links of the day

When Gucci and Louis Vuitton Handbags Serve as Collateral for Loans

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Say hello to the handbag-backed loan. A company in Hong Kong, Yes Lady Finance Co., provides loans to customers if they’re able to bring in their beloved handbags as collateral.

Yes Lady provides a loan within half an hour at 80% of the bag’s value—as long as it is from Gucci, Chanel, Hermès or Louis Vuitton. Occasionally, a Prada purse will do the trick. Secondhand classic purses and special-edition handbags often retain much of their retail prices.

A customer gets her bag back by repaying the loan at 4% monthly interest within four months. Yes Lady says almost all its clients quickly pay off their loans and reclaim their bags.

The company recently lent about US$20,600 in exchange for a Hermès Birkin bag, but Yes Lady’s purse-backed loans start at about US$200.

This is bizarre, and one of those “markets in everything” phenomena. The best part? Some people try to get away with bringing in fake luxury handbags. You should read the article on how Yes Lady handles those scenarios…

Tuesday’s Logic Puzzles

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A brief break from reading this afternoon to tackle two logic/math problems below. See if you can deduce the answer on your own. Leave a comment if you know the answer!

1) Consider an analog clock with both an hour hand and a minute hand. What is the first time after 6PM that the hour hand and the minute hand are exactly coincident (i.e., on top of one another)? NOTE: Your answer should be in this format: HH:MM:SS.DDD, where HH = hour, MM = minutes, SS = seconds, and DDD is the 1/1000th of a second decimal equivalent. (HINT: the first thing that comes to mind, 6:30PM, is an incorrect response).

2) Consider a room  with a very large table on which stand 100 lamps, each with an on/off switch. The lamps are arranged in a straight line, and each one is numbered 1, 2, 3, …, 99, 100. At the beginning of the experiment, all the lamps are turned off.

This room has an entry door and a separate door for an exit. One hundred people are recruited to participate in this experiment. Each of the 100 participants is also numbered 1 to 100, inclusive. When participant number 1 enters the room, he turns on EVERY lamp, and exits. When participant 2 enters the room, he flips the switch for every second lamp (thus, turning off lamps 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and so on because participant 1 has turned all the lamps on his turn). Participant 2 exits and then participant 3 enters. Participant 3 flips the switch on every third lamp (thus changing the on/off state of the lamps which are numbered 3, 6, 9, 12, and so on). This process continues until all 100 participants have taken their turn and passed through the room.

Assume each participant can properly count and doesn’t make any mistakes in changing the on/off state of the lamp(s) he’s assigned to change the state of. Here is the question: after the 100th participant completes his journey through the room, how many lamps are illuminated? And which of those lamps (i.e., reference by number) are they?

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UPDATE (1:30PM): Both questions have been answered in the comments. To make up for these relatively simple questions, I’ll post a much more challenging logic question in the evening. It will have to do with a deck of cards.

Why Lobster Isn’t Priced Like Chicken

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In 2005, Maine lobster was selling for almost six dollars a pound wholesale. By 2009, it cost just half that, and, in the past couple of summers, huge lobster harvests, believed by some to be a result of global warming, have glutted the market, sending prices tumbling further. This month, lobster off the boat is selling for as low as $2.20 a pound. So why hasn’t the price of lobster come down when you’re buying it at your favorite restaurant?

James Surowiecki explains in The New Yorker that lobster isn’t like a commodity, but rather is more like a luxury good. If it were priced like chicken, people would presumably enjoy it less:

Keeping prices high obviously lets restaurants earn more on each dish. But it may also mean that they get less business. So why aren’t we seeing markdowns? Some of the reasons are straightforward, like the inherent uncertainty of prices from year to year: if a bad harvest next summer sent prices soaring, restaurants might find it hard to sell expensive lobster to customers who’d got used to cheap lobster. But the deeper reason is that, economically speaking, lobster is less like a commodity than like a luxury good, which means that its price involves a host of odd psychological factors.

Lobster hasn’t always been a high-end product. In Colonial New England, it was a low-class food, in part because it was so abundant: servants, as a condition of their employment, insisted on not being fed lobster more than three times a week. In the nineteenth century, it became generally popular, but then, as overharvesting depleted supplies, it got to be associated with the wealthy (who could afford it). In the process, high prices became an important part of lobster’s image. And, as with many luxury goods, expense is closely linked to enjoyment. Studies have shown that people prefer inexpensive wines in blind taste tests, but that they actually get more pleasure from drinking wine they are told is expensive. If lobster were priced like chicken, we might enjoy it less.

Another additional point worth highlighting:

Restaurants also worry about the message that discounting sends. Studies dating back to the nineteen-forties show that when people can’t objectively evaluate a product before they buy it (as is the case with a meal) they often assume a correlation between price and quality. Since most customers don’t know what’s been happening to the wholesale price of lobster, cutting the price could send the wrong signal: people might think your lobster is inferior to that of your competitors. A 1996 study found that restaurants wouldn’t place more orders with wholesalers even if lobster prices fell twenty-five per cent.

Finally, having lobster on the menu is a boon for restaurants because its artificially high price makes other dishes on the menu comparatively more affordable. Cited in Surowiecki’s piece is a fascinating paper by Itamar Simonson and Amos Tversky concerning these context-dependent preferences:

The standard theory of choice-based on value maximization-associates with each option a real value such that, given an offered set, the decision maker chooses the option with the highest value. Despite its simplicity and intuitive appeal, there is a growing body of data that is inconsistent with this theory. In particular, the relative attractiveness of x compared to y often depends on the presence or absence of a third option z, and the “market share” of an option can actually be increased by enlarging the offered set. We review recent empirical findings that are inconsistent with value maximization, and present a context-dependent model that expresses the value of each option as an additive combination of two components: a contingent weighting process that captures the effect of the background context, and a binary comparison process that describes the effect of the local context. The model accounts for observed violations of the standard theory and provides a framework for analyzing context-dependent preferences.

Zemblanity is the Opposite of Serendipity

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Stef Lewandowski, in a post titled “Accelerating Serendipity” talks about some of the ways he’s made serendipity become more prevalent in his life. Say yes more, attend events, and find the right location.

But it was this paragraph about zemblanity—the polar opposite of serendipity—that caught my attention:

Zemblanity, a word coined by William Boyd in his book Armadillo in the 1980s, is the polar opposite of serendipity. It’s named after the cold, barren serendipity-less island of Zembla:

“So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds, seawashed, sunbasted? Think of another world in the far north, barren, icebound, cold, a world of flint and stone. Call it Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design.”

Good stuff.

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And here is Wikipedia on The Three Princes of Serendip, the origin of the word Serendipity. The word serendipity was first coined in modern times by Horace Walpole:

The Three Princes of Serendip is the English version of the Peregrinaggio di tre giovani figliuoli del re di Serendippo published by Michele Tramezzino in Venice in 1557. Tramezzino claimed to have heard the story from one Christophero Armeno who had translated the Persian fairy tale into Italian adapting Book One of Amir Khusrau‘s Hasht Bihisht of 1302. The story first came to English via a French translation, and now exists in several out-of-print translations. Serendip is the Persian and Urdu name for Sri Lanka, which was adopted from Tamil “Seren deevu” or originally from Sanskrit Suvarnadweepaor golden island. In contrast, some trace the etymology to Simhaladvipa which literally translates to “Dwelling-Place-of-Lions Island”

The story has become known in the English speaking world as the source of the word serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole because of his recollection of the part of the “silly fairy tale” where the three princes by “accidents and sagacity” discern the nature of a lost camel. In a separate line of descent, the story was used by Voltaire in his 1747 Zadig, and through this contributed to both the evolution of detective fiction and also to the self-understanding of scientific method.

 

The Welding Robot e-David and Art Forgery

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This is quite interesting: e-David is a welding robot programmed to copy art pieces via a select number of algorithms. Watch this video:

 

This brief piece in Wired has more:

The thing that sets the bot apart from his contemporaries is a visual feedback system, a technological set of eyes that continually checks to see how close he’s coming to the mark. Every so often, e-David will take a photograph of his canvas and, after some image correction, subtract it from the image he’s trying to reproduce. Looking at the difference between the two, it determines which areas of the canvas are too dark or too light, generates a hundred or so potential brush strokes, and then chooses which of those are best suited to minimize that difference.

In many ways, the project sidesteps some of the thornier conceptual issues painting robots typically grapple with–concerns like authorship and intent. “Regardless of what we implement, the machine will never be a person,” Oliver Deussen, one of the researchers behind the effort, explained to WIRED UK. “It will only have a very limited idea about what it is doing, no intention. Our simulation is only about the craftsmanship that is involved in the painting process.” In other words, Deussen and his collaborators don’t expect their robotic arm to think like an artist. They just want it to paint like one.

There is much potential here:

The machine works mostly in acrylic, because it dries quickly and is thus easier to correct. It can do color, but it’s a bit tricky. And since e-David needs to ensure the same amount of paint is on the brush for its algorithms to function as intended, it has to make a stroke off to the side every time it dips its brush.

But e-David’s creators think there’s plenty of room for their apprentice to learn. It could be programmed to distinguish between certain styles of painting, for example, and choose its strokes accordingly. Or even, Deussen suggests, to gain some rudimentary understanding of what it was painting, and to know the difference between the sky and leaves on a tree, say, in terms of what they demanded from the perspective of paint applied to canvas.

David Graeber on the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

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David Graeber is a professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years. In a must-read, thought-provoking post titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs” he explains how the majority of workers these days are stuck in meaningless jobs:

In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

So what happened as a result of global automation?

But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

So was Keynes wrong? No, argues David Graeber, in this humorous paragraph:

While corporations may engage in ruthless downsizing, the layoffs and speed-ups invariably fall on that class of people who are actually making, moving, fixing and maintaining things; through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.

On meeting people with bullshit jobs in real life:

In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely.

On the perverse notion that this status quo should endure:

It’s even clearer in the US, where Republicans have had remarkable success mobilizing resentment against school teachers, or auto workers (and not, significantly, against the school administrators or auto industry managers who actually cause the problems) for their supposedly bloated wages and benefits. It’s as if they are being told “but you get to teach children! Or make cars! You get to have real jobs! And on top of that you have the nerve to also expect middle-class pensions and health care?”

A must-read in its entirety. Thought-provoking.

In Praise of Laziness

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Very good piece in The Economist on disruptions, endless meetings, and pointless tasks. Many people mistake being busy for being productive, whereas they’re often not correlated!

Yet the biggest problem in the business world is not too little but too much—too many distractions and interruptions, too many things done for the sake of form, and altogether too much busy-ness. The Dutch seem to believe that an excess of meetings is the biggest devourer of time: they talk of vergaderziekte, “meeting sickness”. However, a study last year by the McKinsey Global Institute suggests that it is e-mails: it found that highly skilled office workers spend more than a quarter of each working day writing and responding to them.

Which of these banes of modern business life is worse remains open to debate. But what is clear is that office workers are on a treadmill of pointless activity. Managers allow meetings to drag on for hours. Workers generate e-mails because it requires little effort and no thought. An entire management industry exists to spin the treadmill ever faster.

All this “leaning in” is producing an epidemic of overwork, particularly in the United States. Americans now toil for eight-and-a-half hours a week more than they did in 1979. A survey last year by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that almost a third of working adults get six hours or less of sleep a night. Another survey last year by Good Technology, a provider of secure mobile systems for businesses, found that more than 80% of respondents continue to work after leaving the office, 69% cannot go to bed without checking their inbox and 38% routinely check their work e-mails at the dinner table.

Not just business people, but everyone would be better off if they did less and thought more.

Hinge: A Dating App Developed by a Military Contractor

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The Verge reports on one John Kleint, a former military contractor who’s now switched gears and is helping develop a dating app called Hinge:

When Kleint first started working at Hinge, in a DC office not far from his old defense gig, the first challenge was understanding his new data set — tens of thousands of completely harmless Facebook users. On a good day at his old job, nobody got hurt, and now, a good day is when Hinge receives an email from two soul mates who found each other using the service. Hinge doesn’t ask the usual array of questions like “Do you believe in God?” from its users, and instead relies on pre-existing signals to make assumptions about you. Solely by examining your friends and interests, the service can predict your political leaning, your age, your sexual orientation, and your race. Kleint works on the algorithms and machine learning techniques to make it all work.

“There are certain factors that go into a stable long-term relationship, and you can infer some of those factors from your friends,” he says. “There’s no explicit equation. There’s no guessing that likes should have 20 percent weight and attraction should be 30 percent.” Picking matches is especially hard since different people have different tastes. Hinge takes the opposite approach to some dating sites like OkCupid with overt “hot or not” meters and percentage odds of being a a match. And unlike dating services that simply pair you with somebody who’s also obsessed with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back,Hinge uses that data to learn other things about you. Kleint won’t expose Hinge’s secret sauce, but points to a study by researchers at Cambridge University who created an algorithm that correctly predicts male sexuality 88 percent of the time, and is 95 percent accurate at distinguishing between African Americans and Caucasian Americans, without ever having seen a photo.

The app is in limited release so far: Washington D.C. and New York City, primarily.

The Perils of Captivity of India’s Celebrity Elephants

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A really sad piece in this week’s New York Times Magazine profiles a few celebrity elephants in India and the perils of captivity that they endure.

The captivity of elephants in south India goes back thousands of years. At first their use was mostly practical — tanks in wartime, timber forklifts in peacetime. In Kerala, elephants have been status symbols since the feudal era, and today most of its captive elephants are owned by private individuals. And it’s the only state in India where elephants are widely used for temple festivals. When or why this tradition started is unknown — no scripture commands it — but you can imagine how it may have happened: elephants were housed at temples between battles and were gradually integrated into religious festivities. Eventually, as soldiers and loggers replaced their elephants with machines, festivals became the best way owners could turn a profit on such high-maintenance animals.

Celebrity elephants in India.

Celebrity elephants in India.

Twenty years ago, Kerala elephants would appear only at whatever festivals were within walking distance, and few elephants were famous. Now they’re trucked all over the state to the highest bidder, the price driven up every year by the enthusiasms of the superfans who form associations to honor their favorite animals, urge festival organizers to feature them and trash-talk the competition. “You call that an elephant?” they write on their rivals’ Facebook pages. “Go tie him up in the cow barn.” The fans are especially concerned with what’s called lakshanam — a term that elephantspotlight.com defines as “the sexy features of the elephants.” A fan named Sujith told me: “The ivory should be clean white. The tail should be like a brush, and the trunk should reach the ground.” (Sujith’s own favorite elephant, he said, was out of commission this season: he was hit in the hind legs by an S.U.V.)

Celebrity elephants at a festival in India.

Celebrity elephants at a festival in India.

Although most elephant festivals in India are Hindu, Kerala is unusual in that its population is a quarter Muslim and a fifth Christian, and those faiths have jumped on the elephant bandwagon, too. At a Muslim festival I went to, rowdy young men rode up and down the road throwing confetti from the 60-odd elephants they rented — some of the same elephants that carried idols at Hindu temples the day before.

There is a conflict among India’s population on what should be done to protect these elephants:

…the solution to the harm inflicted on and by elephants is self-evident: their captivity should be banned — or at the very least, elephants should no longer be used in festivals. Tradition or not, they’re wild animals that belong in the forest. But Raman Sukumar, the founder of the Asian Nature Conservation Foundation and perhaps the world’s leading expert on Asian elephants, says it isn’t that simple. Asian elephants have been on the endangered-species list since 1986, yet contrary to trends nearly everywhere else in the world, the wild-elephant population in southern India has actually been increasing over the past several decades, with elephants now living in places where they hadn’t been spotted for hundreds of years. The trouble with this is that deforestation and booming human populations have shrunk and fragmented their habitats, which means elephants are increasingly coming into conflict with humans — raiding crops, running amok in forest villages. Thirty years ago, Sukumar told me, wild elephants killed around 150 people a year across India. Today it’s closer to 500. When wild elephants exceed the capacity of their habitats, the only alternative to capturing them is culling them, which is to say, shooting them dead.

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Additional reading:

1) This excellent 2006 New York Times piece titled “An Elephant Crackup?” which highlights how elephants have become more violent, prone to attacking villages and humans.

2) George Orwell’s classic essay “Shooting an Elephant.” One of my favorite works by Orwell outside of 1984.

The New York Times Reviews The Art of Sleeping Alone

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The New York Times reviews Sophie Fontanel’s memoir The Art of Sleeping Alone, and it is filled with wonderful, caustic zingers like this:

The first thing to say about “The Art of Sleeping Alone” is that it’s very French. It’s slim, chic and humorless, that is, a sophisticated bagatelle of a volume, filled with detours to exotic locales: the Sahara, Goa in India, the Greek island of Hydra.

It’s also gauzy and episodic and not particularly well written, yet it drifts along on a kind of existential bearnaise of its own secreting. It’s “Bonjour Tristesse” grown bruised, older, warier.

The book appears to be awkward, with a number of non sequiturs:

The opposite of experience is innocence, of course, and in “The Art of Sleeping Alone,” the author often longs to retreat from the adult world into one that can resemble childhood. She wants her life to be “soft and fluffy.” She wishes to be “the girl I’d been years before.”

At night, she hugs her clean pillows as if they were stuffed animals. When she sees a kind father with his children, she thinks, “Who had adored me like that since my parents?”

She takes long lavender milk baths, baths that are no longer just about the “Silkwood”-style scrubbing of the smell of men from her body. “I felt as if some divinity were rejoicing in me,” she writes. “Until then, water had been only a useful element, like the showers, for example, into which I rushed to cleanse myself of a presence after having let myself get caught.”

I am definitely NOT putting this one on my reading list.