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Showing posts with the label Julie Parsonnet

Just my thoughts #0636

Wrong Compensation. A semiconductor chip maker conducted an experiment. Workers worked four days a week and took a break. On the first workday, Monday, if they produced a certain number of chips, the company gave them a $30 bonus to motivate their work. However, there was no compensation for the remaining three days. The same bonus was offered again when work resumed after the holidays. The workers were divided into groups, and only on the first day did they earn a bonus: the first group received no reward, the second group was paid the same amount, the third group received a pizza coupon, and the fourth group got a compliment text message, with their productivity monitored for the other three days. Results showed that the first group, with no compensation, had the lowest productivity. The highest productivity was seen in the praise letter group, followed by the other groups. The company suffered a loss because of the $30 bonus. Social motivation and financial motivation are different....

Just my thoughts #0049

The "normal human body temperature = 37°C" standard was established in 1851 by the German medical doctor "Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich", who took millions of temperature readings from about 25,000 people and reported "36.2°C to 37.5°C". However, surveys in the United States in 1992 and the United Kingdom in 2017 found 36.8°C and 36.6°C, respectively. So in the past people deemed that the discrepancy was due to errors in old measuring equipment or methods. But Julie Parsonnet and her colleagues at Stanford University's School of Infectious Disease Epidemiology found a common thread in the temperature databases: People are cooler now than they were then. It wasn't just a measurement error. They speculated that medical advances had reduced inflammation and lowered the average temperature. We don't question the obvious. - Joseph’s “just my thoughts”