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Hope is a bad thing?

People often say things like “At least he has some hope”, assuming this is obviously a good thing. This NYT magazine article begs to differ:

Prisoners with life sentences but with the possibility of parole adapt less well to prison life, for example, than prisoners with life sentences without the possibility of parole. … The research team … tracked people who had portions of their colons removed or bypassed, such that the patients couldn’t defecate normally. The condition is extremely unpleasant and leads many people to say they’d rather be dead. … But a colostomy isn’t always permanent. Some patients are likely to heal and have their bowels reconnected. . Were it up to the patient to choose, “almost anybody would choose temporary over permanent,” Ubel says.

So it’s surprising that the permanent-colostomy patients ended up happier six months after the operation than the temporary group, whose members were still holding out hope. …

See full article. Link via overcoming bias which goes on to make this interesting statement:

Tyler says people can be happier in a caste society, where the lack of mobility means no one can blame your position on your lack of effort.

McDonald’s = small businesses

Did you know this?

McDonald’s exemplifies the role of small businesses in Americans’ upward mobility. The company is largely a confederation of small businesses: 85 percent of its U.S. restaurants — average annual sales, $2.2 million — are owned by franchisees. McDonald’s has made more millionaires, and especially black and Hispanic millionaires, than any other economic entity ever, anywhere.

Source. 

Improving traffic by removing traffic rules

Towns in Europe are trying innovative ways innovative ways of handling traffic on their roads:

The usual remedies — from safety crossings to speed traps — did no good. So the citizens of Bohmte decided to take a big risk. Since September, they’ve been tearing up the sidewalks, removing curbs and erasing street markers as part of a radical plan to abandon nearly all traffic regulations and force people to rely on common sense and courtesy instead.

As far as I can tell, we have implemented this system in Pune already.

What waterboarding feels like

Waterboarding is a torture technique that has been in the news recently because the United States Justice Department authorized the use of this technique by the CIA to interrogate suspects. This person on the Straight Dope message boards tried it upon himself and reports on the experience:

So much talk of waterboarding, so much controversy. But what is it really? How bad? I wanted to write the definitive thread on waterboarding, settle the issue. Torture, or not?

To determine the answer, I knew I had to try it.

[...]

So, here’s what I would do. First I would google waterboarding to understand the basic concepts than I would try it on myself. First, self inflicted and then, if necessary, inflicted by my wife.(she has no problem torturing me. We’ve been married almost 15 years.)

These are the results of my research and experience:

I am not going to give away the suspense - read the article yourself.

Babajobs: Linked-in for maids and drivers

Webyantra reports on babajob a site that you can use to find domestic help in your area:

Many urban families are looking for good, trustworthy maids, drivers, chauffeurs and crib they don’t get one, whereas many unskilled laborers are desperately looking for some job. He decided to bridge this digital divide with Babajob, a rural version of LinkedIn. Conceptually all of this looks pretty simple, but operationally, it’s a challenge to bring internet to the local Laxmi or Latha, who can’t even read vernacular, let alone reading English or using computers.

How are they tackling this problem? They pay (INR 200/-) anyone who registers the potential worker; may it be a net café owner, or an NGO, or another employer of the maid. The fees for posting a job is 500/-, but again there is a smart caveat here. They first charge 800/- from you, and only when you inform them whom you hired, they return 300/- out of it, so that they can pay 200/- to the mentor. Moreover the site is also available in Hindi and Kannada, and will be available in other languages as they expand to other cities. As expected, there are a few glitches with font and linguistics there, but they should clear up after a few releases. They have also thrown in a neat Google Maps integration to find maids in your specific area.

Found: here. See this International Herald Tribune article for a fuller treatment.

The secret science of restaurant menus

This is how restaurants get you to spend more:

Smart chefs (or their menu consultants) know that when most of you open a menu, your eyes go right to the top of the page on the right side. And, armed with that knowledge, chefs place the menu item that will give them the most profit at the top of the page. Hence, it soon becomes their biggest seller. Then, your eyes normally drift to the center of the page. That’s where many chefs place their absolutely most expensive item. They do that not because they expect you to buy that item, but because the psychology of menus indicates you’ll probably then look at the items immediately above and below the high ticket item and order one of those. Again, those two items rank second and third for generating profits.

I’ve tested this in a dozen different restaurants – and then asked the chefs about their menus. Sure enough, they’ve admitted the practice. “Millions of dollars have been spent to understand what makes a profitable menu,” one chef told me. “By rearranging the order and relaying it out, it can mean tens of thousands of dollars of additional revenue. It has to do with everything from wording or naming, length of description, the number of columns, visuals of icons and pictures, price points, and not using dollar signs.”

See full article. (Found on Shantanu’s blog.)

Choose: Riches 100 years ago or middle-class today?

This post compares the life of a regular guy today with one of the richest people about a 100 years ago. :

If Mark Hopkins or any of his family contracted cancer, TB, polio, heart disease, or even appendicitis, they would probably die. All the rage today is to moan about people’s access to health care, but Hopkins had less access to health care than the poorest resident of East St. Louis. Hopkins died at 64, an old man in an era where the average life span was in the early forties. He saw at least one of his children die young, as most others of his age did. In fact, Stanford University owes its founding to the early death (at 15) of the son of Leland Stanford, Hopkin’s business partner and neighbor. The richest men of his age had more than a ten times greater chance of seeing at least one of their kids die young than the poorest person in the US does today.

And also:

Here is a man, Mark Hopkins, who was one of the richest and most envied men of his day. He owned a mansion that would dwarf many hotels I have stayed in. He had servants at his beck and call. And I would not even consider trading lives or houses with him. What we sometimes forget is that we are all infinitely more wealthy than even the richest of the “robber barons” of the 19th century. We have longer lives, more leisure time, and more stuff to do in that time. Not only is the sum of wealth not static, but it is expanding so fast that we can’t even measure it. Charts like those here measure the explosion of income, but still fall short in measuring things like leisure, life expectancy, and the explosion of possibilities we are all able to comprehend and grasp.

See full article. If you are one of the people who keeps complaining about “progress” as a bad thing, you should read it carefully.

Warning sounded over ‘flirting robots’ | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News.com

CNet has  a report on a program developed by Russian hackers which poses as a person looking for “friends” online. Basically it starts flirting with people with and then extracts personal information from them. It is claimed to be able to establish 10 “relationships” in 1/2 an hour and can then produce a report on every person it meets with name, contact information, photos etc. Excerpt:

Among CyberLover’s creepy features is its ability to offer a range of different profiles from “romantic lover” to “sexual predator.” It can also lead victims to a “personal” Web site, which could be used to deliver malware, PC Tools said.

See full article. I have a feeling that reporter is exaggerating the capabilities of this program, because any other program that I have seen in this category (i.e. ability to carry on a conversation with humans) fall far short of what can be considered normal conversation. It doesn’t take more than 3 or 4 lines to figure out that the thing at the other end is a stupid computer. See the first example here. But anyway, if you start flirting with someone online and lose everything, don’t say you weren’t warned.

Facebook/Orkut are Tribal Societies

This NYT article argues that the use of social networks like facebook or orkut is similar to social customs that existed among humans during tribal times. Excerpt:

Michael Wesch, who teaches cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, spent two years living with a tribe in Papua New Guinea, studying how people forge social relationships in a purely oral culture. Now he applies the same ethnographic research methods to the rites and rituals of Facebook users.

“In tribal cultures, your identity is completely wrapped up in the question of how people know you,” he says. “When you look at Facebook, you can see the same pattern at work: people projecting their identities by demonstrating their relationships to each other. You define yourself in terms of who your friends are.”

Read full article. Quite interesting.