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Great Advice::Book – Ignore Everybody | gapingvoid

Read the rest of the tips at the linked site!

IGNORE EVERYBODY

So you want to be more creative, in art, in business, whatever. Here are some tips that have worked for me over the years.]

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.
via Book – Ignore Everybody | gapingvoid.

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ROTD::Fast food logos unconsciously trigger fast behaviour : Not Exactly Rocket Science

Fast food logos unconsciously trigger fast behaviour

Category: Consciousness • Psychology
Posted on: March 22, 2010 8:30 AM, by Ed Yong

Like it or not, the golden arches of McDonalds are one of the most easily recognised icons of the modern world. The culture they represent is one of instant gratification and saved time, of ready-made food that can be bought cheaply and eaten immediately. Many studies have looked at the effects of these foods on our waistlines, but their symbols and brands are such a pervasive part of our lives that you’d expect them to influence the way we think too.

And so they do – Chen-Bo Zhong and Sanford DeVoe have found that fast food can actually induce haste and impatience, in ways that have nothing to do with eating. They showed that subliminal exposure to fast food symbols, such as McDonalds’ golden arches, can actually increase people’s reading speed. Just thinking about these foods can boost our preferences for time-saving goods and even nudge us towards financial decisions that value immediate gains over future returns. Fast food, it seems, is very appropriately named.

via Fast food logos unconsciously trigger fast behaviour : Not Exactly Rocket Science.

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rePost :: Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead! – Deal Journal – WSJ

When you are cute your questions tend to get answered.  Read the whole thing!

While unsure if we can stomach yet another book on the crisis, a killer thesis on the topic? Now that piqued our curiosity. We tracked down Barnett-Hart, a 24-year-old financial analyst at a large New York investment bank. She met us for coffee last week to discuss her thesis, “The Story of the CDO Market Meltdown: An Empirical Analysis.” Handed in a year ago this week at the depths of the market collapse, the paper was awarded summa cum laude and won virtually every thesis honor, including the Harvard Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work.
Last October, Barnett-Hart, already pulling all-nighters at the bank (we agreed to not name her employer), received a call from Lewis, who had heard about her thesis from a Harvard doctoral student. Lewis was blown away.
“It was a classic example of the innocent going to Wall Street and asking the right questions,” said Mr. Lewis, who in his 20s wrote “Liar’s Poker,” considered a defining book on Wall Street culture. “Her thesis shows there were ways to discover things that everyone should have wanted to know. That it took a 22-year-old Harvard student to find them out is just outrageous.”
via Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short’? Read the Harvard Thesis Instead! – Deal Journal – WSJ.

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ROTD Research Of The Day :: Patterns of Prostitution Captured in Social Network :: Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog:

No Comment. hehehe.

The community they look at is a public online forum with free registration, financed by advertisements, in which men grade and categorise their sexual encounters with female escorts. The community appears large with over 10,000 buyers and more than 6000 sellers all of whom use anonymous nicknames. The study covers a period of 6 years from when the community was set up in 2002 until 2008.
The study throws up both expected and unexpected results. Among the expected results is the discovery that the geographical connections between buyers and sellers vary as an inverse square law rather than a power law as in many other internet mediated networks. That’s not so hard to explain given that buyers or sellers have to travel to each other.
Another discovery is that a high rating for a particular sex worker is a good predictor of high ratings in the future. That’s the kind of rich get richer effect that is seen in many internet phenomena (also known as the Matthew effect). However, average or poor ratings don’t seem to affect future ratings either way.
via Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Patterns of Prostitution Captured in Social Network.

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rePost::Overcoming Bias : Stop Stale Eggs, Jobs?

This is an excellent idea although I believe this is what people in sweden do. and as robin suggested it meant a more engaged grandparent relationship.

Stop Stale Eggs, Jobs?
By Robin Hanson · March 17, 2010 9:15 am · Discuss · « Prev · Next »
Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. Shaw
The average woman is born with around 300,000 eggs … 12 percent of those eggs remaining at the age of 30, and only 3 percent left by 40. … From the mid-30s on, the decline in fertility is much steeper with each passing year. … Female undergraduates significantly overestimated their fertility prospects at all ages. … The biological reality that female fertility peaks in the teens and early 20s can be difficult for many American women to swallow, as they delay childbirth further every year. … The older you get, the more difficult it is to get pregnant and the higher the chance of miscarriage, pregnancy problems such as gestational diabetes and hypertension, and chromosomal abnormalities such as Down syndrome. … The risk of autism increases with a mother’s age.
More here. Also, Andrew Leigh:
We estimate the relationship between maternal age and child … learning outcomes and social outcomes. … Children of older mothers have better outcomes. … When we control for other socioeconomic characteristics, such as family income, parental education and single parenthood, the coefficients on maternal age become small and statistically insignificant.
Today high status women stay long in school, start careers, and take long to match up with a man before having kids. They are often too late, their kids have more defects, and the interruption hurts their career. Low status women more often have an accidental early kid out of wedlock.
Imagine a different equilibrium, where females pick a male at 15, then school more slowly to have kids till some standard age (20? 25? 30?), when females return to full-time school and uninterrupted careers.
via Overcoming Bias : Stop Stale Eggs, Jobs?.

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Quote :: NYRblog – Girls! Girls! Girls! – The New York Review of Books

Why should everything be about “me”? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the personal is political”? If everything is “political,” then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. “What about the woman question?” someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: “Not everything can be about everything.”
via NYRblog – Girls! Girls! Girls! – The New York Review of Books.

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rePost :: NYRblog – Girls! Girls! Girls! – The New York Review of Books

Our successors—liberated from old-style constraints—have imposed new restrictions upon themselves. Since the 1970s, Americans assiduously avoid anything that might smack of harassment, even at the risk of forgoing promising friendships and the joys of flirtation. Like men of an earlier decade—though for very different reasons—they are preternaturally wary of missteps. I find this depressing. The Puritans had a sound theological basis for restricting their desires and those of others. But today’s conformists have no such story to tell.
via NYRblog – Girls! Girls! Girls! – The New York Review of Books.

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rePost :: Chit-chat, happiness, and you

Researchers confirmed what others have already established: The less time people spend alone, the greater their sense of well-being. But the point, and the important finding, is the relationship between well-being and substantive conversation over small talk. They found that people who have more deep conversations than chit-chat are happier. The happiest people spent less time alone and more time talking, but they also had more than twice as many substantive conversations and one-third as much small talk as the unhappiest people.
via . Chit-chat, happiness, and you

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rePost :: Is Weight Loss Associated with Increased Risk of Early Mortality?

Hehe

Is Weight Loss Associated with Increased Risk of Early Mortality?

Category: Obesity Research
Posted on: March 15, 2010 11:42 AM, by Peter Janiszewski
The current recommendations from major health organizations stipulate that if an individual has a BMI in the obese range (>30 kg/m2), they should be counseled to lose at least 5-10% of their body weight. This advice appears to make some sense given that increasing body weight is generally associated with heightened risk of various diseases, and that reduction of body weight usually improves levels of risk factors for disease (e.g blood pressure, triglycerides, etc). However, the literature has been much more complicated in terms of the effect of weight loss on risk of early mortality.