Serving Size and Calorie Counting

When you want to lose body fat, the only way to do it is to burn more calories than you consume.  If you burn approximately 3500 calories more than you eat, your body will metabolize about 1 pound of fat to make up the difference.  Now this has some interesting implications...  Can you lose weight eating only Krispy Kreme donuts?  Well, yes.  You just need to eat less calories worth than you consume.  Of course, an all-Krispy-Kreme diet would almost certainly lead to other nutritional complications.  You would also probably be hungry most of the time because eating few enough donuts to lose weight would probably not be very satisfying.  But it could be done.

If you are keeping track of you calorie intake, it is important to know what your actual calorie count is.  Small errors add up over time.  An extra 10 calories a day, which is less than one teaspoon of sugar, adds up to 3650 calories over a year; that's more than a pound of fat!  Fortunately, there are standard nutrition facts labels on virtually all packaged foods sold in the United States, like this one on tortilla chips:

So, according to this label, the serving size is 28 grams, which is 140 calories.  The FDA has rounding rules that allow manufacturers to round to the nearest 10 calorie increment for values >50 calories, so that means the real value is somewhere between 135.0 and 144.9 calories per 28 gram serving.  Also, most people don't have or regularly use a food scale, so the label often helpfully provides a translation of the serving size into pieces.  Here that is "About 13 chips."  So when I was making nachos the other day I wondered "how close is 'about?'"  The answer was, not too close:

Counting out 13 of the most uniform chips I could find onto a scale (yes, I zeroed out the paper plate), I measured 34.7g, which is 6.7g, or 24% more than the 28g serving size.  That means that if I count out 13 chips and think I'm eating 140 calories, I would really be getting closer to 174 calories.  To get the 28g serving size, I should really eat about 10.5 chips.

To be really precise, I should note that the primary measure for the serving size is given as 1 ounce, which is really closer to 28.35 grams.  But that .35 grams is an error of only 1.25%, which is dwarfed by the 24% error above.  There is also some normal chip-to-chip variation, which I didn't measure.  And often a "chip" is actually broken and missing part.  But ultimately, if you want to confirm serving size, the best way to do it is by weighing your food.

Do you ever keep track of your calorie intake?  Leave a comment below!

Post-A-Week Goal

A bit over a year ago, I set a goal to write a blog entry every day for a month.  I managed to carry through on it, even though it wasn't particularly easy to hold to the commitment every day.  I did not, however, take the next step from that goal, and continue making regular progress on other writing projects, or even here.  So I'm setting another blogging goal.  The goal this time is to write at least one posting here each week for the next year. If I pull it off, that means that I will write over 50 posts in the next year.  Seeing that cumulative progress is, I think, a useful step toward getting myself revved up to do other, larger scale writing projects.

Of course, one of the problems with a "Post-A-Week" is that at least one day each week I'll have to actually finish something and click the "Publish Post" button.  When I get toward the end of any given week, it then becomes a post-a-day goal, for that one day.  So I should try to make sure that I write early in the week, and not late, to keep ahead of the curve.  If my daughter ever reads this, she'll recognize this strategy from the last 5 years of me prodding her about starting her homework early.

For the purposes of this goal, I'll say that the week extends from Sunday through Saturday.  And as it is currently 12:20 AM on Sunday, November 13, 2011, this entry will fulfill my obligation for the week of the 13th - 19th!  Of course, I can write MORE than one a week if time and motivation allow, and I'll certainly try.  But at least this week I'm finishing over 167 hours ahead of my deadline!

I've got dozens of ideas jotted down, and about 25 partially written posts already stock-piled.  Time to start working through the backlog, polishing things up, and get them out into the world.  And then come up with more!

How about you?  What are you planning to do over the course of the next year?  Leave a comment below and tell me!

Wait, what?

Today a co-worker sitting next to me in the lab sent me a file on Skype.  A moment later he said, "Oops, wrong file, cancel it."  So I clicked on the "Cancel" button next to the Skype file transfer bar and was greeted with this dialog box:

That's right, to cancel the file transfer you have to click "Ok," and to NOT cancel the file transfer, you click "Cancel," which is to say, "Cancel the cancellation."

I went looking around and Microsoft does indeed discourage this kind of silliness.  In an article on correct UI design here they say:


"... Never use OK and Cancel for yes or no questions.

Incorrect:

Correct:

Better:
"

Of course, this is made more amusing by the fact that Microsoft recently completed their acquisition of Skype.    Maybe they'll fix this in the next update.  Oops, nope, according to the release notes for the latest update it looks like they're focusing on more important issues:

"Changes:

• Removed Google product bundling..."

So, what goofy or needlessly confusing user interface designs have you run into recently?  Leave a comment!

Interview Scoring

Several years ago, I was involved in a lot of interviewing for several technical positions at the company where I then worked.  Generally, a candidate would come in, and multiple engineers would interview them individually for 30 to 60 minutes each over the course of the day, and then we'd get together in a conference room to discuss their merits.  I realized that it was helpful to have a quick, common starting point for the discussion.  If everyone agreed that someone was a dud, there was no point in continuing to talk about them.  Likewise, if everyone thought they were amazing, we would be motivated to get an offer to them quickly and try to lock them in before they got another offer elsewhere.  To facilitate this discussion, I developed a simple 1 to 10 point scale for broadly rating the viability of a candidate:

1. I will immediately tender my resignation if you offer this person a job.
2. Extremely weak candidate.  This person is likely to be a long-term drain on resources, and may well never make the transition to being a net positive contributor.
3. Weak candidate.  Initially, this candidate will be a net loss, requiring training, mentoring, constant guidance and close supervision.  They may grow in time, and become a net contributor, but it is not clear when (or if) this will occur.
4. Mediocre candidate: This person demonstrated some obvious deficiencies in the course of the interview, although they were not a complete train wreck.
5. Fair candidate:  This person showed no particular brilliance, but no glaring deficiencies either.  They will require support and assistance, but it is reasonable to expect that they will become a useful if uninspired contributor in time.
6. Reasonable candidate: This person seems like they may become a valuable team member, after some start-up delay.
7. Strong candidate:  This person is likely to become a valuable member of the team fairly quickly.
8. This is an extremely strong candidate.  While not a rock star, they have an impressive breadth and depth of knowledge, and will come up to speed very quickly.  Unless there is a rock star candidate in the line-up, we should very strongly consider making this person an offer.
9. This person is a rock star.  They will make an immediate and valuable contribution to the company, and we are unlikely to find a better fit for this job than this candidate.
10. I will immediately tender my resignation if you do not offer this person a job.

At the start of the meeting, everyone would, without discussion, secretly write their score for the candidate on a piece of paper.  Then we would reveal the scores all at the same time.  The results were usually quite interesting.

Often, we would find that one person would rate someone wildly differently, higher or lower, than everyone else did. If the candidate was in the acceptable band to most of the interviewers, then the discussion became an exploration of the cause of the disconnect in scoring.

Engineers being engineers, they would often add precision to the scale.  Scores of 7.5 or 6.5 were common.  And once the discussion was underway, people were free to re-evaluate their initial score in light of the persuasive arguments of the other interviewers.

Depending upon the position, the rate at which a company is growing, and the level of candidate sought, the threshold for further consideration may well slide up and down.  Some people will never consider anyone below an 8.  Some jobs may be perfectly well filled with a 6, but you want to at least know that you're getting a 6 and not an 8.  I would generally dismiss out of hand anyone below a 5;  the dot com days of filling chairs with any warm bodies to boost acquisition valuations are, I hope, a thing of the distant past.

Finally, the score provided a short-hand for the relative comparison of multiple candidates, often across multiple weeks of interviewing.

This is obviously just a first pass go/no-go filter and a starting point for discussion.  In some cases though, it helped keep the wrap-up meetings VERY brief!

Job Search Rules

I have helped with the recruiting of new employees at a number of companies for which I have worked over the years.  Based on that experience, I would like to offer the following list of suggestions for anyone trying to get hired.  You've probably heard them all before, but I can tell you from looking at a lot of bad cover letters and resumes that many people just don't seem to take these to heart:

Your cover letter matters: it is my first impression of you, and if it is poorly written, I may not even get to your resume.  It also indicates to me that you aren't just spamming every e-mail address you can find with your resume.

Proofread your resume.  Then have someone else proofread it.  Much like your cover letter, it is how I continue to develop my first impression of you.  If you can't provide me with one perfect page of work that you had all the time in the world to do, what can I expect of you once you're under time pressure?

Provide a .PDF of your resume, not a Microsoft Word file.  I may or may not have the correct version of Word, and I generally dislike opening .doc / .docx files of unknown origin, just in case some clever new exploit is floating around in them.  Some people don't use Microsoft Office at all, especially Mac and Linux folks.  I may also not have the same fonts as you.  PDFCreator is freely available, and .PDF documents are, as the name says, portable across numerous systems.

The ONLY job of a resume is to get you an interview, and provide starting topics for that interview.  Make it good, but keep it brief.


Polite formality matters:  I want to know that you are capable of interacting in an appropriately professional manner, when needed.  If we end up working together, then the abbreviated e-mails and collegial joking can begin.  But don't jump the gun.

Sell yourself well:  I want you to succeed, because I have a job to fill, so let me know how you will meet my needs.  If we end up working together, I may, at times, spend more of my waking hours around you than I do with my family.  I want to believe that time will be well spent, and that we will work well together.

Expect to be Googled:  My goal is to find professionally relevant information about your work experience, but I'm going to see whatever comes up.  I don't care about your personal life, but if I find your blog entirely about how to sell stolen lab supplies on eBay, I'm probably not going to want to hire you.

And finally, a couple suggestions from my various job hunts:

Talk to your friends: Almost every job I've ever had has been the result of a connection made through a friend, or friend of a friend.  That's how you find out about jobs when the company is thinking of hiring, before they've even cast out their net.  It's a lot easier to stand out in a hiring pool of one than when there are dozens of resumes coming in from a Craig's List posting or Monster.com listing.

Make targeted cold calls:  If you know where you would like to work, do some research and then call them up, and ask to talk to the person likely to be your boss there.  I really loved what was being done at Leapfrog years ago, so I called their engineering R&D office and asked for the CTO, who's name I had gotten from a web search.  He was out of town, so I was referred to the VP of hardware engineering.  I asked if he had any upcoming openings.  He said he did, and asked me to send him my resume.  Two weeks later I had a job there.  This is important though: do not treat this as a "numbers game," but rather as a carefully targeted approach to somewhere you'd really like to work.  Even if they don't have any openings when you call, they might know if any are planned in the near future.  Or, if you present yourself well, they may even make some effort to find a position for you, or accelerate hiring for a planned future opening.

Have you got any good stories from either looking for a job or looking to hire someone?  Comment below!

Manita Guidero / Nery, Alderwood Middle School Home Ec.

I have been extremely fortunate to have had a number of excellent teachers throughout my life.  Some I have kept in touch with, others I wish I had made more of an effort.  One of the latter was my 8th Grade Home Economics teacher.  When I knew her, she was Mrs. Guidero, although I learned that in later years, she got divorced and became Ms. Nery.  She was about 40 years old and a new teacher to Alderwood Middle School when I arrived there in 7th grade. As I sat in her class on the first day of school, I was terrified of her.  She was, I thought, an unreasonably demanding battle-axe, outlining in excruciating detail during that first class exactly how we were to put the headings on our papers, how she would brook no foolishness, and all the behavioral strictures we were expected to observe in her class.  I found her so daunting that when one of the science teachers (another of my favorites) asked me to be a teaching assistant for him, I immediately dropped Home Ec.

The next year, I found myself back in her class, without the option of dropping.  I quickly learned that she expected a lot of us, because she had a lot to teach us.  I loved her class.  I learned a lot about cooking from her, and I did great.  I discovered that she recognized and respected good behavior, and was happy to give freedom to those who demonstrated they could handle it.  By the end of her class, I had so much enjoyed myself that I ended up becoming her teaching assistant the next trimester.  She taught me more about cooking, and taught me to teach, asking me to run entire cooking demonstrations in her class.  At the end of the year student awards ceremony, she gave me the Home Ec. cooking award for that year.

Mrs. Guidero, later Ms. Nery, continued to teach at Alderwood for the next 17 years, becoming, I have heard, a pillar of the school.  I suspect that she demanded, and got, the best out of a lot of students in that time.  I often thought of her, and several years ago I finally did some Googling to try to get in touch with her again.  I wanted to let her know what a positive influence I felt she had had on my life.  I was sad to discover that she had died in a freak hiking accident in Glacier National Park on June 28, 2002 at the age of 59.  I'm sad that I never got to talk to her again.  I expect I am only one of many lives that she touched in the course of her amazing career.

I'm Illiterate in over 160 languages!

I have been travelling to Taiwan occasionally for business, and although I've made some effort to learn Mandarin Chinese, I've not really had the time to make a serious study of it, so I know only a few phrases.  The single most useful thing I can say is "I can not speak Mandarin.  Can you speak English?"  My favorite response to that was a guy who responded in perfect, unaccented west coast American English, "Yeah, what's up?"  The reason I'd needed to speak to that particular person was because I couldn't figure out which "cycle" button to press on the coin operated washing machine I had just dumped my clothes and money into.  The operating instructions, quite helpfully, were in Chinese and English, but step four was "select cycle."  All five of the cycle buttons were labelled only in Chinese.  I can't tell "ultra gentle non-agitating non-wash" from "shred your clothes and set them on fire," so I didn't really want to just pick a button at random.  And this was only one of many experiences that has taught me how utterly terrible it is to be illiterate.

There is a LOT of good information written all around us, to the point that we take it for granted, and often don't even realize when we're absorbing data from our environment.  But when that information isn't there, you really miss it.  Ideographic Chinese is so completely unintelligible to me that it effectively isn't there.  And when I want to get something as simple as a bottle of juice at 7-11, it becomes apparent.  I don't like to drink caffeine or artificial sweeteners.  When I picked up a grape juice bottle the other day, the only thing I could read on the label was "100%," which I eventually assumed was most likely "100% juice."  But it could well have been "100% of your day's vitamin C," or "100% recycled bottle!" or "100% rocket blast wake up caffeine super energy cocktail!"  And yes, I could have started asking people around me, but then I'd also need to explain in at least some detail what I was trying to avoid.  If I had gone through that exercise, then I would always know in the future that I could buy that one item.  But still, coming from a world where I can instantly know quite a lot of details of that product just by reading the label, illiteracy is a jarring change.

Maybe that's part of the secret to how people get by without being able to read:  They always have, so they just aren't acclimatized to the huge chunk they are missing.  But when an adult learns to read late in life, do they undergo a period of realization of how much richer their experience of the world can suddenly become?  If you've taught any adult reading classes, please comment below.  I'd love to know.

And maybe I should renew my efforts to learn some written Chinese as well...