May 2009 Archives
If reality TV is good for anything, it's explaining game theory. Check out this clip of a UK show based around the prisoner's dilemma for instance.
The prisoner's dilemma as explained by The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:
In the traditional version of the game, the police have arrested two suspects and are interrogating them in separate rooms. Each can either confess, thereby implicating the other, or keep silent. No matter what the other suspect does, each can improve his own position by confessing. If the other confesses, then one had better do the same to avoid the especially harsh sentence that awaits a recalcitrant holdout. If the other keeps silent, then one can obtain the favorable treatment accorded a state's witness by confessing.
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Tags: economics, television
[Disclaimer: I realize this is probably not funny to anyone but me. But it makes me laugh every time I think about it so I'm making you all listen.]
Yesterday I had this ridiculous idea that I should start an online shoe store or something (like a competitor to Zappos) and instead of offering free shipping, I offer free shrimping (like I have a shrimp boat and when you buy a product you can come shrimping one morning).
[Okay, you can now carry on with whatever you were doing.]
Update (5/31/09): Apprently there's some unsavory definition for shrimping (which I will not be Googling). I was not aware of this when writing this post and was using the Forrest Gump definition where you own a shrimp boat and go out and catch shrimp. Okay, glad that we've got that cleared up.
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Tags: badhumor, funny
MarketingCharts (which I must admit has become one of my favorite sites) points to a study about the increasing uniqueness of baby names:
Researchers found that in 1955, nearly one-third (32%) of boys received one of the ten most popular names, but by 2007, less than 10% got a common name.
For girls, the percentage receiving common names is even lower. In 1955, about one in four (22%) girls received one of the ten most popular names. By 2007 it had dropped to only 8%.
The article (and study apparently) go on to make some assumptions about what effect this shift may have (including increased narcissism). While I'm not sure I agree with those, it's fun to think about why this shift has happened and what effect it may have.
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Tags: babies, names
I swear I read stuff other than The New Yorker, but here is another pointer: This week's issue has a great article about the costs of healthcare and their inverse relationship to the level of care patients receive. At the heart of the issue is a series of misaligned incentives:
There is no insurance system that will make the two aims match perfectly. But having a system that does so much to misalign them has proved disastrous. As economists have often pointed out, we pay doctors for quantity, not quality. As they point out less often, we also pay them as individuals, rather than as members of a team working together for their patients. Both practices have made for serious problems.
Dr. Jay Parkinson writes about a lot of this stuff and is worth reading as well (I've also been covering a little bit about health economics over at GE Adventure).
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Tags: economics, healthcare
A few weeks ago my grandma asked me about Twitter (for whatever it's worth) and over the last few months both my parents have gotten accounts. In thinking about this, it's kind of a perfect platform for parents looking to keep up with their adult children. I realized in a conversation this morning that the answer to the common Twitter question, "who cares what I ate for breakfast?" is your mom. She wants to know that you stubbed your toe, ate a hamburger and went back and forth to Atlanta yesterday (the last actually happened). It's exactly this sort of information that keeps you close to your loved ones (though obviously more detail would be nice, but that can always be provided in your other interactions).
Anyway, just thinking out loud.
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Tags: communication, twitter
Mark offers up some good advice on when market research is appropriate:
It's only if - as classical economics and many of our 'commonsense' rule of thumb "I'm-just-a-practical-fella" kinds of models assume - individuals are actually choosing independently of each other that you might find asking them what they like about the thing or what they feel etc of some use.
This is something I've tried to explain often to folks in reference to brand tags. I won't add brands that no one knows about because the data you get back will be useless: If people don't yet have a perception of your brand than asking them will only force a false response.
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Tags: marketing, research
Cities, it turns out, tend to grow in the same sort of ways.
Mathematician Steve Strogatz (who was a mentor of Duncan Watts) has an excellent guest column column up at the Olivia Judson blog about the math of cities. In it he outlines some recent (and not-so-recent) discoveries in how cities scale and develop fairly consistently. As Strogatz waxes at the end:
These numerical coincidences seem to be telling us something profound. It appears that Aristotle's metaphor of a city as a living thing is more than merely poetic. There may be deep laws of collective organization at work here, the same laws for aggregates of people and cells.
It was also interesting to compare the following quote with something Paul Krugman wrote about Hong Kong last week. First Strogatz, "Keep in mind that this pattern emerged on its own. No city planner imposed it, and no citizens conspired to make it happen. Something is enforcing this invisible law, but we're still in the dark about what that something might be." Now Krugman:
Hong Kong, with its incredible cluster of tall buildings stacked up the slope of a mountain, is the way the future was supposed to look. The future -- the way I learned it from science-fiction movies -- was supposed to be Manhattan squared: vertical, modernistic, art decoish.
What the future mainly ended up looking like instead was Atlanta -- sprawl, sprawl, and even more sprawl, a landscape of boxy malls and McMansions. Bo-ring.
The future is never as "pretty" as we would imagine it and when we try to impose that false image what we're often left with is something that may look fine for a year, or even five, but won't age much past that. Kind of interesting to think that part of the reason is that there is something organic and natural happening as cities sprout and when we impose false barriers we're somehow standing in the way. With that said, there are laws in ever major city in the world, so who's to say what's "natural" and what's not?
No real conclusion here, just some interesting stuff to think about (and a realization that I need to read some more from Strogatz). Oh, and the Hong Kong thing was especially interesting because I'm supposed to be going there in a few weeks, so if you have any tips on things to do/people to see while I'm there, please leave a comment or drop a line.
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** THIS IS A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT **
If you, like me, were charged an early termination fee from T-Mobile when you jumped to the iPhone you may be eligible to take part in a class action lawsuit:
The Settlement Class includes all subscribers to T-Mobile with personal accounts who paid or were charged a flat-rate Early Termination Fee ("ETF") (generally $ 200) from July 23, 1999 to February 19, 2009, and/or have or had a contract for service with T-Mobile that included a flat-rate ETF from July 23, 1999 to February 19, 2009.
Go get your money!
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Tags: classaction, law, mobile, tmobile
From a recent research paper comes a puzzling idea:
By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men.
Interesting to think about what might have caused this and how to try and turn it around. As Greg Mankiw points out subjective happiness might not be the right measure.
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Tags: gender, happiness
Good internet ideas from brands make me very happy (since it's a sadly rare occurrence). With that said, here are two recent ideas I've run across over the last few weeks:
- Warp20: Super simple idea from Warp Records. To celebrate their 20th anniversary they are letting fans vote on the top 10 Warp tracks to be compiled into a special album that will be printed complete with liner notes full of messages and memories. Getting people invested in the product you make before you make it is a strategy that has served Threadless well. (Via Iain)
- Dell Swarm: Again, a simple but elegant idea, this time from Dell. Basically it allows you to create a swarm around a specific product, allowing you to buy it at a bulk discount. Pretty simple, Dell gets you to promote their products for them and in exchange you get the thing you want for less money. It's a win-win. (Via Zeus Jones)
Other good recent examples?
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Tags: ideas, marketing
So you know that story about how if you put a frog in warm water it will jump out but if you put it in cold water and then slowly bring up the heat it won't? You've definitely heard it. Well, it turns out it's just not true. James Fallows offers up a replacement, cat litter, to which Rafe Colburn offers a good rebuttal:
I don't think the cat litter box analogy is a perfect substitute for the boiled frog. The point I take away from the litter box is that people to become accustomed to conditions that make people who are not so conditioned wince. The point of the boiled frog analogy (despite the fact that it is not scientifically accurate) is that if environmental conditions change slowly enough, people will not perceive that change until it's too late.
Anyone have a good replacement?
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Tags: analogy, innovation, politics
Okay, I promise to make this as short and painless as possible but I'm pretty excited.
I am number 59 on the Fast Company 100 Most Creative People in Business. I couldn't be happier with the opening sentence of my short profile: "If a programmer saw my code, they'd probably vomit," because it's true.
Oh, and one more thing, they put a bunch of widgets on my listing page with stuff from all around the web including a LinkedIn one that lists "CEN at NoahBrier.com" as a current job. This morning Benjamin was the first person to ever ask me what CEN was and now I feel like sharing it: Chief Executive Noah. It's really just a bad joke that took about two years for anyone to ask about ... (Oh, and the photo on the page was taken by the talented and beautiful Leila Fernandes.)
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Tags: business, me
Yesterday this paragraph showed up in Maureen Dowd's Sunday New York Times column:
More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Fine, no big deal. Except, it showed up in a blog post by Joshua Marshall on Thursday (NYTimes.com has since been changed). the nytpicker has a good rundown of what happened, including a nice roundup where they say they believe Dowd when she says it wasn't plagiarism (she is claiming it came from a friend), however, they wonder is it right "to take the expression of a friend's idea -- the words themselves -- and place it into a piece of writing that appears under her byline, as though it were not only her idea, but also her singular expression of that idea"?
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Tags: journalism, nytimes, plagerism
While I'm not sure I totally buy the explanations offered, the issue of parents (especially mothers) putting photos of their children in place of their own is pretty fascinating to me (along with photos of one's animals). This particular article focuses on the idea that parents today pay too much attention to their kids, losing their own identity in place of their children. Or, as the author puts it:
Here, harmlessly embedded in one of our favorite methods of procrastination, is a potent symbol for the new century. Where have all of these women gone? What, some future historian may very well ask, do all of these babies on our Facebook pages say about the construction of women's identity at this particular moment in time?
Again, not sure where I fall on the issue, but it's something I've noticed in the past, spent a bit of time thinking about and am glad to see it brought up. (To be honest the conversation at MetaFilter may be more interesting than the article itself.)
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Tags: culture, parents, psychology
John Battelle points to an interesting blog post by Gian Fulgoni of Comscore that examines the decline in paid search traffic. Fulgoni offers an interesting hypothesis: That it's actually because search queries are getting longer, which means fewer of them have keyword ads associated with them (I wrote a bit about longer search queries in April). Fulgoni explains:
An analysis of comScore data shows that search queries are actually getting longer and that as searchers become more experienced they are using more words per search query. And this apparently reduces the likelihood that an advertiser has bid to have his/her ad included in the results page from these longer queries, due to paid search advertising strategies that limit ad coverage, such as Exact Match, Negative Match, and bid management software campaign optimization.
Interesting. If this is true, I wonder how Google is going to counteract the trend? If it's easier to place ads on long queries it's likely those ads will be less relevant (though you could also argue the opposite, that they will be more relevant, though that would require pretty incredible query matching). Hmmmm.
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Tags: advertising, search
Last week I pointed to a piece about how groups tend towards more extreme opinions and now this week comes some information about how inefficiently groups operate. Overcoming Bias points to an entry about how groups work that points out, "groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members, which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known only to one or a minority of members. This is important because those groups that do share unique information tend to make better decisions."
It's interesting to think about this in terms of groups tending to convince themselves to the most extreme opinion. People tend not to want to question the group, no matter how extreme it may get, only offering information that will be embraced. (As usual, most of this makes logical sense to everyone, but is interesting in context of a study.)
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Tags: culture, psychology
Whole Latte Love (which is an amazing site for buying coffee equipment that will answer any question you have before you purchase) has an interesting blog post up about how coffee becomes decaffeinated, which just happens to be something I've always wondered. As they explain:
In a nutshell, most decaffeination processes consist of soaking beans in water to dissolve the caffeine and then extracting the caffeine with either a solvent or carbon. This process is often repeated up to 12 times to obtain the most complete caffeine extraction. Some methods will actually use a coffee-flavored solution while soaking the beans to avoid a complete loss of flavor composition. Once the caffeine has been removed, the beans are then re-soaked in the decaffeinated water to reabsorb the flavor compounds that were lost in the initial extraction.
They even explain what happens to the excess caffeine they take out: They sell it to soft drink companies. Good to know.
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Tags: caffeine, coffee
Lots of people picked up on Dan Baum's Twitter account of his firing from the New Yorker. Scott Rosenberg, co-founder and one-time editor of Salon has an interesting perspective on the whole thing. In particular, he responds to this Tweet from Baum: "The biggest disappointment was learning that, after all, it's not only about the work on the page."
Rosenberg wrote, "My reaction to reading this observation is: If I were your editor and you ever said anything like that to me, I'd seriously consider firing you on the spot. No reporter can afford this level of naivete, and no editor's budget should be spent on it. Reporters have to understand the world pragmatically, as it is, in all its mess and compromise; how can you trust a reporter who doesn't even understand how his own profession works?"
This is actually one of the things that drive me a bit crazy as well. I find it happens often as people ignore the economics of a situation, but there is a real issue when people pretend that reality is supposed to match the idyllic scene you've painted in your mind. It doesn't and that's okay, if it did things would be a whole lot less interesting (and everyone would probably be rich).
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Tags: culture, economics, journalism
When I was out in Montana last month I had a conversation about how the state had been hit by the economy. As Scott, who runs the Entertainment Management Program at University of Montana explained, it actually hadn't been slammed as badly as the rest of the country since many of its banks were local and hadn't made the same sort of aggressive loans that the big banks had.
I kind of took it all with a grain of salt until this weekend when I read the interview with an anonymous hedge fund manager. Anyway, all of a sudden it popped back in my head. Could it really be possible that this was a problem focused around the big states that held the big banks? As I thought about it some more I realized that most of the stories I had read focused on Florida, California, Ohio and a few of the other biggest states in the country, not necessarily those smaller population ones in the middle of the country. But still, it didn't all add up and I was skeptical.
Then yesterday my friend Justin forwarded me along a New York Times article that pretty much spelled out the big bank/little bank divide. The article explains, "Though they greatly outnumber the national and regional banks, community banks have barely registered in any of the fallout from the credit crisis, in part because they hold less than 10 percent of the $13.8 trillion in bank assets nationwide." It even spells out the geography issue:
The 50 or so bank failures have been largely clustered in a few states, like Florida, Arizona and California, where the bursting housing bubble had the greatest impact.
In states like Indiana, where property values never soared, community banks have been rock solid. The last failure in the state was in 1992.
Anyway, be curious to know if anyone has more info on this one. I guess I'm just really surprised I haven't read more about this.
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Tags: economics, finance, housingcrisis
Spending the weekend down in West Virginia and yesterday we stopped by a bookstore for some coffee/reading time. I picked up a copy of N+1 which I had read online before, but never on paper. Anyhow, still getting through it, but really like this two part interview with an anonymous hedge fund manager. Generally it gave some real insight into how we got to where we are and also provided some nice nuggets of general wisdom, like this one explaining why he doesn't think people trained in finance necessarily make the financiers:
Because I think that in the end the way that you make a ton of money is calling paradigm shifts, and people who are real finance types, maybe they can work really well within the paradigm of a particular kind of market or a particular set of rules of the game--and you can make money doing that--but the people who make huge money, the George Soroses and Julian Robertsons of the world, they're the people who can step back and see when the paradigm is going to shift, and I think that comes from having a broader experience, a little bit of a different approach to how you think about things.
Anyway, the whole thing is worth a read: Part 1 and Part 2.
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Tags: economics, finance
Though I have to admit that I stopped reading this Vanity Fair article about Arthur Sulzberger Jr. about halfway through because it's full of anonymous quotes that question his character (which really isn't of much interest to me). However, towards the beginning there is an interesting quote from a Citigroup report: "The Internet has taken away far more advertising than it has given."
I was thinking about this a little today and realized that classifieds sits at the heart of the issue. While most people forget all about it when they discuss advertising, in 1997 it accounted for just under 41 percent of newspaper ad revenue while today it's about 29 percent and dropping fast (year-on-year drop was almost 30 percent in 2008). To be honest, I have trouble believing it's even that high. After all, if there's one thing internet advertising can deliver on, it's direct response.
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Tags: advertising, internet, newspapers
What a neuroscientist can teach you about life.
Since as usual The New Yorker has decided not to post the full text of the best article in it's latest issue, I'm going to quote from it liberally. (As a side note, this drives me nuts. I just don't get it. If you ask me reading The New Yorker in print is 100 times more enjoyable than reading it online because of the length of the articles. Seems like the website should just have everything and be used as a way to promote print subscriptions -- which should cost more. But that's neither here nor there, they can do whatever they want.)
Anyway, the article Brain Games is a profile of behavioral neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran who has made a number of kind of crazy advances in neuroscience (including the only real progress on phantom limb pain). First off, Ramachandran's general approach is pretty amazing. He recognizes the power of illusion to solve brain problems (reminds me a little of the neuroscience of magic article I pointed to a few weeks ago). Take, for instance, his solution to phantom limb pain:
In his office in Mandler Hall, Ramachandran positioned a twenty-inch-by-twenty-inch drugstore mirror up right and perpendicular to the man's body, and told him to place his intact right arm on one side of the mirror and his stump on the other. He told the man to arrange the mirror so that the reflection created the illusion that his intact arm was the continuation of the amputated one. Then Ramachandran asked the man to move his right and left arms simultaneously, in synchronous motions - like a conductor - while keeping his eyes on the reflection of his intact arm. "Oh, my God!" the man began to shout. "oh my God, Doctor, this is unbelievable. For the first time in ten years, the patent could feel his phantom limb "moving," and the cramping pain was instantly relieved
First off, holy crap. Second off, basically what Ramachandran realized that was the phantom pain was worst for people who had an immobile limb for sometime before it was amputated. It turns out that while the limb was immobile "a kind of 'learned paralysis' was burned into the brain's circuitry, as repeated commands from the patients' brains to move the limb were met with touch, visual, and nerve evidence that the limb could not move. When the limb was later amputated, the patient was stuck with a revised body-image map, which included a paralyzed phantom whose neural pathways retained a memory of pain signals that could not be shut off." Total madness. Just amazing stuff.
Later on in the article Ramachandran goes onto explain his appraoch, which he calls "opportunistic."
"You come across something strange - what Thomas Kuhn, the famous historian and philosopher of science, called 'anomalies.' Something seems weird, doesn't fit the big picture of science - people just ignore it, doesn't make any sense. They say, 'The patient is crazy.' A lot of what I've done is to rescue these phenomena from oblivion."
This, maybe more than anything else in the article, made me smile. Over the last few months I've been putting some thought into building a cirriculum to help kids learn how to make stuff on the internet. Basically my feeling is that "making stuff" offers an interesting interdisciplinary opportunity for kids. While part of it is certainly learning the actual building, there are lots of other lessons you can make part of the process: From coming up with ideas to help getting the word out about them. Anyway, thinking about it a little more (and discussing it with my mom) I got to thinking about teaching really little kids where ideas come from. Essentially it's been my feeling that the best ideas really just come from people paying attention to the stuff that doesn't make any sense. While most of the world ignores or gets angry when things don't work, inventors see an opportunity to fix a problem (or at least think about why things are the way they are). This is certainly something I strive for and I really liked how simply Ramachandran stated it.
Finally, one more quote from the article to wrap things up. In his studies of synesthesia ("an intermingling of the senses that causes some people to see each letter of the alphabet in a particular color"), Ramachandran noticed that artists had a propensity towards synesthesia. He explains the link quite simply:
"What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?" Ramachandran asked me. "The propesnity to link seemingly unrelated things. It's called metaphor. So what I'm arguing is, if the same gene, instead of being expressed only in the fusiform gyrus, is expressed diffusely through the brain, you've got a greater propensity to link seemingly unrelated brain areas in concepts and ideas. So it's a very phrenological view of creativity."
I don't even know if there's anything to say about that except yeah. Oh, and go read the whole article. I'm tempted to scan it and post it.
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I really hoped this article about modeling the flu would be more interesting (especially since one of the teams doing the modeling has used data from Where's George?). The last quote in the piece almost redeemed the whole thing, though: "'People have a very weird perception of large numbers,' he [Dirk Brockmann, the engineering professor who leads the epidemic-modeling team at the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems] said. 'If you have 2,000 cases of flu in a country of 300 million, most people think they're going to be one of the 2,000, not one of the 299,998,000.'"
The lotto paradox?
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Tags: economics, health
I would have sworn I've already written about this, so if you've read it I apologize.
A few months ago my friend Scott posted this: "Follow = RSS + Humanity, so the commercial opportunity is far richer." (Just to give some context to Scott and his RSS creds, we met when I interviewed him for an article on RSS in 2004.)
Anyway, was thinking about this a little more recently, especially as I've gotten more into Tumblr and I think it's super insightful plus a signal of a larger trend that's going on. RSS was never destined for mainstream in it's current form because it just takes too much work. Lots of browsers have tried to make it a little easier with live bookmarks and what not, but ultimately it requires new mechanisms to really reach the masses. In the end I wonder if the biggest takeaway from Twitter/Tumblr will end up be this humanizing of the technology.
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Tags: follow, rss, tumblr, twitter
It should come as no great surprise that I am a sucker for anything Muppet related. Anyway, I ran across this NPR interview of Cookie Monster (it even includes the Proust Questionnaire). What's more, they have short interview with Cheryl Henson where she reveals that there is actually a giant hole in Cookie Monster's mouth for the cookies to go down (or at least what's left as he devours them). Who knew?
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Tags: muppets, npr, sesamestreet
Hi, I'm 