Letters Remain

  • Separating Conversations: The Cocktail Party Effect

    The ‘cocktail party effect’ is the name given to our unusually adept ability of separating out conversations from one another. However it appears that we are unusually bad at retaining information from the discarded conversation(s):

    Cherry [1953] found his participants picked up surprisingly little information [from the ‘rejected’ conversations], often failing to notice blatant changes to the unattended message. When asked afterwards, participants:

    • could not identify a single phrase from the speech presented to the rejected ear.
    • weren’t sure the language in the rejected ear was even English.
    • failed to notice when it changed to German.
    • mostly didn’t notice when the speech to the rejected ear was being played backwards (though some did report that it sounded a bit strange).

    via Mind Hacks

    Tags:
     / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Dunbar Number and the Limits of Social Networking

    The Economist looks at whether Dunbar’s number, the supposed limit of stable social relationships, holds true on social networking sites.

    That […] online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. […]

    Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks “grooming“. In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation. You need to remember who is allied with, hostile to, or lusts after whom, and act accordingly. Several years ago, therefore, Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist who now works at Oxford University, concluded that the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network that an individual of any given species can develop.

    Two items of note: Facebook has an “in-house sociologist”; and this man, Dr Cameron Marlow, reveals that the average number of friends correlates pretty closely to Dunbar’s number.

    via Mind Hacks

    Tags:
     /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Leaving Infants in Cars

    A child is accidentally left in the back seat of a car and dies from hyperthermia: a parent’s worst nightmare, I imagine, and something many believe wouldn’t happen to them (itself a big part of the problem).

    In an article debating the legal ramifications of such an accident, The Washington Post presents not only a heart-rending story, but offers some fascinating insights into risks and compromise; possible technical solutions; and neurological/psychological theories of why a child may unintentionally be left in a car.

    via Schneier (which itself is a good overview if you don’t have time to read the full article.)

    Tags:
     / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • 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 around his neck. It took six months of rigmarole to obtain that license, in which time he applied, auditioned for a panel of four or five London Underground staff members and agreed to a mandatory police background check. The process didn’t cost anything, but took talent, patience and a little luck (audition judges are not required to have backgrounds in music). Still, of the 400 buskers that audition each year, 80% pass. Now that he’s in the system, Muttel is not required to re-audition; he just re-applies for his permit every year. He has been busking for almost three years. […]

    Of the 28 or so total pitches at 21 Tube stops throughout central London, some argue there are really only half a dozen ideal spots: two at Green Park, two at Tottenham Court Road, one at Piccadilly Circus and one at Leicester Square. If a busker shows up late for a spot, the previous busker is entitled to stay for the next two-hour time slot. Unsurprisingly, this can get messy.

    Tags:
     / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • 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 financial incentives.

    Economists Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh have discovered that after the Australian government announced that it would abolish inheritance tax, effective 1 July 1979, the death rate fell in late June of that year before surging in early July. Gans and Leigh reckon that half the likely taxpayers managed to escape death long enough to escape the tax too.

    More cheeringly, when the Australian government announced (with six weeks notice) a “baby bonus” of about £1,250 for families of children born on or after 1 July 2004, something very strange happened in the labour wards. The number of happy events on 1 July was an all-time record, and twice as many births as on 30 June.

    Whether entering this world or leaving it, people respond to financial incentives.

    For a primer on incentives, you can do worse than reading Russell Roberts’ Incentives Matter article—one of the Ten Key Ideas from the Library of Economics and Liberty.

    via The Undercover Economist

    Tags:
     / / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • 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:

    1. Marriage requires compatibility not just at the point of saying ‘I do,’ but across the entire life span.
    2. Assuming that marriage implies monogamy, the institution itself is counterintuitive to biology.
    3. There is far too much emphasis on ‘weddings’ as opposed to ‘marriages.’
    4. Many couples do not know how to fight fairly.
    5. Marriages [don’t] solve problems.
    6. People settle for less than what they want.
    7. Couples assume they are immune to reasons 1-6 and believe that hard work isn’t part of the deal. They think that love, sex, children or some combination thereof will be enough.

    On the topic of marriage I found this recapitulation of John Molloy’s Why Men Marry Some Women And Not Others interesting (and a little ridiculous).

    Tags:
     / /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • 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 predict whether a call would result in a sale from only a few seconds of data. Successful operators, it turned out, spoke little and listened more. And when they did speak, their voices fluctuated strongly in amplitude and pitch, suggesting interest and responsiveness. […] In an experiment involving a 45-minute mock salary negotiation between students in a business school, [Alex] Pentland says that by combining several display signals from the first 5 minutes of the negotiation, his team could predict who would come out on top with 87% accuracy. […]

    As a result of such experiments, the MIT group has identified a handful of common social signals that predict the outcomes of sales pitches, the success of bluffing in poker, even subjective judgements of trust. These signals include the ‘activity level’, effectively the fraction of time the person speaks; their ‘engagement’ or how much a person drives the conversation; and ‘mirroring’, which occurs when one participant subconsciously copies another’s prosody and gesture.

    The original Nature article is behind a paywall, hence the link to Overcoming Bias with their larger excerpt.

    Tags:

    Lloyd Morgan

  • 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 believed they shared a birthday (Study 1), a first name (Study 2), or fingerprint similarities (Study 3) with a requester were more likely to comply with a request than participants who did not perceive an incidental similarity with the requester. The findings are consistent with past research demonstrating that people often rely on heuristic processing when responding to requests and with Heider‘s description of unit relationships in which perceived similarities lead to positive affect. Consistent with the unit relation interpretation, participants did not increase compliance when hearing about an incidental similarity with someone other than the requester or when they believed the feature they shared with the requester was common.

    Wondering why there were two birthday-related posts today? Today I am 25!

    Tags:

    Lloyd Morgan

  • 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 of at least 23 randomly chosen people, there is more than 50% probability that some pair of them will both have been born on the same day. For 57 or more people, the probability is more than 99%, and it reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367[…]. The mathematics behind this problem leads to a well-known cryptographic attack called the birthday attack.

    Tags:
     /

    Lloyd Morgan

  • 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 offer to work for them for free. If they accept, take whatever task they give you and knock it out of the park. Go the extra mile. Make it your most important task for the day, or week, or month. Do the work quickly and efficiently. Then, when you’re done, email the person and say that it was a pleasure working for them, and you’d love to help them out in the future if they have any other cool projects lined up.

    Pretty good advice for both students and those seeking a gradual career change.

    Tags:
     / /

    Lloyd Morgan