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Kids learn to flatter around age 4

Kang Lee, a professor at the University of Toronto, has been researching the development of lie-telling in children for the past decade.  He has just conducted research which shows that kids start learning flattery around the age of 4:

They asked a group of preschool children ages 3 to 6 to rate drawings by children and adults they knew, as well as strangers. The preschoolers judged the artwork both when the artist was present, and when he or she was absent. The three-year-olds were completely honest, and remained consistent in their ratings; it didn’t matter who drew it, or whether the person was in the room. Five- and six-year-olds gave more flattering ratings when the artist was in front of them. They flattered both strangers and those they knew (although familiar people got a higher dose of praise). Among the four-year-olds, half the group displayed flattery while the other half did not. This supports the idea that age four is a key transitional period in children’s social understanding of the world.

Lee suggests adults flatter for two reasons. It can be to show gratitude for some positive action in the past. As well, when they’re meeting someone for first time – someone who may turn out to be important for their advancement down the road – flattery is also used as an investment for future favourable treatment from the person. “We don’t know which the child is doing,” says Lee. However, the fact that the older children flattered strangers as well as familiar people suggests “they are thinking ahead, they are making these little social investments for future benefits.

Found: here.

Waiters use nodding trick to boost restaurant tabs

A tip to trick people from the Wikipedia:

A Sullivan nod is executed by nodding slightly, by approximately 10–15 degrees, when the item it is hoped the customer will choose is reached. The key is to make the nod perceptible, yet subtle, so as to not distract. The nod is best done with lists less than 5 items in length. Studies have concluded that 60–70% of the time, a Sullivan nod will result in the customer choosing the ‘recommended’ item.

Found: here.

Hello, My name is Navin, and I am a practising numerologist

…while part of me is ashamed of this, the rest is enjoying being cruel to idiots.

It all started when I wrote this supposedly humorous article titled ‘Star Numerologist Sanjay B. Jumaani to be awarded the Bharatt Rratnaa’. You would think, that to anybody with an IQ greater than their age, it would be obvious that this is not intented to be taken seriously. You would think that the first few commentors (Full2Faltu and Krish Ashok) would have convinced the doubters that this is all a job.

And you would be wrong. Things started going downhill from the 7th comment onwards. Incredibly, people managed to read past such wise cracks as ‘[Jumaani as predicted that] the astronomic rise of the Sensex in 2008 after it is renamed to Sensekks’ and then at the bottom of the same page, they started asking me for numerological advice. Seriously, what is wrong with these people?!

Anyway, considering the satirical nature of the parent article, I decided to give smart-ass / humorous answers to the questions. To the MBA student wanting to know whether he will get an ‘international placement’ I suggested that he should apply only to companies whose names start with a ‘B’ and he will get an international placement - in Bhutan or Burma.

But I also tried to work in some serious suggestions. To they guy who wanted to succeed as an entrepreneur, I bluntly said

Numbers don’t play an important part in your life. (Fortunately or unfortunately) success in your career will depend upon hard work and smart choices.

To the guy with terrible english facing ‘lost of problem in [...] life’ I suggested:

Based on the limited information you have given, I have the following recommendation: the numbers 8 and 3 are important in your life. Do a 3 month course on English speaking; it should include at least 8 hours per week. And after 8/3/08 your fortunes will improve.

I felt rather proud of having given useful advice in the guise of numerological humor. Apparently however, he was not interested in actually working for success and sent this follow-up: “Plz suggest how i become sucessful with the changing of name” and he ended this paragraph with “because u r the toperson to whom i can trust to take suggestion”.

At this point, I give up. I admit defeat. If you can’t lick them, join them. I have started actually giving numerological advice and making predictions about their life. I can see how writing this satirical article was actually divine intervention which helped me find my true calling in life. If people want my advice who am I to deny it? Young women want to meet me in person. (Seriously. Check it out for yourself. And I know that they are young because I know their birth dates! Ha ha.) This seems like a much better career choice than debugging C programs. So I am going to start using cold-reading techniques to guess their past and then predict their future. I am going to tout “scientific numerology” and design experiments for them to figure out their perfect numbers and colors and days of the week. I want to find out how easy it is to get ’satisfied’ customers through pure bullshit. This is all of course, purely in the spirit of scientific inquiry and the relentless pursuit of knowledge.

And before you condemn my cruelty, remember that these people are asking me for advice on a page where at the top it says “Bollywood news for idiots. Humor for the rest of you…”, and at the bottom it says, “BasKya.com is a satirical website. Which means that all content is meant to be humorous and for entertainment only. It’s not true. If you cannot handle that fact, close your browser, and step away from the computer.” They are asking for advice in the comments of an article which says ridiculous stuff like Sanjay B. Jumaani is being given the ‘Bharatt RRatnaa’ for future contributions like “the complete annihilation of Pakistan in 2011 when he will go undercover as Arabian numerologist Sanj-e-Jumma-i-imaani and will give them bad numerological adivce.” And these are educated people. One is a doctor (who is presumably out there giving medicine to other people), and another is a lecturer (who is shaping the minds of our coming generation). Would you show any pity?!

Some of those reading this and who know me personally might be wondering whether my computer got taken over by my evil twin today. Because, I am a rather nice guy otherwise. My only excuse is that fact that somehow this set of doctors, lecturers and MBAs who are too stupid to be anywhere near the internet and who believe in numerology has just irritated beyond my normal limits. The way I think about it is that these people are such idiots that if I weren’t doing it, someone else would be doing it, and charging them money for it! At least, I am doing it for free.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

P.S.

I am sure that after reading this article, some smart alecs are going to post more queries on that page asking for advice with the intention of pulling my leg. Don’t even think about it! I am an all-seeing, all-knowing numerologist and I can see through all the paltry tricks of your small minds.

Before investing in a stock, see a photo of its CEO

A photo tells you quite a lot about a person. Evidence:

Photos of chief executive officers (CEOs) of top American companies can reveal much about them and the firms they manage — including how successful they are, according to a new study.

In research published in the journal Psychological Science, 100 college students who looked at headshots of the bosses of the highest and lowest ranked Fortune 1000 companies were able to identify the most and the least successful CEOs without knowing their name, title or the company they headed.

See full article.

The background score of Tare Zameen Par

This is an (old) blog post by Aamir Khan about the process they followed for recording the background score of Tare Zameen Par which I found very interesting:

The work on the TZP background score is going rather well I think. We went surprisingly fast too. And interestingly we ended up recording live! Which hasn’t been done in films for around… what…15 years or more.

Let me explain. When we score for a film we look at a scene/sequence, decide at which point in the scene we want the music to start, were it should end, and were we want any changeovers in between etc. Now once all this is decided, and the creative is clear, the recording begins. Which now days can be quite a technical process. All keyboards are connected to a computer on which the picture is dumped. On that the start point is marked, a grid created, tempo tweaked around to fit the length of the music, etc, basically this means that a lot is done mathematically. All this as a result of the advent of computers. Not a very organic way to work in my opinion but definitely more controlled and practical. This is generally called sequencing/programming. So you sequence/programme a piece and then dump it in sync with the picture.

Going ‘live’ means that the musicians playing the instruments don’t peer and jab at a computer, instead they look at the screen as they play the instrument, with a conductor guiding them for cues and timing and intensity of playing. So they play live in sync with the picture. They don’t follow a grid, they follow the scene and the feel of what the characters are going through. Anything goes wrong you try it again. If the take doesn’t have the right ‘feel’ then you go again. Each take is different. Now this is how background scores used to be recorded 15-20 years ago.

In fact we went one step further, we were working without visual aides of cross marks on the scene to give ‘in’ points and ‘change over’ points. So the ‘in’ point was ‘felt’ rather than pre-marked and counted in. Not only that, the music was not written and never locked in, so when Loy or Ehsan or Shankar or Tubby (one of their musicians) were playing, they often were also improvising from take to take!!! At one point we decided we wanted a harmonica for one of the pieces. Not a synth harmonica sound but a real harmonica. Not a problem if you are in Bombay where a harmonica and a player are a phone call away. But we were in of course were in Panchgani. So Loy sends Sachin (my help) to the Panchgani market to look for a harmonica… which Sachin miraculously finds! Then Loy, who I discovers plays the harmonica rather well, goes on to breath life into that 8inch piece of metal and we’re cruising! Mind you all this is happening in a house not in a studio.

Actually since I’m doing this for the first time for myself (I’ve worked on background recordings when I was an assistant director some 18 years ago) I found this the most natural way to work. But Shankar, Ehsan and Loy were freaked out as they haven’t worked this way for ages, probably never. At first I suspect they thought I was mad, then they began really enjoying themselves jamming away.

Cameras to prevent teacher absenteeism in rural India

Update: After writing this post, I looked at the original research paper and wrote a much more detailed post on this topic which is worth reading.

Interesting idea:

Esther Duflo, a French economics professor at MIT, wondered whether there was anything that could be done about absentee teachers in rural India, which is a large problem for remote schoolhouses with a single teacher. Duflo and her colleague Rema Hanna took a sample of 120 schools in Rajasthan, chose 60 at random, and sent cameras to teachers in the chosen schools. The cameras had tamper-proof date and time stamps, and the teachers were asked to get a pupil to photograph the teacher with the class at the beginning and the end of each school day.

It was a simple idea, and it worked. Teacher absenteeism plummeted, as measured by random audits, and the class test scores improved markedly.

Found: here.

If you smell food in a shop be very careful…

More scientists doing interesting experiments:

In the first experiment, Li asked participants to act as “photo editors of a magazine” and choose among either appetite stimulating pictures of food or non-appetite stimulating pictures of nature. A control group was shown no pictures at all. All were then asked to participate in a lottery that would either pay them less money sooner or more money later.

Those who had been exposed to the photos of food were almost twenty percentage points more likely to choose the lottery with the chance of a smaller, more immediate payoff than those who were exposed to the photos of nature (61 percent vs. 41.5 percent) and eleven percentage points more likely to choose the short-term gain than those who had not been exposed to any stimulus (61 percent vs. 50 percent).

Similarly, another experiment used a cookie-scented candle to further gauge whether appetitive stimulus affects consumer behavior. Female study participants in a room with a hidden chocolate-chip cookie scented candle were much more likely to make an unplanned purchase of a new sweater — even when told they were on a tight budget — than those randomly assigned to a room with a hidden unscented candle (67 percent vs. 17 percent).

See full article (via boingboing).

Can you get thin by thinking about exercise?

I hate exercise. So do you. But wouldn’t it be nice if you could get all the benefits of exercise by just thinking about exercise? Thankfully, that’s exactly the kind of thing that our scientists are working on:

In this study, she decided to look at whether our perception of how much exercise we are getting has any effect on how our bodies actually look. To do this, she studied hotel maids.

As any casual observer of the hospitality industry knows, hotel maids spend the majority of their days lugging heavy equipment around endless hallways. Basically, almost every moment of their working lives is spent engaged in some kind of physical activity.

Well, turns out that the maids don’t really think of their jobs are exercise. That is not good.

Despite the fact all of the women in her study far exceeded the U.S. surgeon general’s recommendation for daily exercise, the bodies of the women did not seem to benefit from their activity.

Langer and her team measured the maids’ body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, blood pressure, weight and body mass index. They found that all of these indicators matched the maids’ perceived amount of exercise, rather than their actual amount of exercise.

If you have been paying attention, you’ll notice that this is opposite of what we really wanted at the top of this page. Let’s see if something can be done about that.

So Langer set about changing perceptions.

She divided 84 maids into two groups. With one group, researchers carefully went through each of the tasks they did each day, explaining how many calories those tasks burned. They were informed that the activity already met the surgeon general’s definition of an active lifestyle.

The other group was given no information at all.

One month later, Langer and her team returned to take physical measurements of the women and were surprised by what they found. In the group that had been educated, there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure.

One possible explanation is that the process of learning about the amount of exercise they were already getting somehow changed the maids’ behavior. But Langer says that her team surveyed both the women and their managers and found no indication that the maids had altered their routines in any way. She believes that the change can be explained only by the change in the women’s mindset.

Essentially, what Langer is talking about is a placebo effect. She says that if you believe you are exercising, your body may respond as if it is.

Yippie! Read the full article while I go off and imagine that I am running the marathon.

If free market is so great, why do “companies” exist?

One of the fundamental lessons of economics is that in a free market, prices determine what gets produced and by whom. If onions are in short supply somewhere, the prices of onions rise, then more farmers switch to planting onions and the supply problem is met. And this is one of the most efficient ways of organizing production of the world.

But obviously, this is now how things work within a company. You do what your boss tells you to do. If he wants TPS reports, he doesn’t announce this fact to all the employees and give the job to the one who quotes the lowest prices. He simply tells you to do it because “it is your job”.

So how does economic theory handle this apparent contradiction?

This essay tackles this problem. First the problem definition:

So, one day the boss has this crazy thought. He asks himself a question that has never occurred to him before: Why have any employees at all? Why have a building? Why not just sit home, wearing his jammies and bunny slippers, sipping a nice cup of tea, and outsource everything? He can write contracts to buy parts, he can pay workers to assemble the parts, and he can use shipping companies to box and transport the product.

The boss is elated. He never really liked these people anyway. Always asking questions, constantly looking for direction and expecting him to know the answers. He fires all his employees, effective one month from now, and takes bids on all the design, parts manufacture, assembly, and shipping that those people used to do.

On day 31, after all those wasteful employees are gone and the new contracting efficiency regime is in place, the boss has a nice breakfast, pours his tea, and puts his bunny-slippered feet up on his desk at home.

So what is wrong with this picture? Why aren’t all companies in the world structured this way?

If prices and competition do such a terrific job of directing resources (and they do!), then why are there firms? Why are there hierarchical organizations that are internally directed by command and control, rather than the price system? Why not outsource everything? Why don’t bosses sit home wearing bunny slippers?

The problem is the overheads introduced:

Each step, each break in the production process from one artisan to another, would require negotiations, a transaction, payment, and transportation of the product to the next step.

Obviously, that’s silly: no [company] could work that way. The cost savings from division of labor would be swamped by the increased cost of negotiating and carrying out transactions, and monitoring quality.

But that’s only a partial answer. The real question that needs to be answered is:

The task of the economist, then, is to explain two phenomena with just one theory. First, why are firms more efficient than markets at organizing some transactions? Second, if firms are so efficient, why are there any market transactions at all? What determines the margin where the firm stops organizing additional transactions internally, and buys goods or services instead through the market?

Will this mean the end of free-market theory? Will the author succeed in saving economic theory from imminent doom? For answers to this and all other questions, read the thrilling conslusion in the original essay.

Prediction: Very bad weather in 2008

A great article from the New York Times:

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.

Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific. I don’t know if disaster will come by flood or drought, hurricane or blizzard, fire or ice. Nor do I have any idea how much the planet will warm this year or what that means for your local forecast. Long-term climate models cannot explain short-term weather.

But there’s bound to be some weird weather somewhere, and we will react like the sailors in the Book of Jonah. When a storm hit their ship, they didn’t ascribe it to a seasonal weather pattern. They quickly identified the cause (Jonah’s sinfulness) and agreed to an appropriate policy response (throw Jonah overboard).

[...]When judging risks, we often go wrong by using what’s called the availability heuristic: we gauge a danger according to how many examples of it are readily available in our minds. Thus we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television; we underestimate the risks of dying from a stroke because we don’t have so many vivid images readily available.

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, professor of economics and political science at Duke University, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

See full article. If you want to get confused about global warming, it might be a good idea to see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and then go read Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. That should convince you to stop getting involved in weighty issues like this and go back to Rakhi Sawant’s antics.

See also my earlier post on global dimming.

By the way, Al Gore’s movie is an excellent example of how to give a good Powerpoint presentation - as opposed to the bullet-point ridden junk that you usually turn out. (Essentially the entire movie is a Nobel-prize winning slide show presented by Al Gore.)