Month: March 2009
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Busking in the London Underground
Walking through the London Underground I usually don’t give much thought to the designated busking areas. However, the scheme, started by Transport for London in 2003, is surprisingly involved, as I discovered after reading this profile of Mike Muttel, an Underground busker. Muttel’s official busking license, good for one year, hangs visibly from a lanyard…
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Unlikely Events Influenced by Financial Incentives
With the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, proposing that alcohol should cost a minimum of 50p per unit, many opposers are arguing that the increase would “punish ordinary drinkers without deterring the winos, brawlers and wife-beaters”. However, as Tim Harford notes, it may well work as the unlikeliest of events are influenced by…
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Why Marriages Fail
Dr Rob Dobrenski of Shrink Talk has an absolutely fantastic post on reasons why marriages fail. These are the seven he felt worthy of note: Marriage requires compatibility not just at the point of saying ‘I do,’ but across the entire life span. Assuming that marriage implies monogamy, the institution itself is counterintuitive to biology.…
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Subconscious Social Interactions
Some recent research has shown that our conscious minds controls less of our interactions than previously thought: The researchers could predict how around 70% of the students would rate an instructor just by analysing the instructor’s body language in 30 seconds of soundless video. […] The researchers were able to devise an algorithm that could…
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Incidental Similarities and Compliance
We are more likely to comply with requests from strangers if we believe we share seemingly uncommon, incidental characteristics (e.g. first name, birthday, etc.), according to a 2004 research study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (pdf): Four studies examined the effect of an incidental similarity on compliance to a request. Undergraduates who…
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The Birthday Problem
I’ve heard of this ‘problem’ numerous times before, as I’m sure many others have too. Nonetheless, everytime I do hear it, it fascinates me. The birthday problem (or paradox, as it’s often referred), looks at the probability of two or more people from a randomly chosen set of people sharing a birthday. In a group…
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Unsolicited Internships
Expanding on an idea originally posted on the Freakonomics blog, Andrew Lynch suggests soliciting people you admire or respect for an unpaid internship: Find someone you really admire or respect. Email them. Describe your skills, how you can help them, what you have to offer. Link them to your blog full of quality posts. Then…
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Ted Kennedy’s Eulogy for Bobby Kennedy
Earlier this week I listened to and read Ted Kennedy’s eulogy for his brother, Robert Kennedy. I had never heard this speech before and it is a fantastic oration worth listening to in full. However… I would advise listening to the speech on the embedded video while reading along so that you can hear the…
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Map of Science
By crunching data from more than a billion user interactions on scholarly databases, Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers produced a high-resolution map of the relationships between different fields of science. That’s from Wired where they display the ‘Map of Science‘ that was produced, in part, to “help researchers frame discipline-hopping questions and identify neglected cooperative opportunities”.…