A restaurant that decides for you

PSFK reports on an emerging trend called "freestyle dining" where customers order based on whatever emotion or adjective best describes their dining mood, trusting the chef to translate it into a matching meal. "It’s like assigning the chef the role of culinary therapist."

Some reactions :

• Why should freestyle restaurants exist since it would be easy for a normal restaurant to offer a menu in addition to this option?
• Why not have freestyle cinemas or freestyle libraries? Or for that matter, why not have freestyle college, freestyle major, freestyle job, freestyle marriage, or freestyle whether-or-not-to-have-(another)-kid? You might think these decisions are too important to leave to others, but in a big confusing world with dispersed knowledge, maybe these decisions are too important to leave to ourselves. Many people already elect to have a freestyle retirement plan.
  
• Due to overconfidence, the leaving-your-choice-to-others strategy is likely to be underused.
• Reminds me of the story of a man leaving all his choices to others.
  

Blogger personalities

Typealyzer is a fun site that analyzes the personality of a blogger based on writing style.

Below are the assessments of some of my favorite blogs, which I think are surprisingly (but not 100%) accurate.


ENTP - The Visionaries

Blogs under this category: Ben Casnocha, Design Milk, Change the Thought, Well-Formed Data

"The charming and trend savvy type. They are especially attuned to the big picture and anticipate trends. They often have sophisticated language skills and come across as witty and social. At the end of the day, however, they are pragmatic decision makers and have a good analytical ability.

They enjoy work that lets them use their cleverness, great communication skills and knack for new exciting ventures. They have to look out not to become quitters, since they easily get bored when the creative exciting start-up phase is over."


ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers

Blogs under this category: Wehr in the World, Newmark's Door, PSFK, Information Aesthetics, Partially Unexpected, Carpe Diem, Wages of Wins, Geary Behavioural Economics Blog

"The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.

The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work in their own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it."


INTJ - The Scientists

Blogs under this category: Dilbert Blog, Freakonomics, Seth [Robert]'s Blog, Creative Class, Becker-Posner Blog, Decision Science News, Junk Charts, Greg Mankiw, Simple Complexity

"The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone."


ESTP - The Doers

Blogs under this category: FlowingData, Durham Bull Pen, Dare Mighty Things, The Sports Economist, Bull City Rising

"The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time."


INTP - The Thinkers

Blogs under this category: Marginal Revolution, Deric Bownds' MindBlog, The Alternate Blog, Kottke, Predictably Irrational, Quantified Self, Ben Fry, Study Hacks, The Angry Economist, Market Urbanism, Dolores Labs Blog, EconLog, Overcoming Bias, Good Morning, Economics

"The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.

They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about."


ESFP - The Performers

Blogs under this category: Carpe Durham, No Promise of Safety, Illini? Or Huskie?...Illini!

"The entertaining and friendly type. They are especially attuned to pleasure and beauty and like to fill their surroundings with soft fabrics, bright colors and sweet smells. They live in the present moment and don't like to plan ahead - they are always in risk of exhausting themselves.

They enjoy work that makes them able to help other people in a concrete and visible way. They tend to avoid conflicts and rarely initiate confrontation - qualities that can make it hard for them in management positions."


ISTP - The Mechanics

Blogs under this category: Tim's Data Blog, The Undercover Economist, Market Design, Nudge

"The independent and problem-solving type. They are especially attuned to the demands of the moment and are masters of responding to challenges that arise spontaneously. They generally prefer to think things out for themselves and often avoid inter-personal conflicts.

The Mechanics enjoy working together with other independent and highly skilled people and often like seek fun and action both in their work and personal life. They enjoy adventure and risk such as in driving race cars or working as policemen and firefighters."


ESFJ - The Socializers

Blogs under this category: Passive Aggressive Notes

"The social and opinionated type. They are especially attuned to the feelings of themselves and others. They tend to be very aware of the values of their peer-group and tend to see things as either right or wrong, good or bad. They tend to be traditional and value their friends and family the most.

The Socializers are down-to-earth, practical people and very keen on making sure everyone is alright. This quality makes them enjoy social work places. Since they enjoy being and keeping things neat and tidy, they often also enjoy working in such environments."


ESTJ - The Guardian

Blogs under this category: Cool Infographics

"The organizing and efficient type. They are especially attuned to setting goals and managing available resources to get the job done. Once they have made up their mind on something, it can be quite difficult to convince otherwise. They listen to hard facts and can have a hard time accepting new or innovative ways of doing things.

The Guardians are often happy working in highly structured work environments where everyone knows the rules of the job. They respect authority and are loyal team players."

Things I learned about talent, Part 3

Continuing the discussion of Anders Ericsson's The Role of Deliberate Practice, here is part 3 of things I learned about talent. Part 1. Part 2.

How Experts Develop

• An explanation for the inability of many child prodigies in music and math to succeed as adults: In the performance of music, children and adolescents are judged principally on their technical proficiency. Expert adult performers, however, are judged on their interpretation and ability to express emotions through music. There are difficulties making this transition—possibly resulting from inappropriate training and instruction during the early and middle phases of music training. In math, child prodigies often display superior ability in mental addition and multiplication (the mechanics of mathematics), whereas major adult contributions in mathematics reflect insights into the structure of mathematical problems and domains.
• The age at which eminent individuals attain their best performance is much later in their 20s and 30s. In fact any significant achievements in literature, music composition, visual arts, and most other domains before age 16 are exceedingly rare.
• "International-level performers often receive their first exposure to their domain between the ages of 3 and 8. [. . .] The parents' costs for a national-level swimmer is estimated by Chambliss (1988) to exceed 5 thousand dollars per year. [. . .] These extraordinary commitments by parents are probably based on the belief that their children are somehow special and particularly likely to succeed."
• Bloom (1985) found that there seems to be at least one central person in a promising child's near environment who firmly believes, as the child develops, that the child is special. Additionally, only one child per family was considered special.

Intensity of Practice

• "A number of training studies in real life have compared the efficiency of practice durations ranging from 1 -8 hr per day. These studies show essentially no benefit from durations exceeding 4 hr per day and reduced benefits from practice exceeding 2 hr. Many studies of the acquisition of typing skill and other perceptual-motor skills indicate that the effective duration of deliberate practice may be closer to 1 hr per day."
• C. E. Seashore, the pioneering researcher in music psychology, claimed, "Many a student becomes disgusted with music because he cannot learn by dull drudgery. The command to rest is fully as important as to work in effective learning".
• Practice without concentration might even be detrimental to improvement of performance. On the basis of an extended study of Olympic swimmers, Chambliss (1988, 1989) argued that the secret of attaining excellence is to always maintain close attention to every detail of performance "each one done correctly, time and again, until excellence in every detail becomes a firmly ingrained habit".
• Inability to recover from the stress of training can lead to "staleness," "overtraining," and eventually "burnout." These states are characterized not only by physical fatigue and soreness but also by motivational problems such as lack of enthusiasm and even unwillingness to continue. The only known effective treatment for these conditions consists of rest, and in some cases, complete abstention from training may be necessary. After extended time with an acceptable practice level, individuals adapt their bodies and lives and can slowly and gradually increase the level of practice without these adverse consequences.
• "While completing a novel, famous authors tend to write only for 4 hr during the morning, leaving the rest of the day for rest and recuperation. Hence successful authors, who can control their work habits and are motivated to optimize their productivity, limit their most important intellectual activity to a fixed daily amount when working on projects requiring long periods of time to complete."
• The top-level expert musicians studied averaged between 1.7 and 2.7 hours of practice per day.
• Violinists rated sleep as highly relevant for improvement of violin performance and they napped to recover from practice.

Dominant vs. Trusthworthy Faces [chart]

The chart comes from a New Scientist article called How Your Looks Betray Your Personality.

They generated random faces on a commercial program called FaceGen and morphed them into exaggerated caricatures of trustworthy, untrustworthy, dominant or submissive faces. An extremely trustworthy face, for example, has a U-shaped mouth, and eyes that form an almost surprised look. An untrustworthy face has the corners of the mouth curled down and eyebrows pointing to form a V.

They showed these faces to people and asked them a different question: what emotions did they appear to be expressing? People consistently reported that trustworthy faces looked happy and untrustworthy ones angry, while dominant faces were deemed masculine and submissive ones feminine.

More from The Thinking Meat Project.

Comparing bear markets from 1929 to 2009 [chart]

[HT: Andrew Sullivan]

Creativity in casinos

Natasha Shull, an Assistant Prof from MIT, touches on the economics of gambling and the ingenious creativity that goes into designing Vegas casinos in the 23 minute Gel video embedded below.

Moreso than gambler irrationality, perhaps the loss of creative energy is a better reason to outlaw gambling. Protests against gambling are typically on a foundation of paternalism, but maybe the bigger problem with casinos is that, like military contractors, they suck up creative potential while producing minimal social benefits. (This is something I need to think more about; it doesn't exactly fit in with my libertarian-leaning worldview.)

Top 10 NBA Markets [graph]

LeBron and the Cavaliers more than doubled their share of local households since last season, placing them just ahead of San Antonio as the top NBA market.

More from Nielsen.

RANK	TEAM/MARKET	2008-09 HH RATING	2007-08 HH RATING	% CHANGE
1	Cleveland	8.1	3.7	119%
2	San Antonio	7.9	6.8	16%
3	Portland	5.6	4.4	27%
4	Utah	5.6	6.3	-11%
5	L.A. Lakers	4.7	4.2	12%
6	Boston	4.0	3.6	11%
7	Detroit	3.8	5.6	-32%
8	Phoenix	3.8	5.0	-24%
9	Houston	2.6	2.5	4%
10	Chicago	2.6	2.5	4%
source: The Nielsen Company 2009

Visualizing space junk

ESA has the video [HT: Cool Infographics].

The video is good for understanding the explosion of stuff orbiting the earth since 1957, but I have a few major criticisms:

• What's with the year swooping in? Unnecessary and distracting.
• The time does not progress linearly. It starts one year at a time and later progresses four years at a time.
• The legend should be visible at all times. It's only visible for the first few seconds, and by that time, I've already forgotten what the different colors mean.
• It is not drawn to scale. In reality, this space junk is probably small enough that it looks like specs of dust compared to the earth.

Notes from William Easterly talk at NCSU

William Easterly, a leading developmental economist and professor at NYU, was the J.W. Pope Lecturer at NCSU last night. His views on developmental economics are laissez-faire and somewhat controversial. (Coincidentally, Dr. Easterly and I were raised in the same small town of Bowling Green, Ohio.) Below are some notes from the talk.

• It was a packed house. The seats were just about full with 10 minutes remaining before start time.
• Faces in the crowd: Mike Munger (NC Libertarian gubenatorial candidate and Duke professor) and a slew of other local professors (including many former professors of mine at NCSU).
• The talk was called "The History of Freedom and Escape from Global Poverty".
• Easterly criticized what he called a "double standard for freedom", meaning that freedom is given to some people, but not others -- namely, the poor.
• At the time the Declaration of Independence was written, the U.S. was much poorer than Africa is today. The per capita income in the U.S. today is 35 times higher than what it was in 1776. He showed the steep increasing trend of per capita income from 1776 to today, and the Great Depression was just a blip. He commented that if freedom is not abandoned, we will recover strongly just as we did after the Great Depression.
  
• He compared the 1776 American Revolution to the 1793 French Revolution, saying that the French Revolution had many of the same misguided beliefs about ending poverty as persist today -- namely, a dictatorial solution to poverty, and a failed promise to end poverty immediately.
• The emancipation proclimation and MLK's "I have a dream" both spoke against the double standard of freedom. However, the influential English economist John Stuart Mill argued for a double standard, saying that freedom should not apply to "barbarians".
• American stereotype: the poor are helpless victims. This is reinforced through "disaster pornography", where media seek the most helpless, malnourished people they can find. This is not a representative sample and skews our perceptions of the problem. In reality, 0.2% of Africans are in famine every year. This small minority absolutely needs immediate assistance. However, the vast majority of the poor are needlessly treated as children..
  
• There is a pattern of people proposing to solve poverty by having foreign aid doubled.
• "Nobody is individually responsible for any one result." He repeated this a few times.
• Sometimes aid organizations try to solve poverty by, paradoxically, forcing freedom. Bad idea.
  
• There has been $715 Billion in aid to Africa since 1960, but it has not led to improvement in quality of life.
• What is needed to solve poverty are more social entrepreneurs (e.g., Muhammed Yunus) and private entrepreneurs. Success stories of private entrepreneurs were noted with cut flowers in Kenya, women's cotton suits in Fiji, and bathroom ceramics in Egypt. He quipped that no aid organization would be smart enough to solve Egypt's problem by telling them to sell toilets to Italy; instead, it takes private entrepreneurship through trial and error to discover these business opportunities.
• A survey by a Harvard professor asked Africans "How did you get out of poverty?" Percentage of respondents claiming that charity raised them out of poverty: 0.3%.
• Quoted Hayek, "We trust the independent and competitive efforts of many to induce the emergence of what we shall want when we see it."
• Why is the free-market view so unpopular? He quipped that the free-market view has people like Friedrich Hayek arguing for it, whereas the other side has Selma Hayek.
• He ended on the positive note that things are getting better. Since 1776, as the number of democracies has increased, the poverty level has decreased tremendously.
• Defined freedom as "free to do whatever you want so long as you don't harm anyone else". The free-market often gets criticized for benefiting the rich, but Easterly argued that the rich also don't like free markets because through creative destruction, the free market allows new generations of wealthy to replace old ones.
• Types of assistance he is in favor of: scholarship (for schools), microcredit, and anything else that would allow them to help themselves.
• The final question from the audience was about capitalism and sweat shops. Easterly had an elegant response, but to crudely paraphrase: it's better than the alternative.

P.S. - Easterly recently started blogging at Aid Watch.

"Brainwriting": An alternative to brainstorming

Interesting (albeit somewhat complicated) idea :

There are several reasons brainstorming is thought to be ineffective. To give two examples: it's easy for members of a group to remain creatively passive while others bandy ideas around - a phenomenon dubbed social loafing. Or group members can worry that their ideas will attract negative comment - this is called evaluation apprehension - thus leading them to keep quiet.

Brainwriting aims to avoid some of these issues and is designed to encourage all group members to engage with each others' ideas. Briefly, it involves four group members writing ideas on slips of paper in silence. Group members pass the slips of paper between each other, reading others' ideas and inserting their own. Ink colour indicates who owns which ideas and when a paper slip has four ideas on it, it is placed in the centre of the table for all to see. This is repeated up to 25 times. The second stage involves group members withdrawing to the corners of the room and recalling as many of the ideas generated so far as possible - the rationale being that this encourages attention to the ideas generated. The final stage involves group members working alone for 15 minutes in an attempt to generate yet more ideas.

More from Geary Behavioural Economics Blog.

Comparison of data analysis packages

For my fellow stat and visualization geeks: Comparison of R, Matlab, SciPy, Excel, SAS, SPSS, and Stata from Brendan O'Connor.

Ed Tufte coming to Durham!

Legendary information visualizer Edward Tufte will be teaching a one-day course in Durham March 9th and 10th. I feel very fortunate to be living in one of the 5 locations on the tour this year (with the other four being Atlanta, Arlington, Seattle, and Portland) and very fortunate to be working for a company (and a boss) gracious enough to pay my way for the course. All four of his books are included in the course fee of $380. More details on the course can be found here: edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses.

This will be my first Tufte course and I can't wait. I am anxious to learn from Tufte's wisdom, to witness some of the infamous Tufte groupies, and to meet others in the area interested in information visualization. I will be sure to post some notes and reactions here.

Visualizing billions

More from Life at HOK. [HT: PSFK]

2 years, 6,000 paintings, one 5 minute video

I hate to be critical of such an extraordinary undertaking, but the result hardly seems worth the effort. (As an economist, opportunity cost is always the first thing that comes to mind.) I enjoyed the animation during the closing credits more than the video itself.

More from Change the Thought.

"Wrapping your head around a trillion"

Commentary from K.C. Cole on Marketplace :

We automatically "read" a billion as about a third of a trillion. After all, it's only three zeros off. But of course, a trillion is a thousand times a billion, and a thousand is a lot.

Decrease your salary by a factor of a thousand, and it could go from $200,000 to $200. Increase class size by the same amount, and your 15 students would turn into 15,000. It's roughly what happens when the "m" in million becomes a "b."

Our brains haven't evolved to directly deal with such staggering numbers, but we can use stories and metaphors to retrain ourselves.

So the next time a trillion begins to sound just like a billion, think about how you'd fare on a $200 annual salary -- or survive teaching a class of 15,000 students instead of 15, in the same classroom, with the same number of books.

Yelp accussed of shady business

From East Bay Express, Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0.

I tend to agree with the Yelp spokesperson who said "We wouldn't be in business very long if we started duping customers," although in this situation, I am not sure that's true. Yelp has far and away the best designed recommendation site out there. Even assuming that Yelp is guilty of extortion, people will probably still use their site just because their map browsing feature surpasses any similar feature on citysearch or otherwise. Point being that the negative potential for skewed recommendations probably isn't as important to customers as the ability to effectively find places in the area and read one or two good reviews. I predict Yelp will be fine despite this negative press.

"Continuous Partial Attention"

Linda Stone discusses technology's effect on attention spans in this 20 minute Gel Video released yesterday

Having coined the phrase "continuous partial attention," Linda has many thoughts about the effects of pervasive digital technology. She was previously an executive at Microsoft and Apple and has seen the technology landscape develop for over two decades.

I disagree with some of her claims, but think it is an overall solid presentation. I particularly enjoyed this quote at the end borrowed from Dee Hock, founder of Visa :

Noise becomes data when it has a cognitive pattern.

Data becomes information when it's assembled into a coherent whole, which can be related to other information.

Information becomes knowledge when it's integrated with other information in a form useful for making decisions and determining actions.

Knowledge becomes understanding when it's related to other knowledge in a manner useful for anticipating, judging, and acting.

Understanding becomes wisdom when it's informed by purpose, ethics, principles, memory, and projection.

Congratulations to my girlfriend!

For being accepted to NCSU's PhD program in Economics! She has no formal background in economics, making this accomplishment all the more impressive. I know she will do great and fit right in with the residents of 4th floor Nelson. I couldn't be more excited for her.

Favorability by occupation [charts]

I created these charts using numbers from the Rasmussen Report called CEOs Hit Rock Bottom, Less Popular Than Congress.

The first chart shows the overall favorability of different positions as judged by the adult U.S. population {click to enlarge}.



The second chart looks at four positions (local religious leaders, journalists and reporters, congressmen, and corporate CEOs) by political affiliation.



(Trying hard to resist rant about irrational hatred of CEOs. Trying so hard. OK, done.)

You're probably not as attractive as you think

(. . . Unless of course you're my girlfriend, in which case you are more beautiful than you can ever imagine.)

From Scientific American :

In a well-controlled series of experiments published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Epley and Whitchurch took photos of undergraduate students with a neutral facial expression, invited these same students back to the laboratory two to four weeks later, and simply asked them to identify their actual face out of an assortment of eleven possible images. But here's the really clever part. These other images were in fact the actual face morphed to varying degrees with either an extremely attractive gender-matched composite face or unattractive targets suffering from craniofacial syndrome.

The results? On a variety of different measures, the participants were significantly more likely to choose a more attractive morphed face as being their actual face than even their nonmorphed actual face! The authors conclude, "It is perhaps of little wonder, then, that people so rarely seem to like the photographs taken of themselves. The image captured by the camera lens just doesn't match up to the image captured in the mind's eye."

MappedUp: News Map

As I've mentioned before, I like the idea of an interactive news map, but MappedUp is the first I've seen that I actually like. It is beautifully designed and easy to use. My one criticism is that it might even be too simple -- there aren't enough features to keep me coming back.



[HT: Cool Infographics]

Nicholas Felton interview

An interview with Nicholas Felton, creator of the Feltron Annual Reports (and blogged about here), is up on the SVA Interaction Design Blog.

Nothing too mind blowing, but I liked this passage primarily because of the strong use of the word "oodles" :

SVA: Is there a data set that you’ve yet to be able to successfully visualize?

NF: I am certain there are oodles of data sets that are outside of my capabilities. As all my charts and maps are made by hand, it would be easy to overwhelm my capacities, but no one has asked me to tackle a machine-caliber project yet!

A tip for reducing bias

From Decision Science News :

So, how to use behavioral science to help yourself? When asked to make a forecast 1) generate an answer under ideal conditions, then 2) generate your forecast. Though you’d think the ‘ideal conditions’ would skew your forecast upwards due to anchoring, it does not. In fact, it causes you to generate more realistic forecasts of your own behavior.

So to get less biased answers to a question, split the question into two parts: (1) "In the perfect world, . . ." and (2) "In the real world, . . ."; this should even reduce bias when pointed at yourself.

Juan Enriquez TED talk released

From the description :

Even as mega-banks topple, Juan Enriquez says the big reboot is yet to come. But don't look for it on your ballot -- or in the stock exchange. It'll come from science labs, and it promises keener bodies and minds. Our kids are going to be . . . different.

Very interesting stuff.

Things I learned about talent, Part 2

It took me a weekend and some change to get through Anders Ericsson's The Role of Deliberate Practice, but I did it, and am glad I did. I learned too much to put into one post, so I will split it into multiple parts. Part 1 is here.

Things I learned :

• Deliberate practice has four characteristics:
  

1. Subjects must have motivation to attend to the task and improve their performance.
   
2. The design of the task should take into account pre-existing knowledge of the learners so that the task can be correctly understood in a brief period of instruction.
   
3. Subjects should receive immediate information feedback.
   
4. Subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.

• "In the absence of adequate feedback, efficient learning is impossible and improvement only minimal even for highly motivated subjects. Hence mere repetition of an activity will not automatically lead to improvement in, especially, accuracy of performance."
• Individualized instruction is extremely important to deliberate practice and improved performance: "Research in education reviewed by Bloom (1984) shows that when students are randomly assigned to instruction by a tutor or to conventional teaching, tutoring yields better performance by two standard deviations—the average tutored student performed at the 98th percentile of students taught with the conventional method."
• "Maximization of deliberate practice is neither short-lived nor simple. It extends over a period of at least 10 years and involves optimization within several constraints. First, deliberate practice requires available time and energy for the individual as well as access to teachers, training material, and training facilities (the resource constraint). [. . .] Second, engagement in deliberate practice is not inherently motivating (the motivational constraint). [. . .] Finally, deliberate practice is an effortful activity that can be sustained only for a limited time each day during extended periods without leading to exhaustion (effort constraint). To maximize gains from long-term practice, individuals must avoid exhaustion and must limit practice to an amount from which they can completely recover on a daily or weekly basis."

Cheap thoughts :

• If feedback is so crucial to deliberate practice, what does this say about skills where immediate, observable feedback is impossible? Entrepreneurs, for example, need the skills of understanding how the market will react to certain moves, but often the results of an action will not be known until years later. I would argue that some of the most important skills in life (I'm thinking parenting, writing, interpersonal skills) have delayed and not-directly-measurable feedback, thus making it much more difficult to become an expert. I wonder how much it would help to have some sort of game like Inspectd.com that lets you test your skills against historical data.
• I have a new found appreciation for the value of individualized instruction. It is extremely important to (1) provide guidance on the mechanics of the skill, (2) address specific questions and weaknesses, and (3) provide objective and immediate feedback on performance.
  

Belief in evolution by faith [chart]

Research by Pew. [HT: Andrew Sullivan]

Kobe vs. LeBron: Who's better?

Wages of Wins crunches the numbers and finds a clear answer :

Both players are above average with respect to almost every statistic. King James, though, does more. In fact, LeBron has done more across the past four seasons than Kobe has done in his four best seasons. And the difference is even bigger if we look at what each player has done in 2008-09.

Month 2 blogging in review

Wehr in the World is two months old. 151 posts have been published (2.5 per day), and 45 more have been drafted. Wehr in the World averaged 17 visits per day in the first month, and 40 visits per day in the second month (breaking the elusive one-visit-per-hour barrier). Additionally, Wehr in the World received the honor of being named one of six ClustrMaps users of the month.

Four posts received the lion's share of attention: Calorie distributions of 22 popular restaurants (239 page views, linked to by Newmark's Door), Internet population in perspective (142 page views, linked to by PSFK), Tracking myself (120 page views, linked to by 30THREADS), and 825 billion in perspective (96 page views, mostly from search engines).

Visitors came from 54 countries, with Canada and the United Kingdom being responsible for most of the traffic outside the U.S.; surprisingly few visits came from China (4) and Japan (7). Within the U.S., visitors came from every state except Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Maine. North Carolina had the most visits, with almost as many coming from Raleigh as from Durham. Many visitors also came from the San Francisco area.





According to FeedBurner, Wehr in the World currently has around 30 RSS Subscribers (but with FeedBurner's inconsistency, it's hard to tell).



I am grateful to have a solid (albeit small) base of regular readers. More exciting still is the high quality of those readers. I am optimistic that readership will continue to grow so that I can publish the surveys in queue and get some meaningful results.

(I promise that I won't keep doing this every month. I'm still in the honeymoon phase, I guess.)

Month 1 blogging in review.
Week 1 blogging in review.

Easing the mind through words

Researchers find that putting feelings into words regulates distress.

Another advantage of blogging, perhaps?

Also, this might be a topic of interest to self-experimenters: "[. . .] Putting feelings into words might help people who fear spiders or have anxiety disorders."

Survival of the weakest

Game theory simulations show that cyclical competition of three species favors the weakest.

I wish ScienceDaily would have done more to explain the intuition behind this theory. Is this sort of like two sprinters tripping over each other, allowing the person in third position to go ahead for the win?

Triangle model of information aesthetics

Sorry if old, but I had not seen this before. This model was developed by Andrea Lau and Andrew Vande Moere and presented by Moritz Stefaner (slides here) at The Scent of Information.

To my Valentine

{Click to enlarge.}

HT: PTS Blog

Things I learned about talent, Day 1

So far I have only made it through the first three and a half pages of Anders Ericsson's The Role of Deliberate Practice, but have already learned a lot.

Some key points :

• The earliest theories of extraordinary ability speculated that it was the result of divine intervention or special gifts. Recent research has shown that expert performance is acquired through experience and that the effect of practice on performance is larger that earlier believed possible; however, many people still maintain the simplistic conviction that extraordinary abilities are innate and genetically transmitted.
• The relation of intelligence to exceptional performance is surprisingly weak in many domains, including chess.
• Aptitude tests predict short-term performance fairly well, but long-term performance very poorly, even for skills such as typing.
• "We can cite only two abilities that investigators have argued directly reflect genetic factors. Some successful musicians can recognize a musical note in isolation by its pitch (perfect pitch). Championship-level typists can tap their fingers faster than normal."
• Unique environmental conditions and parental support, rather than innate ability, may be the important factors determining the initial onset of training and ultimate performance.
• Adults tend to perform at a level far from their maximal level even for tasks they frequently carry out. "Even very experienced Morse Code operators could be encouraged to dramatically increase their performance through deliberate efforts when further improvements were required for promotions and external rewards."
  
• One explanation for why adults might not come close to maximal performance: "It is that we have too many other improvements to make, or do not know how to direct our practice, or do not really care enough about improving, or some mixture of these three conditions."
• "[. . .] throughout the history of the Olympic Games, the best performance for all events has improved—in some cases by more than 50%. [. . .] Increases in duration, intensity, and structure of training appear to play a major role."
  

Tracking birds, with tiny backpacks

An interesting article from the NYT about the challenges of tracking bird flight patterns, and a recent innovation that may help.

This article reminded me of the amazing documentary Winged Migration, which to me is equally as spectacular as the Planet Earth series. For a sample, see the 2 minute video embedded below.

Estimating web site market values

Stimator estimates web sites' blue book value, so to speak. A number of sites do this, but Stimator is the only one I know of that shows you how the estimate was calculated.

Wehr in the World is apparently worth $956. Let the bidding start at $956. Any takers?

Informed intuition

Scientific American describes research concluding that visual systems store information quite accurately, even when we're not paying attention; so what we call intuition is likely to be based on good information.

Two reactions :

1. One implication is that in order to make the best decisions, we should inundate ourselves with as much information as possible, even if we're not consciously processing it. However, I'm skeptical that sitting in a room with multiple TVs and radios going at the same time would really improve our knowledge relative to concentrating on one thing at a time. I am reminded of students trying to absorb the knowledge from their textbook by using it as a pillow; certainly, we do not become smarter simply by being in the presence of information.

2. It is striking to think that nearly all of what we have learned is stored somewhere but is not able to be consciously recalled. One reasonable theory is that our beliefs are mostly supported by the information we are not able to recall, helping to explain why new information is unlikely to have much of an influence on our beliefs, and why we often feel strongly about certain issues without being able to effectively verbalize or argue for our position. Ben Casnocha has a similar idea, but puts it much more eloquently.

Overcoming fear of public speaking

Scientific American summarizes the research on "how to avoid choking under pressure".

In short :

• Catch yourself as soon as you start self-monitoring. Telling yourself to slow down -- like thinking about what to do with your hands -- will only raise anxiety.
• Instead of focusing on mechanics, repeat some mantra in your mind such as "smooth".
• When rehearsing, video record yourself or use a couple of friends as your audience. The best way to prepare for game-time anxiety is to practice in a similar setting.
  

Announcing a new focus of Wehr in the World

Not that Wehr in the World needs a longer subtitle, but I have decided that one topic in particular deserves much more of my (and the rest of the world's) attention: Talent, and how it is acquired.

The topic has gained some attention with the Freakonomics NYT column on the research of Anders Ericcson and more recently with Malcom Gladwell's Outliers (which I have yet to pick up), but it is still woefully understudied.

I hereby promise to learn more about this important subject, and post about it regularly.

From the economics of prisons to the economics of tax cuts

Freakonomics gets criticized for being too cutesy, and for inspiring a generation of empiricists who want to answer sexy questions over the classical macroeconomic conundrums. On the contrary, I think Freakonomics is one of the best things to ever happen to economics because it introduces creativity to academic research, presents findings in an easily understandable way to a broader audience, inspires popular interest, answers big questions with sometimes bigger implications, and, unlike macroeconomics, presents theories that are likely to be true. Steven Levitt is one of the best economists in the world, and together with Justin Wolfers and others, upholds one of the best things the web has to offer, the Freakonomics blog.

Steven Levitt yesterday on California's potential release of inmates :

What does this mean for crime? If my estimates are correct, ultimately violent crime will be roughly 6 percent higher in California than it would have been absent the lawsuit. That is roughly 150 extra homicides a year, 500 additional rapes, and 4,500 more robberies.

While those crime numbers sound bad, according to my estimates, letting out the prisoners is more or less a wash from a societal cost-benefit perspective. The money we save from freeing the prisoners is on the same order of magnitude as the pain and suffering associated with the extra crime.

And Justin Wolfers on Eggerston's conjecture that tax cuts could backfire :

Is Eggertson’s conjecture right? Unfortunately the historical record can’t tell us: there’s never been an episode in which we’ve tried reducing taxes when interest rates were this low. When we’re in uncharted waters, we’ve got nothing but economic theory to guide us. And the theory says it’s safer to stick to a spending-based stimulus plan.

Kahneman and Taleb

Daniel Kahneman and Nassim Nicholas Taleb reflect on the crisis in this hour long Edge video.

It is quite entertaining to see these two scholars discuss weighty philosophical issues from hot pink swiveling chairs. I have expressed mixed feelings for Taleb before, but one thing he has going for him is that Kahneman likes him (although I'm not sure why). Taleb speaks with about the same skill in this video that I would: babbling all over the place and changing thoughts mid-sentence without any coherent structure. This is quite the contrast to Kahneman, whose thoughts are impressively linear and clear.

Note to Edge: Take a tip from TED: people aren't that patient anymore. This video takes a ridiculous amount of time to get started. You can skip to about the 7 minute mark and not miss anything.

Trendspotting: Tree businesses

1. From Change the Thought : This tree house/hotel room is lined with mirrored glass and almost vanishes at a glance from the outside, while granting the guest a 360 degree view from the inside.



2. From PSFK : The Yellow Tree House stands 10 meters up a Redwood tree in a forest near Warkworth, north of Auckland, New Zealand. The project was part of a marketing campaign for the Yellow Pages. Claiming they can “get anything done” Yellow commissioned Pacific Environment Architects to design the treetop restaurant.

My nomination for photo project of the year

"We're all gonna die - 100 meters of existence"

PSFK explains :

Danish photographer Simon Hoegsberg recently produced a 100m image to document the beauty of ordinary people. Titled We’re All Gonna Die - 100 meters of existence, the image took 17 months to complete and captured commuters walking across the railroad bridge on Warschauer Strasse, Berlin. Few of the 178 people captured during the twenty day photoshoot were aware of Hoegsberg’s presence, as he sat on the same spot taking pictures of passers by.

Predicted energy trends infographic

HT: Cool Infographics

P.S. - Notice who created this beautiful graphic.

Gender stereotypes with age [charts]

Dolores Labs has another great post showing how people perceive a person's attractiveness, intelligence, political affiliation, intoxication, wealth, and trustworthiness using over 10,000,000 judgments from FaceStat.

There are some interesting looking curves :

The internet has solutions to all your troubles with . . . the internet

Annoyed by web advertisements? Try replacing them with art. [HT: PSFK]

Check your email too often? Addicted to a web site? KeepMeOut warns you when you visit a site too often. [HT: MakeUseOf.com]

How you think affects how you feel

. . . So says an article in Scientific American called Rapid Thinking Makes People Happy. It is a poor choice of title because, as the article goes on to discuss, it is actually varied thinking that makes people happy.

The most exciting thing I learned all week

Google Health to allow users to connect to and stream data from medical devices.

The Forbes article points out the obvious benefit that doctors will be able to catch problems and provide treatment early, but there is another far more exciting benefit: the data are going to be immensely valuable in understanding how behavior and lifestyle affect health outcomes. If this catches on even with just a small subset of the population, an enormous amount of data could be collected and shared--everything from heart rate to blood pressure to stress to food intake to exercise to sleep. Imagine the predictive power of these data if they were collected every few seconds. This could be a revolution in data collection; now all we need is a revolution in data analysis -- data visualization to the rescue!

Don't mind me, I'm just high class

From a ScienceDaily article called Rich Man, Poor Man: Body Language Can Indicate Socioeconomic Status:

[. . .] the researchers looked for two types of behaviors: disengagement behaviors (including fidgeting with personal objects and doodling) and engagement behaviors (including head nodding, laughing and eye contact). The results, reported in Psychological Science, reveal that nonverbal cues can give away a person's Socioeconomic Status (SES). Volunteers whose parents were from upper SES backgrounds displayed more disengagement-related behaviors compared to participants from lower SES backgrounds. [. . .] They surmise that people from upper SES backgrounds who are wealthy and have access to prestigious institutions tend to be less dependent on others.

A quick reminder of how little we know

If it took NYC four years to figure out what smells, imagine what else we might not know.

Font troubles

Without having a clue of what I was doing, I played a game of operation with the Wehr in the World blog code the other day, and now the font is way too small and I can't figure out how to increase it (changing it under Fonts and Colors won't work). Please bear with me until I have time to figure out how to fix this. In the meantime, if you subscribe to Wehr in the World, the text will appear in normal size.

Addendum 2/8: I changed the template in an effort to fix the problem, but it was not until I got help from the Blogger forum that I was able to fix it. It turns out it was a piece of code in my calorie distribution post that was screwing everything up.

Assorted links

1. Two of my least favorite economists--Paul Krugman and Steven Marglin--were on the same Wisconsin public radio show as one of my favorite economists, Steven Levitt, although not at the same time. I thought all three made good points throughout, but admirably, Levitt was very critical of himself on the Freakonomics blog for "descending into expertdom".

2. Tim's Data Blog; like me, he is a Nicholas Felton wannabe, although he is much closer than I am with some wonderfully creative visualizations of his own. [Hat tip: Cool Infographics]

3. Local news: Prarie Home Companion coming to Durham May 9 and Muhammed Yunus' Grameen Bank eyes a Triangle Branch.

4. "You Are Your Data."

A charity that makes me grumpy

I recently heard of a charity that has the goals of ending hunger, encouraging healthy diets, and saving the environment. Noble causes to be sure, but here is how they propose to do it:

Giving the gift of livestock to the 3rd world.

In their minds this would (1) end hunger by providing the poor with meat and dairy, (2) encourage healthy diets by increasing protein and calcium intake, and (3) save the environment by providing fertilizer to rejuvenate the soil.

I hope you see the problems here:

Ending hunger

This is simple math. If more people ate a diet rich in meat and dairy, more people would go hungry because livestock require more land. For every poor farmer that converts part of his land for growing grains or vegetables to land for raising livestock, more people will go hungry.

For a poor family, it makes much more financial sense for them to exchange their livestock for wheat or rice, which provide more calories per dollar. And the milk is unlikely to be much benefit because most people in developing countries are lactose intolerant anyway.

Healthy diets

The saturated fats in meat and dairy make them not the healthiest options. Heart disease, cancer, and diabetes are diseases of luxury that are more common in areas with diets high in animal fat. Even assuming that an animal-rich diet would improve health, as mentioned earlier, the families would likely end up trading their livestock anyway, so what's the point?

Saving the environment

If you want to save the environment, you should be raising less livestock, not more. Livestock emit carbon and pollute the groundwater; but perhaps the biggest environmental cost they impose is in taking up space that could otherwise be used for trees.


It is disheartening that a charity that runs on people's misguided beliefs is as popular as it is. If I could say one thing to the charity's organizers, it would be this: Microfinance has demonstrated that the people who know best how to rise out of poverty are the people in poverty themselves. Instead of trying to impose your formula, let them make their own decisions. If you insist on giving them something other than a loan, empower them with the internet so that they might expand their reach beyond their village. You don't even need to teach them how to use it; they can figure it out themselves.

Calorie distributions of 22 popular restaurants [chart]

Using data collected from fatburgr.com, I created the chart above showing the calories of each item on a restaurant's menu {click to enlarge}.

Lesson learned: never eat at Chili's again.

Addendum: Kottke points to the 20 worst foods of 2009 which includes the following quote about this year's loser (winner?), the Baskin Robbins large chocolate oreo shake:

We didn't think anything could be worse than Baskin Robbins' 2008 bombshell, the Heath Bar Shake. After all, it had more sugar (266 grams) than 20 bowls of Froot Loops, more calories (2,310) than 11 actual Heath Bars, and more ingredients (73) than you'll find in most chemist labs. Rather than coming to their senses and removing it from the menu, they did themselves one worse and introduced this caloric catastrophe. It's soiled with more than a day's worth of calories and three days worth of saturated fat, and, worst of all, usually takes less than 10 minutes to sip through a straw.

The 25 worst offenders:

Restaurant	Name	Calories
Arby's	Pecan Sticky Bun (4 pack)	2751
Chili's	Texas Cheese Fries w/ Jalapeno-Ranch Dressing	2070
Chili's	Country-Fried Steak w/ Sides, Toast and Gravy	1890
Chili's	Crispy Honey Chipotle Crispers (no dressing)	1890
Chili's	Chicken Crispers®	1880
Chili's	Smokehouse Bacon Triple-The-Cheese Big Mouth Burger® w/ out side of Jalapeno-Ranch Dressing	1840
Chili's	Fajita Steak Quesadillas w/ Rice, Black Beans, Sour Cream and Pico de Gallo	1830
Chili's	Fajita Chicken Quesadillas w/ Rice, Black Beans, Sour Cream and Pico de Gallo	1830
Chili's	Classic Nachos w/ Fajita Beef and Pico de Gallo and Sour Cream	1740
Chili's	Fajita Combo Chicken & Steak Quesadillas w/ Rice, Black Beans, Sour Cream and Pico de Gallo	1690
Chili's	Country Fried Chicken Crispers (no dressing)	1660
Chili's	Classic Nachos w/ Fajita Chicken and Pico de Gallo and Sour Cream	1630
Chili's	Chocolate Chip Paradise Pie® w/ Vanilla Ice Cream	1600
Whataburger	Whatacatch® Dinner (2 piece)	1580
Chili's	Southern Smokehouse Bacon Big Mouth Burger® w/ out side of Ancho-Chile BBQ Sauce	1560
Chili's	Grilled Shrimp Alfredo Pasta w/ Garlic Toast	1540
Chili's	Jalapeno Smokehouse Bacon Big Mouth Burger® w/ out side of Jalapeno-Ranch Dressing	1530
Chili's	Cajun Chicken Pasta w/ Garlic Toast	1500
Five Guys Burgers and Fries	Large Fries	1464
Whataburger	Malt, chocolate (Large)	1460
Jack In The Box	Egg Nog Shake (24oz)	1450
Whataburger	Malt, strawberry (Large)	1450
Chili's	Classic Nachos w/ Pico de Gallo and Sour Cream	1450
Jack In The Box	OREO® Cookie Ice Cream Shake (24oz cup)	1450
Jack In The Box	Chocolate Ice Cream Shake (24oz cup)	1430

Solution to sweet tooth: make sweets more available?

From a EurekAlert article on the paradox of temptation:

Although it seems intuitively obvious that the dieter should not keep bonbons in every room of the house, psychological theory argues the opposite. According to counteractive self-control theory, we deflate desire for readily available temptation when indulging conflicts with pursuit of more important goals.

I think the premise is right, but not the conclusion. For example, putting televisions in every room might decrease desire for television, but the desire will not be altogether erased, so people will still watch some television. Alternatively, removing every television might increase desire for television, but the inconvenience of finding a place to watch television will outweigh the desire for it, and so people will watch much less television.

Google is my hero

Google Earth unveiled a whole series of new features today, including Google Mars, historical imagery, and, my personal favorite, Google Ocean. The two best, in my opinion, are that (1) you can view the ocean floor in 3D under water, and (2) you can track the position and migration paths of various animals.

To see the features in action, check out the 3:27 video from the Google Earth Blog embedded below.



. . . It just keeps getting better.

Assorted links

1. Throwing like a girl. (Did not know that Brazilian men tend to 'throw like a girl'.)

2. What happens when a stone impacts water?



3. This could either be a serious invasion of privacy or an exciting new way to collect data.

4. $3 LED light bulb has 100,000 hour (11.4 year) lifespan and could skim three quarters off a typical household's energy bill.

5. Create a font with your own handwriting (free). [via Cool Tools]

Attention Charles Platt: you need your own blog!

Charles Platt is guest blogging at Boing Boing right now. He is publishing fascinating post after fascinating post on an impressively diverse set of subjects. While I would like to comment on each of his posts (I already posted on the two life expectancy charts), I recognize that that would be excessive; instead, I will point out a sample of very good ones here:

1. Life at Wal-Mart

He took a job at Wal-Mart to find out first hand whether Wal-Mart workers were being exploited. His conclusion: while true that they don't get paid much, the working environment is very respectable with opportunites for growth that Mom & Pop stores can't provide.

2. Square feet per person by country



I love that he went with squares instead of circles here because humans are notoriously bad at interpreting the area of circles. It would also be interesting to see the amount of arable land per person (I'm just thinking that even though Australia has lots of land, most of it is desert). Maybe if I can figure out how to make a chart like this I will post something.

3. Cryonics (1 and 2)

4. Suburban Japan (1 and 2)

5. And finally, from back in December 2008, a meditation on the U.S. prison system with a contribution from a prisoner.

Two life expectancy charts

The first chart gives remaining life expectancy based on current age, and the second chart gives the percentage of people born in 2004 expected to survive to a certain age.

Both charts (1 and 2) are from Charles Platt on Boing Boing.

For more on aging, see the wonderfully colorful and logical Aubrey de Grey speak at TED about why we age and how we can avoid it.

The importance of externalizing ideas

From Donald Norman's book Things That Make Us Smart:

The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, memory, thought, and reasoning are all constrained. But human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities. How have we increased memory, thought, and reasoning? By the invention of external aids: It is things that make us smart.

From a 2003 NYT article called Pure Math, Pure Joy:

“Since our theories are so far ahead of experimental capabilities, we are forced to use mathematics as our eyes,” Dr. Brian Greene, a Columbia University string theorist, said recently. “That’s why we follow it where it takes us even if we can’t see where we’re going.”

So in some ways the men and women seen here scrutinizing marks on their blackboards collectively represent a kind of particle accelerator of the mind.

Both quotes were borrowed from the very interesting dissertation of MIT student Ben Fry called Computational Information Design which is about, among other things, the open-source visualization software he co-created called Processing. He blogs here.