So I was inordinately fascinated by a paragraph in Schelling’s paper “Enforcing Rules on Oneself”. This is a paper about personal rules, i.e. the rules we all adopt to reign in our behavior against the pest that is hyperbolic discounting. Since Schelling’s wrote the paper for a law journal he needed to outline why the usual tools of [...]
Fun video by Barry Swartz author of “The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less”.
Why choice makes people miserable:
regret over the choice not taken, and fear of that future regret,
the cost of managing a portfolio of options,
the benchmark for success is raised higher, i.e. expectations escalate
self blame, when the choices made later appear to [...]
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
“… It’s long been our belief that REST and Roy Fielding has been palling around with Hypermedia. He barely denies it. But, my friends, let me tell you that no washed up PhD dissertation will dictate our request/response. He says it, in his own words – he talks about ‘constraints’, he toys with the idea [...]
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Thomson-Reuters raises the stakes and then calls the bluff of the Academy.
“For my part, I’m going to refuse to use Reuters’ software in future, strongly discourage graduate students from buying EndNote, and try to get this message out to my colleagues too (at least those of them who aren’t using Zotero or some BibTex client [...]
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Finally actionable advise on how individuals can address the current market turmoil:
If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1000 would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now be worth less than £5, but if [...]
Monday, September 29, 2008
Never seen anything this scale before.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Sometimes there is too much news. The southeastern US is suffering from serious shortages of petrol. I wonder what it would take to get them to lower the speed limit; organize some ride sharing; provide some discounts on public transportation. I’m reminded of how in the depths of the recent and horiffic drought in that [...]
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Clay Shirky spends a few pages (p286..290) in his book digging into how as it becomes easier to communicate with others value of each message declines. After a while everything looks like spam. He mentions some examples of ways to work around that. If a few thousand people show up for a political rally, if [...]
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