Potato Farming Leads to Greater Things 

Linda Sanford grew up on a potato farm on Long Island. She says that growing up on the farm gave her a strong work ethic that she values tremendously today. According to a story on Newsday.com, Sanford said everyone in the family contributed to the farm.  

“We all worked,” she said. “We were moving irrigation pipes or picking vegetables, or helping to plant, or we were driving trucks and tractors. You rolled up your sleeves and you got the job done.”

Eventually, Sanford found herself working and earning about $300 a week in a job in the typewriter division of a Lexington, Ky., business. Sanford later landed IBM’s top sales post. She was the first woman to ever fill this job. She sold computer equipment around the world and oversaw a 17,000-person unit. She flew overseas for business meetings on a regular basis. Sanford is now vice president of IBM’s internal On Demand Transformation and Information Technology initiative.

Sanford said when she starts feeling down or overwhelmed she remembers the farm and what her parents and grandparents told her repeatedly: “If you work hard and do what you need to do, good things will happen.”  

They Can See It In Your Face

One of the world’s foremost experts on facial expressions and how they relate to deceit said he first began to develop deceit identification skills when he was a bouncer in a Buffalo, NY, bar. Mark Frank, an associate communications professor at the University of Buffalo, a social psychologist and revolutionary researcher, said he taught himself to spot behavior that indicated patrons were underage, packing lead or looking for a fight. He added he developed a sixth sense that helped him identify when people were trying to get away with something.

Frank’s work now indicates that when people are being deceptive, they expose themselves by a series of microexpressions of the facial muscles in conjunction with other behavioral cues. Frank said he wants to make it clear that these expressions by themselves or even in a series mean nothing and are not a sweeping indictment of anyone, but only have meaning in context with other cues.

However, J.J. Newberry, who was formerly a senior special agent with the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, said Frank’s methods are “uncanny.” In fact, his methods are considered so effective and accurate that he has been called upon by judges, the office of Homeland Security and even Scotland Yard to assist in investigations.

Frank’s mentor was Paul Ekman, known as the world’s foremost expert in reading facial expressions. Ekman did research on expressions and found that there were facial expressions linked to emotions that were identical from culture to culture. He established a numbering system for each of the movements that created facial expressions, for instance, 1 is left and right eyebrows up, 2 is the eyebrows pulled together, and so forth.  

Frank took this work, which identified movement associated with the 44 human facial muscles and linked them to things like fear, distress and deception. He developed computer programs that took Ekman’s numbering and made it instantly accessible. What used to take three hours of painstaking stop, rewind, start video viewing to assess one minute of facial movement could now be done almost instantly.  

“What we have done is quantify it, automate it, prove its effectiveness and teach it very effectively,” Frank said. 

One example of these microexpressions is the genuine smile, which involves the muscles around the mouth and the eyes. If someone just tells you to smile, only the mouth gets involved. Then there’s the “yes, you caught me and don’t you love me, I’m such a scamp.” First the face smiles, then the corners turn down. Next the chin is raised, the lips are pressed together slightly and the eyes roll. Finally, a sure sign of anger is the narrowing of the red margin of the lips. This movement is very hard to do voluntarily, For more information, check out Ekman’s book, What the Face Reveals.