Letters Remain

  • A More Positive View of McDonald’s

    The Washington Post talks to Jim Skinner, the McDonald’s CEO, and presents a positive viewpoint of McDonald’s.

    McDonald’s exemplifies the role of small businesses in Americans’ upward mobility. The company is largely a confederation of small businesses: 85 percent of its U.S. restaurants — average annual sales, $2.2 million — are owned by franchisees. McDonald’s has made more millionaires, and especially black and Hispanic millionaires, than any other economic entity ever, anywhere.

    On the nutrition of their meals:

    Americans eat 90 meals a month. In a nation with 900,000 restaurants, the average American eats three of those meals at McDonald’s. Surely the other 87 meals are more of a problem. Even McDonald’s core customers, who eat there 50 times a year, consume more than 1,000 meals elsewhere.

    A persuasive argument, but surely a red herring fallacy?

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Vitamins: A Pointless Expense?

    Medical research is beginning to suggest that vitamins have questionable health benefits.

    One study found that vitamin C is ineffective for cold–prevention unless you’re exposed to extreme physical stress (read: ultramarathon runners and “soldiers during sub-Arctic winter exercises”).

    The New York Times looks at this trend, noting that in some cases, vitamins may do more harm than good. However, there are always exceptions (B12 supplements for the elderly and folic acid for women of child-bearing age have proven health benefits) and caveats:

    Despite a lack of evidence that vitamins actually work, consumers appear largely unwilling to give them up. Many readers of the Well blog say the problem is not the vitamin but poorly designed studies that use the wrong type of vitamin, setting the vitamin up to fail. Industry groups such as the Council for Responsible Nutrition also say the research isn’t well designed to detect benefits in healthy vitamin users.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Our Convenient Overconfidence

    Overcoming Bias looks at two research papers on overconfidence, concluding that we “are more overconfident on tasks we don’t actually expect to perform, and when we don’t expect to have to explain our evaluation to others”.

    On performance:

    Participants made predictions about performance on tasks that they did or did not expect to complete.  In three experiments, participants in task-unexpected conditions were unrealistically optimistic: They overestimated how well they would perform, often by a large margin, and their predictions were not correlated with their performance. By contrast, participants assigned to task-expected conditions made predictions that were not only less optimistic but strikingly accurate.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The 90-9-1 Principle: Participation Inequality in Social Communities

    Jakob Nielson, the leading usability consultant, discusses the participation inequality of social communities, in which:

    • 90% of users are the “audience”, or lurkers.
    • 9% of users are “editors”; or those who participate.
    • 1% of users are “creators”.

    More information at 90-9-1: a website dedicated to this ‘principle’ where you can view, among other things, these fascinating statistics:

    • Over 50% of all the Wikipedia edits are done by just 0.7% of the users.
    • Just 0.16% of all visitors to YouTube upload videos to it, and 0.2% of visitors to Flickr upload photos.

    Richard Millington, Seth Godin’s 2008 summer intern, offers us up some different ways we can treat this theory.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Why Local Content Matters

    Google.org on helping technologically developing countries in Africa gain a global voice: allowing them to be producers, not just consumers, of knowledge.

    Today, Swahili books online for example, number in the hundreds compared to the hundreds of millions of books in English available online. What message does this send to young people about the relative importance of their knowledge, language, and culture?

    An important (rhetorical) question.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Raising Money for a StartUp Company

    Jason Nazar, founder of DocStoc, digs up an old document on Raising Money for a StartUp Company

    Good information within on the ‘funding lifecycle’, bootstrapping, angel investors vs. venture capital, and valuation methods, amongst others.

    Entrepreneurs face a great deal of challenges in building a successful venture.  They have to identify a good opportunity, in a thriving industry, organize a competent management team, out pace the competition, and build a product and/or provide a service that is worthwhile to others.  However, in spite of all these obstacles, raising money to seed or grow a company is often the largest challenge of all.  The following paper will discuss the business and legal process of raising capital.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Five Physics Lessons for Obama

    Foreign Policy presents five physics lessons for Obama, written by Richard Muller, lecturer and author of Physics for Future Presidents (the book, the website, the lecture series and podcast at UC Berkeley).

    There are lessons on terrorism, energy (oil), nuclear energy, space and global warming.

    via Kottke

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Scale of Stressful Life Events and The Misdiagnosis of Sadness

    Mind Hacks points us to a recent article in Psychiatric News arguing that the current definition of ‘major depression’ has led to misdiagnoses of ‘normal sadness’.

    They argue that the diagnosis contains no qualifications about whether the reaction is appropriate in the context of the person’s life, meaning that people who have suffered unemployment, relationship break up or other forms of personal tragedy are considered equally as ‘mentally ill’ as people who have similar mood disturbances but without a specific trigger.

    This reminded me of the Holmes and Rahe list of stressful life events. With a score of 162, my risk of illness is ‘moderate’.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The “Broken Windows” Theory of Crime

    The “broken windows” theory of crime, dating back to an article in The Atlantic from 1982 and more recently popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point and Rudy Giuliani (mayor, NYC), suggests that signs of petty crime, like littering and broken windows, trigger further criminal behaviour.

    Now, recent research is starting to suggest that the theory is correct.

    Keiser thinks that it’s unlikely that people inferred a reduced police presence by the presence of litter or graffiti – certainly, litter is generally tolerated by the police [in the area where the research was undertaken]. Instead, he thinks that one transgression was actually fostering another. This isn’t a simple case of imitation – littering doesn’t just beget littering. Keiser’s idea is that seeing the breakdown of one social norm makes it easier to ignore others, by weakening our general resolve to act appropriately and strengthening our temptations to act in our own self-interest.

    Via Link Banana, there’s also an interesting write-up on the same research in The Economist.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Experimenting with Ganzfeld Hallucinations

    After reading a recent issue of Cortex, Mind Hacks goes into some detail discussing the Ganzfeld procedure:

    The Ganzfeld procedure exposes the participant to ‘unstructured’ sensations usually by placing half ping-pong balls over the eyes so they can only see diffuse white light and by playing white noise through headphones.

    It is probably best known for its uses in parapsychology experiments, but it is also used to induce hallucinations and sensory distortions which are much more likely to occur in the absence of clearly defined sensory experiences.

    The post goes on to vividly describes some hallucinations before letting us know how we can try this at home.

    Lloyd Morgan