Using data from the person-to-person lending company Propser.com, research is starting to show that—when it comes to analysing creditworthyness—the once discredited science of physiognomy may be valid.
In other words, people may be able to tell if we are actually trustworthy just from looking at our facial features.
Science proceeds by trial and error. The successes are trumpeted. The errors are often regarded with embarrassment by subsequent generations, and locked away in attic rooms of the subject’s mansion like mad relatives in a Victorian novel. Usually, they stay there. Craniology, phrenology and eugenics, once-respectable fields of endeavour that are now regarded with a shudder, may shriek from time to time, but few sane people pay attention to them. One, however, has escaped recently, and is trying to rehabilitate itself. For years physiognomy—the idea that a person’s face is a reflection of his character—was sneered at. Now, it is making a come back.
The New York Times Developer Network is the media outlet’s “API clearinghouse” offering details of how you can get access to the extensive data they have released (from stories dating back to 1981).
Using this API, Jer Thorp has created some visualisations of NYT trends using Processing (a language I keep promising to take a serious look at). Two of my favourites: the frequency of the words ‘communism’ and ‘terrorism’ in NYT articles since 1981, and an abstract visualisation of the occurrence of the term ‘organic’.
Hot on the heels of The New York Times, The Guardian announced yesterday the release of their Open Platform which allows access to data from full-text articles back to 1999. The Open Platform consists of the Content API and the Data Store. Jer Thorp has already compiled a brief introduction to The Guardian’s API and has created a few early visualisations.
Also: Carl Morris on what this is all about and why it’s exciting and important.
Ben Casnocha compiles a list of grievances and observations on “restaurants, tips, and bread baskets”. For example:
If I were a restaurant manager I would spend 30 minutes with each of my waiters explaining the research around how to maximize tips from patrons. For example, leaving a mint with the bill or drawing a smiley face on the bill have been shown to increase tip. Research also suggests that the tip amount is only marginally connected with the actual quality of wait service. Bottom line is that many waiters miss out on easy psychological hacks that would increase their tips.
And this; one of the four rules-of-thumb from Tyler Cowen’s recently updated Ethnic Dining Guide (via Kottke):
Avoid dishes that are “ingredients-intensive.” Raw ingredients in America [and likely the UK, too] – vegetables, butter, bread, meats, etc. – are below world standards. Even most underdeveloped countries have better raw ingredients than we do, at least if you have a U.S. income to spend there, and often even if one doesn’t. Ordering the plain steak in Latin America may be a great idea, but it is usually a mistake in Northern Virginia. Opt for dishes with sauces and complex mixes of ingredients. Go for dishes that are “composition-intensive.”
Tim Harford—the FT’s ‘Undercover Economist’—has produced a video demonstrating Thomas Schelling’s theory of racial segregation, in 2 minutes.
Schelling, who was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economics for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis”, showed with his Models of Segregation that even a mild preference for the colour of your neighbour can lead to extreme segregation.
Harfords view on this:
Although we as individuals may be rational and we may be tolerant, the society that we produce together may be neither rational nor tolerant.
Not everyone agrees with the development philosophies of 37signals, but you can’t deny that they do have some ideas that are spot-on. This, for example, on printers and why they are so damn annoying:
Buying a printer remains the last confusing part of modern computing. […]
What makes this an even tougher choice is that the products look so different and yet so similar. They’re all either black, white, or grey. They’re all roughly the same size, They’re all roughly the same shape. But they still look so different. […]
Sounds like an industry awaiting a revolution.
I couldn’t agree more.
Upload your magazine as a PDF to MagCloud and they’ll not only print it on demand, but also manage payments, subscriptions and delivery… now to the UK and Canada as well as the US. Reasonably priced, too.
It reminds me somewhat of the newspaper, Things Our Friends Have Written On The Internet 2008 (via Kottke).
via @zambonini
Eliezer Yudkowsky on planning for the abyssal.
Never mind hindsight on the real-estate bubble – there are lots of things that could potentially trigger financial catastrophes. I’m willing to bet the American government knows what it will do in terms of immediate rescue operations if an atomic bomb goes off in San Francisco. But if the US government had any advance idea of under which circumstances it would nationalize Fannie Mae or guarantee Bear Stearns’s counterparties, this plan was not very much in evidence as various government officials gave every appearance of trying to figure everything out on the fly. […]
It’s questionable whether the government should be in the position of trying to forecast the abyss – to put a probability on financial meltdown in any given year due to any given cause. But advance abyssal planning isn’t about the probability, as it would be in investing. It’s about the possibility. If you can realistically imagine global financial meltdowns of various types being possible, there’s no excuse for not war-gaming them. If your brain doesn’t literally cease to exist upon facing systemic meltdowns at the time, you ought to be able to imagine plausible systemic meltdowns in advance.
This got me thinking about planning for our own abyss (be it employment or health). Why don’t we have plans for the worst case scenario? After all, as the Financial Times’ Tim Harford states, “[A] recently published research paper [shows] that most unemployed people are too cocky about their prospects of finding a new job. On average, they expect seven weeks of unemployment, but eventually endure 23 weeks. And this is using data from the mid-1990s, not recession years”.
A case of the planning fallacy?
Looking at the business models of the top 100 web apps of 2008, Dan Zambonini of Box UK found that 34% use Advertising, 12% a Variable Subscription model, and a further 8% each for Virtual Products, Related Products and Pay-Per-Use.
Continuing this analysis he compiles an extensive list of different methods to monetize web apps.
via @zambonini
Flickr user 802.11 has created a lovely flowchart depicting the evolution of art and design between 1845 and 1980. The chart depicts art movements and design groups and how each are connected.
You should take a look at some of her other visualisations, too. I particularly like the depiction of character interactions throughout Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, act 1 scene 1.
