Category: Uncategorized
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Workforce Cuts vs. Wage Cuts
As part of the excellent Lectures on Macroeconomics series, Arnold Kling discusses why companies tend to cuts jobs rather than wages in times of hardship. The core arguments: Cutting wages is not standard practice, therefore: The best workers will leave and seek better opportunities: it’s better to choose which workers to lose. Wage cuts demoralise, harming…
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Misunderstanding and Rethinking Expertise
The public’s distrust of scientific experts has been growing in recent years, as is worryingly evident with subjects such as Creationism and particle physics (think: the LHC)—but why is this happening? Harry Collins and Robert Evans, sociologists at my alma mater, Cardiff University, believe it has to do with a “misunderstanding of expertise itself”. They talk…
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Corruption in the (Legal) Drug Trade
Marcia Angell reviews three books for The New York Review of Books and in the process creates an article that acts like an in-depth primer on the whole sordid business of “fraud, undisclosed payments, data burying and off-label promotion that pervades the pharmaceutical industry”. Like David Balan on Overcoming Bias, I felt this was the most damning admission…
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Short Introduction to Molecular Gastronomy
A (very) short introduction to molecular gastronomy, by Jonah Lehrer for The Boston Globe. In the graphic four tips are shared which we can all add to our culinary repertoires right away (if you haven’t already): Don’t fret about salting meat For juicy meats, don’t sear: you’re evaporating the juices. Pasta sticking together? Don’t add oil, add…
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How to Do What You Love
Paul Graham, he of Y Combinator fame, offers up some learned and insightful advice on how to do what you love. What you should not do […] is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. When you can…
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Advice on Being a Consultant
Consultant Steve Friedl offers some fantastic advice on being a consultant. I found this comment interesting: I purposely put the technical part of this Tech Tip last, to reinforce the notion that “customer service”, not “computer science” skills are the biggest factors in a successful consulting practice. But it’s foolish to think that technical skills…
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What Will Change Everything?
The Edge annual question, 2009: What will change everything? Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet,…
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Interview with Obama’s Campaign Manager
An interview with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign manager, David Plouffe: There are business analogies. One is, we’re a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a matter of weeks. Our company, if we were successful, would only last two years at the most. You have an end line. You don’t have quarter…
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For-Profit Charities
Charities should embrace for-profit business models in order to drive fundraising, or so says Dan Pallotta, author of Uncharitable and founder of the now-defunct Pallotta TeamWorks company; a for-profit organisation that produced many successful fundraising events for nonprofits. In his column The Sin of Doing Good Deeds, The New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof…
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The Science of Shopping
The Economist has a fascinating and eye-opening article looking at the ‘science of shopping’. Mind Hacks reviews the article: The piece discusses the psychology of big store marketing, touching on three areas: store layout and environment design, ‘neuromarketing’ and customer tracking. It’s interesting that much of the fuss in the media has focused on ‘neuromarketing’…