Author Archives: Luc Beaulieu

Air travel and frequent flying in 2015

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Made my first flight I was 9 years old. I remember vividly that you could ask and go talk with the pilot in the cabin. I did it a few times over the years. This strongly quite similar what travellers are getting in first/business class today.

Nowadays, while there is still a romantic notion in flying in most people mind, there is little left in the everyday execution. Sometimes, you may even feel in bootcamps when a TSA officer is talking to you at security, some yelling as loud as they can. I remember that at certain times you almost had to strip down in underwear going to security and then there is the continued fascination with shoes in certain countries, which has been gone for years now almost everywhere in the OECD countries.

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About recommendations, guidelines and those who ultimately generate them

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Progress always involves risks. You can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first base.

– Frederick B. Wilcox

Coming back from attending a major meeting in our field. I find it interesting to notice that the words “recommendation” and “guidelines” were some of the most used. Most of the time this is good and provides a common languages. However, once in a while someone use these words to shutdown an otherwise very interesting work.

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Productivity, multitasking and notification

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It is now well established that multitasking is impacting productivity significantly. If you do a quick Google search with the terms “multitasking and productivity”, you will get over 1.4 million hits but the first few are quite interesting. The average reduction in productivity due to multitasking is estimated to be about 40%. Another interesting study related to impact on organization, across 45 different organizations, determined that the impact of reducing multitasking ranges from 13% to 150% increase in productivity.

In fact, what ever you do, including simple daily life tasks, multitasking simply means that each things you are doing simultaneously is done at less than full capacity, full attention.

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Memory of my first major peer-reviewed paper 

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My very first manuscript published in Physical Review Letters (major physics journal!) came about by drawing figures on piece of papers (basically mocked-up figures) with a colleague of mine!

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