:) :> :~) — I’m bad at emoticons. But I appreciate other people’s work. From an article about the Lehman report:
“So it’s legally doable but doesn’t look good when we actually do it? Does the rest of the street do it?” one Lehman employee asks another in emails included in the report. The answers, respectively, are yes and no, followed by a smiley face.
At Berkeley, one of my most unusual students was a psychology major named Sandy Tesch, who by then had risen through Red Cross volunteer ranks to be on their national youth council. A few years later she was head of the youth council. During college, she assumed that after she graduated, she would work for a non-profit. Now, however, she does fund-raising for the UC Berkeley library.
She won a post-graduate fellowship and during her fellowship year she met a woman who worked in fund-raising. She realized she liked it. Why? I asked. Because when you do fund-raising, you’re working with a lot of caring people, she said. They’re like the volunteers she worked with during her Red Cross years. Instead of giving time, they’re giving money.
The QuietComfort 15 headphones ($300) are Bose’s newest noise-cancelling headphones. I had two of an earlier model, the QC 2, because when they broke I couldn’t bear to be without one for two weeks. I used them while walking on my treadmill and riding the subway. BART is noisy.
The model numbers went 1, 2, 3, 15. And, yeah, the QC 15 is much better than the QC 2 and QC 3, which were about the same. The first time I wore them on BART, when I got out of the subway I noticed I didn’t feel exhausted, the way I usually did after a subway ride. I felt normal. The noise had been exhausting.
Duncan Watts, a Yahoo! researcher who studies networks, has some interesting things to say:
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
Epidemics and many other contagion phenomena have a power-law distribution (large frequency of small number infected, small frequency of large number infected). When my colleagues and I studied the distribution of rat bar-press durations, we found a power-law-like function where the “size” wasn’t number but duration. Most bar-presses were quite short; a few were quite long. We also found that expectation of reward had a big effect on the slope of the power-law function. I think Watts is saying that more attention should be paid to what determines the slopes of these power-law functions.
A recent article by Watts. Thanks to Hal Pashler.
This website is a scam. Search “scam” in this blog for lots and lots of evidence about why it is a scam. It used to have other names, such as gamesingate.com. Notice how new the website is — how recently it was registered.
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