GATHERING INFORMATION

We’re great at reading, gathering, searching, and finding new and interesting ideas. With search engines now almost anything on the internet can be found using the right keywords. The problem now is not finding information, but sorting and relating it to other information we already know. We start doing this sorting and categorizing at a young age – this is a dog, it’s an animal; this is a cat, it’s also an animal. Slowly over time the number of categories and items we understand expands through learning – Kampala is the capital of Uganda, which is a country in Africa, which is one of 7 continents. These layers can become quite complex and deep. As I learn more about Uganda I store it away in my mind with other information about the country or maybe even relating it to some of its neighboring countries.

CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING

Once we have a basic framework, we start to hang new information around what we already know. However, without an understanding of the big picture new information can seem meaningless. For example, in my economics class we jumped straight into utility theory formulas without discussing the broader context of how and why we need to analyze individuals utility preferences.

After looking at these graphs long enough I started to build an understanding on my own, but only through repeated rote exercises – copying the board directly from the professor. If instead we could slowly zoom further in to each level of detail, the foundation for each idea would be much firmer. The best example of this idea of zooming if of course Powers of 10 by Ray & Charles Eames:

Why don’t we have a massive Powers of 10-esque way of presenting knowledge? We have Wikipedia, but right now we can only see one page at a time. The average person can’t aggregate data into any sort of meaningful visual form.

LEARNING AS EXPLORATION

Once a beginner sees the big picture – micro vs macro economics – its time to zoom into those groups for more information. Prezi presentations are the most popular way to visually represent this movement. Concepts only become visible once we zoom down through the larger items.

These broad sweeps of information should not be limited to something that only the professor does as part of a presentation. By visually representing the data so students can explore and relate interesting ideas on their own, learning can become exploratory and interesting again.

Imagine a zoomable Prezi for any topic you want to learn that has detailed layers that allow you to skim the broad concepts or learn all the way down to ongoing research.

The problem with Prezi’s is that the proportions and layers are all built individually by the presenter. We need a new system that allows the data to persist between Prezi’s, for this web to expand through the efforts of everyone just like Wikipedia is built by the masses instead of one author.

BIG HISTORY

Microsoft’s ChronoZoom research project is one of the best examples I’ve seen of trying to give the broadest sense of context with an ability to zoom in to what interests you. ChronoZoom is part of the broader field of Big History – best summarized by David Christian at TED – which tries to place human history within the context of the full history of the universe. Imagine learning history in school with this massive level of context that’s fully zoomable.

NOT JUST PRETTY; COMPUTABLE

I keep talking about representing the ideas or data visually but the key here is that the web of information isn’t just a static mindmap that’s used once; instead by defining the relationships between items we can sort, pivot, rotate, filter, and re-organize the data in ways that answer questions. These sorts of questions are the ones I hope to answer and illustrate in future postings.

Related articles

• Prezi zooms past 10M users, releases PowerPoint import tool (venturebeat.com)
• Visualization of the Week: Visualizing Big History (radar.oreilly.com)

Read: 4/21/12

Rating: 5/5

My Highlights & Notes:

“Games are about engaging with the most entertaining thing on the planet, which is other people.” ~ Jordan Weisman – p.17

“If ever the Story of any private Man’s Adventures in the World were worth making Pvblick, and were acceptable when Publish’d, the Editor of this Account thinks this will be so… The Editor believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it…; and as such he thinks, without farther Compliment to the World, he does them a great Service in the Publication.” introduction to Robinson Crusoe in the first edition. p.32

“Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art in comparison is near, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing, and emasculate,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a few months later in response. Life is true; art is a construct. But Defoe was writing long before this particular type of construct became accepted as art. So never mind that every story is by definition a fiction of some sort – what Defoe was saying in his preface was, This is not a novel. - p.33

They weren’t building a game; they were building an experience that was capable of, as he [Elan Lee] put it, “transforming your life into an entertainment venue.” p.34

Interesting points about new mediums trying to mask their new powers by acting like old mediums. p.36-37

[William] Gibson calls cyberspace: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, recording.” p.38

…one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web… Passion. Obsession. A yearning to immerse oneself in stories that transpire in a fictional universe. The desire to experience that universe through as many different media as possible. A need to extend and embrace that universe by telling new stories within it. ~ quoting from an essay by William Gibson p.40

Talks about James Cameron creating a full world for Avatar, including hiring Paul Frommer – a linguist from USC – to build a language for Pandora. p.48

“I think the role of this type of film should be to create a kind of fractal-like complexity,” he [James Cameron] went on. “The casual viewer can enjoy it without having to drill down to the secondary and tertiary levels of detail. But for a real fan, you go in an order of magnitude and, boom! There’s a whole set of new patterns. You can step in in powers of 10 as many times as you want, and it still holds up. But you don’t need to know all that stuff to enjoy it – it’s just there if you want it. To me, that’s the best science fiction.” p.49

Entertainment gets defined as “escapism” by Jon Landau – I disagree. I don’t think people are always trying to escape from their boring lives. p.54

“The best stories in video games are the stories the player tells himself,” said Yannis Mallet. “In French we say ‘son propre film’ – the movie in his head.” p.57

“I like the way they think,” [James Cameron] said, still talking about the Marines. “The way they think is, they’re not doing it because it’s easy. They’re doing it because it’s hard. They’re doing it because you can’t.” p.64

… the audience for Star Wars, as for other deep media sagas, takes the form of an inverted pyramid. At the top are the hundreds of millions of people who’ve seen a couple of the movies and know Star Wars as a cultural icon. Just below them are the millions who respond to the story in different media – gamers who play the games, readers who love the books, collectors who obsess over the toys. And at the point of the pyramid are the otaku – the hundreds of thousands of superfans who are most deeply connected to the saga, who contribute to the online forums and belong to the official Hyperspace fan club and help construct the Wookieepedia, the fan-built knowledge base for true Star Wars otaku. p.74

- If the costs of production have fallen massively since the original Star Wars and creators can sell directly to fans or superfans, why are we waiting on studios? You could build an entire digital world through crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding – to a niche market and still make money.

Who controls a story – its creator or its fans? p.75

- We need to invite creatives to build these universes around a common framework. Set up the premise and then see where the creative process takes us.

… there’s nothing inherent in humans that makes them want to be passive consumers of entertainment, or of the advertising that pays for it. The couch potato era, seemingly so significant at the time, turns out to be less an era than a blip – and a blip based on faulty assumptions at that. p.87

People don’t passively ingest a marketing message, or any type of message. They greet it with an emotional response, usually unconscious, that can vary wildly depending on their own experiences and predispositions. They don’t just imbibe a story; they imbue it with meaning. Which means that perceptions of a brand aren’t simply created by marketers; they’re “co-created,” in the words of Gerald Zaltman of Harvard Business School, by marketers and consumers together. p.88

“For me, the deeper aspect is model building,” Will Wright continued. “We’re always building models of the world around us to help us predict what’s going to happen, and play is one of the primary ways in which we build these models. I think storytelling lives alongside play as another mechanism for building models.” p.141

Mystery, [J.J. Abrams] went on to say, is the catalyst for imagination. p.151

“Foraging,” because that’s what looking for information is like. And “sensemaking,” because the need to make sense of the show is why you need to go foraging in the first place. p.153

Great quote from William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition. p.163

Interesting company named Bunchball mentioned. p.176

“Each of us is part of the giant network that we call society,” writes Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, a network theorist at Northeastern University in Boston. “Our world is small because society is a very dense web.” p.204

Stripped of all the apparatus of advanced civilization and pecuniary gain – stripped of Hollywood and television and publishing – storytelling is a simple act of sharing. We share information. We share experience. Sometimes we overshare. But why do we share at all?… Because life is a constantly functioning information exchange. p.204

Interesting research by Brian Boyd of the University of Auckland – mentions his book On the Origin of Stories. p.204

The most obvious thing we get is status: telling a story, (almost) any story, gives us an opportunity to claim the attention of people around us. So we compete to tell stories, to fill in the details of other people’s stories, to offer out own comment. And we get a payoff in the form of an ego boost. p.205

It’s interesting this “ego boost” idea seems to be true, it’s strange that the impact on the audience and what they gain seems to hardly ever be talked about.

Talking again about how the brain fires off in similar ways when we watch someone do something – almost as if we’re doing it ourselves. p.208-209

Poignant anecdote about John Moe on twitter. p.216

As Brian Boyd writes:
Signals that evolve through competition tend to be costly, as arms races develop between insistent senders and resistant receivers. Messages become louder, longer, more repetitive, massively redundant, like the roars of red deer stags or Superbowl advertisers. Signals user for cooperative purposes, by contrast – “conspiratorial whispers” – will be energetically cheap and informationally rich.
It’s not enough to just break through the clutter, in other words. And rarely is it worth the effort required to smash through the filter. You need to disarm the filter – and the best way to do that, the most economical and efficient way, is to signal that your signal is nonthreatening. p.236

It’s like Alex Bogusky said: this generation knows you’re trying to sell them something, and you know they know, so let’s drop the pretense and make the whole exercise as much fun as possible. p.240

Cool story about Nick Haley. He did a homemade iPod ad to the song “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” by Cansei de Ser Sexy – “My music is where I’d like you to touch.” p.240

By subtly directing brand perceptions while encouraging the consumer to help create those perceptions, Howard maintained, the marketer can help the brand and the consumer to, in effect, become one. “You can’t rely on ads,” she said. “A brand becomes relevant by infusing itself directly into the culture“… “Advertising used to interrupt life’s programming. Now advertising is the programming. And if you’re actually being marketed to successfully, you have no idea.” p.242

Jeff Gomez is big on myth. “We see ourselves as stewards,” he said. In too many cases – Star Wars being an obvious exception – the producers of a movie or a television show or a video game haven’t plumbed their story deeply enough even to identify its message, much less whatever underlying myth it may embody. “So the message changes and the audience becomes frustrated,” he went on. “It’s our job to figure it out. And to do that [you have to find] the core of the story. “That means immersing ourselves in it and figuring out what makes it timeless and relevant. There’s an aha! moment that’s very specific to each property. It’s the moment when I’ve found the true emotional connection.” p.245-246

Wow! Gomez’s group – Starlight Runner – produces a huge 150 page book to develop the “story worlds”… from a platform-neutral perspective… so robust as to furnish hundreds of hours of content. p.246

“Do people like storytelling?” asked Nick Law, R/GA’s chief creative officer for North America, when I saw him at the agency’s New York headquarters. “Of course people like storytelling. But given the choice, they’re probably going to go to HBO.” p.249-250

[TV ads now]… it’s a ballooning of entertainment at the expense of information. It’s a poor man’s Hollywood.” But what civilians actually want, he argued, is information. p.251

Cool chart about system thinkers. p.253

…dopamine has less to do with pleasure itself than with the drive to seek pleasure. p.262

“Addictive drugs hijack the natural reward system,” he continues, “and what we showed was that video games hijack it as well.” At the same time, the experiment also connected gaming to another behavior – one seemingly quite different, yet equally connected with the role of dopamine in the brain’s reward circuitry: learning.
“Learning and addiction are very tightly bound together.” p.264

Fascinating brain science. p.266

“If you measure dopamine while an animal is searching, it’s very high,” LeDoux said later, over lunch at a lower Manhattan cafe. “But when they find something and consume it, dopamine doesn’t register. It’s more in the seeking than in the attainment of the goal.” If anticipation is so often sweeter than success, dopamine would seem to be the reason why. p.268-269

Scientist at Concordia University hypothesized that dopamine servers to heighten the brain’s focus in response to uncertainty, possibly in an attempt to learn how to predict the reward. p.271

This emotional system… makes animals intensely interested in exploring their world and leads them to become excited when they are about to get what they desire. It eventually allows animals to find and eagerly anticipate the things they need for survival, including, of course, food, water, warmth, and their ultimate evolutionary survival need, sex. In other words, when fully aroused, it helps fill the mind with interest and motivates organisms to move… in search of the things they need, crave, and desire. p.272 block quote from Jaak Panksepp

Related articles

• The Internet and the ‘Art of Immersion’ (cnet.com)
• Multichannel customer experience – Q&A: Frank Rose on digital storytelling and media immersion (serve4impact.com)
• Storytelling experiments – Frank Rose: digital technology allows multi-way conversations (nextlevelofnews.com)
• Macroeconomic storytelling (cafehayek.com)
• James Cameron And Getting Trapped Inside Your Most Successful Creation (wnyc.org)
• Received: Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion (datamining.typepad.com)
• Will James Cameron Become the Next George Lucas? (screencrave.com)

Freakonomics (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Read: 3/23/12

Rating: 5/5

The best books inspire great questions that leave me day dreaming about solutions to problems. Dubner and Levitt are like mythbusters for economics, politics, science, or any other field they wish to go after. Their core concept here is questioning everything – especially if it’s considered “common knowledge.” Levitt’s geniues as an economist has been credited to his ability to measure data typically considered outside the realm of economics. This non-traditional, lateral thinking is what I love most about the book. As a reader I start to feel like each new riddle seems more and more beatable – like these unrelated fields can all be approached with a similar toolkit and economics just happens to be the best tool for many of the sticky questions.

My Highlights & Notes:

he approached economics in a notably unorthodox way. He seemed to look at the world not so much as an academic but as a very smart and curious explorer—a documentary filmmaker, perhaps, or a forensic investigator or a bookie whose markets ranged from sports to crime to pop culture.Read more at location 46

“I’m not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics, and I also don’t know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market’s going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy’s going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation’s good or bad, if you ask me about taxes—I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things.”Read more at location 50

Note: This is the stuff! I feel this way just taking basic econ classes.

As Levitt sees it, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions.Read more at location 55

he has merely distilled the so-called dismal science to its most primal aim: explaining how people get what they want.Read more at location 61
Unlike most academics, he is unafraid of using personal observations and curiosities; he is also unafraid of anecdote and storytelling (although he is afraid of calculus). He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else has found. He figures a way to measure an effect that veteran economists had declared unmeasurable.Read more at location 62

Levitt’s underlying belief: that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and—if the right questions are asked—is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking.Read more at location 70

Note: I don’t know that this is true but it’s an interesting premise.

“We know we’ve got about six years to turn this juvenile crime thing around,” Clinton said, “or our country is going to be living with chaos.Read more at location 123

Note: Interesting how their predictions were so wrong. Who tracks this stuff?

These theories were not only logical; they were also encouraging, for they attributed the crime drop to specific and recent human initiatives.Read more at location 136

If it was gun control and clever police strategies and better-paying jobs that quelled crime—well then, the power to stop criminals had been within our reach all along.Read more at location 137

Decades of studies have shown that a child born into an adverse family environment is far more likely than other children to become a criminal.Read more at location 154

You depend on her for this information. That, in fact, is why you hired an expert. As the world has grown more specialized, countless such experts have made themselves similarly indispensable.Read more at location 172

In a medical study, it turned out that obstetricians in areas with declining birth rates are much more likely to perform cesarean-section deliveries than obstetricians in growing areas—suggesting that, when business is tough, doctors try to ring up more expensive procedures.Read more at location 180

Someone who didn’t know better might contemplate these figures and conclude that it is all those extra police in Washington who are causing the extra murders. Such wayward thinking, which has a long history, generallyRead more at location 220

It is well and good to opine or theorize about a subject, as humankind is wont to do, but when moral posturing is replaced by an honest assessment of the data, the result is often a new, surprising insight.Read more at location 256

Morality, it could be argued, represents the way that people would like the world to work—whereas economics represents how it actually does work.Read more at location 258

in the face of the Internet, their informational advantage is shrinking every day—as evidenced by, among other things, the falling price of coffins and life-insurance premiums.Read more at location 273

Note: What? Edit

Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so. If you learn to look at data in the right way, you can explain riddles that otherwise might have seemed impossible. Because there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.Read more at location 275

“Smith held that the answer lay in our ability to put ourselves in the position of a third person, an impartial observer,” Heilbroner wrote, “and in this way to form a notion of the objective…merits of a case.”Read more at location 296

Economics is, at root, the study of incentives: how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing.Read more at location 314

The typical economist believes the world has not yet invented a problem that he cannot fix if given a free hand to design the proper incentive scheme.Read more at location 315

But most incentives don’t come about organically. Someone—an economist or a politician or a parent—has to invent them.Read more at location 327

a solution to this one: automatic tax withholding from employees’ paychecks.Read more at location 331

Note: Was this really one of Friedman’s contributions? Edit

when people are given a small stipend for donating blood rather than simply being praised for their altruism, they tend to donate less blood. The stipend turned a noble act of charity into a painful way to make a few dollars, and it wasn’t worth it.Read more at location 368

Whatever the incentive, whatever the situation, dishonest people will try to gain an advantage by whatever means necessary.Read more at location 373

as W. C. Fields once said: a thing worth having is a thing worth cheating for.Read more at location 375

Instead of merely listing the name of each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number. Suddenly, seven million children—children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms—vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.Read more at location 389

teacher cheating is rarely looked for, hardly ever detected, and just about never punished.Read more at location 415

If economics is a science primarily concerned with incentives, it is also—fortunately—a science with statistical tools to measure how people respond to those incentives. All you need are some data.Read more at location 436

A dramatic one-year spike in test scores might initially be attributed to a good teacher; but with a dramatic fall to follow, there’s a strong likelihood that the spike was brought about by artificial means.Read more at location 452

this is a less charitable but just as likely answer—she doesn’t know the right answers herself. (With standardized tests, the teacher is typically not given an answer key.) If this is the case, then we have a pretty good clue as to why her students are in need of inflated grades in the first place: they have a bad teacher.Read more at location 520

They weren’t the ones who artificially jacked up their scores; they probably expected to do great in the seventh grade—and then they failed miserably. This may be the cruelest twist yet in high-stakes testing. A cheating teacher may tell herself that she is helping her students, but the fact is that she would appear far more concerned with helping herself.Read more at location 537

a good teacher’s students carried over all their gains into the next grade.Read more at location 552

The evidence was only strong enough to get rid of a dozen of them, but the many other cheaters had been duly warned. The final outcome of the Chicago study is further testament to the power of incentives: the following year, cheating by teachers fell more than 30 percent.Read more at location 579

Note: Why can they only warn them! That’s ridiculous! Cheating teachers should be charged with fraud. Edit

As Malloy saw it, all his troubles stemmed from the one fight in which he took a dive. Otherwise, he could have had class; he could have been a contender.Read more at location 617

theoretically happy lives; employees who steal company property are rarely detected.Read more at location 722

Note: Why do we consider street crime so egregious compared to white collar crime? Surely more people have been damaged from losses related to Enron and Wall St than muggings or thefts. How many people would you have to steal from to reach the level of Wall St. fraud? What’s the average loss from theft? Edit

But white-collar crime presents no obvious victim. From whom, exactly, did the masters of Enron steal? And how can you measure something if you don’t know to whom it happened, or with what frequency, or in what magnitude?Read more at location 724

economist Richard Thaler, in his 1985 “Beer on the Beach” study, showed that a thirsty sunbather would pay $2.65 for a beer delivered from a resort hotel but only $1.50 for the same beer if it came from a shabby grocery store.Read more at location 731

the same people who routinely steal more than 10 percent of his bagels almost never stoop to stealing his money box—a tribute to the nuanced social calculus of theft.Read more at location 742

a smaller community tends to exert greater social incentives against crime, the main one being shame.Read more at location 757

(Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn’t consider is that perhaps cheating was how they got to be executives.)Read more at location 768

“The Ring of Gyges,”Read more at location 777

In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant spelled out for the House of Representatives the true aims of the Ku Klux Klan: “By force and terror, to prevent all political action not in accord with the views of the members, to deprive colored citizens of the right to bear arms and of the right of a free ballot, to suppress the schools in which colored children were taught, and to reduce the colored people to a condition closely allied to that of slavery.”Read more at location 794

In Plessy v. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to full-scale racial segregation.Read more at location 803

D. W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (originally titled The ClansmanRead more at location 804

Will Rogers was the first to draw a line between the new Klan and the new threat in Europe: “Papers all state Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini,” he wrote. “Looks to me like it’s the Ku Klux that he is copying.”Read more at location 811

Kennedy would go on to become a self-described “dissident at large,”Read more at location 826

the few anti-hate groups that existed at the time had little leverage or even information about the Klan. “Almost all of the things written on the subject were editorials, not exposés,” Kennedy would later explain. “The writers were against the Klan, all right, but they had precious few inside facts about it.”Read more at location 834

It was Klan custom, for instance, to append a Kl to many words. (Thus would two Klansmen hold a Klonversation in the local Klavern.)Read more at location 847

Note: This is what children do. Edit

he would ask for a “Mr. Ayak”—“Ayak” being code for “Are You a Klansman?” He would hope to hear this response: “Yes, and I also know a Mr. Akai”—code for “A Klansman Am I.”Read more at location 849

Note: Poor choice of code words. Edit

The second is the absence of a correlation between lynchings and Klan membership: there were actually more lynchings of blacks between 1900 and 1909, when the Klan was dormant, than during the 1920s, when the Klan had millions of members—which suggests that the Ku Klux Klan carried out far fewer lynchings than is generally thought.Read more at location 859

The most compelling explanation is that all those early lynchings worked. White racists—whether or not they belonged to the Ku Klux Klan—had through their actions and their rhetoric developed a strong incentive scheme that was terribly clear and terribly frightening.Read more at location 868

there are few incentives more powerful than the fear of random violence—which, in essence, is why terrorism is so effective.Read more at location 874

Then there were rackets like the Klan’s Death Benefit Association, which sold insurance policies to Klan members and accepted only cash or personal checks made outRead more at location 882

to the Grand Dragon himself.Read more at location 883

overheated passages from the Klan’s bible, which was called the Kloran.Read more at location 900

the Klan hierarchy as it proceeded from the local to the national level: an Exalted Cyclops and his twelve Terrors; a Great Titan and his twelve Furies; a Grand Dragon and his nine Hydras; and the Imperial Wizard and his fifteen Genii.Read more at location 904
he converted heretofore precious knowledge into ammunition for mockery.Read more at location 923

Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.Read more at location 951

It is common for one party to a transaction to have better information than another party. In the parlance of economists, such a case is known as an information asymmetry. We accept as a verity of capitalism that someone (usually an expert) knows more than someone else (usually a consumer). But information asymmetries everywhere have in fact been gravely wounded by the Internet.Read more at location 959

Information is the currency of the Internet. As a medium, the Internet is brilliantly efficient at shifting information from the hands of those who have it into the hands of those who do not.Read more at location 962

Henry Blodget of Merrill Lynch and Jack Grubman of Salomon Smith Barney wrote glowing research reports of companies they knew to be junk.Read more at location 978

Though extraordinarily diverse, these crimes all have a common trait: they were sins of information. Most of them involved an expert, or a gang of experts, promoting false information or hiding true information;Read more at location 982

For an information crime to reach the surface, something drastic must happen. When it does, the results tend to be pretty revealing.Read more at location 988

If you were to assume that many experts use their information to your detriment, you’d be right. Experts depend on the fact that you don’t have the information they do. Or that you are so befuddled by the complexity of their operation that you wouldn’t know what to do with the information if you had it. Or that you are so in awe of their expertise that you wouldn’t dare challenge them.Read more at location 998

experts can exert a gigantic, if unspoken, leverage: fear.Read more at location 1007

the agent’s main weapon: the conversion of information into fear.Read more at location 1027

The first trick of asking questions is to determine if your question is a good one. Just because a question has never been asked does not make it good. Smart people have been asking questions for quite a few centuries now, so many of the questions that haven’t been asked are bound to yield uninteresting answers.Read more at location 1233

“We associate truth with convenience,” he wrote, “with what most closely accords with self-interest and personal well-being or promises best to avoid awkward effort or unwelcome dislocation of life. We also find highly acceptable what contributes most to self-esteem.” Economic and social behaviors, Galbraith continued, “are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring. Therefore we adhere,Read more at location 1238

as though to a raft, to those ideas which represent our understanding.”Read more at location 1241

But Listerine changed that. As the advertising scholar James B. TwitchellRead more at location 1262

Note: Interesting books listed on amazon. Edit

As it happened, J. T. was a college graduate himself, a business major.Read more at location 1348

if you were to hold a McDonald’s organizational chart and a Black Disciples org chart side by side, you could hardly tell the difference.Read more at location 1384

except for the top cats, they don’t make much money. They had no choice but to live with their mothers. For every big earner, there were hundreds more just scraping along.Read more at location 1434

The top 120 men in the Black Disciples gang represented just 2.2 percent of the full-fledged gang membership but took home well more than half the money.Read more at location 1435

A 1-in-4 chance of being killed! Compare these odds with those for a timber cutter, which the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the most dangerous job in the United States. Over four years’ time, a timber cutter would stand only a 1-in-200 chance of being killed. Or compare the crack dealer’s odds to those of a death-row inmate in Texas, which executes more prisoners than any other state. In 2003, Texas put to death twenty-four inmates—or just 5 percent of the nearly 500 inmates on its death row during that time. Which means that you stand a greater chance of dying while dealing crack in a Chicago housing project than you do while sitting on death row in Texas.Read more at location 1453

Had they grown up under different circumstances, they might have thought about becoming economists or writers. But in the neighborhood where J. T.’s gang operated, the path to a decent legitimate job was practically invisible.Read more at location 1464

Note: How do we start to solve this? Edit

So if the prize is big enough, they will form a line down the block just hoping for a chance. On the south side of Chicago, people wanting to sell crack vastly outnumbered the available street corners.Read more at location 1472

when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well. This is one of four meaningful factors that determine a wage. The others are the specialized skills a job requires, the unpleasantness of a job, and the demand for services that the job fulfills.Read more at location 1474

After six years running his local gang, J. T. was promoted to the board of directors. He was now thirty-four years old. He had won the tournament.Read more at location 1520

This claim would spark a belief that still seethes to this day, especially among urban blacks, that the CIA itself was the chief sponsor of the American crack trade.Read more at location 1547

Note: Interesting. Has this been followed? Edit

“Apparently, it takes a Ph.D. in criminology to doubt that keeping dangerous criminals incarcerated cuts crime.”Read more at location 1697

This theory rapidly became an article of faith because it appealed to the factors that, according to John Kenneth Galbraith, most contribute to the formation of conventional wisdom: the ease with which an idea may be understood and the degree to which it affects our personal well-being.Read more at location 1759

Soon after the city’s crime turnaround landed Bratton—and not Giuliani—on the cover of Time, Bratton was pushed to resign. He had been police commissioner for just twenty-seven months.Read more at location 1777

a family already unable, psychologically and otherwise, to care for it.Read more at location 1914

Note: This sounds 99% selfish Edit

the number of babies put up for adoption (which has led to the boom in the adoption of foreign babies).Read more at location 1936

G. K. Chesterton: when there aren’t enough hats to go around, the problem isn’t solved by lopping off some heads.Read more at location 1974

Consider the effort to save the northern spotted owl from extinction. One economic study found that in order to protect roughly five thousand owls, the opportunity costs—that is, the income surrendered by the logging industry and others—would be $46 billion, or just over $9 million per owl.Read more at location 1986

“Risks that you control are much less a source of outrage than risks that are out of your control,”Read more at location 2059
The most radical shift of late in the conventional wisdom on parenting has been provoked by one simple question: how much do parents really matter?Read more at location 2110

genes alone are responsible for perhaps 50 percent of a child’s personality and abilities.Read more at location 2116
Judith Rich Harris. The Nurture AssumptionRead more at location 2123

Steven Pinker, the cognitive psychologist and bestselling author, who in his own book Blank Slate called Harris’s views “mind-boggling” (in a good way).Read more at location 2133

Let’s say that we want to ask the ECLS data a fundamental question about parenting and education: does having a lot of books in your home lead your child to do well in school? Regression analysis can’t quite answer that question, but it can answer a subtly different one: does a child with a lot of books in his home tend to do better than a child with no books? The difference between the first and second questions is the difference between causality (question 1) and correlation (question 2). A regression analysis can demonstrate correlation, but it doesn’t prove cause.Read more at location 2253

Note: Great overview of correlation. Edit

Even fifty years after Brown v. Board, many American schools are virtually segregated. The ECLS project surveyed roughly one thousand schools, taking samples of twenty children from each. In 35 percent of those schools, not a single black child was included in the sample.Read more at location 2285

The typical white child in the ECLS study attends a school that is only 6 percent black; the typical black child, meanwhile, attends a school that is about 60 percent black.Read more at location 2287

Perhaps educators and researchers are wrong to be so hung up on the black-white test score gap; the bad-school/good-school gap may be the more salient issue.Read more at location 2295

poor testing in early childhood isn’t necessarily a great harbinger of future earnings, creativity, or happiness.Read more at location 2310

whether a child’s family is intact doesn’t seem to matter. Just as the earlier-cited studies show that family structure has little impact on a child’s personality, it does not seem to affect his academic abilities either, at least in the early years.Read more at location 2347

(In Finland, whose education system has been ranked the world’s best, most children do not begin school until age seven but have often learned to read on their own by watching American television with Finnish subtitles.)Read more at location 2406

Here’s a likely theory: most parents who buy a lot of children’s books tend to be smart and well educated to begin with.Read more at location 2433

A book is in fact less a cause of intelligence than an indicatorRead more at location 2437

To overgeneralize a bit, the first list describes things that parents are; the second list describes things that parents do. Parents who are well educated, successful, and healthy tend to have children who test well in school; but it doesn’t seem to much matter whether a child is trotted off to museums or spanked or sent to Head Start or frequently read to or plopped in front of the television.Read more at location 2455

But it isn’t so much a matter of what you do as a parent; it’s who you are. In this regard, an overbearing parent is a lot like a political candidate who believes that money wins elections—whereas in truth, all the money in the world can’t get a candidate elected if the voters don’t like him to start with.Read more at location 2464

adopted children test relatively poorly in school; any influence the adoptive parents might exert is seemingly outweighed by the force of genetics. But, Sacerdote found, the parents were not powerless forever. By the time the adopted children became adults, they had veered sharply from the destiny that IQ alone might have predicted. Compared to similar children who were not put up for adoption, the adoptees were far more likely to attend college, to have a well-paid job, and to wait until they were out of their teens before getting married. It was the influence of the adoptive parents, Sacerdote concluded, that made the difference.Read more at location 2471

in his life, he found he liked them. After graduate workRead more at location 2521

Note: What was the focus of his graduate work? Edit

I basically want to figure out where blacks went wrong, and I want to devote my life to this.”Read more at location 2525

Note: This goes along with Bret Victors life structure. Edit

Fryer came to wonder: is distinctive black culture a cause of the economic disparity between blacks and whites or merely a reflection of it?Read more at location 2531

most significantly, her own date of birth. This last fact made it possible to identify the hundreds of thousands of California mothers who had themselves been born in California and then to link them to their own birth records. Now a new and extremely potent story emerged from the data: it was possible to track the life outcome of any individual woman. This is the sort of data chain that researchers dream about,Read more at location 2631

His name is an indicator—not a cause—of his outcome. Just as a child with no books in his home isn’t likely to test well in school, a boy named

DeShawn isn’t likely to do as well in life.Read more at location 2644

Most Common High-End White Boy Names 1. BenjaminRead more at location 2700

Note: From Freakanomics Edit

Most Common White Boy Names Among High-Education Parents 1. BenjaminRead more at location 2718

A caution to prospective parents who are shopping for a “smart” name: remember that such a name won’t make your child smart; it will, however, give her the same name as other smart kids—at least for a while.Read more at location 2771

Eleanora (15.80)Read more at location 2786

MacGregor (16.10)Read more at location 2798

There is a clear pattern at play: once a name catches on among high-income, highly educated parents, it starts working its way down the socioeconomic ladder. Amber and Heather started out as high-end names, as did Stephanie and Brittany. For every high-end baby named Stephanie or Brittany, another five lower-income girls received those names within ten years.Read more at location 2868

Parents are reluctant to poach a name from someone too near—family members or close friends—but many parents, whether they realize it or not, like the sound of names that sound “successful.”Read more at location 2881

AnsleyRead more at location 2897

AveryRead more at location 2898

EleanoraRead more at location 2899

FlanneryRead more at location 2901

there is at least a common thread running through the everyday application of Freakonomics. It has to do with thinking sensibly about how people behave in the real world.Read more at location 2928

if morality represents an ideal world, then economics represents the actual world.Read more at location 2937

The most likely result of having read this book is a simple one: you may find yourself asking a lot of questions.Read more at location 2938
“I gave up a long time ago pretending that I knew stuff I didn’t know,” he says. “I mean, I just—I just don’t know very much about the field of economics. I’m not good at math, I don’t know a lot of econometrics, and I also don’t know how to do theory. If you ask me about whether the stock market’s going to go up or down, if you ask me whether the economy’s going to grow or shrink, if you ask me whether deflation’s good or bad, if you ask me about taxes—I mean, it would be total fakery if I said I knew anything about any of those things.”Read more at location 2976
He is an intuitionist. He sifts through a pile of data to find a story that no one else had found.Read more at location 2988

“Levitt is considered a demigod, one of the most creative people in economics and maybe in all social science,” says Colin Camerer, an economist at the California Institute of Technology. “He represents something that everyone thinks they will be when they go to grad school in econ, but usually they have the creative spark bored out of them by endless math—namely, a kind of intellectual detective trying to figure stuff out.”Read more at location 2995

Behavioral economists have called into doubt the very notion of “homo economicus,” the supposedly rational decision-maker in each of us. Young economists of every stripe are more inclined to work on real-world subjects and dip into bordering disciplines—psychology, criminology, sociology, even neurology—with the intent of rescuing their science from its slavish dependence upon mathematical models.Read more at location 3003

“Steve isn’t really a behavioral economist, but they’d be happy to have him,” says Austan Goolsbee, who teaches economics at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. “He’s not really an old price-theory guy, but these Chicago guys are happy to claim him. He’s not really a Cambridge guy”—although Levitt went to Harvard and then M.I.T.—“but they’d love him to come back.”Read more at location 3009
A syllogism, after all, can be a magic trick: All cats die; Socrates died; therefore Socrates was a cat.Read more at location 3041

“The first step in analyzing suspicious strings is to estimate the probability each child would give a particular answer on each question,” he wrote. “This estimation is done using a multinomial logit framework with past test scores, demographics and socioeconomic characteristics as explanatory variables.”Read more at location 3071

Other grad students stayed up all night working on problem sets, trying to make good grades. He stayed up researching and writing. “My view was that the way you succeed in this profession is you write great papers,” he says. “So I just started.”Read more at location 3094

Sometimes he would begin with a question. Sometimes it was a set of data that caught his eye.Read more at location 3096

He completed his Ph.D. in three years, but because of his priorities, he says, he was “invisible” to the faculty, “a real zero.” Then he stumbled upon what he now calls the turning point in his career.Read more at location 3110

Nozick turned to the other fellows: “He’s twenty-six years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he’s going to be one of those people who’s so talented he doesn’t need one. He’ll take a question and he’ll just answer it, and it’ll be fine.”Read more at location 3127
To Levitt, Becker is the most influential economist of the past fifty years.Read more at location 3133
Be honest about your weaknesses. Has there ever been a prizewinning scholar as honest about his weaknesses as Steven Levitt? He doesn’t understand economics, he claims, or math.Read more at location 3177

Further Learning

• Steven Levitt’s University of Chicago page - http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Freakonomics.html
• Steven Levitt’s TED Talk on Crack Economics – http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_analyzes_crack_economics.html
• Steven Levitt’s TED Talk on child carseats - http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_levitt_on_child_carseats.html

Related articles

• Freakonomics: Did It Go Right or Wrong? (3quarksdaily.com)
• A kaleidoscope of responses to Dubner’s criticisms of our criticisms of Freaknomics (andrewgelman.com)

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203370604577265632205015846.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_6

My Notes:

We tend to assume that experts are the creative geniuses in their own fields. But big breakthroughs often depend on the naive daring of outsiders. For prompting creativity, few things are as important as time devoted to cross-pollination with fields outside our areas of expertise.

Although we live in an age that worships focus—we are always forcing ourselves to concentrate, chugging caffeine—this approach can inhibit the imagination. We might be focused, but we’re probably focused on the wrong answer.

And this is why relaxation helps: It isn’t until we’re soothed in the shower or distracted by the stand-up comic that we’re able to turn the spotlight of attention inward, eavesdropping on all those random associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain’s right hemisphere. When we need an insight, those associations are often the source of the answer.

As Einstein once declared, “Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”

Of course, not every creative challenge requires an epiphany; a relaxing shower won’t solve every problem. Sometimes, we just need to keep on working, resisting the temptation of a beer-fueled nap.

There is nothing fun about this kind of creativity, which consists mostly of sweat and failure. It’s the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nietzsche referred to this as the “rejecting process,” noting that while creators like to brag about their big epiphanies, their everyday reality was much less romantic. “All great artists and thinkers are great workers,” he wrote.

This relentless form of creativity is nicely exemplified by the legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser, who engraved the slogan “Art is Work” above his office door.

But this raises an obvious question: If different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking, how can we ensure that we’re thinking in the right way at the right time? When should we daydream and go for a relaxing stroll, and when should we keep on sketching and toying with possibilities?

The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions “feelings of knowing,” and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don’t require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we’re getting “warmer” or not, without knowing the solution.

If you’re trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.

Steve Jobs famously declared that “creativity is just connecting things.”

Or look at Google: Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with their famous search algorithm by applying the ranking method used for academic articles (more citations equals more influence) to the sprawl of the Internet.

How can people get better at making these kinds of connections? Mr. Jobs argued that the best inventors seek out “diverse experiences,” collecting lots of dots that they later link together. Instead of developing a narrow specialization, they study, say, calligraphy (as Mr. Jobs famously did) or hang out with friends in different fields. Because they don’t know where the answer will come from, they are willing to look for the answer everywhere.

Such solutions are known as “mental restructurings,” since the problem is only solved after someone asks a completely new kind of question. What’s interesting is that expertise can inhibit such restructurings, making it harder to find the breakthrough. That’s why it’s important not just to bring new ideas back to your own field, but to actually try to solve problems in other fields—where your status as an outsider, and ability to ask naive questions, can be a tremendous advantage.

For the first time in human history, it’s becoming possible to see how to throw off more sparks and how to make sure that more of them catch fire. And yet, we must also be honest: The creative process will never be easy, no matter how much we learn about it. Our inventions will always be shadowed by uncertainty, by the serendipity of brain cells making a new connection.

Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It’s almost like magic.

Books I added to my wishlist:

Related articles

• The Creative Time of Day (saintleoinkblot.com)

May 22, 2011

“In software development, we are essentially working on the same car or widget continuously, often for years. We are in the same soup, the same codebase. We can’t expect a model based on independence of pieces in manufacturing to be accurate when we are working continuously on a single thing (a codebase) that shows wear over time and needs constant attention. No, to me, code is inventory. It is stuff lying around and it has substantial cost of ownership. It might do us good to consider what we can do to minimize it. I think that the future belongs to organizations that learn how to strategically delete code. Many companies are getting better at cutting unprofitable features in their products, but the next step is to pull those features out by the root: the code. Carrying costs are larger than we think. There’s competitive advantage for companies that recognize this.”

via m. migurski / snippets.

Friday Lunch: City Cafe

The best of the best! Classic southern meat and three. The only thing that’s changed since the 1960′s is the prices – they go up about $0.05 a year. Closed on the weekends, and only open for breakfast & lunch so you have to prioritize.

Friday Dinner: Nick’s in the Sticks

Double check the address before you leave, you don’t want to get lost looking for this place. It’s tucked just off the road with a sign that’s easy to miss so look for a parking lot full of cars. Expect to wait about an hour or more. Buy a couple of drinks at the bar (everybody talks about the “Nickademus” – make sure you have a DD!) and then smoke a few cigarettes outside while you wait.

One of the best steaks I’ve ever had – thick, bacon wrapped, and actually a true medium-rare.

Saturday Breakfast: Rama Jama’s

There is some serious debate over who has the better breakfast – City Cafe or Rama Jama’s. I lean towards Rama just because the memorabilia is entertaining for folks who’ve never seen Bama Football madness. 2 eggs scrambled, with sausage patties, toast, cheese grits, and coffee. Mmmm! That’s a good way to start the day.

The great thing about Rama’s for a weekend breakfast is you can walk off your pain by taking a look at the football stadium. Around the front towards University Blvd is the Walk of Champions with large, gaudy bronze statues of all the football coaches who have won national championships over the years – 14. Don’t forget it! The really crazy part is thousands of people line up to see the players walk-in towards the stadium before every home game.

Saturday Lunch: Bama Smoke House

Don’t let the fact that it’s built in next to a gas station throw you off. They have the best ribs in town. If you’re feeling hungry or thinking about splitting (you’ll change your mind), get the 2-meat with 2-sides. The smoked sausage pairs up great with the ribs. This is not my favorite pork in town – drive right down the street to the Pigg Shack if you want a great pork sausage.

Saturday Dinner: Cypress Inn

The best part about this place is the view. You can’t beat a sunset dinner looking out over the river. If it’s raining though, the indoor seating is decent.

Pretty much the cheapest thing is the best thing on the menu! Get the smoked chicken with white BBQ sauce and ask for extra rolls. I know this is cheating the system, but grab that chicken and stuff it into a warm roll. Wow!

If you want to play by their fancy rules and not eat with your fingers, get the catfish or maybe a pasta. Everything else is hit or miss.

Sunday Breakfast: Waysider

Legend has it Coach “Bear” Bryant used to eat breakfast here, so if you want to become a legend then you should too. Basically, think of this as your grandmother’s dining room that hasn’t been redecorated in decades, with a few extra tables and chairs. The nice way of saying it is, it’s “cozy” or “intimate.” Arrive early to get a table.

Sunday Lunch: Carmelo Cafe

We wrap the dining blitzkrieg with a lunch similar to how we started. Think of Carmelo’s as a nice, fresh, organic-ish version of City Cafe. When they run out of something, it’s done for the day. Simple, fresh dishes made from local ingredients.

Pick anything you like! You can’t go wrong here. I usually get the catfish, but only after changing my mind 10 times.

Plan B’s / Honorable Mentions:

Archibald’s BBQ – This is the original Archibald’s (not to be confused with the many unsuccessful off-shoots) and this is for the folks who think I didn’t include enough BBQ shacks on the list. They’ve got 4 stools and a wood fire for cooking in a run down cinder block shack. You can’t get more local and run down than this.

Catfish Heaven – Seriously great catfish in a less than ideal dining area. Most folks just grab it to go, but they do have a couple tables. Try the purple drink!

After Dinner / Bars:

The Alcove – Best bar in town with the best selection and atmosphere. They’ve got great outdoor seating and they keep the music low enough so you can actually have a conversation! They’ve always got great regional beers on tap.

The Gray Lady – Decent alternative if the Alcove is too crowded. They’ve got the turf from the old football stadium hanging up over the bar. Yeah, football is serious here.

Sweets and Treats:

Edelweiss German Bakery & Cafe – Best Coffee in town, with a decent patio for outdoor seating.

Rama Jama’s – Swing back by for a milkshake if you need a nice lazy afternoon.

Mary’s Cakes and Pastries - This place is tucked away, almost behind City Cafe, in downtown Northport. You will walk out happy.

Gigi’s Cupcakes – I don’t get it, but some folks go crazy about this place. Too much icing for my taste.

It’s simple to understand the levels of the hierarchy but what I want to know is what are the cross-connections between different people. For example, which people tend to co-author articles with people from other schools of thought? Which individuals bridge the space in-between different schools of thought? Which universities are graduating people into these schools of thought? For example the University of Chicago seems to have fewer Neo-Keynesians.

As a seasoned researcher you come to expect a particular bias merely through your experience, but as someone new to the field I have a hard time placing what some of the influencing factors on the research might be. If however there was a way that I could see quickly which schools some of these main thinkers came from or worked at, I could orient myself in a broad sense quickly. When I start to ask these questions I begin to wonder if these hierarchies of thought we create are all that meaningful.

We all have an urge to categorize and sub-divide but the problem with traditional hierarchies is we are limited to a single dimension or way of sorting. The future is in “semantic” links that allow items to be linked together with meta-data describing the type of link. I will be posting more soon about some of the partial solutions I’ve found. So far nothing seems to answer the underlying problem.

Related articles from other blogs

• Economics School Of Thoughts (marjanarbab.wordpress.com)
• Paul Krugman vs. the World – Businessweek What has been getting… (underpaidgenius.com)

Another classmate asked the basic question: is deflation really all bad or is it just bad for our current system? There is no incentive to save now because of the artificially low-interest rates that set by the Federal Reserve. If interest rates reflected the cost of money, as we defined it at the beginning of class, then people would be rewarded for saving and as deflation started to take place interest rates would rise causing more savings and less consumption.

Now this increase in savings would cause aggregate demand to fall in the near-term. But what are savings? Saving is just setting aside money for future spending. No one saves with the intention of never spending the money, they just think they can put it to better use later.

So if interest rates were not set by the Fed but instead allowed to reflect the natural price of money, more people would save and be rewarded for their savings. At some point even if interest rates were 0% forever, debt taken on by individuals still means that future consumption is merely being pushed forward for present spending. That does not change the basic definition of debt as something that has to be paid back. The debt still must be paid back there is just less future consumption.

Back more to the original question now, if deflation starts and people leading up to this have been rewarded for saving, then wouldn’t people eventually buy things as prices fell even if they thought the price might fall a little bit more? Or put another way, there has to be some threshold where people would see an opportunity to invest even if prices could fall further? I’m thinking of Warren Buffett investing billions into Bank of America recently when few people wanted anything to do with the banks.

One of the counter arguments seems to go that: lower-income people will never have a large enough savings cushion to weather a true deflationary spiral with high unemployment. My question now though is, are people really better off with the current system? It looks like we have at least another year or two of slow to low growth. That hurts everyone but especially the people who cannot find jobs to get back into the economy.

If you see something I am missing here, please comment. This is a genuine question that I am trying to learn more about and answer.