Passing Comments

Last year the winner was a lowly beagle, this year it’s an aging spaniel. Whatever’s happening to the judges at the Westminster Kennel Club Show, I like it.

Yesterday, a spaniel named Stump won the top prize at Westminster’s 133rd annual competition in New York. Ten-year-old Stump, who almost died a few years ago, is also the oldest dog ever to win “Best in Show” at the event.

Scientific research increasingly is revealing something that explains why the testosterone-heavy ambition “masters of the universe” is a most flawed concept,  according to Nicholas Kristof, writing in his  New York Time‘s column today.

Excerpt: (Feb 7, 2009)

Wall Street is one of the most male-dominated bastions in the business world; senior staff meetings resemble a urologist’s waiting room. Aside from issues of fairness, there’s evidence that the result is second-rate decision-making.

“There seems to be a strong consensus that diverse groups perform better at problem solving” than homogeneous groups, Lu Hong and Scott E. Page wrote in The Journal of Economic Theory, summarizing the research in the field.

Read all here.