

Data sets can be investigated in unexpected ways to yield powerful results. For example, Google has developed a way of aggregating users’ search data to spot flu outbreaks.

“That flu algorithm [Google Flu Trends] picked up on people searching for flu remedies or symptoms,” says Ross, “and by itself it seemed to be performing about as well as the US Centers for Disease Control. If you take the output of that algorithm and use it as part of the decision-making process for doctors, then we really get somewhere.”

But Google, of course, is a private company with its own profit motives, and this provokes another algorithmic fear; that Big Data is being processed by algorithms that might not be working in our best interests. We have no way of knowing; we feel far removed from these processes that affect us day to day.

Ross argues that it’s perfectly normal for us to have little grasp of the work done by scientists.

“How much understanding is there of what they actually do at Cern?” he asks. “The answer is almost none. Sometimes, with things like the Higgs boson, you can turn it into a story where, with a huge amount of anecdote, you can just about make it exciting and interesting – but it’s still a challenge.

“As far as data is concerned, the cutting-edge stuff is a long way from where many organisations are; what they need to be doing is much, much more basic. But there are areas where there are clearly huge opportunities.”

That’s an understatement. As the so-called “internet of things” expands, billions of sensors will surround us, each of them a data point, each of them with algorithmic potential. The future requires us to place enormous trust in data scientists; just like the hopeful romantic in Carry On Loving, we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed that the results emerging from the slot are the ones we’re after.

We’ll also be keeping our fingers crossed that the processes going on out of sight, behind that wall, aren’t overseen by the algorithmic equivalent of Sid James and Hattie Jacques.

Here’s hoping.

Chapter 11 comes to India

Pritish Nandy in the Times of India

One of the best things in last week’s Union Budget, which has gone largely unnoticed, is the finance minister’s pledge to bring in a comprehensive Bankruptcy Code. Bankruptcy law reform is now a priority for improving the ease of doing business, said Arun Jaitley, thus telling us for the first time that the government has finally come to accept the fact that shit happens. And it’s time that we, as a nation, realized this and found ways and means to deal with it.

Till now, every failure was chased by a lynch mob hardwired to believe that failure is deliberate and must be punished. Not only countless lives and careers have been destroyed by this attitude but it has also fostered a business climate where people either stay away from taking the kind of crucial risks businessmen ought to take or, worse, it has brought risk taking and failure (which are at the heart of all serious entrepreneurship) into unnecessary disrepute. We, as a people, actually believe that every business that fails is a deliberate deep-rooted conspiracy, a plan to loot others. In this perverse worldview, we ignore the simple fact that most bankruptcies owe their origins to Black Swan events that have become increasingly commonplace. Not the greed and wickedness of businessmen.

History shows that the best businessmen go through many failures. They may not always talk about them but these failures teach them the lessons that eventually make them successful. The very failures we despise are the bedrock on which shining empires are built. Bankruptcy, or Chapter 11 as the Americans love to call it, is hardly a dirty word in today’s business scenario, where everything changes all the time, abruptly and without any notice. In fact, failure is a badge of honour that many successful entrepreneurs openly wear. For who will ever risk investing in a business where the promoter claims he has never known failure?

Hiding failure, in fact, is the worst thing one can do. It causes all round damage. Acknowledging it and then finding ways and means to mitigate it and move on is the way all civilised societies deal with failure. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb, my favourite economist recently said, failure is the only real asset of a nation and knowing how to fail is its biggest talent. Taleb also added that failure may be the best mantra for India’s success. For a nation that has not experienced failure and learnt from it is hugely handicapped in today’s world where everything changes at short notice, including the nature of risks. A nation that turns away from risk is not a nation yet ready for success.

He cites the examples of France and Japan. Their economies are doing poorly, Taleb argues, because the failure rate is so low. In the US, on the other hand, the highest fail rate is in California which also has the most inspiring success stories. Walt Disney is an example. He was fired by his editor because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas”. He went bankrupt several times before he built Disneyland. In fact, even the proposal for Disneyland was rejected by the city of Anaheim on the ground that it would attract only riffraff. Henry Ford went bankrupt before he could steer Ford Motors to its huge success. So did HJ Heinz, founder of Heinz. And William Durant who created General Motors. And Milton Hershey, founder of Hershey Chocolates. The day Trump Towers was being announced with huge fanfare in Mumbai I read that Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City had gone belly up.

Business is not about not taking risks. It’s about riding the right risks to build institutions and create wealth. Sports, media, entertainment have had its share of bankrupts. From Larry King to Francis Ford Coppola to rapper MC Hammer to Stan Lee, founder of Marvel Comics, to blogger Perez Hilton to Mick Fleetwood, and Bob Guccione, founder of Penthouse, all have faced bankruptcy. Even famous US Presidents have. Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S Grant, William McKinley, Thomas Jefferson. In recent years, Steve Jobs went almost bankrupt. So did Apple. Today it’s the world’s richest, strongest brand, seemingly indestructible.

Restaurants improve every time they fail. So do cars, trains, planes. They become safer because we always over-compensate after a disaster. Every shock strengthens us, readies us better for the future. Businesses too are like that and I am glad the Finance Minister has realised it and removed the stigma.

Have I ever gone bankrupt? No, but I have teetered on the edge often enough and never been embarrassed to admit it.

Funnily, as Taleb points out, the only business that never learns from failure is banks. When a bank crashes today, the probability of a bank crashing tomorrow actually increases. Banking is clearly not a business that learns from its mistakes. History proves that too.

Why you're almost certainly more like your father than your mother

The Independent 

Genes from your father are more dominant than those inherited from your mother, new research has shown.

All mammals are likely to use the majority of genetic material passed down from males, even if offspring look and act more like the mother, according to the study on lab mice by University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine.

This means that even though we inherit an equal amount of DNA from each parent, the paternal line is mostly found to govern how a person develops into an adult – especially in regards to their health.

The findings could give scientists more insight into how diseases and conditions are caused by the expression of thousands of genes, of which several hundred imprinted genes – rather than out of the 95 initially thought – could be in favour of the father.

Professor and author of the study paper Fernando Pardo-Manuel de Villena said: “This is an exceptional new research finding that opens the door to an entirely new area of exploration in human genetics.”

The study on the offspring of three genetically-diverse strains of “Collaborative Cross” mice is hoped to shed light on how mutations show up in complex diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, schizophrenia and obesity, according to Science Daily. 

James Crowley, assistant professor of genetics, selected strains of mice that descended from a subspecies that evolved on different continents and each type was used as both father and mother.

When the nine baby mice reached adulthood, the researchers measured gene expression in four different kinds of tissue, including RNA sequencing in the brain.

“This expression level is dependent on the mother or the father,” Pardo-Manuel de Villena said.

“We now know that mammals express more genetic variance from the father. So imagine that a certain kind of mutation is bad. If inherited from the mother, the gene wouldn't be expressed as much as it would be if it were inherited from the father.

“So, the same bad mutation would have different consequences in disease if it were inherited from the mother or from the father.”

The study is published in the journal Nature Genetics.