All sorts of fun and craziness
June 26th, 2007
I’ve mentioned Democracy TV here before, as well as Joost here. I’m not going to say one is better than the other - they are booth interesting and useful in their own way. Democracy TV is changing to Miro - it should be the same great stuff, just a new name.
Categories: Science/Tech | No Comments
June 23rd, 2007
This article on the word ‘fuck’ promises to be interesting:
This Article is as simple and provocative as its title suggests: it explores the legal implications of the word fuck. The intersection of the word fuck and the law is examined in four major areas: First Amendment, broadcast regulation, sexual harassment, and education. The legal implications from the use of fuck vary greatly with the context. To fully understand the legal power of fuck, the nonlegal sources of its power are tapped. Drawing upon the research of etymologists, linguists, lexicographers, psychoanalysts, and other social scientists, the visceral reaction to fuck can be explained by cultural taboo. Fuck is a taboo word. The taboo is so strong that it compels many to engage in self-censorship. This process of silence then enables small segments of the population to manipulate our rights under the guise of reflecting a greater community. Taboo is then institutionalized through law, yet at the same time is in tension with other identifiable legal rights. Understanding this relationship between law and taboo ultimately yields fuck jurisprudence.
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June 23rd, 2007
Regular readers here know we have a general disgust for Fox’s Bill O’Reilly - it really comes down to him entirely missing any sort of clue.
Here is about the best I’ve seen, O’Reilly getting smacked down by a 16 year old high school student - just makes O’Reilly look dumb and exposes his hypocritical bullshit ‘journalism.’
Categories: Politics | No Comments
June 20th, 2007
Freakonomics has a pair of posts on the evils of PowerPoint.
I completely agree - I hate PowerPoint, I think it makes people stupid. It is not so much that PowerPoint is a bad application (it is), but that it is so terribly misused. I hate, hate hate, doing a ‘deck’ for something that really deserves 2 bullets in an email. Or condensing 18 months of full time work and effort for 8 people in to no more than 4 slides. It goes beyond executive summary and goes in to ridiculous over summarization.
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June 20th, 2007
I haven’t posted in eons and there are reasons (or excuses?) for it.
Since my last post, I have passed one professional certification, went on 3 trips, and almost got killed by a deer. The latter is a long story surrounding my weekend trip up to the North Shore of lake Superior (the story is well covered here by Genya.) A few things that I have learned from this experience:
1. If you’re in Northern Minnesota, EVERYTHING on the road is suspected to be a deer until proven otherwise.
2. My car cannot take on a deer without severe damage to the vehicle and its occupants– I am glad that the morning of the accident we decided against taking it and went with the rental instead. I do feel lucky that we were all buckled up, that the car was very sturdy and that the driver had excellent reaction. Otherwise, we might have been in a hospital right now.
3. You can use water instead of radiator fluid if that’s all you have handy.
4. Radiator fluid tank on a Ford500 is 11 liters which means 6 (!) trips to a neighboring church’s bathroom to fill up 4 little water bottles.
5. The car with a hole in the radiator makes funny tractor noises and produces a lot of steam from under the hood if you try to drive it.
6. It is very scary not knowing if the car you’re in will make it to the next stop light or not.
7. There is not much good food available north of Duluth.
8. Bonfires are cool. Bonfires with wine/beer right on the shore of the largest lake in US with a sky full of stars and a good company are unbelievable.
Not to be outdone, my next week is promising to be very crazy as well– we have K and J coming to visit from New England. That means lots of fun, lots of people at my house, staying up late, talking a lot, and making a $38 investment in cheese. Stay tuned.
Categories: Uncategorized | No Comments
June 16th, 2007
There is a new album out raising money for the situation in Darfur, which is one of the poorly known political conflicts that the US doesn’t see fit to care about (note, they don’t have much oil).
I’m not completely in love with Instant Karma
While the overall compilation is good, there aren’t a lot of standouts beyond the Green Day track, the rest are good, but not standout great. I wish Imagine from A Perfect Circle’s Emotive
Categories: Music, Movies, etc, Politics | No Comments
June 10th, 2007
I can’t believe G didn’t post this, but she did sent it to me, and it is really quite funny. I’m not an engineer, but I can certainly related to them.
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June 7th, 2007
I’m a little bit embarrassed to admit this, but my thinking on the previous game show kept me thinking, so when Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader came on in the background I didn’t change the channel.
This game is also rather simple, an adult is presented with general knowledge questions that are presumably in US grade 1 - 4 curriculum. The more questions the contestant answers, the more money he or she wins, all the way up to $1 million. Like so many trivia shows, there is a gimmick, in this one the contestant has a 5th grader for help. The contestant can get one question wrong and continue (a ’save’), if and only if the 5th grader has the correct answer. He or she also has one ‘peek’ in which the 5th grader’s answer can be viewed before choosing a final answer, and a ‘copy’ where the youngster’s answer must be taken as the contestant’s own.
The behavior here seemed generally rational. Of the three contestants (none of whom did very well) they each chose the ‘peek’ option before the ‘copy’ option, meaning they increased their input to the decision, but retained the final decision. They also tended to use the ‘copy’ option only if they did not have the ’save’ option, meaning they only deferred completely to the 5th grader when they had no other choice.
I’m a little curious why contestants on one game show seem to be more rational than on another. One possibility is that with the 5th grader show the contestants audition and have time to prepare, possibly creating a strategy, whereas the cab contestants did not have this opportunity.
What I’m even more curious about is whether there are any behavioral economists who are using TV game shows for analysis. It seems to be a handy experiment where the rules are strictly defined, options are limited and contestants are most certainly acting as selfish agents.
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June 7th, 2007
I am not a big fan of game shows, especially the reality kind, but I do like some of the behavioral economics aspects. Last night, while watching the Discovery Channel, and the Cash Cab show came on. Normally, I would look for something else, or just go to bed, but I was pretty tired, and this was the least offensive thing on TV, which I was sort of ignoring anyway.
Anyway, the premise is simple, people jump in a cab in Manhattan going somewhere and find themselves in a TV game show. Like many trivia shows, they are presented with a series of questions, each worth a dollar value, which become progressively more difficult, and progressively more valuable. If the contestants get three questions wrong, they loose all the money and get kicked out of the cab. They also have two ’shout outs,’ one allowing them to phone a friend, and one allowing them to ask a stranger on the street. At the very end at their destination they are offered the option to go ‘double or nothing.’
Now, I haven’t seen this show too many times, and have not done an exhaustive analysis, but a few things jumped out. First interesting thing, I noticed was that when presented with a difficult question to which the contestants did not know the answers they usually chose to call a friend, even if they had zero or one wrong answers so far. This means they were calling a friend for relatively low valued questions ($25 or $50 when questions go to $100), and they were choosing this option before asking someone on the street, meaning they valued the opinion of a friend less than the opinion of a stranger. This is especially puzzling since they could call any friend at all, possibly one with subject matter expertise, and someone on the street is, well, someone on the street. These choices seem entirely irrational, but were consistent across half dozen iterations of the game I saw.
The other very surprising feature was how rarely someone reaching their destination, and therefor winning the money, chose the double or nothing option. These people did not intend to go on a game show, did not expect to win any money that day, and even if they answered the question and were wrong would at least have had a free cab ride. Yet my estimate is less than 1/3 actually took the double or nothing option. I’m not quite sure what the most rational choice in this scenario is, but it seems that faced with the choice of a free cab ride (say $30), the winnings (say $400) and double ($800) one only needs to be convinced he has a 50-50 chance at getting the question right for the double or nothing strategy to pay off. Practically, since the questions are not multiple choice it is difficult to say what chance the contestant has, but if he or she made it so far, answering 6 to 10 questions correctly depending on which questions, it seems there would be a 50-50 shot at getting this last one correct.
This might be why I should not watch TV……..
Categories: Uncategorized | 1 Comment
