:> :~) — I’m bad at emoticons. But I appreciate other people’s work. From an article about the Lehman report:
“So it’s legally doable but doesn’t look good when we actually do it? Does the rest of the street do it?†one Lehman employee asks another in emails included in the report. The answers, respectively, are yes and no, followed by a smiley face.
At Berkeley, one of my most unusual students was a psychology major named Sandy Tesch, who by then had risen through Red Cross volunteer ranks to be on their national youth council. A few years later she was head of the youth council. During college, she assumed that after she graduated, she would work for a non-profit. Now, however, she does fund-raising for the UC Berkeley library.
She won a post-graduate fellowship and during her fellowship year she met a woman who worked in fund-raising. She realized she liked it. Why? I asked. Because when you do fund-raising, you’re working with a lot of caring people, she said. They’re like the volunteers she worked with during her Red Cross years. Instead of giving time, they’re giving money.
The QuietComfort 15 headphones ($300) are Bose’s newest noise-cancelling headphones. I had two of an earlier model, the QC 2, because when they broke I couldn’t bear to be without one for two weeks. I used them while walking on my treadmill and riding the subway. BART is noisy.
The model numbers went 1, 2, 3, 15. And, yeah, the QC 15 is much better than the QC 2 and QC 3, which were about the same. The first time I wore them on BART, when I got out of the subway I noticed I didn’t feel exhausted, the way I usually did after a subway ride. I felt normal. The noise had been exhausting.
Duncan Watts, a Yahoo! researcher who studies networks, has some interesting things to say:
“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one–and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”
Epidemics and many other contagion phenomena have a power-law distribution (large frequency of small number infected, small frequency of large number infected). When my colleagues and I studied the distribution of rat bar-press durations, we found a power-law-like function where the “size” wasn’t number but duration. Most bar-presses were quite short; a few were quite long. We also found that expectation of reward had a big effect on the slope of the power-law function. I think Watts is saying that more attention should be paid to what determines the slopes of these power-law functions.
A recent article by Watts. Thanks to Hal Pashler.
This website is a scam. Search “scam” in this blog for lots and lots of evidence about why it is a scam. It used to have other names, such as gamesingate.com. Notice how new the website is — how recently it was registered.
I’d never heard the phrase in your wheelhouse (= in your area of expertise) until a few days ago. Now I’ve heard it twice: once on Ugly Betty, once on Glee. Maybe someone used in the LA Times six months ago, when those scripts were being written.
If you look on this blog you will find several other website names that this site has used to scam people, such as myshopinsun.com. You will pay via PayPal, complain to PayPal, PayPal will “investigate”, decide you were right — and not give you your money back. That PayPal keeps helping whoever is behind this is curious and infuriating to anyone scammed.
Dennis Mangan writes here about the campaign to destroy the journal Medical Hypotheses because its editor dared to publish an article by Peter Duesberg and others questioning that HIV causes AIDS.
The campaign is associated with AIDSTruth.org, which says it is about “the scientific evidence for HIV/AIDS.” A dead giveaway. When I was a senior in college, I wrote a paper called “The Scientific _______” in which I said that use of the term scientific is a sign that the writer or writers don’t know what they’re talking about. Calling this or that “scientific” amounts to calling something else “unscientific” — which isn’t an argument, it’s abuse. The term scientific is often just a way to sneer at other people. Like the word nigger and many other derogatory names and adjectives.
Animal Farm put it well: You become what you are supposedly against. Holocaust denial is strange, yes, but then there are the people who get really really upset by it. Who would have guessed that the solution to intolerance (German intolerance of Jews) is . . . more intolerance? And that is what the campaign against Medical Hypotheses is in favor of: more intolerance.
A famous short story by Tama Janowitz, called “The Slaves in New York” (a short-story collection called “Slaves of New York” was made into a movie), was about New York City renters who couldn’t afford to move because rents were so high. Whatever their relationship with their roommate, they were stuck.
[Eleanor] lives with her boyfriend Stash in the Village. Stash is a graffiti artist who complains a lot, while Eleanor makes him elaborate meals. One night she goes to a party and meets Mikell, a handsome South African writer. They make a date and meet at the White Horse Tavern. It turns out that Mikell lives with a woman named Millie, who owns a co-op. Millie and Mikell fight as much as Eleanor and Stash do but, because neither can afford their own apartment, they are trapped.
Now, due to the huge decline in house prices, many Californians face a similar slavery. As a friend of mine put it,
Anyone like my parents, who paid cash for their houses, are kinda stuck living where they are, or they’ll take a giant financial hit.
A curious comment was left on a previous post of mine about an internet shopping scam:
Hi Guys I really thank you for this blog
I am going to buy from the Web-Site name www.myshoppingsun.com
But I am not convince about it so I went to PayPal Verified and this is all they said, I just copy from the window they put a domain name but they used all paypal scammers account,By the way I was scammer with some phone from UK, I Hate to said these but I am affright to do business with chinese people they always try to scamme me
And Please read what paypal said about these myshoppingsun.com website
Light in the box Limited. is PayPal Verified
PayPal’s Verification System allows you to learn more about users before you pay them through PayPal. Verify that the information below is consistent with the business, organization or person you wish to pay.
Email: order@litb-inc.com
Status: Verified
Account Creation Date: Aug. 18, 2006To ensure that this is a legitimate PayPal Verified user, make sure that the URL of this page begins with https://www.paypal.com/.
What it Means to be Verified
To become Verified, a PayPal member in the United States must enroll in our Expanded Use Program. When a member completes Expanded Use enrollment, he undergoes additional checks that increase security for all PayPal users. Please note that PayPal’s verification system does not constitute an endorsement of a member, nor a guarantee of a member’s business practices. You should always consider other indicators when evaluating members, including length of PayPal membership and reputation scores (on eBay or other auction sites, if applicable)
The commenter’s URI: www.myshoppingsun.com. Their IP: 98.203.87.228.
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