text:
Basic Nail Polish Application Tutorial
11:54 AMAhhh, it's such a beautiful Saturday! Sometimes I wish the weather would always stay this for the Fall: 74 with a high of 80, sunshine, blue skies, and mild enough for lightweight cardigans and flip flops. It really seems like it went from BLAZING HOT summer to Fall in a matter of one week where I live! But hey, that's midwest weather for you. ;)
I'm not complaining, but I do want to soak it up while it lasts. As soon as October hits, I'll be grasping my legwarmers and wool jackets for dear life! I much prefer the heat to the cold because I'm a weenster like that.
So getting back on topic, I've had an interesting time with my nails lately. This last 2 months I've gone polish-less (GASP!) for more than I have in the last whole year. Really bizarre, but I just haven't always found the time on my weekends to reapply something fun. Hopefully that will change as the weather cools since I'll want to be inside and warm up all day. ^.^
For those of you who are used to having naked nails and wanted a tutorial for a good polish application technique -- base, polish, and topcoat included -- here is how I apply nail polish.
Products mentioned in this video:
* Seche Natural - this is a nail treatment but it works well as a basecoat. I also have and love Seche Clear. (similar here and here)
* OPI Who Needs A Prince? - sheer-ish cute, red-flash pearly pale pink. needs 3 or 4 coats to be opaque, but is SO PRETTY when opaque. (other pale pinks I love here and here)
* Seche Vite - my HG top coat. Basically, this is the magic product that keeps polish on way longer, dries faster, and makes it super shiny. LOVE!
Here is a pic of the final look I did right after the basic polish application. The tutorial for this purple gradient nail art will be coming up very shortly.
Hope you are all having a wonderful, relaxing weekend in these short weeks before the weather changes once again (unless you live in Cali or FL, or a mild-weather country in which case, I shake my fist at you!)
Don't forget to join the giveaway for a free TLBC bra & panty set and I'll talk to you guys soon. ^_^
Disclaimer: All items mention in this video were purchased by me and were not sponsored in any way. Some affiliate links are included in this post.
43 comments
Thanks Jen! I didn't know about the "wrapping" thing - I will try that next time :)
Do you have a tutorial on nail care? My cuticles are so dry no matter how much I moisturize. There must be a technique to follow!Pretty! You apply it so smoothly! I always have to redo my nails >.<
http://xmaterialgirlsx.blogspot.com/Simple and helpful! I've been polish-less for 2 months now..yikes. Want to get that Revlon peach polish you have.
ReplyDeleteaw jen! i love how the nail changes from one to the other! tutorial on how to do that pleseeee! :( and yes, i love opi's brushes. i love the thickness of it because my nails are sort of big. haha. great tutorial! thanks! :)
ReplyDeleteI can't wait to see the gradient look you created...I've been seeing it a lot lately and wanted to learn how to do it myself..thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteYou have such steady hands, haha. I was in Sephora the other day playing with the testers and made a mess!
ReplyDeleteI love your rings on your other hand....the one that looks like a rose and the squarish one...First time I watched the video I just looked at that Lol Any idea where you got them? They're really great...The nail polish is really great too, I've been looking for a really pretty pale pink.
ReplyDeleteHey Jen! i've been following your blog unofficially for a while now but have never commented... I just couldn't resist commenting this time, I bought the seche vite top coat because a lot of gurus said it was their favorite and my nails chip like crazy so i thought I'd give it a try. I do love it but it happens to peel fairly quickly and was wondering if you had any advice on how to make it not peel? haha thanks for all that you do!! :D
ReplyDeleteOh fun!! I can't wait to try this out~ And I also can't wait for the gradient tut! That looks so cool! :D
ReplyDeleteOh that's lovely~ I love the gradient look!
I've been following you since soompi and never commented but I just bought a Seche Vite topcoat today and then I came home and watched your vid...:) a co-in-ki-dink :DIt's so pretty!! I can't wait to see the tutorial for the gradient nails. Very pretty! :)
ReplyDeleteooh I did my nails like this with purple not too long ago as well! it is indeed pretty :)
ReplyDeletethank you for the tutorial!
aaa i want the seche vite Natural base coat thing you have. I tried looking in Sally Beauty near my house but they don't sell it. Where did you get yours?
I can't wait for the gradient tutorial you have next :)
you're looking gorgeous as alwaysOh btw, do you have trouble with your Seche Vite top coat being too too goopy?
I've had my old one for about a year now and then it got too goopy and stringy--I had to throw it away. I tried thinning it out with nail polish remover which turned out to be a disaster lol. I just went and bought a new bottle.
How do you keep your Seche Vite from turning super thick and stringy? xDthanks!
i love your tutorials
btw, i was wondering if you could make an inspired tutorial for parkbom's look on ''can't nobody'', the part where she's meditating~ :)Hi, Jen.
I was wondering if you can help me with something. It seems like when I layer my nail polish, I always get bubbles. I always thought it was because I didn't let the first layer dry completely, but I tested this by applying one layer, then waited until the next day to re-apply another layer. I still got bubbles. And it happens with every brand of polish I have. I see in your video that you applied three coats within a time frame of five minutes without getting any bubbles. Any suggestions? Thanks!curls and pearls: I don't have a nail care tutorial per se but I do try to keep my hands and nails moisturized. If you wash dishes, wear gloves. :)
PetiteAsianGirl: That revlon polish is notoriously nasty to work with but it's such a pretty color!
The Indecisive One & Nika: My rings are mostly from ebay since you can search for small sizes.
Steph: Make sure you wash your hands right before you polish so your natural oils aren't making the polish peel off.
Kylie: I am wearing Shisem XOG teuk lashes.
Ichigobunny: I got Seche Natural from the company (I think I won a twitter contest randomly) but I like Seche Clear just as much which is easier to find. Try nail polish thinner for the goopy Seche Vite problem! Never add remover to your polishes because this will KILL them!!!Tina: To keep polish from bubbling, make sure to not shake your polish. Twist it like in my video. Also, avoid polishing in direct sunlight and in an environment that is too warm. Try using really thin layers as well. Hopefully that will help. :)
ReplyDeleteI love the gradient :) I've tried to do some blue gradient once and it was plain messy. Looking forward to the tutorial :P And polishless for 2 months? I've been polishless for way longer than that now, laziness is horrifying D:
http://herumbrella.blogspot.comThanks for this video. My nails always get chipped off at the front, but now I know how to prevent it by "wrapping". =)
ReplyDeleteThanks for a basic post. I definitely do not have your skills with a brush, so a lot of the more complicated things you do are beyond me. :)
Also, I know what you mean about the weather. I'm in the Midwest as well, and it has been a crazy seesaw these last few days.wow!
i thought i knew everything about applying nail polish but i guess i don't! :D thank you so much for this Jen! :) applying the topcoat at the tips is totally a must-do for me from now on. my polish tends to 'chip' (is that how you call it?) & by doing your tip, that should solve the problem!
can't wait for the gradient nail tutorial!
i've been trying it for so long but have always fail!
- Cocohi jen!
I actually just came across your videos on youtube today and I totally fell in love with you haha XD! you're my girl crush xD!! I think you are very very pretty and adorable, I really like the way you talk in the videos. even tho I dont know you in real but I am sure that you are a very lovely person ^-^ I really liked your bra fitting video! very sweet, funny and educational, now I will go look for the right bra HA!
I wish you all the best!! I now shall check your older posts and vids XDThanks for this tutorial... I've searched Youtube for something like this before but never found anything really helpful. I just suck at using my left (non-dominant) hand to paint, and I guess no tutorial can really help that! I love Seche Vite top coat too but like Steph said, sometimes it peels on me. And btw I love the shape of your nails! Mine are so wide and mannish looking :\
ReplyDelete- AnonymousSeptember 15, 2010 at 11:39 PM
:) So excited for the purple gradient nail tutorial. They look so adorable!
ReplyDelete WOW. I love that nail polish holy goodness! AMAZING!
heart: miss furnellieAwesome tutorial Jen!
When buying nail polish, do you prefer certain brand or simply choose the color you like?
The top coat is amazing!! Hopefully can find it at where I live.


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Introductions to Haskell
These are the recommended places to start learning, short of buying a textbook.
See also Meta-tutorial, another, shorter overview of tutorials aimed at helping you find the right one.
Best places to start
- Introduction to Haskell (Spring 2013)
- An excellent tutorial to Haskell for beginners given as a course at UPenn by the author of the Typeclassopedia and Diagrams, Brent Yorgey. More compact than LYAH and RWH, but still communicates both basics and some notoriously unfamiliar concepts effectively.
- Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! (LYAH)
- Nicely illustrated tutorial showing Haskell concepts while interacting in GHCi. Written and drawn by Miran Lipovača.
- Real World Haskell (RWH)
- A free online version of the complete book, with numerous reader-submitted comments. RWH is best suited for people who know the fundamentals of Haskell already, and can write basic Haskell programs themselves already. It makes a great follow up after finishing LYAH. It can easily be read cover-to-cover, or you can focus on the chapters that interest you most, or when you find an idea you don't yet understand.
- Yet Another Haskell Tutorial (YAHT)
- By Hal Daume III et al. A recommended tutorial for Haskell that is still under construction but covers already much ground. Also a classic text.
- Happy Learn Haskell Tutorial (HLHT)
- Illustrated total beginner tutorial with fun, example-driven learning. Free and PDF/ebook versions available.
- Haskell Wikibook
- A communal effort by several authors to produce the definitive Haskell textbook. It's very much a work in progress at the moment, and contributions are welcome. For 6 inch e-Readers/tablet computers, there is a PDF version of the book.
- Write Yourself a Scheme in 48 Hours in Haskell
- A Haskell Tutorial, by Jonathan Tang. Most Haskell tutorials on the web seem to take a language-reference-manual approach to teaching. They show you the syntax of the language, a few language constructs, and then have you construct a few simple functions at the interactive prompt. The "hard stuff" of how to write a functioning, useful program is left to the end, or sometimes omitted entirely. This tutorial takes a different tack. You'll start off with command-line arguments and parsing, and progress to writing a fully-functional Scheme interpreter that implements a good-sized subset of R5RS Scheme. Along the way, you'll learn Haskell's I/O, mutable state, dynamic typing, error handling, and parsing features. By the time you finish, you should be fairly fluent in both Haskell and Scheme.
- How to Learn Haskell
- Some students at Washington University in St. Louis documented the path they took to learning Haskell and put together a nice meta-tutorial to guide beginners through some of the available resources. Experienced programmers looking for some quick code examples may be interested in their breadcrumbs.
- About Haskell by Human Language (О Haskell по-человечески)
- The book about Haskell for an absolute beginners. Written by Denis Shevchenko in Russian.
Other tutorials
- What I wish I knew when learning Haskell
- By Stephen Diehl. Does what it says on the tin. See Reddit appreciation
- C9 Lectures: Erik Meijer - Functional Programming Fundamentals
- A set of videos of lectures by Erik Meijer
- Haskell for the Evil Genius
- By Andrew Pennebaker. An overview of how functional and declarative programming can increase the accuracy and efficiency of digital superweapons, empowering evil geniuses in their supreme goal of taking over the world.
- Parallel Processing with Haskell
- By Andrew Pennebaker. A short, accelerated introduction to Haskell for coding parallel programs.
- GetOptFu
- By Andrew Pennebaker. A guide to robust command line argument parsing in Haskell. Available online in HTML, and offline in ePUB and MOBI formats.
- A Gentle Introduction to Haskell
- By Paul Hudak, John Peterson, and Joseph H. Fasel. The title is misleading. Some knowledge of another functional programming language is expected. The emphasis is on the type system and those features which are really new in Haskell (compared to other functional programming languages). A classic, but not for the faint of heart (it's not so gentle). Also available in French from this website, Russian and in EPUB and MOBI formats.
- H-99: Ninety-Nine Haskell Problems
- A collection of programming puzzles, with Haskell solutions. Solving these is a great way to get into Haskell programming.
- Undergraduate Haskell Lectures from the University of Virginia
- An introductory set of slides full of example code for an undergraduate course in Haskell. Topics include basic list manipulations, higher order functions, cabal, the IO Monad, and Category Theory.
- Haskell Tutorial for C Programmers
- By Eric Etheridge. From the intro: "This tutorial assumes that the reader is familiar with C/C++, Python, Java, or Pascal. I am writing for you because it seems that no other tutorial was written to help students overcome the difficulty of moving from C/C++, Java, and the like to Haskell."
- Beginning Haskell
- Tutorial Papers in Functional Programming.
- A collection of links to other Haskell tutorials, from John Hughes.
- Two Dozen Short Lessons in Haskell
- By Rex Page. A draft of a textbook on functional programming, available by ftp. It calls for active participation from readers by omitting material at certain points and asking the reader to attempt to fill in the missing information based on knowledge they have already acquired. The missing information is then supplied on the reverse side of the page.
- Haskell-Tutorial
- By Damir Medak and Gerhard Navratil. The fundamentals of functional languages for beginners.
- Video Lectures
- Lectures (in English) by Jürgen Giesl. About 30 hours in total, and great for learning Haskell. The lectures are 2005-SS-FP.V01 through 2005-SS-FP.V26. Videos 2005-SS-FP.U01 through 2005-SS-FP.U11 are exercise answer sessions, so you probably don't want those.
- Albert's Functional Programming Course
- A 15 lesson introduction to most aspects of Haskell.
- Introduction to Haskell
- By Chris Dutton, An "attempt to bring the ideas of functional programming to the masses here, and an experiment in finding ways to make it easy and interesting to follow".
- An Introduction to Haskell
- A brief introduction, by Brian Howard.
- Translating Haskell into English
- By Shannon Behrens, a glimpse of the Zen of Haskell, without requiring that they already be Haskell converts.
- Haskell for Perl Programmers
- Brief introduction to Haskell, with a view to what perl programmers are interested in
- How To Organize a Picnic on a Computer
- Fun introduction to Haskell, step by step building of a program to seat people at a planned picnic, based on their similarities using data from a survey and a map of the picnic location.
- Dirk's Haskell Tutorial
- in German for beginners by a beginner. Not so deep, but with a lot examples with very small steps.
- Software Tools in Haskell
- A tutorial for advanced readers
- Learning Haskell
- A comprehensive introduction to Haskell that combines text with screencasts. No previous knowledge of functional programming is required. The tutorial is still work in progress with additional chapters being added over time.
See also the discussion Papers every haskeller should read.
Motivation for using Haskell
- Why Functional Programming Matters
- By John Hughes, The Computer Journal, Vol. 32, No. 2, 1989, pp. 98 - 107. Also in: David A. Turner (ed.): Research Topics in Functional Programming, Addison-Wesley, 1990, pp. 17 - 42.
Exposes the advantages of functional programming languages. Demonstrates how higher-order functions and lazy evaluation enable new forms of modularization of programs.
- video of John Hughes talk at Functional Conf 2016 is available on youtube
- Why Haskell matters
- Discussion of the advantages of using Haskell in particular. An excellent article.
- Haskell Introduction
- A video from FP Complete
- Higher-order + Polymorphic = Reusable
- By Simon Thompson. Unpublished, May 1997.
Abstract: This paper explores how certain ideas in object oriented languages have their correspondents in functional languages. In particular we look at the analogue of the iterators of the C++ standard template library. We also give an example of the use of constructor classes which feature in Haskell 1.3 and Gofer.
- Explore functional programming with Haskell
- Introduction to the benefits of functional programming in Haskell by Bruce Tate.
Blog articles
There are a large number of tutorials covering diverse Haskell topics published as blogs. Some of the best of these articles are collected here:
Practical Haskell
These tutorials examine using Haskell to writing complex real-world applications
- Tackling the awkward squad: monadic input/output, concurrency, exceptions, and foreign-language calls in Haskell
- Simon Peyton Jones. Presented at the 2000 Marktoberdorf Summer School. In "Engineering theories of software construction", ed Tony Hoare, Manfred Broy, Ralf Steinbruggen, IOS Press, ISBN 1-58603-1724, 2001, pp47-96. The standard reference for monadic IO in GHC/Haskell.
Abstract:Functional programming may be beautiful, but to write real applications we must grapple with awkward real-world issues: input/output, robustness, concurrency, and interfacing to programs written in other languages.
- Hitchhikers Guide to the Haskell
- Tutorial for C/Java/OCaml/... programers by Dmitry Astapov. From the intro: "This text intends to introduce the reader to the practical aspects of Haskell from the very beginning (plans for the first chapters include: I/O, darcs, Parsec, QuickCheck, profiling and debugging, to mention a few)".
- Haskell I/O inside: Down the Rabbit's Hole
- By Bulat Ziganshin (2006), a comprehensive tutorial on using IO monad.
- A Guide to Haskell's Foreign Function Interface
- A guide to using the foreign function interface extension, using the rich set of functions in the Foreign libraries, design issues, and FFI preprocessors.
- Haskell IO for Imperative Programmers
- A short introduction to IO from the perspective of an imperative programmer.
- A Brief Introduction to Haskell
- A translation of the article, Introduction to OCaml, to Haskell.
- Roll your own IRC bot
- This tutorial is designed as a practical guide to writing real world code in Haskell and hopes to intuitively motivate and introduce some of the advanced features of Haskell to the novice programmer, including monad transformers. Our goal is to write a concise, robust and elegant IRC bot in Haskell.
- Glade Tutorial (GUI Programming)
- For the absolute beginner in both Glade and Gtk2Hs. Covers the basics of Glade and how to access a .glade file and widgets in Gtk2Hs. Estimated learning time: 2 hours.
- Tutorial de Glade
- A Spanish translation of the Glade tutorial
- Gtk2Hs Tutorial
- An extensive Gtk2Hs programming guide, based on the GTK+2.0 tutorial by Tony Gale and Ian Main. This tutorial on GUI programming with Gtk2Hs has 22 chapters in 7 sections, plus an appendix on starting drawing with Cairo. A Spanish translation and source code of the examples are also available.
- Applications of Functional Programming
- Colin Runciman and David Wakeling (ed.), UCL Press, 1995, ISBN 1-85728-377-5 HB. From the cover:
This book is unique in showcasing real, non-trivial applications of functional programming using the Haskell language. It presents state-of-the-art work from the FLARE project and will be an invaluable resource for advanced study, research and implementation.
- DealingWithBinaryData a guide to ByteStrings, the various Get monads and the Put monad.
- Internationalization of Haskell programs
- Short tutorial on how to use GNU gettext utility to make applications, written on Haskell, multilingual.
Reference material
- A growing list of Haskell tutorials on a diverse range of topics
- Available on this wiki
- Haskell Reference
- By Miloslav Nic.
- A tour of the Haskell Monad functions (Web Archive)
- By Henk-Jan van Tuyl.
- Useful Haskell functions
- An explanation for beginners of many Haskell functions that are predefined in the Haskell Prelude.
- Documentation for the standard libraries
- Complete documentation of the standard Haskell libraries.
- Haskell idioms
- A collection of articles describing some common Haskell idioms. Often quite advanced.
- Useful idioms
- A collection of short, useful Haskell idioms.
- Programming guidelines
- Some Haskell programming and style conventions.
- Lightning Tour of Haskell
- By John Hughes, as part of a Chalmers programming course
- The Little Haskeller
- By Cordelia Hall and John Hughes. 9. November 1993, 26 pages. An introduction using the Chalmers Haskell B interpreter (hbi). Beware that it relies very much on the user interface of hbi which is quite different for other Haskell systems, and the tutorials cover Haskell 1.2 , not Haskell 98.
- Functional Programming
- By Jeroen Fokker, 1995. (153 pages, 600 KB). Textbook for learning functional programming with Gofer (an older implementation of Haskell). Here without Chapters 6 and 7.
Comparisons to other languages
Articles contrasting feature of Haskell with other languages.
- Haskell versus Scheme
- Mark C. Chu-Carroll, Haskell and Scheme: Which One and Why?
- Comparing Haskell and Python
- A short overview of similarities and differences between Haskell and Python.
- Monads in OCaml
- Syntax extension for monads in OCaml
- Haskell for Perl programmers
- Short intro for perlers
- An algorithm for RELAX NG validation
- by James Clark (of RELAX NG fame). Describes an algorithm for validating an XML document against a RELAX NG schema, uses Haskell to describe the algorithm. The algorithm in Haskell and Java is then discussed here.
- Haskell + FastCGI versus Ruby on Rails
- A short blog entry documenting performance results with ruby on rails and Haskell with fastcgi
- Haskell vs. Ada vs. C++ vs. Awk vs. ..., An Experiment in Software Prototyping Productivity (PDF)
- Paul Hudak and Mark P. Jones, 16 pages.
Description of the results of an experiment in which several conventional programming languages, together with the functional language Haskell, were used to prototype a Naval Surface Warfare Center requirement for Geometric Region Servers. The resulting programs and development metrics were reviewed by a committee chosen by the US Navy. The results indicate that the Haskell prototype took significantly less time to develop and was considerably more concise and easier to understand than the corresponding prototypes written in several different imperative languages, including Ada and C++.
- A Comparative Study of Language Support for Generic Programming (pdf)
- Ronald Garcia, Jaakko Jrvi, Andrew Lumsdaine, Jeremy G. Siek, and Jeremiah Willcock. In Proceedings of the 2003 ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications (OOPSLA'03), October 2003.
An interesting comparison of generic programming support across languages, including: Haskell, SML, C++, Java, C#. Haskell supports all constructs described in the paper -- the only language to do so.
- Functional Programming in the Real World
- A list of functional programs applied to real-world tasks. The main criterion for being real-world is that the program was written primarily to perform some task, not primarily to experiment with functional programming. Functional is used in the broad sense that includes both `pure' programs (no side effects) and `impure' (some use of side effects). Languages covered include CAML, Clean, Erlang, Haskell, Miranda, Scheme, SML, and others.
- Lisp in Haskell
- Writing A Lisp Interpreter In Haskell, a tutorial
- From Ruby to Haskell, Part 1: Testing
- A quick comparison between ruby's and haskell's BDD.
Teaching Haskell
- Where do I begin? A problem solving approach to teaching functional programming
- By Simon Thompson. In Krzysztof Apt, Pieter Hartel, and Paul Klint, editors, First International Conference on Declarative Programming Languages in Education. Springer-Verlag, September 1997.
Abstract: This paper introduces a problem solving method for teaching functional programming, based on Polya's `How To Solve It', an introductory investigation of mathematical method. We first present the language independent version, and then show in particular how it applies to the development of programs in Haskell. The method is illustrated by a sequence of examples and a larger case study.
- Functional programming through the curriculum
- By Simon Thompson and Steve Hill. In Pieter H. Hartel and Rinus Plasmeijer, editors, Functional Programming Languages in Education, LNCS 1022, pages 85-102. Springer-Verlag, December 1995.
Abstract: This paper discusses our experience in using a functional language in topics across the computer science curriculum. After examining the arguments for taking a functional approach, we look in detail at four case studies from different areas: programming language semantics, machine architectures, graphics and formal languages.
- The Risks and Benefits of Teaching Purely Functional Programming in First Year
- By Manuel M. T. Chakravarty and Gabriele Keller. Journal of Functional Programming 14(1), pp 113-123, 2004. An earlier version of this paper was presented at Functional and Declarative Programming in Education (FDPE02).
Abstract We argue that teaching purely functional programming as such in freshman courses is detrimental to both the curriculum as well as to promoting the paradigm. Instead, we need to focus on the more general aims of teaching elementary techniques of programming and essential concepts of computing. We support this viewpoint with experience gained during several semesters of teaching large first-year classes (up to 600 students) in Haskell. These classes consisted of computer science students as well as students from other disciplines. We have systematically gathered student feedback by conducting surveys after each semester. This article contributes an approach to the use of modern functional languages in first year courses and, based on this, advocates the use of functional languages in this setting.
Introducing I/O
- Haskell I/O for Imperative Programmers
- A direct low-fuss jargon-light guide to using Haskell's I/O system, with examples.
- Introduction to IO
- By Cale Gibbard. A quick introduction to how I/O is treated in Haskell.
- Haskell I/O in Five Minutes
- Another quick introduction to Haskell I/O.
More introductions and guides about Haskell I/O can be found here.
Using monads
- How to build a monadic interpreter in one day (PDF)
- By Dan Popa. A small tutorial on how to build a language in one day, using the Parser Monad in the front end and a monad with state and I/O string in the back end. Read it if you are interested in learning:
- language construction and
- interpreter construction
- MonadCont under the hood
- A detailed description of the Cont data type and its monadic operations, including the class MonadCont.
- IO inside page
- Explains why I/O in Haskell is implemented with a monad.
- The Haskell Programmer's Guide to the IO Monad - Don't Panic.
- By Stefan Klinger. This report scratches the surface of category theory, an abstract branch of algebra, just deep enough to find the monad structure. It seems well written.
- Systematic Design of Monads
- By John Hughes and Magnus Carlsson. Many useful monads can be designed in a systematic way, by successively adding facilities to a trivial monad. The capabilities that can be added in this way include state, exceptions, backtracking, and output. Here we give a brief description of the trivial monad, each kind of extension, and sketches of some interesting operations that each monad supports.
See also:
- the Monad HaskellWiki page
- Research papers/Monads and arrows.
- Blog articles
- Monad tutorials timeline
The comprehensive list is available at Monad tutorials timeline.
- Mike Vanier's monad tutorial
- Recommended by David Balaban.
- All About Monads, モナドのすべて
- By Jeff Newbern. This tutorial aims to explain the concept of a monad and its application to functional programming in a way that is easy to understand and useful to beginning and intermediate Haskell programmers. Familiarity with the Haskell language is assumed, but no prior experience with monads is required.
- Monads as computation
- A tutorial which gives a broad overview to motivate the use of monads as an abstraction in functional programming and describe their basic features. It makes an attempt at showing why they arise naturally from some basic premises about the design of a library.
- Monads as containers
- A tutorial describing monads from a rather different perspective: as an abstraction of container-types, rather than an abstraction of types of computation.
- Monad Transformers Step by Step
- By Martin Grabmüller. A small tutorial on using monad transformers. In contrast to others found on the web, it concentrates on using them, not on their implementation.
- What the hell are Monads?
- By Noel Winstanley. A basic introduction to monads, monadic programming and IO. This introduction is presented by means of examples rather than theory, and assumes a little knowledge of Haskell.
- Monads for the Working Haskell Programmer -- a short tutorial
- By Theodore Norvell.
- You Could Have Invented Monads! (And Maybe You Already Have.)
- A short tutorial on monads, introduced from a pragmatic approach, with less category theory references
- Meet Bob The Monadic Lover
- By Andrea Rossato. A humorous and short introduction to Monads, with code but without any reference to category theory: what monads look like and what they are useful for, from the perspective of a ... lover. (There is also the slightly more serious The Monadic Way by the same author.)
- Monstrous Monads
- Andrew Pimlott's humourous introduction to monads, using the metaphor of "monsters".
- A State Monad Tutorial
- A detailed tutorial with simple but practical examples.
- Three kind of monads
- sequencing, side effects or containers
- The Greenhorn's Guide to becoming a Monad Cowboy
- Covers basics, with simple examples, in a for dummies style. Includes monad transformers and monadic functions. Estimated learning time 2-3 days.
Workshops on advanced functional programming
- Advanced Functional Programming: 1st International Spring School on Advanced Functional Programming Techniques, Bastad, Sweden, May 24 - 30, 1995. Tutorial Text (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
- Advanced Functional Programming: 3rd International School, AFP'98, Braga, Portugal, September 12-19, 1998, Revised Lectures (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
- Advanced Functional Programming: 4th International School, AFP 2002, Oxford, UK, August 19-24, 2002, Revised Lectures (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
- Advanced Functional Programming: 5th International School, AFP 2004, Tartu, Estonia, August 14-21, 2004, Revised Lectures (Lecture Notes in Computer Science)
More advanced materials available from the conference proceedings, and the Research papers collection.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Thousands of anti-abortion activists gathered across the nation's capital Friday, marking the 40th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision.
For many, faith was a large part of their opposition. Dunia Minniun from New Jersey, brought her husband's cross to the rally so he could be with her "to save the lives of the innocents."
The once presidential candidate Rick Santorum spoke to demonstrators. He talked about his own decision to "chose life" for his daughter, Bella, who has a rare genetic disorder.
"You are the voice of the voiceless," Santorum told the crowd. "You are those who stand for love in a world of death. And we are proud to be here with you."
NPR's Gabriella Demczuk spent the day with the protesters and brings us these photographs:
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.


text:
What Is an Ear Infection?
Do you remember having an ear infection? Even if you don't remember, you probably had one. Most kids have at least one middle ear infection before they are 2 years old. These infections can cause ear pain and a fever.
What Is a Middle Ear Infection?
Middle ear infections are one of the most common childhood problems. Let's start by talking about infections. An infection (say: in-FEK-shun) happens when germs like bacteria and viruses get inside the body and cause trouble. Germs can get into your ears. The ear is divided into three parts: outer, middle, and inner. When the germs bother your outer ear, it's called swimmer's ear.
The middle ear is a small pocket of air behind the eardrum. You have a middle ear infection when germs get into the middle ear and the area fills up with fluid (or pus), which contains germ-fighting cells. When the pus builds up, your ear starts to feel like a balloon that is ready to pop, which can really hurt.
How Do I Get an Ear Infection?
Between your middle ear and your throat there is a passage called the eustachian (say: yoo-STAY-she-un) tube. The eustachian tubes (you have one on each side) keep pressure from building up by letting air move in and out of your middle ear. When you were young, especially before you turned 3, the eustachian tubes were very small and less able to keep germs out.
The eustachian tubes get longer and usually work better in older kids, but they can still cause problems. If you have allergies or catch a cold, the eustachian tubes can get blocked up and let germs get in the middle ear. Then the number of germs can grow inside your middle ear and cause an infection.
You do not catch ear infections from other people, though you might catch a cold that then leads to an ear infection. If you have an ear infection, you might have ear pain, a fever, or trouble hearing. If you have any of these problems, tell your parent so he or she can take you to the doctor.
What Does the Doctor Do?
The doctor will look into your ear with a special flashlight called an otoscope (say: OH-te-skope). With the otoscope, the doctor can see your eardrum, the thin membrane between your outer and middle ear.
The doctor may use the otoscope to blow a little puff of air in your ear. Why? To see if the air causes your eardrum to move the way a healthy eardrum does. An infected eardrum won't move as it should because the pus presses against it and may make it bulge. An infection also can make the eardrum red.
If you have an ear infection, the doctor will make a decision about what to do next. He or she might ask your parent to watch you over the next day or two to see if you get any better. The doctor also might suggest a pain reliever to keep you comfortable.
If bacteria are causing the problem, the doctor might prescribe a medicine called an antibiotic (say: an-ty-by-AH-tik), which usually clears up a bacterial infection, so you'll feel better in a few days.
If you are given an antibiotic, it's very important to keep taking the medicine for as many days as the doctor instructs — even if your ear stops hurting. If you don't take all the medicine, the infection could come back and your ear will start hurting again.
A kid who has chronic, or frequent, ear infections might need a few other tests. They include an audiogram (say: AW-dee-uh-gram), which tests your hearing, and a tympanogram (say: tim-PAH-noh-gram), a machine that checks whether your eardrum moves normally.
How to Prevent Ear Infections
What can kids do to prevent ear infections? You can avoid places where people are smoking, for one. Cigarette smoke can keep your eustachian tubes from working properly.
You also can try not to catch colds. These steps can help:
- Stay away from people who have colds, if possible.
- Wash your hands regularly.
- Try not to touch your nose and eyes.
Good luck staying clear of colds and keeping those pesky germs out of your ears!
Note: All information is for educational purposes only. For specific medical advice, diagnoses, and treatment, consult your doctor.
© 1995- The Nemours Foundation. KidsHealth® is a registered trademark of The Nemours Foundation. All rights reserved.
Images sourced by The Nemours Foundation and Getty Images.


text:
...Happy Bengali New Year To Every One
Poila Baishakh or the First Day of the Month of Baishakh is the first day of the Bangla Calendar. This is the Bengali New Year and is celebrated amongst Bengalis in a much festive manner. According to the Gregorian calendar it falls on April 14th or April 15th, this year it is April 15th. This is the New Year for both BanglaDesh and West Bengal.
The Bengalis usher in the New Year with a lot of festivities importance being given to cultural functions, and food. The day is started off with visiting the temples to seek blessings for the New Year but this is not a religious festival and Puja is not the mainstay of this day. Though for businesses this is the day to begin their new accounting year and so this group of people offer Puja and seek blessings to begin the year with a new accounting book called halkhata. With all the new accounting software I don't know what they do, maybe open a new fresh account or something.
For mere mortals like us it was more about a quick prayer at the temple early morning and then off to school , yes my school did not believe in Bong Calendars. Rushing back home in the afternoon, we would change into new clothes bought for the Day -- and then after devouring the sweets my Ma would have made we would rush off in the evening to attend the cultural program that our town had to offer. That was important for my parents. My Ma in her fresh new Tanter Shari with that crisp smell that only such saris can have and my Baba in his starched Pajama and Punjabi would sit there engrossed in the Rabindra Sangeet being sung. I would be thoroughly bored and look around for familiar faces of my friends who would be equally bored.
Often we would be invited by the shops we were loyal customers to and this part was more fun because it involved gorging on great food.
It is not very different here regarding the cultural functions part and I am sure the Bengali Association has things lined up for this day but I have already said about D not very keen on going there. So we usually visit the temple on this day and binge on good food.
Though the New Year is tomorrow we we extended invitations and had an early celebration with some of our friends over last weekend for dinner. Though we did not serve a typical Bengali menu this is what we had for the main dinner. The appetizers were assortment of Dhoklas, mini samosas etc.
Plain White Rice ~ like what an average Bong would prefer
Roasted Yellow Moong Dal ~ Split yellow moong dal roasted and then cooked and garnished with grated Coconut
Cat Fish Nugget er Charchari - Remember in my Charchari post I had said that Charchari might not be vegetarian and we have Fish Charchari too. In absence of the small fish like Mourala etc. we made a Fish Charchari with Cat Fish Nuggets. Tempered with Panch Phoran and with Potatoes and Brinjal to keep the Cat fish company this was the most wanted of all the food items.
Paneer in a gravy of Kaju and Posto ~ Paneer cubes simmered in a light gravy of cashew and khus khus paste
Mashla Chingri or Shrimps in Masala ~ A spicy shrimp dish
Pepper Chicken ~ This I followed Sailaja's Pepper Chicken Recipe and it was a big hit too
Pineapple Chaatni ~ The recipe is here
For Dessert
Mango Pudding
Pineapple Malpua
However since we cooked for a large crowd neither me nor my Ma took any measurments while cooking so I won't be able to post the recipes until I measure and cook again !!!
To end this post on a Sweet Note I will post the recipe for the desserts soon but you have to wait for the rest :)
Mango Pudding
Pineapple Malpua


text:
A Future Where Class Warfare Is Much More Than A Metaphor
The writer-director of District 9 returns with Elysium, a dystopian sci-fi/action story with Matt Damon as the hardscrabble hero. Jodie Foster plays the severely chic Big Bad in a saga where the rich live a literally out-of-this-world life above a dying Planet Earth.
Related Topics
Other segments from the episode on August 7, 2013
August 7, 2013
Guest: Elisabeth Rosenthal
TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Americans pay more for health care than people in many other developed countries, and my guest, Elisabeth Rosenthal, has been finding out why. She's a New York Times correspondent who's spending a year investigating the high cost of health care. The first article in her series, "Paying Till It Hurts," examined what the cost of colonoscopies reveals about our health care system.
The second explained why the American way of birth is the costliest in the world. And the third, published this week in the Times, told the story of one man who found it cheaper to fly to Belgium and have his hip replaced there than to have the surgery performed in the U.S. Rosenthal has also been investigating why costs for the same procedure can vary so much within the U.S., by thousands of dollars, depending on where it's performed.
Before becoming a journalist, Rosenthal trained as a doctor and worked in the emergency room of New York Hospital. She's also worked at the New York Times as an international environmental correspondent, a reporter in the Beijing bureau, and a metro reporter covering health and hospitals.
Elisabeth Rosenthal, welcome to FRESH AIR. What's the overall purpose of this year-long series that you're doing?
ELISABETH ROSENTHAL: It's to make Americans aware of the costs we pay for our health care. Because so many of us have insurance, and we don't see the bills, we tend to think of health care as free. Oh, why not get that colonoscopy, it doesn't cost anything. What's the difference if my hip replacement costs $100,000? I'm not paying. But in fact we're all paying.
And as we all know, medical care is a huge cost of individual bankruptcies now, co-pays and deductibles are going up, and the nation, because it pays for a lot of medical care and subsidizes a lot of medical care, just can't afford the way we're doing this anymore.
GROSS: So let's start looking at some of the costs and why things are so expensive. Your latest article in the series is on joint replacement. It focuses on a man whose insurance wouldn't pay for his hip replacement, even though he could hardly stand, because the insurance company considered it part of a pre-existing condition.
So he couldn't afford to pay for it in the United States, and he ended up going to Belgium. Can you compare what he paid in Belgium with what he would have paid in the U.S.?
ROSENTHAL: Yes, it's really shocking every time I say it. In Belgium he paid $13,660 for everything. That included his new hip implant, the surgeons' fees, the hospital fees, a week in rehab and a roundtrip plane ticket from the U.S., soup to nuts.
Now, if he had done that surgery in the U.S., it would have been billed at somewhere between $100,000 and maybe $130,000 at a private hospital. Now, insurance wouldn't have paid that much, but they would have paid maybe $60,000, $70,000. So you know, there is a huge difference. In fact, this gentleman, Mr. Chopin(ph), was a great consumer, and he had tried to have it done in the U.S., and he priced out joint implants and found that the wholesale joint implant cost that he wanted was $13,000.
So in the U.S. for that $13,000 he could get a joint, a piece of metal and plastic and ceramic, whereas in Europe he could get everything. And this is at a high-quality hospital, top-of-the-line joint, top-of-the-line surgeon, so really no difference in quality.
GROSS: You know, why is there such a big difference in just the joint itself, the artificial joint itself, a big difference in price?
ROSENTHAL: Well, the irony is that Mr. Chopin's joint that he got in Belgium was made by an American company. It's a company based in Indiana. So the fact is that we pay more for everything, even the identical thing, as people do in other countries. And that's partly because of the way we price medicine.
We don't have any, aside from Medicare and Medicaid, we don't have any national intervention in rate-setting, the way we do in electricity. So companies, when they're selling joints in the U.S., can price them however they want. You know, it's a bargaining situation between a hospital and a manufacturer, often with many intervening steps; whereas in Belgium, for example, or in France, there's a limit on what joint manufacturers, device manufacturers, can charge.
The government says we're going to make all these joints available to you, but this is what you can charge and you can't pay more, the way we do for electricity. But for some reason we're not willing to do that with health care.
GROSS: The joints, at least for hip replacement, are made by like five companies. Like most of them are made by five companies, four of which are in the United States, three of which are in a small town in Indiana called Warsaw, which is where your piece is datelined. You say some economists have described these five companies that manufacture joints as a cartel. Why?
ROSENTHAL: Well, because they don't actively work together. They emphasize this over and over again, that they don't actively set prices. But what you realize, especially when you go to a place like Warsaw, Indiana, where three of these big joint manufacturers are located, is that there's a lot of - it doesn't need to be said. It's kind of unspoken.
So you would think if five different companies were making candy bars, that would drive the price of candy bars lower, but if five different companies are making joints and trying to sell them at $10,000 apiece, it's really in no one's interest to say, hey, guess what, guys, I'm going to sell it for $1,000 because that's what it costs me to make it, because then everyone loses money, the whole industry kind of implodes.
So I think there's a lot of - you don't even need to say, hey, guys, let's cooperate on price. It just happens kind of automatically.
GROSS: And you write that generic joints or foreign-made joints have been kept out of the United States by trade policy, patents and an expensive FDA approval process that deters startups from entering the market. So does that mean that the policies we have are inhibiting the kind of competition that could drive prices down?
ROSENTHAL: Well, I suppose, depending on how you look it, at one level they're protecting us because of course you don't want low-quality joints coming into the country, but you could use the same argument as was once used for generic pharmaceuticals.
So I think at this point it's mostly inhibiting competition. Of course, you know, the FDA needs to require generic manufacturers to prove that they're manufacturing safely, that they meet high quality standards, they need their factories inspected, on and on and on. And that does make it hard for smaller manufacturers to enter this market.
But part of what makes it so difficult is just that these five companies kind of have it locked up. You know, their sales reps are in every hospital. They are at all the trade shows. They know the doctors. They know the hospital administrators. So it's just a really hard market to break into.
Now, part of that is we tend to think of the joint as just the piece of metal and plastic and ceramic, but in fact when you buy a joint from Zimmer or Biomet, which are two of the big companies, you're buying into a whole system. You're buying into a distribution system of joints.
There's a representative from the joint company in the operating room when you have that surgery. So should that person be there? I think that's a big question of ethics and economics that makes a lot of people uncomfortable, but that's the way we do it now. So it's very hard to replicate the full-service system that those five companies have now if you're a small startup, although some people are trying.
And you know, when you talk to people in the joint industry, in the joint manufacturing industry, their fear, which they'll tell you about, is uh-oh, in five to 10 years or 10 or 20 years, maybe we'll be seeing a lot more low-cost joints from Asia the way we saw TVs and air conditioners.
GROSS: So you said that there's often a representative from the joint manufacturing company in the operating room with the surgeon. What is the point of that? Is that like - I mean I know like when our printer in the office breaks, it's great to have somebody from the company come down and fix it. So I could see how maybe you'd want somebody from the manufacturer there in case there's like a technical issue. Is that why they're there?
ROSENTHAL: Yeah, I can give you the upside and the downside.
GROSS: Thank you.
ROSENTHAL: The upside is - is that, as I said, joints are not - you know, they don't exist in a vacuum. They come with these big tool kits to put them in. There are a lot of different choices. And the rationale is that if you have someone from the company there, he or she will be able to say, here, I've got the perfect wrench to get that hip in just the right place.
They know the tools backwards and forwards. They've seen a lot of joints put in. Now, the downsides are many and costly. The downsides are that obviously it costs something to have that person in the OR. It's an extra person whose salary is folded into the price of the joints. Second of all, it really ties the surgeon to a particular brand of joint.
So if a hospital says, you know what, Zimmer joints are getting really expensive, I want to buy Stryker joints next year, the surgeons will resist because they'll say, oh look, I know this guy from this one company, and they've always - you know, I know their whole system.
And the third thing is it allows for what's called up-selling in the OR, where someone will say, hmm, that hip isn't working, how about a more expensive one I have in my bag. So economically the costs are many, and it's become standard practice. It wasn't always practice to have these people in the OR, and it's certainly not the practice elsewhere in the world.
GROSS: Is it controversial in the American health care system?
ROSENTHAL: There's a lot of controversy among orthopedists about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. There's kind of a co-dependence that's evolved between the surgeons and the sales reps. And a lot of them, in fairness a lot of the orthopedists do not like this system at all, but it's hard to get the companies to say standardize all the equipment in part so you can use a generic system to implant any brand of joint.
It's not in their interest to do that. It's like saying, you know, to Apple and Microsoft we want all your programs to be completely interchangeable. At some level, at a business level, you want your brand distinct, and you want to keep people in the universe of your brand. So it's in many ways a business decision as much as a medical decision.
GROSS: Not to belabor the point here, but my guess would be that the joint replacement companies don't call the person in the operating room a sales rep. They probably call them, you know, an expert on joint replacement or something.
ROSENTHAL: They'll call them a representative or a tech, but it is the same person, generally, who, you know, does the selling. I mean the person from the company will bring the joint to the hospital because the hospitals don't routinely anymore keep them in storage. So the manufacturer stores the joint.
You say, you know, we need three - these kind of knees and two these kind of hips next week. They'll bring them in, they'll bring the equipment, they'll bring - so they kind of, it's a full-service industry. Now, that has - that makes it easy at some level for hospitals and doctors, but it also comes at a price.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Elisabeth Rosenthal, a correspondent for the New York Times, who's spending a year doing a series on health care costs, and she's just published the third of her articles. The new one that came out this week is about the cost of hip replacement and joint replacement, and previous ones were about the costs of colonoscopies and the high cost of childbirth in the United States. Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Elisabeth Rosenthal, a correspondent for the New York Times, who's devoting a year to a series examining health care costs. Her most recent piece, published this week, is about the high cost of hip and other joint replacement surgery. Previous pieces were about the high costs of colonoscopies and of childbirth.
Doctors and hospitals, you say, have to sign nondisclosure agreements about the pricing, saying that they won't reveal the prices of the joints that they're using. Why are they asked to sign these agreements, and what are the results of signing them?
ROSENTHAL: It's partly a function of the crazy way we price all health care. There are list prices, as with hospitals, as with MRI scans, that are published. The list prices of joints will be, say, $11,000 to $18,000. But hospitals don't actually pay that price. No one pays that price. There's a great deal of bargaining.
But it's - the companies really don't want hospitals to know what kind of deals they're giving out to their competitors. So you don't know if you're getting a good deal or not a good deal, and basically they don't want you to know if you're getting a good deal or not a good deal because it keeps everyone a little bit off-balance.
And in fact the bargaining system between hospitals and the joint manufacturers is so complicated, and it makes the hospitals so nervous because they don't know if they're getting a good price, they then have to go out and hire - and I didn't even know this all existed - there are joint brokers. There are joint consultants. There's this whole intervening industry of people who have grown up to tell hospitals are you getting a good deal on that joint you're purchasing.
And the problem is, of course, that each of those layers charges another 10 percent. So even if a hospital does bargain for a good price on the joint, they get the 7,500 price, there'll be added fees from the joint broker and the joint negotiator and the joint biller, and the last step is the hospital will mark up the joint too because they've spent all of this time and effort negotiating for it, that they want to factor that in, and they want to make some profit off this too.
You know, everyone is in a little bit of the mode, oh, well, the joint manufacturer is making this much money, so why shouldn't I, and I think it's kind of a feeding frenzy, and of course what everyone's feeding on are our insurance dollars and our medical bills and our health. So that's not good.
GROSS: You write that joint manufacturers in the United States paid a $311 million settlement to the Justice Department regarding accusations that the joint makers were paying kickbacks to surgeons back in 2007, and that year nearly 1,000 orthopedists in the United States received a total of about $200 million in payments from joint manufacturers for consulting, royalties and other activities.
Is that considered kickbacks?
ROSENTHAL: Well, I think it's the other activities which raised a lot of eyebrows. Yes, the accusation at the time, and there's still ongoing concern, was that some of these payments were the kinds of things that happen in a lot of medical specialties that the doctors' world have grappled with for many years now.
You know, if you are an orthopedic surgeon and you're paid $20,000 to speak about the wonders of joint replacement by the company whose joints you use, is that a kickback, is that a speaking fee? You know, there are a lot of gray areas. So we know that some of those payments went for legitimate research that you want orthopedists to be doing, but the suspicion, and I think the size of that fine and the size of the money that was paid out, leads you to believe that some of it was just kind of a loyalty payment.
GROSS: So now that we've talked about some of the costs and some of the hidden costs of joints for joint replacement surgery in the U.S., compare that to Belgium, where the person you profile decided to go for his hip replacement surgery because it wasn't covered by insurance and he couldn't afford the cost of doing it in the United States.
So how do they make it so cheap in Belgium, $13,000 as compared to what were the prices he was quoted here?
ROSENTHAL: So here it would have ended up costing over $100,000. He didn't price it out all the way because once the hospital came back and said our share will be 68,000, and then he knew the joint was 13, he kind of said, uh-uh, this is not going to work for me in the U.S.
So there are many, many differences. The first one is that the joint implant itself is priced by the country. Well, different countries do it differently. Some have a national negotiation, where they'll say we're going to purchase Stryker joints for all of our hospitals. So they have tremendous bargaining power, and they get a much better rate.
Others, like Belgium and France, set an allowed rate that can be charged for that particular joint in that country. So if you look in Belgium or in France, there are lists of all the joints, and this is what you can pay for them, and you can mark them up but only by $180 for the patient.
So it's - pricing is very, very regulated. Another big difference is that hospital day charges are three or four times as much in the U.S. as in most other countries. So even though routinely for most procedures in other countries patients stay in the hospital longer, their hospital bills are much less.
Then again, they tend to see things as a package. I think one of the most striking things is, in the U.S. hospital bill for a joint replacement, you see things like operating room fees, $13,000; recovery room fees, $6,000; facility fees, you know, X thousands of dollars. If you look at a European bill, those things don't exist.
And you know, in fact it was kind of funny when I started on this series, although sad in another way. When I would call some of the European hospitals and say, well, what's your facility fee on that, what's your operating room fee, and they kind of - there was this puzzled pause at the other end of the line where they said, what do you mean an operating room fee? You can't do the surgery without an operating room.
It's just, you know, that's part of our day rate for the hospital. It's all included. So that's a huge difference. You know, that doesn't even exist. And then also down to the smaller items, when you look at pharmacy charges for European hospitals, where sometimes they are broken out - you'll see every medicine is less than a euro or, you know, a dollar, whereas on U.S. bills you see the things that people always notice and complain about: heating pad, $90; warming blanket, $30; Tylenol, $4.
So you know, it's really everything, which is what's striking. It's just everything.
GROSS: Elisabeth Rosenthal will be back in the second half of the show. Her New York Times series on the high costs of health care is called "Paying Till It Hurts." I'm Terry Gross and this is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Elizabeth Rosenthal, a New York Times correspondent who's doing a year-long investigation into the high cost of health care in America. Her series is called "Paying Till It Hurts." The first article was about colonoscopies, the second childbirth; the third - which was published this week - is about the high cost of hip and other joint replacements. She profiled one man whose insurance wouldn't cover his hip replacement. He saved tens of thousands of dollars by flying to Belgium and having the surgery performed there.
When we left off, Rosenthal was explaining that in many developed countries - like Belgium - there's a set price for the whole procedure. But in the U.S., every part of the procedure is priced a la carte - from the joint itself, to the operating room, the recovery room, and each pill and medication.
So how come we itemize in the United States all the different - all, you know, the operating room and the recovery room fee and the individual Tylenol and other countries don't?
ROSENTHAL: Well, I think some of it has to do with...
ROSENTHAL: You know, the answer I kept getting over and over again in the series from economists is because you can. You know, if you're thinking of - if you are a profit-making hospital or hospital that needs to balance its budget or a practice that wants to make money, you look how to - and I hate this word - monetize what you do and get the most revenue from it. And you know, if you bundle in everything and say, well, the Tylenol's included in the price of the room, you know, you make less money than if you say, we're charging you, you know, a la carte for everything we do. And part of the problem is our system allows that. In most other systems there's - you just legally can't do that. So you know, the interesting thing is I think there are some interesting projects on the horizon that are being tried for American health care, where insurers or companies offer a bundled price and the hospital has to figure out a way to do it for that price. I mean that's how Medicare pays for inpatient care, so - and that's a lot of why Medicare charges are much less than the fee-for-service charges. You know, we're really the only country that pays for medicine that way, I think, or one of the few.
GROSS: If I understand you correctly, one of the reasons why a la carte pricing is so expensive is that everything that you're paying for a la carte has an individual markup. So you're paying markups on everything as opposed to like just one general markup.
ROSENTHAL: Yes. I think that's right. And if you say, well, OK, I'm paying - and this is literally off a bill from an orthopedic hospital in New York - you're billing me $15,000 for operating, the operating room costs. Well, what does that include? Oh, it doesn't include the blood pressure cuff? Oh, it doesn't include the anesthesia drugs? It does - so you know, it kind of includes walking in the door or being rolled in the door, because it's an operating room. So, you know, it just, it's a way to - it's called unbundling, is the medical term. But it really adds to the cost.
GROSS: So the person who you profile in your article on the cost of hip replacement decided to go to Belgium for his surgery because his insurance wasn't paying for it and it was tens of thousands of dollars cheaper there than it would have been in the United States. Belgium has mandatory national health insurance. It requires contributions from employers and workers and then that pays for 80 percent and the other 20 percent you have to pay for yourself - though apparently a lot of people or most people have supplemental insurance to cover that 20 percent.
ROSENTHAL: Mm-hmm.
GROSS: So what are some of the differences between what you get in Belgium - in terms not just of health care, but like of amenities...
ROSENTHAL: Right.
GROSS: ...and what you'd get at, say, you know, a good American hospital?
ROSENTHAL: Right. And I think one of the things that got me thinking about the costs of health care in the U.S. was that I had been a correspondent overseas for a number of years. I trained as a doctor originally, so I was very familiar with, before becoming a journalist, with U.S. hospitals, but then spent 10 years overseas - first in Beijing and then in Europe. And so I experienced a lot of different health systems. And when you go into a hospital in Stockholm or Rome, it has a very different feel. The care I got there was superb - I have to say - in both places when I needed it. But, you know, there was a Starbucks in the lobby. There weren't waterfalls or a lot of potted plants. It was very utilitarian. And you know, I think Michael Shopenn, the patient I profiled, he was funny. He said when he first pulled up to the hospital in Belgium, he was like, oh my, I'm not sure I want to be here because it doesn't look fancy. But the infection rates are among the lowest in the world in Belgium. The care is superb. So you know, we tend to focus on, oh, wasn't this a great, I love this doctor's office, you get free coffee. Well, right, it's free coffee but we're paying a huge price for that free coffee.
GROSS: We just talked about joint replacement surgery. Let's move on to the cost of childbirth. And in your article about childbirth you profiled a couple, man and a woman, both professionals, who have health insurance but their health insurance did not cover childbirth. So they tried to price different hospitals and see what would it cost so that they could go with a place that might be relatively affordable. And they had a really hard time pricing it. Why was it so hard?
ROSENTHAL: Well, because even most hospitals don't know what they charge. Again, it partly comes back to this a la carte pricing. You know, well, how much does a pregnancy cost? It depends. Are you going to need for scans or three scans or six cans? But the range, even given the variability of pregnancy, the range was pretty astounding. This couple I profiled in New Hampshire - Renee Martin and her husband Mark - they went to their local hospital and said, well, what's this going to cost us, after they got pregnant. And the estimate they were given was between $4,000 and $45,000. So how can you plan for that if you're trying to be responsible?
GROSS: Right. Now, you also compare American health care costs for childbirth with European countries. And give us a sense of, you know, what the comparison is.
ROSENTHAL: Well, most European countries - I mean it's almost hard to even do an economic comparison because most countries feel that childbirth is a right, it's vital for perpetuating your citizenry and your country, and so there really shouldn't be a cost disincentive for having a child. So even though you could - you can come up with a cost for childbirth in other countries, patients almost always aren't actually paying it. It's the cost to the system. So the cost to the system - or the cost if you were coming from outside and for some reason were to have your baby in France or Great Britain, so anyway, the cost in other countries tends to be in the $5,000 range, often much lower - as opposed to here 20,000.
GROSS: And do you think the health care in European countries is inferior to what we get in the United States for childbirth?
ROSENTHAL: Well, if we're looking at infant mortality or maternal mortality rates, we're inferior to care in Europe. I think we tend to get more medicalized care. We have more use of scans. But I don't think that means we have better care. You know, we have this - again, because we pay one by one by one, we kind of have this more is better attitude or more is, you know, why not check and see if the baby is in good position? Why not check and see if the baby is growing? Whereas in most other countries the care of a pregnant woman is kind of dictated by - purely by medicine, what needs to be done. So it's in these European countries they aren't getting their prenatal testing and they're not getting their prenatal scans. They are. They're just not getting as many as we do because we kind of tend to use a lot of them for like to know rather than need to know. And again, that gets very, very expensive.
The other big thing which you see in most other health systems is there is a much greater use of non-M.D. pregnancy providers - like nurse midwives, doulas, general practitioners for the early stages of pregnancy. We tend to go right to the OB, whereas in most other countries obstetricians tend to be the doctors who take the complicated cases. And you know what? I think it's partly your cultural perception of what's proper and needed and your expectation. People in Europe say they love the way they gave birth, whereas people here, some of them might say, well, where is my obstetrician? This makes me nervous.
GROSS: And, as we found out with this couple that you followed, childbirth isn't always covered by insurance. Now, that's about to change because under Obamacare, starting in January, insurance has to cover the cost of childbirth, right?
ROSENTHAL: Yes. One of the great things that the Affordable Care Act will do is it will say that pregnancy services have to be covered in insurance policies. Because until now, many, many insurance policies purchased on the individual market, more than half, didn't cover childbirth. Now, that's pretty shocking, and it was particularly shocking to those couples who thought, wow, I've done the right thing, I've gone out and bought insurance, only to discover that there is a little clause saying, sorry, not for pregnancy. But I think going forward, the thing we have to be concerned about is, well, what do you mean when you say maternity care is covered or pregnancy is covered? Because what you see in patients who have coverage for maternity is that there is a lot of stuff that's carved out. You know, the same thing we see in other parts of medicine - OK, you have to have pregnancy coverage. Well, will that cover midwife care if I want to go to a midwife? What we see now is that a lot of policies that cover pregnancy say, oh no, not a midwife. So if you want to go to a midwife, that's, you know, $2,000 of your own money. Will it cover pain control during pregnancy - epidural anesthesia, if you choose that? Again, not clear. So when you say it's covered, as we all have seen in our own insurance policies, that doesn't necessarily mean that your costs will be taken care of. So I think we need to very careful about defining what coverage is.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Elisabeth Rosenthal. She's a correspondent for The New York Times. We're talking about a year-long series that she's working on about the high cost of health care in the United States. And the article that was just published is about the high cost of joint replacement surgery. Earlier articles were about the high cost of childbirth and of colonoscopies.
Let's take a short break and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.
GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Elisabeth Rosenthal. She's a correspondent for The New York Times who is doing a year-long series on the high cost of medicine in the United States. This week she published her article on joint replacement surgery and why that's so expensive compared to European countries. Earlier articles were on colonoscopies and the cost of childbirth.
Any other big picture things you want to mention to us about childbirth costs?
ROSENTHAL: I think the big thing that really surprised me was...
ROSENTHAL: Oh, I also want to thank all of the readers who have sent in their comments because I've learned a tremendous amount from the comments. Another pretty shocking thing I learned from our reader comments was that, you know, pregnancy is nine months and co-pays and deductibles reset every January 1. So I heard from a number of people who, you know, became pregnant in, say, 2012 and delivered in 2013, had $5,000 deductible policies, so ended up paying 5,000 in 2012 and 5,000 in 2013, which is kind of crazy.
GROSS: Wow. I never would've thought of that.
ROSENTHAL: Yeah. So this is why I say, you know, being covered for a pregnancy or a procedure, the devil is in the details, the way insurance policies are written today.
Yeah. And I should add, you know, with respect to pregnancy, I mean, gosh, it's a stressful enough time as it is. You know, it's joyful, it's stressful, you're worried about your new baby, you're worried, you know, every time it moves. You're like, oh, is everything OK? And when you talk to couples like the one I profiled, I mean these were really great people who were spending a pregnancy and are now spending their post, you know, time with their new daughter just worried about how they're going to pay for it. And that to me is a really sorry state of affairs. And it makes them very vulnerable too because when you're shopping while you're pregnant and a doctor says, hmm, you know, maybe we should get this heart scan, it's your, you know, your unborn child. You're not going to say, oh, I don't know, I don't think it's worth a thousand bucks to me. You're going to say I'll find a way to pay for it. So it's a very - it's kind of like a financial minefield in some way when instead it should be this wonderful part of your life filled with, you know, joy and anticipation.
GROSS: Is the series that you're doing on health care costs affecting how you approach your own health care?
ROSENTHAL: Well, you know, I think I said I trained as a physician. I worked in an ER for a few years before converting to journalism, as it was, 20 years ago. I've always been a pretty conscious shopper of health care. But the problem is even if you're a good consumer you really can't be in the U.S. So, I waste a lot of time on the phone trying to be a good consumer.
You know, my husband recently had a clot in his leg and had to get heparin shots for that. And I went to the pharmacy and the pharmacist said, oh, sorry, this is going to cost you $1,263. And I was like what? That's ridiculous. You know, this is an old medicine. It should - and, you know, meanwhile I'm worried that my husband is going to have a clot go to his lungs.
So, I, you know, don't argue as long as I should. But I think the problem is that even if you're a really savvy consumer who knows a lot, it's really hard to find out prices and when you're shopping for medicine it's not like generally shopping for, you know, a car or a new couch where you can take your time. You know, my husband needed that heparin that night. So what bargaining power did I have?
Even though I knew it was overpriced. So I guess part of my goal in doing the series is to put this topic into the national conversation. I think so many people experience this as I did two weeks ago at the pharmacy counter or when they open their explanation of benefits at home as, you know, Susan Foley, one of the hip patients in the last story, did and say, wow, these prices are ridiculous.
But then, you know, life goes on. Probably you're not paying them and if you have good insurance, or at least not paying the full amount. And anyway, no one - there's nothing on the ballot to check and say I'm unhappy about healthcare pricing. And so my goal in doing the series and The Times' goal I think was to hopefully start a national conversation about these prices. Because they really are bankrupting not just the country but individuals as well.
I mean, I can't tell you how many commenters we've heard back from who've said, you know, health care is now the leading budget item for my family, above housing. Now, that's really, really a shame - to me, at least.
GROSS: You know, so many people are really frustrated with their insurance company because of the high cost of premiums and co-pays and things that aren't covered. But if you look at the larger system, as you're trying to do in this year-long series on health care costs, can you single out any one part of the system and say this is where the problem is? These are the bad guys. Or is, like, is the problem, like, divided every step of the way?
ROSENTHAL: I think the problem, and what makes it so hard to solve, is that it's everywhere. And I feel bad saying that, because, I mean, certainly there are way too many administrative layers and I kind of have to laugh a little bit because the emails I get after each story are, like, oh, yes, there's a problem. It's all, well, we have a consulting service that will make that more efficient.
So the way we've solved every inefficiency is to bring in another layer. So I think it's everyone. And it's partly, you know, our expectations in the sense of, wow, we want a private delivery room with, you know, good wi-fi and great coffee. I mean, some of these hospitals, they're competing the way universities compete. You know, we have a great gym. We have room service. I mean, that's not really the essence of health care.
So I think if that's what we demand, we're really tracking our health care dollars in the wrong direction. So I think it's every part of the system needs to rethink the way it's working. Or maybe what I'm really saying is that we need a system, instead of 20, 40 components each one having its own financial model and each one making a profit.
GROSS: Elisabeth Rosenthal, thank you so much for talking with us.
ROSENTHAL: Oh, thank you.
GROSS: Elisabeth Rosenthal is a New York Times correspondent and is writing a series on the high costs of health care in America. You'll find links to her first three articles about colonoscopies, childbirth and joint replacements on our website freshair.npr.org.
TERRY GROSS, HOST: "Elysium" is this year's latest dystopian sci-fi movie set on a dead or dying Earth. It was written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, who made the 2009 hit "District 9." It stars Matt Damon as a worker on the ruined, overpopulated planet and Jodie Foster as the defense secretary who guards an orbiting space refuge for the very rich. Film critic David Edelstein has this review.
DAVID EDELSTEIN, BYLINE: "Elysium" begins with a good, angry, satirical premise: It's the year 2154, and Earth has been polluted to the point where the rich have decamped for a humongous, ring-shaped super-space-station in orbit - a paradise of manicured lawns, swimming pools, robot servants and even machines that cure cancer in, like, 15 seconds.
It's called Elysium, and, down below, the poor in their dirty slums gaze on it like the brass ring on an old merry-go-round. But it's hard for them to immigrate. Elysium's defense secretary welcomes illegals with guided missiles. The writer-director is 33-year-old South African Neill Blomkamp, who in his Oscar-nominated sci-fi action picture "District 9" re-imagined apartheid with giant shrimp from outer space.
There's nothing as audacious in "Elysium," but then this is a studio film with major stars. Matt Damon plays Max, a luckless parolee who once had big dreams but is now beaten down. He wants only to keep his dangerous factory job and stay out of trouble. The problem is that he has a way of mouthing off to authority figures, especially a cheap-looking robotic dummy that won't let him speak.
MATT DAMON: (as Max) Hello. Uh, before we start I'd just to explain...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (as robot) Max DeCosta. Violation of penal code 2219 today at bus stop 34B.
DAMON: (as Max) Yes. That's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. You see, I believe there's been a misunderstanding.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (as robot) Immediate extension of parole by a further eight months.
DAMON: (as Max) Wait. What? No, no, no. No, no. I can explain what happened. I just made a joke and, uh, you know...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (as robot) Stop talking. Elevation in heart rate detected. Would you like a pill?
DAMON: (as Max) No. Thank you. What I'd like to do is explain...
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (as robot) Stop talking. Personality matrix adjusts a 78.3 percent chance ore regression to old behavior patterns - grand theft auto, assault with a deadly weapon, resisting arrest. Would you like to talk to a human?
DAMON: (as Max) (in robotic voice) No. I am OK. Thank you.
UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (as robot) Are you being sarcastic and/or abusive?
DAMON: (as Max) (in robot voice) Negative.
EDELSTEIN: If the rest of "Elysium" were like that, it would be golden. But director Blomkamp uses his ripe conceit and twisty, stylish, state-of-the-art techniques in the service of a plot more suited to 19th-century melodrama. Jodie Foster plays the defense secretary of the orbiting Elysium. The person who orders space ships bearing families destroyed in defiance of a president who tells her just to send them back to Earth.
So she plots to take him out by getting a robotics mogul, played by William Fichtner, to shut down and reboot Elysium, which would make her president. It sounds ridiculous to me, too, but then nothing about Foster's performance makes sense. Her accent is either English, South African or Martian - it's hard to tell; it's different in every scene.
And she moves more stiffly than the robots. Foster joins the ranks of outspoken liberals who can't manage to play their political opposites. Damon is much better, but still not convincing. After Max gets a lethal dose of radiation in a factory, he has one motivation - not to die. That takes precedence over doing good things: joining some rebels or even helping the adorably inquisitive cancer-ridden daughter of his childhood companion, Frey, played by Alice Braga.
But I'm sorry, Damon looks and acts like too much of a sweetie. You can see his moral trajectory from miles away, from his crisis of conscience to the face-off against the paramilitary psycho villain played by the star of "District 9," Sharlto Copley. Director Blomkamp makes up for the creaky plotting by shooting everything with a hand-held camera that's always super-tight on the actors.
So when Max gets pummeled by fists and lethal objects, we get pummeled by light and noise and rock-'em-sock-'em editing. The action is thrilling. "Elysium" revs you up, and on its own dumb terms delivers. But it's less fun when Blomkamp blows something up than when he sends it up, as he does the incorrigible insensitivity of the rich, or the absence of empathy in robots programmed to punish the poor for showing impudence.
The rest of the movie is lowest-common-denominator stuff. It also seems programmed, by studio executives who dream of grabbing the brass ring right here, right now.
GROSS: David Edelstein is film critic for New York Magazine. We'll close with a recording featuring the keyboard player George Duke who died Monday from complications after being treated for leukemia. He was 67. He started out as a jazz pianist but also played keyboards with rock and funk bands. And he played for many years with Frank Zappa. This is a 1972 Zappa recording featuring George Duke on electric piano. I'm Terry Gross.
Transcripts are created on a rush deadline, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of Fresh Air interviews and reviews are the audio recordings of each segment.


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So here's my plan to shake things up. I think I'm going to skip forward a couple patterns to the background dress. Mostly because it's a long-sleeved dress and it's the dead of winter here. And I have the pattern in a 34" bust size, which isn't too hard for me to size up to fit me.
So I'm TEMPORARILY skipping over the little girl's party dress (which I've decided is boring because apparently I'm a selfish seamstress - like some other people - and I don't feel like making clothing that isn't for me).
I'm also skipping (for now) the full-skirted dress which I LOVE but is more spring-like and I unfortunately could only find in a bust size 32" which sounds impossibly tiny to me. I know I'll have to do some pattern grading, and I'd like to put that off as long as possible.
So the background dress it is! It's a lovely frock on the model, though I do worry about a potential dowdiness factor in real life. Here's the pattern:
What do you think? Any tips for fitting and styling this so it's not too dowdy?


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What, you're still here? Ok, fine, here's some background info:
Well, this year I was honored to have Cake Wrecks included on the famous list! Here it is, clue #79:
And here are the submissions! [drum roll, please]
From the GASH Team, a "My Little Pony":
From Breckinridge House's team: a "thrillin' failure" (their words) of Michael Jackson:
(True story: When John & I first saw this he asked who it was supposed to be, and I guessed "Edward." I'm not sure who that insults more: Twi-hards or Team Breckinridge. So...sorry, everyone.)
From Sonia A.'s team, a "wooden labyrinth game":
The Federation of Independent Scav Teams claims this is a wreckplica of several items on the list:
From Macpierce's Master Chef Allison:


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Nearly 60 percent of respondents to a recent McKinsey survey1 say that building organizational capabilities such as lean operations or project or talent management is a top-three priority for their companies. Yet only a third of companies actually focus their training programs on building the capability that adds the most value to their companies' business performance.
We defined a capability as anything an organization does well that drives meaningful business results. The survey explored which capabilities are most critical to a company's business performance and why they focus on the capabilities they do. It also asked executives how their companies create and manage training and skill-development programs and how effective those programs are in maintaining or improving on their priority capabilities.
It's notable that the majority of companies don't focus on a specific priority capability for purely competitive reasons; most often, the reason is that the capability is part of their culture. Further, some three-quarters of respondents don't think their companies are good at building the capability that is most important. When senior executives are involved in setting the capabilities agenda, companies are more successful at aligning those agendas with the capability most important to performance and more effective at building the needed skills.
A strategic priority
Companies can gain a competitive advantage by building foundational capabilities such as lean operations and project management or industry-specific capabilities such as merchandising or underwriting. Indeed, executives say building capabilities is a top priority for their companies: 58 percent of respondents say it's among their companies' top three priorities, and 90 percent place it among the top ten.
Even in the context of the current financial crisis, 29 percent of respondents say their companies have not changed their training budgets; 11 percent have actually increased them.
Notably, however, the most common reason respondents give for their companies' focus on the capability identified as most important to business performance is that the skill is a part of their companies' culture, rather than any competitive reason (Exhibit 1).
Why companies focus on building capabilities
Lack of alignment
Despite the importance of capability building on the strategic agenda, executives' responses indicate they're not very good at executing: only about a quarter think their companies' training programs are "extremely" or "very effective" in preparing various employee groups to drive business performance or improve the overall performance of their companies (Exhibit 2).
The survey results also indicate a potential explanation: training programs are misaligned with what is thought to be the capability most important to a company's business performance. Only 33 percent of respondents say their training and skill-development programs focus on developing their companies' most important capability.
Leadership skill, for example, is considered by the majority of respondents to be the capability that contributes most to performance. Yet only 35 percent of respondents say they focus on it. And only 36 percent of executives consider their companies better than competitors at leadership development.
Room for improvement
In addition, companies do not focus on day-to-day activities that could maintain or improve the capability that contributes the most to their business performance. For example, only 41 percent of respondents whose companies focus on supply chain management spend time defining roles, responsibilities, and decision rights for key positions, and just 39 percent set targets and track metrics.
Ineffective training methods
Companies tend to rely on on-the-job teaching (60 percent of respondents use this method "exclusively" or "extensively"), but no more than a third use any other method of training extensively (Exhibit 3). As companies try to replicate or scale up their training across more geographies, alternative ways of delivering it will become necessary. In addition, our experience shows that on-the-job training is most effective when it is reinforced through some sort of formal teaching and feedback loop.
Respondents at companies whose training programs are effective in maintaining or improving the drivers of business performance also say their companies pay more attention to tools that support or enable capability building, such as standard operating procedures, IT systems, and target setting and metric tracking.
Training methods
What else goes wrong
Companies also struggle to measure the impact of training on business performance: 50 percent of respondents say their companies keep track of direct feedback, and at best 30 percent use any other kind of metric. In addition, a third of respondents don't know the return on their companies' training investment. Because companies don't know the impact of training, they appear to set their agendas using different measures, including prioritizing by employee role, which may not actually result in the most impact to the bottom line.
Executives at companies where training is reported to be least effective, for example, are more likely to invest in training for the leadership team and least likely to spend on the front line—despite this group's more immediate impact on operations. In contrast, effective companies invest the most in training the front line (Exhibit 4).
In addition, although resistance to change is often viewed as a barrier to building new capabilities, almost as many respondents to this survey identified a lack of resources and an unclear vision as barriers (Exhibit 5).
Opportunity at the front line
Top challenges
When senior leaders engage
Seventy percent of senior executives say capability building is among their companies' top three priorities, compared with 58 percent of respondents overall and 48 percent of respondents in HR (Exhibit 6). Accordingly, when senior leaders set the training agenda, capability building is more often explicitly linked to immediate business goals than when other groups do so. For example, 38 percent of respondents at companies where senior leaders are involved in setting the training agenda say their companies' key training and skill-development programs are focused on building or maintaining the companies' number one skill priority, compared with 28 percent at companies where HR sets the agenda. Further, at companies where senior leaders set the agenda, 17 percent spend between 6 percent and 10 percent of their operating budget on training and skill development, compared with the much lower 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively, who spend the same at companies where HR or business unit leaders set the agenda.
Perhaps not surprisingly, at companies where senior executives set the training agenda, the training and skill-development programs are seen as more effective in driving business performance, though there is still much room for improvement. When senior leaders set the agenda, a quarter of the respondents view the program as effective, compared with 20 percent overall.
A strategic priority
Looking ahead
Companies need to be more deliberate in understanding which capabilities truly impact business performance and align their training programs accordingly. Those that focus on leadership skill development are likelier to consider their training programs effective in improving business performance.
When senior leaders set the agenda for building capabilities, those agendas are more often aligned with the capability most important to performance.
Most companies focus on the capability executives say is most important to business performance because it's a part of the companies' culture, not for any competitive reason. While culture is a strong driver of effective capability building, companies that focus on certain capabilities for competitive reasons rather than cultural ones gain a stronger competitive advantage.


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Brain-Observatory-Toolbox. (2018).
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