links of the day

Radio Colifata, a Radio Show Run by Psychiatric Patients

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Amelia Rachel Hokule’a Borofsky writes about her visit to Radio Colifata, a radio show run by psychiatric patients in Buenos Aires. She mentions falling down a rabbit hole:

I get out of the taxi and see the paint-peeling walls of a hospital with black graffiti that reads “Don’t shut us down.” Founded in 1863 and spread out on 49 acres, the hospital stands as a testament to an older model of institutionalized psychiatric treatment. In the United States, in part due to socio-political changes and the availability of psychiatric medications, most long-term hospitals closed in the 1970s, the patients moved into underfunded community healthcare networks. El Borda reflects the old institutional model, but Buenos Aires style. Psychoanalysis, magical realism, circus, tango, and pirate radio all thrive here.

A security guard smiles and says, “Are you here for Radio Colifata?” I nod and look for an ID. He shakes his head and, without unlocking any doors, points me to the courtyard. Big leafy shade trees cover a tiny yellow building with a mosaic of colorful people. Above their heads reads: “Radio Colifata,” which means “crazy lady” in the lunfardo prison slang developed in the late 19th century so guards would not understand the prisoners. The motto of Radio Colifata, the founder Dr. Alfredo Olivera explains, is “To create bridges where there are walls.”

And an interesting note that this venture isn’t unique, but would be so in the United States:

Inspired by Radio Colifata, I looked again into the possibility of a radio station broadcasting from an inpatient psychiatric facility. I found around fifty such stations based on the Radio Colifata model in Latin America and Europe, including Nikosia in Barcelona, Spain, Les Z’entonnoirs in Roubaix, France, and Radio Rete in Italy. I asked a few directors of facilities here in the United States, but they all reiterated that funding, confidentiality, and legality would make it virtually impossible.

Fascinating.

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(hat tip: Kottke)

Alex Payne: Alone, Together, Technology

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This is a must-read personal post by Alex Payne, in which he reflects the influence of technology in his life following a divorce with his wife:

I owe my life to technology.

I first realized it in my early twenties. Everything important around me at the time, I’d found on Craigslist: my girlfriend, my job, my apartment. It was a powerful realization: I could sit down with my laptop and, in a matter of hours or days, change my world in both superficial and fundamental ways.

That was years ago. Technology specializes over time. The life I just finished packing up wasn’t courtesy of Craigslist. It wouldn’t be, now. The modern web has six sites for everything, branded and polished and localized and full of options. House from Redfin. Cars negotiated online before ever walking into a dealership. Wife from OkCupid. Wedding invitations by email. Date-night dinners booked on OpenTable. Fast and friction-free.

I spent four years telling anyone who asked how we met that OkCupid’s matching algorithms must have been off. “We were only a seventysomething percent match, with like a twelve percent chance of being enemies. Guess they need to work some bugs out!” The joke’s on me, of course. I emailed the right person at OkCupid to apologize for the years of disparagement.

I could blame technology. Maybe stitching together a durable life takes physical work, needle callouses.

I think this was the second best line in the piece:

Maybe technology made it all too easy to slide into a life I wasn’t meant to have.

And the best:

I will owe the next part of my life to technology, but I will owe it more to experience.

Amen.

Again, a must-read in its entirety.

Do People Secretly Love Black Friday?

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Why will millions of people brave long lines this Friday (Thursday evening if you’re shopping at Wal-Mart) in order to score some Black Friday deals? Do people secretly love Black Friday? I am not buying this research, summarized in The Atlantic Wire:

For all the stress of the waiting, the Black Friday deals have a physical—and positive—effect on our brain. In the age of the smartphone, retailers lure customers with mobile coupons to get cell-phone shoppers to buy at the store, rather than online. And so even if discounts will get deeper in-store or on Cyber Monday, Black Friday-specific coupons can offer an immediate sense of relaxation. All of which makes consumers happier, found a recent Claremont University study.

Measuring the oxytocin levels of a group of female shoppers after giving them a coupon,  neurologist Dr. Paul Zak found that the deal increased this hormone’s levels in some shoppers. As this hormone (not to be confused with Oxycontin) has been linked to feelings of love and trust, Dr. Zak concluded that the positive mental reaction to it has become one of the reasons we love coupons so much. We view it as a social gesture, he says. “We’re so engrained to being social creatures that even receiving a coupon online is viewed by the brain as a social experience,” Zak says. “We’re building a relationship with an online shopping site like it’s a personal relationship.” The same study also found the coupon reduced stress and increased happiness in some participants. Ergo, on Black Friday, the biggest coupon day of the year must make this hormone go wild in some shoppers’ brains, making it a very relaxing and lovely experience.

…

At certain levels, consumers enjoy arousal and challenges during the shopping process,” researcher Sang-Eun Byun told The Washington Post’s Olga Khazan. “They enjoy something that’s harder to get, and it makes them feel playful and excited.” Given that bit of science, it’s no wonder that shoppers have acted quite aggressive in recent years, as this Christian Science Monitor article notes. 

The people who choose to partake in Black Friday, will likely associate many of its aspects with positive feelings. In fact, the day doesn’t evoke angry or related emotions for many of its participants, found an study from Eastern Illinois University. The researchers observed consumer behaviors and emotions on that day and… calmness, happiness, and courteousness ranked higher than anger and anxiety. 

As for me? I am staying on the sidelines and not stepping a foot within brick-and-mortar stores.

How to Reduce Taxes on Your Investments

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I was reading an article on reducing your 2012 taxes at Fidelity this morning. A lot of it was already familiar to me, such as this bit about investing in municipals:

If generating income is one of your investment goals, you may want to consider using a taxable account to invest in tax-free municipal bond and money market funds—especially if you’re in a high tax bracket. These funds typically invest in bonds issued by municipalities and their earnings are generally not subject to federal tax. You may also be able to avoid or reduce state income tax on your earnings if you invest in a municipal bond or money market fund that holds bonds issued by entities within your state. Interest income generated by most state and local municipal bonds is generally exempt from federal income and/or alternative minimum taxes.

But I would venture to say not a lot of investors may be familiar with tax-loss harvesting:

Use ongoing tax-loss harvesting. Tax-loss harvesting is the practice of selling investments that have lost value to offset current- and future-year capital gains. Unlike one-time or occasional loss sales, however, a systematic tax-loss harvesting strategy requires diligent investment tracking and detailed tax accounting. That means continuous analysis of every tax lot (shares purchased at a given price and time) to determine when the tax-loss benefit warrants selling appreciated positions. Trading a specific tax lot with a specific cost basis is different than selling all of your shares in a particular fund or stock, which may have been purchased at different times over many years and could have significantly different tax implications as a whole than they would individually.

I also found the below table very useful. Especially notable, if nothing changes before end of the year, is that all dividends will be taxed at your income level in 2013:

Your tax rate schedule in 2012 and 2013.

Read the full post on Fidelity here.

On Algorithmic Gatekeepers

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Writing for the opinion section of The New York Times, Evgeny Morozov characterizes “one dimensional” algorithms which censor the Web:

The proliferation of the Autocomplete function on popular Web sites is a case in point. Nominally, all it does is complete your search query — on YouTube, on Google, on Amazon — before you’ve finished typing, using an algorithm to predict what you’re most likely typing. A nifty feature — but it, too, reinforces primness.

How so? Consider George Carlin’s classic comedy routine “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.” See how many of those words would autocomplete on your favorite Web site. In my case, YouTube would autocomplete none. Amazon almost none (it also hates “penis” and “vagina”). Of Carlin’s seven words, Google would autocomplete only “piss.”

Until recently, even the word “bisexual” wouldn’t autocomplete at Google; it’s only this past August that Google, after many complaints, began to autocomplete some, but not all, queries for that term. In 2010, the hacker magazine 2600 published a long blacklist of similar words. While I didn’t verify all 400 of them on Google, a few that I did try — like “swastika” and “Lolita” — failed to autocomplete. Is Nabokov not trending in Mountain View? Alas, these algorithms are not particularly bright: unable to distinguish between Nabokov’s novel and child pornography, they assume you want the latter.

Why won’t tech companies let us freely use terms that already enjoy wide circulation and legitimacy? Do they fashion themselves as our new guardians? Are they too greedy to correct their algorithms’ mistakes?

Thanks to Silicon Valley, our public life is undergoing a transformation. Accompanying this digital metamorphosis is the emergence of new, algorithmic gatekeepers, who, unlike the gatekeepers of the previous era — journalists, publishers, editors — don’t flaunt their cultural authority. They may even be unaware of it themselves, eager to deploy algorithms for fun and profit.

“I, for one, welcome our new algorithmic overlords.” –Said almost no one.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Incredible Hulk

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The Economist reviews Nassim Taleb’s latest book, Antifragile, and has this awesome tidbit about Taleb at the end:

He is a weightlifter and calls himself “an intellectual who has the appearance of a bodyguard”. He avoids fruit that does not have an ancient Greek or Hebrew name and drinks no liquid that has not been in existence for at least 1,000 years. He has little time for copy editors, even less for economists, bankers and those who cluster at Davos. He once spent two years in bed reading every book about probability he could lay his hands on.

And according to New York Magazine, Taleb revealed the following to New Scientist, that he is not “some pantywaist writer dweeb.” He is the Invisible Hulk who uses the pen as his sword:

I lift stones and do weightlifting. I don’t go to the doctor except when I’m very ill, and when I go to India, I drink a drop of local water. Things like this harness the body’s antifragility. I have never had personal debt and never will. I also picked a profession in which I am antifragile, because any attack makes me stronger.

Love it.

The Quiet Ones

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We’re a tribe, we quiet ones, we readers and thinkers and letter writers, we daydreamers and gazers out of windows. We are a civil people, courteous to excess, who disdain displays of anger as childish and embarrassing.

This is a quote from a very thoughtful essay titled “The Quiet Ones” by Tim Kreider, published in The New York Times. Kreider laments that the beauty of quiet is disappearing, and there’s not much we can do about it:

Those of us who despise this tendency don’t have a voice, or a side, let alone anything like a lobby. There are anti-noise-pollution groups, but they can fight only limited skirmishes over local nuisances; the war is lost. It’s impossible to be heard when your whole position is quiet now that all public discourse has become a shouting match. Being an advocate of quiet in our society is as quixotic and ridiculous as being an advocate of beauty or human life or any other unmonetizable commodity.

I’d never heard of Kreider before reading this essay; his collection of essays We Learn Nothing has promising reviews on Amazon.

The Rise and Fall of Medbox

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Earlier this week, WSJ/MarketWatch published a piece “How to Invest in Legalized Marijuana.” One of the suggested stocks mentioned was Medbox ($MDBX), a company that creates medical-marijuana dispensing machines:

For regular investors looking to get in on the action — and without having to actually grow or sell drugs — there are several small-cap stocks that stand to gain from marijuana’s growing acceptance. Medbox , an OTC stock with a $45 million market cap, for example, sells its patented dispensing machines to licensed medical-marijuana dispensaries. The machines, which dispense set doses of the drug, after verifying patients’ identities via fingerprint, could potentially be used in ordinary drugstores too, says Medbox founder Vincent Mehdizadeh. Based in Hollywood, Calif., the company already has 130 machines in the field, and it expects to install an additional 40 in the next quarter…

That article propelled the stock to a meteoric rise from roughly $4/share to a whopping $215/share in a matter of two days (thereby increasing Medbox’s market capitalization from $45 million at the start of the week to a staggering $2.3 billion by Friday). So much interest was expressed in the stock that company executives had to go on record to “dampen investor enthusiasm.” It seems to have worked: the stock traded in a wide range today, ultimately finishing at $20/share.

Pretty wild stuff.

The Silk Road and Carpet Making in Uzbekistan

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The Wall Street Journal has a short piece on the dying art of carpet making in Uzbekistan. Profiled are the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara.

This was the most fascinating bit from the story, I think:

Out of the 300 or so carpets the Samarkand workshop produces by hand each year, around 40% are private commissions. These range from ancient Persian designs to hand-drawn images sentimental to the person commissioning the carpet. One Japanese client, intent on creating one of the finest carpets in the world, has commissioned a 90-centimeter-by-55-centimeter piece at a cost of $85,000, which will take seven years to complete. It is so fine it can only be worked on an hour a day, so as not to ruin the eyesight of the weaver.

Click through to see pictures accompanying the piece.

Saving Real Oviedo

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Real Oviedo, a soccer club in Spain, has been undone by years of financial negligence and political strife. The current owner, charged with tax evasion, is missing. The club’s tax bill of 1.9 million euros is due at the end of the year. So a campaign was born to save the club by issuing shares:

Fueled by Twitter messages by a British sportswriter in Spain, fans from Britain, South America, China and elsewhere have snapped up thousands of shares. Real Oviedo alumni playing in the English Premier League bought some and urged fans to do the same. Real Madrid said it would buy 100,000 euros’ worth of shares. One fan near Portland, Ore., promised to get a Real Oviedo tattoo if others bought 100 shares. She got the tattoo.

By Wednesday, the team had raised about 1.57 million euros, mostly from people who had never been to Spain, let alone seen Real Oviedo play live. Nearly 40 percent of the more than 20,000 new shareholders are from 60 countries outside Spain. After the spasm of support, well-heeled investors from Britain, Mexico and Spain are studying the club’s books to decide whether to buy stakes.

It’s a pretty cool story. If you want to participate, here’s the link.