Read the whole thing by clicking through the overcoming bias blog!!!

Would something like this work for the Philippines? No as long as the Education System is in shambles we cannot do anything as radical as this.

National Juries

By Robin Hanson · February 25, 2010 12:00 pm · Discuss · « Prev ·

The reason so many bad policies are good politics is that so many people vote. … Ignorant voters … are biased towards particular errors. …

The best way to improve modern politics? … The number of voters should be drastically reduced so that each voter realizes that his vote will matter. Something like 12 voters per district … selected at random from the electorate. With 535 districts in Congress … there would be 6,420 voters nationally. A random selection would deliver a proportional representation of sexes, ages, races and income groups. This would improve on the current system, in which the voting population is skewed … the old vote more than the young, the rich vote more than the poor, and so on.

To safeguard against the possibility of abuse, these 6,420 voters would not know that they had been selected at random until the moment when the polling officers arrived at their house. They would then be spirited away to a place where they will spend a week locked away with the candidates, attending a series of speeches, debates and question-and-answer sessions before voting on the final day.  All of these events should be filmed and broadcast, so that everyone could make sure that nothing dodgy was going on.

More here.  This logic is simple and strong enough for most folks to both understand and accept.  Yet most would still prefer our current system – why?

via Overcoming Bias : National Juries.

In the Philippines how well you are treated as a customer is most of the time inversely proportional to how good a customer you are. If you complain a lot you get good service but if you are more of the let it slide type you don’t have such great service. I sometimes wish restaurants do the math and just give great service to their valuable customers. This is partly the reason why I sign up for loyalty cards which help them track your spending, maybe they’d get their act together and figure out that the 80-20 rule / pareto principle probably applies to them. 80 percent of their revenues may come from just 20 percent of their clientele.

You have three choices: put up with the whiners, write off everyone, or, deliberately exclude the ungrateful curs.

Firing the customers you can’t possibly please gives you the bandwidth and resources to coddle the ones that truly deserve your attention and repay you with referrals, applause and loyalty.

via Seth’s Blog: more, More, MORE!.

This is a Pink film waiting to happen. Spartans lose to the Sacred Band even with a 3 to 1 advantage. This could be legendary. hehehe!

The Sacred Band under Pelopidas fought the Spartans at Tegyra in 375 BCE, vanquishing an army that was at least three times its size. It was also responsible for the victory at Leuctra in 371 BCE, called by Pausanias the most decisive battle ever fought by Greeks against Greeks. Leuctra established Theban independence from Spartan rule and laid the groundwork for the expansion of Theban power, but possibly also for Philip II’s eventual victory.

via Philip of Macedon, the Ultimate Authority on Gays in the Military, Speaks! – Grasping Reality with a Ten-Foot-Long Flexible Trunk.

This is an interesting perspective. Though I’ve been very wary of Evolutionary Psychology/Neurology/Anything concerning the brain, I am drawn to this idea.  I believe this is another form of the more nuanced view in the book by probably 5th most favorite TED talk speaker sir Ken Robinson (ted Talk here) . I embedded the talk at the end of this post. Hope you can read his book The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything.

Clearly, farming is a very different activity from hunting. Farmers spend time sweating the details, worrying about the weather, making smart choices about seeds and breeding and working hard to avoid a bad crop. Hunters, on the other hand, have long periods of distracted noticing interrupted by brief moments of frenzied panic.

It’s not crazy to imagine that some people are better at one activity than another. There might even be a gulf between people who are good at each of the two skills. Thom Hartmann has written extensively on this. He points out that medicating kids who might be better at hunting so that they can sit quietly in a school designed to teach farming doesn’t make a lot of sense.

A kid who has innate hunting skills is easily distracted, because noticing small movements in the brush is exactly what you’d need to do if you were hunting. Scan and scan and pounce. That same kid is able to drop everything and focus like a laser–for a while–if it’s urgent. The farming kid, on the other hand, is particularly good at tilling the fields of endless homework problems, each a bit like the other. Just don’t ask him to change gears instantly.

Marketers confuse the two groups. Are you selling a product that helps farmers… and hoping that hunters will buy it? How do you expect that people will discover your product, or believe that it will help them? The woman who reads each issue of Vogue, hurrying through the pages then clicking over to Zappos to overnight order the latest styles–she’s hunting. Contrast this to the CTO who spends six months issuing RFPs to buy a PBX that was last updated three years ago… she’s farming.

via Seth’s Blog: Hunters and Farmers.

Sorry for stating the obvious, I’m taking a half-day today and need to post this soon.

Just buy Erap Estrada off and Villar would probably win.  If I was Noy I’d convince Erap to vindicate himself by running.

iSteam features an incredible graphics engine that renders foggy, wet overlays on top of any image from your iPhone’s library with astounding realism. But it isn’t just the graphics itself, it’s the clever use of iPhon’s user interface and sensors that earned this application such a huge following.

The iSteam application is for sale for just 99cent and has been bought over 1 million times since its launch last week! ISteam has currently experienced more than 14% daily growth, with estimated monthly revenues of $100,000 – all this just 8 days after iSteam was first released. Since the launch of iSteam other top iPhone applications such as iFart and iBeer have seen a drop in sales for the first time since they launched.

This was all done by a bunch of 22 year olds, it just shows that young entrepreneurs know where it is at! iSteam managed to show up some well established Apps backed by millionaires in under 2 weeks! I wonder what would happen if we give them a month.

Good job iSteam!

via iSteam for iPhone earns a bunch of 22-year olds $100,000.

Posting this to inspire us.

Touring Gangland

By FREAKONOMICS

A group of civic activists in Los Angeles plans to start giving “Gang Tours” — taking busloads of tourists through some of the most dangerous parts of the city — in hopes of “sensitizing people, connecting them to the reality of what’s on the ground.” Critics liken the tours to voyeuristic “slum tourism” in India and Rio de Janeiro. But Gang Tours organizers say they plan on using tour profits to help communities through avenues like loans for inner-city entrepreneurs and sending graffiti taggers to art school.

via Touring Gangland – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

We desensitize ourselves from the hard realities of our environment. This is an excellent idea. I’ve been saying that if we required all powerful people to ride in cars with windows down, we would probably have cleaner air. If we also require politicians and rich people’s children to go to public schools we would have a far better education system. There is a saying “out of sight , out of mind”; what we need is to make people who can create major change to feel the pain!

I’d gladly play in a casino like this!

A Casino for Conservation?

Category: Solutions

Posted on: October 25, 2009 3:14 PM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet

What if you could gamble for a good cause? Why not build a casino where the profits go to conservation?

The idea came to me last night while watching a BBC documentary on gambling with Louis Theroux (see preview below). The segment features a woman who has lost $4 million over the last 7 years (don’t worry, she says she had fun doing it) and a Canadian mattress man who lost somewhere over $250,000 in one weekend. Imagine if these people could lose their money and know that it ultimately wound up going toward a good cause rather than in the pockets of already rich casino owners?

via A Casino for Conservation? : Guilty Planet.

Agreed!

People read from one line to the next. If you can’t read the line above the line you’re reading, it feels odd, and you can lose track of the narrative. When you’re reading a book, it’s almost instantaneous to flip a page, but with a website, the time taken to click on the “next” link and wait for the page to reload is much longer. What’s more, all that finding the link and clicking takes you out of the narrative — and, of course, makes it much more likely that you’ll disappear off somewhere else entirely, just like newspaper readers generally fail to read beyond the jump.

The multiple-pages problem is so annoying, indeed, that many bloggers, including myself, make it a point to always link to a “single-page format” or “print version” of the article instead. That’s not always possible, however, and what’s more the print version often lacks important navigation, multimedia, and other hypertext components.

Most annoying, for a blogger, is when you’re quoting a bit of an article which is on, say, page three. Do you link to page three, or to page one? Neither is particularly pleasant.

Every time I go to a website like the NYT or The Big Money, the need to hunt around for the “single page” button and click on it and wait for the page to reload makes me hate the site just a tiny bit. For really gruesome offenders like Time, I simply don’t read a lot of their listicles, no matter how good they are, because the multiple-page format makes them all but unreadable. Now that the need to maximize inventory has disappeared, maybe this whole annoying thing will go away.

How the Ad Recession Could Improve the Web – Finance Blog – Felix Salmon – Market Movers – Portfolio.com.