Month: February 2012

The World’s Most Expensive City

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In what city would you be if a house cost around $10,000 month to rent, a sandwich and a soda cost over $20, a hotel room is upwards of $400 a night, a kilogram of imported tomatoes is a staggering $16, and a Barbie cake for a kid’s birthday costs a whopping $360?

If you guessed Moscow, Tokyo, or Zurich you’d be wrong. The correct answer is Luanda, the capital of the African nation of Angola.

So why is Luanda the most expensive city? According to the BBC:

There are several reasons. The main one is that Angola lived through a long civil war which started in 1975, when the country gained independence from Portugal, and continued right up until 2002.

Infrastructure is in poor shape after more than 20 years of civil war

During that time most industry, agriculture and local production stopped and basic infrastructure including roads, railways, electricity lines and water supplies were badly damaged.

Having once been a major exporter of products like coffee and cotton, and self-sufficient in most foods, Angola now imports an estimated 80% of its consumable goods.

This is interesting, even if the rest of the press doesn’t recognize Luanda as the world’s most expensive city.

The One Minute Exercise Regimen

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The New York Times reports on the benefits of high-intensity interval training, in which short bursts of very intense activity are followed by short period of recovery:

For years, the American Heart Association and other organizations have recommended that people complete 30 minutes or more of continuous, moderate-intensity exercise, such as a brisk walk, five times a week, for overall good health.

But millions of Americans don’t engage in that much moderate exercise, if they complete any at all. Asked why, a majority of respondents, in survey after survey, say, “I don’t have time.”

Intervals, however, require little time. They are, by definition, short. But whether most people can tolerate intervals, and whether, in turn, intervals provide the same health and fitness benefits as longer, more moderate endurance exercise are issues that haven’t been much investigated.

Several years ago, the McMasters scientists did test a punishing workout, known as high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, that involved 30 seconds of all-out effort at 100 percent of a person’s maximum heart rate. After six weeks, these lacerating HIIT sessions produced similar physiological changesin the leg muscles of young men as multiple, hour-long sessions per week of steady cycling, even though the HIIT workouts involved about 90 percent less exercise time.

Recognizing, however, that few of us willingly can or will practice such straining all-out effort, the researchers also developed a gentler but still chronologically abbreviated form of HIIT. This modified routine involved one minute of strenuous effort, at about 90 percent of a person’s maximum heart rate (which most of us can estimate, very roughly, by subtracting our age from 220), followed by one minute of easy recovery. The effort and recovery are repeated 10 times, for a total of 20 minutes.

Despite the small time commitment of this modified HIIT program, after several weeks of practicing it, both the unfit volunteers and the cardiac patients showed significant improvements in their health and fitness.

The results, published in a recent review of HIIT-related research, were especially remarkable in the cardiac patients. They showed “significant improvements” in the functioning of their blood vessels and heart, said Maureen MacDonald, an associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster who is leading the ongoing experiment.

This is very interesting research and high-intensity interval training is something I’d be willing to try in the gym.

A Profile of the Nigerian Scam Artist

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If you use email, then you’re no doubt familiar with the Nigerian scam letter, otherwise known as the 419 scam (419 is a section of the Nigerian criminal code pertaining to fraud).  You’ll receive an email saying that you or your family has come under a massive wealth, but you must relinquish some funds in order for processing of these funds to proceed forward.

But who are the people behind these scams? Known locally as “Yahoo Boys” because they prefer to use Yahoo! email accounts, Joshua Oyeniyi Aransiola, Ph.D., and Suraj Olalekan Asindemade, M.Sc in the Department of Sociology and Anthropolog at Obafemi Awolowo University (Ile–Ife, Nigeria) conducted interviews with these Nigerian scam artists and published a paper (abstract below) about their lives and proclivities:

A lot has been written on cybercrime and its prevention, but the problem has proved particularly resilient to remedial action. Desperate and vulnerable individuals in every continent continue to fall into its trap. Despite this, there is dearth of descriptive study that attempts to unravel the strategies employed by the perpetrators in Nigeria, as an important precondition for workable and reliable policy direction to address the problem. This article has filled this gap by using data from 40 cybercrime perpetrators selected with snowballing technique. The findings revealed that most of the cybercrime perpetrators in Nigeria are between the age of 22 and 29 years who were undergraduates and have distinctive lifestyles from other youths. Their strategies include collaboration with security agents and bank officials, local and international networking, and the use of voodoo that is, traditional supernatural power. It was clear that most perpetrators of cybercrime were involved in on-line dating and buying and selling with fake identity among others. The article discussed the need for reorientation of Nigerian youths in higher institutions, and various methods as guiding principles for potential victims. It recommended a complete reorganization of the Nigerian Police Force and Economic and Financial Crime Commission, as some of the officers in the institutions aid and abet cybercrime. It finally suggested a review of the Nigerian law guiding the operations of banking, poster agencies, and various speed post services in the country, as these are necessary preconditions to effectively combat the problem.

New Scientist has a brief post summarizing the paper, the best part of which is this:

Nigerian scammers make regular use of voodoo. As one Yahoo Boy put it: “The Voodoo thing exists for real, I have used it but I have stopped because of the fear of repercussion. With the aid of Voodoo the money comes faster. I have friends that still use it, they can collect money twice or thrice a week and it helps. I have a friend that uses a calabash filled with black substance; he hides it in his room and says incantations.

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Related reading: this piece in TechCrunch, profiling Ibrahim Boakye, “a genius in the land of chronic unemployment.”

John Gruber’s Critique of Walter Isaacson’s Biography of Steve Jobs

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John Gruber has an excellent critique of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I’ve read the biography last year, but I couldn’t make an informed critique like this:

There is much that is wrong with Walter Isaacson’s biography of Jobs, but its treatment of software is the most profound of the book’s flaws. Isaacson doesn’t merely neglect or underemphasize Jobs’s passion for software and design, but he flat-out paints the opposite picture.

Isaacson makes it seem as though Jobs was almost solely interested in hardware, and even there, only in what the hardware looked like. Superficial aesthetics.

In Chapter 26, “Design Principles: The Studio of Jobs and Ive”, Isaacson writes (p. 344 in the hardcover print edition):

“Before Steve came back, engineers would say ‘Here are the guts’ — processor, hard drive — and then it would go to the designers to put it in a box,” said Apple’s marketing chief Phil Schiller.
“When you do it that way, you come up with awful products.” But when Jobs returned and forged his bond with Ive, the balance was again tilted toward the designers. “Steve kept impressing on us that the design was integral to what would make us great,” said Schiller.

“Design once again dictated the engineering, not just vice versa.”

On occasion this could backfire, such as when Jobs and Ive insisted on using a solid piece of brushed aluminum for the edge of the iPhone 4 even when the engineers worried that it would compromise the antenna. But usually the distinctiveness of its designs — for the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad — would set Apple apart and lead to its triumphs in the years after Jobs returned.

Isaacson clearly believes that design is merely how a product looks and feels, and that “engineering” is how it actually works.

Jobs, in an interview with Rob Walker for his terrific 2003 New York Times Magazine profile on the creation of the iPod, said:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
That quote is absent from Isaacson’s book, despite the book’s frequent use of existing source material.

The entire post is worth reading, especially if you’ve read Steve Jobs.

How an Economist Says “I Love You”

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Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes this brilliant post on how economists say “I love you.” Some of my favorites:

1) The marginal returns of spending time with you will never diminish.

2) The monopoly you have on my heart is all natural.

3) For what you’re supplying, my demand’s inelastic.

Inelastic demand for your love.

See the entire post here.

Brainstorming Doesn’t Work

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Jonah Lehrer has a good piece in The New Yorker on the brainstorming myth. Briefly, brainstorming doesn’t work:

The underlying assumption of brainstorming is that if people are scared of saying the wrong thing, they’ll end up saying nothing at all. The appeal of this idea is obvious: it’s always nice to be saturated in positive feedback. Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. Brainstorming seems like an ideal technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is a problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work.

The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientists gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn. The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative. Although the findings did nothing to hurt brainstorming’s popularity, numerous follow-up studies have come to the same conclusion. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.

In the piece, Lehrer discusses the famous Building 20 on the campus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (I’d never read or heard of it before reading this piece), which turned out to be a hub for creative work (this is where Chomsky got his start as a world-renowned linguist):

Room numbers, for instance, followed an inscrutable scheme: rooms on the second floor were given numbers beginning with 1, and third-floor room numbers began with 2. Furthermore, the wings that made up the building were named in an unclear sequence: B wing gave onto A wing, followed by E, D, and C wings. Even longtime residents of Building 20 were constantly getting lost, wandering the corridors in search of rooms. Those looking for the Ice Research Lab had to walk past the military recruiting office; students on their way to play with the toy trains (the Tech Model Railroad Club was on the third floor, in Room No. 20E-214) strolled along hallways filled with the latest computing experiments.

The building’s horizontal layout also spurred interaction. Brand quotes Henry Zimmerman, an electrical engineer who worked there for years: “In a vertical layout with small floors, there is less research variety on each floor. Chance meetings in an elevator tend to terminate in the lobby, whereas chance meetings in a corridor tended to lead to technical discussions.” The urban theorist Jane Jacobs described such incidental conversations as “knowledge spillovers.”

Building 20 was full of knowledge spillovers. Take the career of Amar Bose. In the spring of 1956, Bose, a music enthusiast, procrastinating in writing his dissertation, decided to buy a hi-fi. He chose the system with the best technical specs, but found that the speakers sounded terrible. Bose realized that the science of hi-fi needed help and began frequenting the Acoustics Lab, which was just down the hall. Before long, Bose was spending more time playing with tweeters than he was on his dissertation. Nobody minded the interloper in the lab, and, three years later, Bose produced a wedge-shaped contraption outfitted with twenty-two speakers, a synthesis of his time among the engineers and his musical sensibility. The Bose Corporation was founded soon afterward.

So what kind of interactions are the most useful for sparking creativity? Jonah Lehrer concludes:

The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process. Although such conversations will occasionally be unpleasant—not everyone is always in the mood for small talk or criticism—that doesn’t mean that they can be avoided. The most creative spaces are those which hurl us together. It is the human friction that makes the sparks.

The Science of the Ponytail

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In more bizarre scientific research, physicists have come up with an equation that explains and predicts the shape of a ponytail.

Professor Raymond Goldstein worked on the equation with Professor Robin Ball from the University of Warwick and Patrick Warren, from Unilever’s Research and Development Centre. According to them, this equation aims to “solve a problem that has puzzled scientists and artists ever since Leonardo da Vinci remarked on the fluid-like streamlines of hair in his notebooks 500 years ago”.

The abstract of the paper, which will appear in Physical Review Letters Journal, follows:

A general continuum theory for the distribution of hairs in a bundle is developed, treating individual fibers as elastic filaments with random intrinsic curvatures. Applying this formalism to the iconic problem of the ponytail, the combined effects of bending elasticity, gravity, and orientational disorder are recast as a differential equation for the envelope of the bundle, in which the compressibility enters through an “equation of state.” From this, we identify the balance of forces in various regions of the ponytail, extract a remarkably simple equation of state from laboratory measurements of human ponytails, and relate the pressure to the measured random curvatures of individual hairs.

The best part? The scientists have come up with a new mathematical quantity known as the Rapunzel Number. Very clever.

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(via BBC News)

Television in Putin’s Russia

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There are two targeted TV audiences in Russia these days: older Russians who are nostalgic for their pre-perestroika youth and younger viewers who are curious about a Communist system that today seems unimaginable. This New York Times piece profiles some of the shows:

The jokes on a new Russian sitcom called “The Eighties,” are punctuated with faded archival footage; Moscow without neon or traffic and Russians lining up around the block to buy sausage. It’s a coming-of-age comedy like “That ’70s Show” or “Happy Days” but focused on the naïveté and insularity of Soviet society in a way that makes viewers feel sophisticated and modern. A nerdy university student tries to impress a pretty girl who just moved back from France. “When I was a kid, I went abroad too,” he boasts. “Mongolia.”

And Russia’s version of The Bachelor:

“Let’s Get Married!” is a dating show like “The Bachelor,” but without the time — or budget — for sunset balloon rides across Moldovan wine country or hot-tub getaways on the Black Sea. Instead, it brings a jolt of Slavic fatalism to romance: the bachelor has his choice of three eligible and comely young women, but first he must listen to the advice and commentary of a panel of older women who cross-examine him and the potential brides. Also, for no better reason than a flair for excess, the bachelor and his prospective brides sometimes wear theme costumes: he as a hussar officer and they as Tolstoyian ballroom belles, he as Aladdin and they as a harem of belly dancers.

Still playing today, my favorite Russian TV show is Что? Где? Когда?, a very exciting and challenging team trivia game.

Twitter, Facebook, and Personality Type

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What can one glean of someone’s personality type based on preference for Twitter vs. Facebook usage? David Hughes at Manchester Business School and his colleagues surveyed 300 people online and were scored on the “big five” personality factors of extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness. The study’s findings are summarized here:

People who used Facebook mostly for socialising tended to score more highly on sociability and neuroticism (consistent with past research suggesting that shy people use the site to forge social ties and combat loneliness). Social use of Twitter correlated with higher sociability and openness (but not neuroticism) and with lower scores on conscientiousness. This suggests that social Twitter users don’t use it so much to combat loneliness, but more as a form of social procrastination. 

What about using the sites as an informational tool? There was an intriguing divergence here. People who said they used Facebook as an informational tool tended to score higher on neuroticism, sociability, extraversion and openness, but lower on conscientiousness and “need for cognition”. Informational users of Twitter were the mirror opposite: they scored higher on conscientiousness and “need for cognition”, but lower on neuroticism, extraversion and sociability. The researchers interpreted these patterns as suggesting that Facebook users seek and share information as a way of avoiding more cognitively demanding sources such as journal articles and newspaper reports. Twitter users, by contrast, use the site for its cognitive stimulation – as a way of uncovering useful information and material without socialising (this was particularly true for older participants).

Finally, what about people’s overall preference for Twitter or Facebook? Again, people who scored higher in “need for cognition” tended to prefer Twitter, whilst higher scorers in sociability, neuroticism and extraversion tended to prefer Facebook. Simplifying the results, one might say that Facebook is the more social of the two social networking sites, whereas Twitter is more about sharing and exchanging information. 

It’s an interesting study, though I would have liked to see a sample size of a magnitude higher, and more balanced with the female-male ratio.

Smart People Ask Questions

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This Harvard graduate makes a few conclusions about smart people:

I have noticed one overarching theme among smart people: they ask questions. When someone explains something new to me, I’ll usually just nod my head like I know what they’re talking about. If I don’t understand something, I’ll just Google it later. After all, I don’t want this person to think I’m a moron. Smart people are different. If they don’t understand something, or even if they think they understand something, they’ll ask questions. I distinctly remember, as an immature and perhaps arrogant freshman, a guest lecture in one of my classes. After explaining what I thought was a straightforward concept, the guest lecturer asked if anyone had any questions. Looking around the room, every student simply nodded, indicating everything was clear. A question, however, came from a tenured professor who had undoubtedly been exposed to the material before. At the time, I thought nothing of it, and perhaps even thought that I was smarter than the professor because I understood a concept he/she didn’t. Now, I am confident that this professor did not ask the question just to make the guest lecturer feel better, to start a discussion, or anything else. The intonation of the question and the intensity with which the professor listened to the response definitively suggested that the professor’s question was genuine, and that the answer was of great importance.

Based on the research and findings of so many of the students and professors here, it’s clear that this trend is no accident. Not only do smart people ask questions when they don’t understand something, but they also ask questions when the world thinks it understands something. Smart people challenge the very limit of human understanding, and push the envelope of what’s possible farther than many people would argue it’s meant to be pushed. Smart people don’t take claims at face value, and smart people don’t rest until they find an explanation they’re comfortable accepting and understanding.

There’s a lot to add here, especially in terms of introversion and extroversion of individuals and their ability/desire to ask questions. But the author’s point is a good one.