June 2009
110 posts
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“Such renewed optimism is uplifting. But this crisis was supposedly caused by decades of malign economic and financial forces. Do things turn round in one quarter? Japan, for example, remains bedridden almost 20 years after its meltdown. For this crisis to be over so soon, investors have to believe that the initial collapse was exaggerated and that the old world was not so sick after all.”
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I keep thinking this. Everyone says “this is a giant change in the way the world works” but they also think they’re going to emerge unscathed. It can’t be both, can it?
The Chaos in Your Head →
noahbrier.com
Neuroscience and networks, two topics I can’t resist.
And here they are all wrapped together in an article about how your brain constantly walks on the edge of chaos. Apparently, the chaotic cascades inside your head are what drives intelligence and people who let chaos take over more often (though not too much) are smarter (at least from an IQ perspective).
The neuronal avalanches that Beggs investigated, for example, are perfect for transmitting information across the brain. If the brain was in a more stable state, these avalanches would die out before the message had been transmitted. If it was chaotic, each avalanche could swamp the brain.
Oh, and apparently your brain has 13 degrees of separation. Who knew?
The Value of Shared Information →
noahbrier.com
A few weeks ago I pointed out a study that explained, “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.”
Today I ran across some research on how celebrities stay popular for so long that sheds further light on the subject. Essentially people talk about more famous people more because it’s a social lubricant to have a shared topic, therefore making the famous more famous.
I’ve been spending some time thinking about how you break this cycle. Especially at work, it’s important to share ideas that everyone doesn’t know about yet as they may hold information that could push things forward in new ways. No answers yet, but it’s interesting to think about.
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Recommendations, Networks, Etc. →
noahbrier.com
Partly because I haven’t written anything of any length in awhile and partly because I’ve been thinking about a bunch of different stuff lately, I’ve got an entry chock full of random thoughts.
So,…
“UberCEO said one of the most surprising findings of the study was that no Fortune 100 CEOs had a personal blog that was easily findable using the executive’s name.”
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This is by far the least surprising thing labeled as “surprising” that you’ll read today. They’re Fortune 100 CEOs … They’re probably pretty busy.
M.T.A. Sells Naming Rights to Brooklyn Subway Station - NYTimes.com →
nytimes.com
Zomg we have to find a sponsor for The Bedford Ave spot BEFORE THEY DO.
Naming rights are a terrible way for the subway to make money. Ugh.
“Twenty-three-year-old Louis Deenan, undeniably the most detestable, loathsome individual ever to walk the earth, willfully decided Monday to devote his miserable life and all of its awful ambitions to the field of marketing.”
—World’s Worst Person Decides To Go Into Marketing | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source
Non-Random Iranian Election Results →
noahbrier.com
How do you tell if Iran’s election results are fraudulent? Well, if you’re a statistician you look at the last two digits of the vote counts from the precincts that report and look for anomalies.
The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average — a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another — are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.
To put it in perspective, in last year’s US presidential election “returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections.” So there’s that.
Bring Back Dueling? →
noahbrier.com
An interesting thesis: “The form of the duel - with its pointless deaths, inherent injustice and absurd pride - seems to us against reason and morality. But it did answer a problem that always confronts human society: how can one settle a dispute between essentially equal parties?”
Also from the same article, they compare dueling to modern-day PR battles: “Instead, the modern equivalents of the duellists’ “seconds” were the rival armies of spin doctors, and so the contest was carried on, at public expense, through the media.”
Strange Airports →
noahbrier.com
Fun. A list of four of the strangest airport runways including Gibralter, where pedestrians actually walk across the runway. As a side note, when I told people I was going to Hong Kong they all mentioned Kai Tak Airport which closed in 1998 but used to be in the center of town (Kowloon) and was known for it’s amazing landings.
Good Question →
noahbrier.com
Sure, Twitter has been a fascinating window for those of us on the outside and at times a critical tool for some of those on the inside. I certainly won’t try to deny this, but I have to ask: if - like most start-ups who show only casual interest in generating revenue - Twitter had folded months ago, would the protesters in Iran be somehow muzzled or in any way hindered?
Gotta say I agree with Nathan’s answer: “To say so is nothing less than patronizing. Outward and inward communiques would surely have found another path.” That’s not to say it’s a bad thing, just a bit of perspective on the situation.
