Eric Barker points to a new study linking a firm handshake with employment interview success:

The authors examined how an applicant's handshake influences hiring recommendations formed during the employment interview. A sample of 98 undergraduate students provided personality measures and participated in mock interviews during which the students received ratings of employment suitability. Five trained raters independently evaluated the quality of the handshake for each participant. Quality of handshake was related to interviewer hiring recommendations. Path analysis supported the handshake as mediating the effect of applicant extraversion on interviewer hiring recommendations, even after controlling for differences in candidate physical appearance and dress. Although women received lower ratings for the handshake, they did not on average receive lower assessments of employment suitability. Exploratory analysis suggested that the relationship between a firm handshake and interview ratings may be stronger for women than for men. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

The full study - which I have not read, but will certainly try to look over - is in the Journal of Applied Psychology volume 93, issue 5 released in September of 2008. If you're still in school and interested in reading the journal article, you should be able to access it through your campus library.

"Handshake" courtesy AndyRob via Flickr Creative Commons

The question of nature vs nurture is one that plagues every behavioral scientist. But on a personal level, it's also one the plagues any self-reflective individual. Personally, I've often questioned how I become who I am and what that says about the potential for my future? Am I limited in what I can accomplish on a professional level by an inherent cap on talent and intelligence, or am I a product of my environment, who can rise above whatever limitations that stand in my way?

The science necessary to answer these questions is intricate and untested, but this months Atlantic reveals some groundbreaking studies that may reinvent how we think about genes and environment. This research reevaluates previous thoughts on behavior in at risk children, posing the question: "Could it be ... that the children who suffer most from bad environments also profit the most from good ones?" Confused? Well, read the whole article, but let's take a sneak peak:

The Swedes, Ellis and Boyce noted in an essay titled “Biological Sensitivity to Context,” have long spoken of “dandelion” children. These dandelion children—equivalent to our “normal” or “healthy” children, with “resilient” genes—do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden. Ellis and Boyce offer that there are also “orchid” children, who will wilt if ignored or maltreated but bloom spectacularly with greenhouse care.

[This is] actually a completely new way to think about genetics and human behavior. Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It’s one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications. Gene variants generally considered misfortunes (poor Jim, he got the “bad” gene) can instead now be understood as highly leveraged evolutionary bets, with both high risks and high potential rewards: gambles that help create a diversified-portfolio approach to survival, with selection favoring parents who happen to invest in both dandelions and orchids.

Can liability really be so easily turned to gain? The pediatrician W. Thomas Boyce, who has worked with many a troubled child in more than three decades of child-development research, says the orchid hypothesis “profoundly recasts the way we think about human frailty.” He adds, “We see that when kids with this kind of vulnerability are put in the right setting, they don’t merely do better than before, they do the best—even better, that is, than their protective-allele peers. “Are there any enduring human frailties that don’t have this other, redemptive side to them?”

Research like this is obviously young and in no way conclusive. But still, it's useful in understanding our own behavior as well as the behavior of others. And while you're not exactly going to use this knowledge to map the success or failure of your future career path, it helps to understand how both your genetics and the environment in which you reside can shape your route to success.

"Molecule!!" courtesy of monkeymad2.0b via Flickr Creative Commons

A recent Scientific American article has been making the rounds for introducing new research which indicates that people are more likely to retain information if they learn through error. That is, searching for an answer and getting it wrong will help you to remember the real answer once you find it (via Jonah Lehrer).

Students were asked to read the essay and prepare for a test on it. However, in the pretest condition they were asked questions about the passage before reading it such as “What is total color blindness caused by brain damage called?” Asking these kinds of question before reading the passage obviously focuses students’ attention on the critical concepts. To control this “direction of attention” issue, in the control condition students were either given additional time to study, or the researchers focused their attention on the critical passages in one of several ways: by italicizing the critical section, by bolding the key term that would be tested, or by a combination of strategies. However, in all the experiments they found an advantage in having students first guess the answers. The effect was about the same magnitude, around 10 percent, as in the previous set of experiments.

What are the career implications of this? Remember those old commercials, "The More You Know," well, as lame as they were, they're pretty much true. While in college or once you get on the job, you are constantly going to have to keep growing and adapting as the environment and your assignments change around you.

Also, this is pretty good indicator that you shouldn't be afraid to take risks in your career. If we do indeed learn more through error, it never hears to take a calculated gamble here and there. If you succeed great, if you fail, learn from it.

All this also reminds of an excellent chart I came across from Jessica Hagy's This Is Indexed blog (via Flowing Data):

That should make it pretty clear, right? OK, kiddies, that's it for this week. Check on Monday to see our interview with Law Abiding Citizen Director F. Gary Gray. And, of course, another week of blogging. If you haven't yet, get your questions in for Andrew Ross Sorkin and Jared Hess. Have a great weekend ... and learn something!

I was pretty excited when Wolfram Alpha launched. I'm a dork for knowledge and was psyched for a smart search engine that could return data, rather than links to data. Unfortunately I was pretty disappointed with some early queries I ran and lost interest pretty quickly. I thought the wording it took to return results was a bit finicky and never used it how I thought I would.

That being said, I think it could be a pretty good resource for college students. ReadWriteWeb seems to agree. It appears the programmers have worked out a number of kinks and bugs and the engine is constantly improving (plus it just signed a deal with Bing, which could be pretty big news). According to RWW the engine should be popular with college students (specifically Chemistry) and should be ready to go by the start of the semester.

If you are unfamiliar with Wolfram, here's some background and how it may help you with your studies.

Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. We aim to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Our goal is to build on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.

Get it? Well, if not, maybe this isn't for you. Here are some Links to get you through the weekend ...

College Recruiter Has Advice On How NOT To Write a Cover Letter: Don't be boring: "What a snoozer! Everyone uses that line, let's see... being like everyone else isn't going to get you very far in your job search now is it? No it's not. So what you need to be is different, but more than different, unique and valuable. Let's take a look at some more creative and attention grabbing opening lines"

MonsterBlog Has More Advice On Setting Yourself Apart: "The other key action item to set yourself apart from the swells of job seekers is to send out thank-you notes promptly, not just after interviews but also to folks who have extended themselves to you. These thank-you notes must be handwritten -- gasp, not an email! Slowly writing with good penmanship is a good idea to clearly spell out your appreciation."

Ramit Sethi Gets Kinky: With the "Craiglist Penis Effect." I don't know what you're thinking this is, but you're probably wrong. "The Craigslist Penis Effect describes situations where everyone else is so horrible that, by being even half-decent, you can dominate everyone else and win." I ... It's ... uh ... just read it.