from the August CareerXroads Update - musings on staffing written monthly since 1996
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Data geeks will love this TedTalks [Ted.com] video. I've never seen information presented visually the way Hans Rosling, a Swedish professor of global health, does it using an application he developed.
I was amazed by a deep data mining dive into global health care. The video (to which we were pointed by Jeremy Shapiro, a fellow data junkie who is leading one of the Staffing Standards Task Force groups) opens with a story by Professor Rosling trying to benchmark just how smart his students are at the beginning of his graduate class.
He asked them to take a 1-question pre-test: "Which country of each pair (below) has the highest child mortality?"(One member of each pair has twice the mortality of the other)
• Sri Lanka or Turkey • Poland or South Korea
• Malaysia or Russia
• Pakistan or Vietnam
• Thailand or South Africa
He discovered that the students consistently did worse than a control group of chimpanzees! (A group of peers -professors at his University, managed only to match the chimps.)
The professor surmised that it wasn't ignorance but preconceived ideas about the distribution of wealth and other variables that contributed to the result.
As we integrate staffing globally, I'm willing to bet that similar preconceived ideas we have about the employment process will also hinder our ability to devise effective protocols.
Here's hoping we do better than the chimps.
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