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From Ariel Rubinstein of course, here’s his answer to question 5:
Q5. I have already written 30 pages. I have repeated myself several times and my proofs are much longer than necessary. I have added uncertainty wherever I could and I have moved from a discrete case to Banach spaces. My adviser still says I hardly even have enough for a note. How long should my paper be?
If you don’t have a good idea, then keep going. Don’t stop at less than 60 single-spaced pages. Nobody will read your paper in any case so at least you have a chance to publish the paper in QJE or Econometrica.
If you have a really good idea, my advice is to limit yourself to 15 double-spaced pages. I have not seen any paper in Economics which deserved more than that and yours is no exception. It is true that papers in Economics are long, but then almost all of then are deathly boring. Who can read a 50-page Econometica paper and remain sane? So make your contribution to the world by writing short papers — focus on new ideas, shorten proofs to the bare minimum (yes, that is possible!), avoid stupid extensions and write elegantly!
The rest is here, via Jakub Steiner on Facebook.
It’s for those days when you are supposed to be flying to Milan to give a talk, and you are connecting and when you are checking in to your connecting flight and you pull out your passport thinking wistfully about how much you love your wife for thoughtfully packing your passport for you and just generally breathing in the beautiful life you have to be able to take a little time away to fly to Milan, meet people, give a talk, do a little work on your laptop which is tucked away in your suitcase because you are getting on a redeye and you plan to sleep on the plane, you’ll get that work done while you are in your hotel in Milan, or maybe you won’t because you might just stroll the city and enjoy a little solitude, putting out of your mind the hundreds of job market letters of recommendation that you have to submit online to hundreds of distinct websites each with their own password amounting to about 3 hours of work just logging in, figuring out what to click, copying and pasting passwords, etc and also taking the opportunity to just let your mind wander and think abiut whatever, sorry hordes of coauthors whom I have left in the lurch I know I am already a maddeningly irresponsible partner but please permit me a couple more days after all I am in Europe and for all you know I don’t have Internet access or I am scheduled to be meeting with people all day long and wouldn’t have time to correct thirty pages of typos or rewrite the introduction for the third time because after being rejected at journals 1 and 2 we better write it in the way that journal 3’s referees are going to like; and anyway I need a little escape to get over the sting of those rejections and this time to myself in a faraway European city is just what the doctor ordered and that brings an extra smile to my face as I open up my passport to show to the friendly TSA agent and that smile and it’s associated feeling of intoxication explains why it’s the TSA agent who is the first to notice that the picture on the passport is of my lovely wife and not me.
And my passport is back home in chicago, and I am not getting on this plane and I am not going to Milan today and the only time I am going to be having by myself is stuck in this airport trying to figure out how I am going to get that passport to me from Chicago and all the while fighting back the relentless thoughts of what a ridiculous life I am living, flying to Europe for two days just to give a pointless talk wasting all this time while my students still don’t have their application letters uploaded and all those papers need to be revised and I am sure my coauthors think I am a useless primadonna, and after these recent rejections I know I will never have a top 5 publication again and I won’t even be getting any work done because my laptop is soon going to fly without me to Milan,
It’s for those days, you know those days, it’s for those days that you are so thankful that your connection was through Newark airport and Manhattan Penn Station is a 30 minute train ride away, and you have that favorite little hotel on midtown which has a room for $129 and so what you don’t have any clothes and you will have to buy a toothbrush for what like $30 at a pharmacy in the middle of manhattan but to make up for all of that when you wake up in the morning you will get your stroll and ok it’s smelly New York but look Milan was going to be smelly too you were just fantasizing that stroll anyway and 1 block into that stroll you stumble onto Cafe M, a tiny cafe’/bakery on 32nd and 5th avenue where the coffee is lovingly made one at a time the croissants are the best you have ever had, certainly in the US and arguably rivaling even Paris, beautiful oneofakind people come in and out as you sit each with their own unique beautiful lives and you can sit and enjoy that coffee and croissant and listen in on their lives as they pass through 5 minutes at a time and what better life can one person have than to sample the uncanny diversity of life and where else can you get such a sample as in New York City.
(blogged from my phone)
Tyler Cowen passes along one:
A new technique of cybercrime is the taking hostage of data. “I think it’s going to become a more common tactic for attackers,” says Karen Schuler, Senior Managing Director of Kroll.
If the hostage taker has any credible threat then it remains credible whether or not I pay him because there is no way to prevent him from making arbitrary copies of the data. I can’t “buy them back” in any verifiable way.
The brochure (note that Kroll is a cybersecurity firm) talks about the threat of intellectual property data being stolen and the hostage taker threatening to sell it to my competitors. If you receive a call with such a threat the first thing you should do is sell your intellectual property to your competitors. There’s no way you are going to stop the thief from doing the same and you might as well get in on the profits.
On a similar note, these chartered jet passengers didn’t seem to understand the same point. (Ayam ack: Josh Gans)
This is from an article in the New York Times.
When the taxi baron Robert Scull sold part of his art collection in a 1973 auction that helped inaugurate today’s money-soused contemporary-art market, several artists watched the proceedings from a standing-room-only section in the back. There, Robert Rauschenberg saw his 1958 painting “Thaw,” originally sold to Scull for $900, bring down the gavel at $85,000. At the end of the Sotheby Parke Bernet sale in New York, Rauschenberg shoved Scull and yelled that he didn’t work so hard “just for you to make that profit.”
The uproar that followed in part inspired the California Resale Royalties Act, requiring anyone reselling a piece of fine art who lives in the state, or who sells the art there for $1,000 or more, to pay the artist 5 percent of the resale price.
A laudable use of brain scanner methodology.
Regular joke: Why did Cleopatra bathe in milk? Because she couldn’t find a cow tall enough for a shower.
Funny pun: Why were the teacher’s eyes crossed? Because she couldn’t control her pupils.
Unfunny pun: What was the problem with the other coat? It was difficult to put on with the paint-roller.
The regular joke and the funny pun are both amusing, but for different reasons: in the decidedly unfunny parlance of humor theorists, the pun has “semantic ambiguity” and the joke does not. Part of the fun in the funny pun, in other words, is thinking through the two meanings of pupil.
But now compare the funny pun and the unfunny pun. Both have semantic ambiguity. So why is the funny one funny? The researchers say it’s because both meanings of the ambiguous word (pupil) are true at the same time, whereas in the unfunny pun, only one of the meanings of the ambiguous word (coat) is true.
Read the article to find out why.
If you have a meeting scheduled at 2 and you are worried its going to drag on too long, what do you do? Here’s a confession: Sometimes I lie and say I have an appointment and I have to leave at 3. But it’s a double-edged sword.
Because warning my friend that I will have to leave at 3 implies that I anticipate that the hour will be a binding constraint. That would only be true if I expect the meeting to go that long. My friend will therefore infer that the topic of our meeting is important enough to me to potentially warrant an hour of face time.
As far as I know, had I never said anything he might have kept the meeting to 30 minutes, but now that I capped it at 3:00, its a sure thing we are going to meet for the full hour.
The problem is that there is no way I can know how long he was planning to meet. If i knew he was planning to leave at 2:30 I wouldn’t say anything. But if he is actually planning to stay until 4:30 and I don’t invent a 3:00 appointment I am hosed.
Of course some meetings really need to take more than 30 minutes and often you only discover that in the course of the meeting. The downside of the cap is that it commits you. Unless you want to lose all credibility you are going to have to keep to your fictional meeting and cut those meetings shorter than they should be.
So what is the optimal cap? The tradeoffs are reminiscent of textbook monopoly pricing. You have your marginal and infra-marginal meetings. If i raise the cap by a minute then the marginal meeting gets the extra minute that it really needs but the infra-marginal meeting gets needlessly extended.
Its a complicated calculation that comes down to hazard rates, incentive constraints, etc. but I will save you the effort; I have done the integration by parts. The optimal cap is exactly 37 minutes. You can’t say that of course because your friend will know that nobody schedules appointments at 2:37, so you will have to round up or down to the half hour.
Or schedule all your meetings to start at 23 minutes past the hour.
Here’s how Steve Jobs explains “Think Different” as quoted in Walter Isaacson’s biography (thanks to Mallesh Pai for the pointer.)
We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It’s grammatical, if you think about what we’re trying to say. It’s not think the same, it’s think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. “Think differently” wouldn’t hit the same meaning for me.
I may have been taken in by the GDF but after thinking about this for a day or so I am convinced that I understand what he means, even if he didn’t explain it very well. Constructions like “think X” are used all the time where X is a noun and what the writer really means is “think about X” or “consider X” and especially “join the X movement.” (Think “Think Green”, a familiar slogan that is saying “be enviornmentally conscious.” )
“Eat Local” has a different interpretation than “Eat Locally” which would not make sense in its stead. For that matter, “Think Locally, Act Globally” suffers from excessive adherence to grammatical rules.
What “Think Different” was supposed to convey is essentially “be a member of Team Different.” But I am sure that was lost on most people and has nothing to do with why it was a successful campaign.
I stopped following Justin Wolfers on Twitter. Not because I don’t want his tweets, they are great, but because everyone I follow also follows Justin. They all retweet his best tweets and I see those so I am not losing anything.
Which made me wonder how increasing density of the social network affects how informed people are. Suppose you are on a desert island but a special desert island which receives postal deliveries. You can get informed by subscribing to newspapers but you can’t talk to anybody. As long as the value v of being informed exceeds the cost c you will subscribe.
Compare that to an individual in a dense social network who can either pay for a subscription or wait around for his friends to get informed and find out from them. It won’t be an equilibrium for everybody to subscribe. You would do better by saving the cost and learning from your friends. Likewise it can’t be that nobody subscribes.
Instead in equilibrium everybody will subscribe with some probability between 0 and 1. And there is a simple way to compute that probability. In such an equilibrium you must be indifferent between subscribing and not subscribing. So the total probability that at least one of your friends subscribes must be the q that satisfies vq = v – c. The probability of any one individual subscribing must of course be lower than q since q is the total probability that at least one subscribes. So if you have n friends, then they each subscribe with the probability p(n) satisfiying 1 – [1 – p(n)]^n = q.
(Let’s pause while the network theorists all rush out of the room to their whiteboards to solve the combinatorial problem of making these balance out when you have an arbitrary network with different nodes having a different number of neighbors.)
This has some interesting implications. Suppose that the network is very dense so that everybody has many friends. Then everyone is less likely to subscribe. We only need a few people to be Justin Wolfers’ followers and retweet all of his best tweets. Formally, p(n) is decreasing in n.
That by itself is not such a bad thing. Even though each of your friends subscribes with a lower probability, on the positive side you have more friends from whom you can indirectly get informed. The net effect could be that you are more likely to be informed.
But in fact the net effect is that a denser network means that people are on average less informed, not more. Because if the network density is such that everyone has (on average) n friends, then everybody subscribes with probability p(n) and then the probability that you learn the information is q + (1-q)p(n). (With probability q one of your friends subscribes and you learn from them, and if you don’t learn from a friend then you become informed only if you have subscribed yourself which you do with probability p(n).) Since p(n) gets smaller with n, so does the total probability that you are informed.
Another way of saying this is that, contrary to intuition, if you compare two otherwise similar people, those who are well connected within the network have a tendency to be less informed than those who are in a relatively isolated part of the network.
All of this is based on a symmetric equilibrium. So one way to think about this is as a theory for why we see hierachies in information transmission, as represented by an asymmetric equilibrium in which some people subscribe for sure and others are certain not to. At the top of the hierarchy there is Justin Wolfers. Just below him we have a few people who follow him. They have a strict incentive to follow him because so few others follow him that the only way to be sure to get his tweets is to follow him directly. Below them is a mass of people who follow these “retailers.”
Stefan Lauermann points me to a new paper, this is from the abstract:
Our analysis shows that both stake size and communication have a significant impact on the player’s likelihood to cooperate. In particular, we observe a negative correlation between stake size and cooperation. Also certain gestures, as handshakes, decrease the likelihood to cooperate. But, if players mutually promise each other to cooperate and in addition shake hands on it, the cooperation rate increases.
We had a spectacular Fall in Chicago with lots of sun and warm temperatures. Usually October is fried green tomatoes month for us, but this year after the leaves had fallen off the birch tree in our backyard they got a good couple weeks of sun and many of them ripened on the vine. Here’s your picture of empty plates:
While on the subject here’s a trick for ripening your green tomatoes when the sun won’t do it for you. Bring them inside and put then in a paper bag along with some bananas. Ethylene gas stimulates the ripening process and bananas, the champions of ripening, put out a lot of it.
We enjoyed our tomatoes with this 2004 Bordeaux, Chateau Lascombes which I must say is drinking perfectly right now.
- The Bad Plus are going into the studio next week.
- The price of his masterclass is rising from Free to $20 per three-hour session.
- If you live in Seattle you can see The Bad Plus play with the Mark Morris Dance Group Dec 1-3
- David Lynch’s new album Crazy Clown Time.
- Dude surfs a 90 foot wave.
- Great photography blog. (via CCK)
- If you have been known to entertain your cat by shining laser pointers at the ground and making them chase the red dot all around, then you better hurry up and claim prior art.
- Cormac McCarthy’s Yelp reviews.
It’s 11/11/11, what else?
In some sense every day is a day to appreciate corduroy, but in another sense there is only one true Corduroy Appreciation Day, as declared by the venerable Corduroy Appreciation Club. That is 11|11, the date that most resembles corduroy. And this Friday being 11|11|11, it is the date that most resembles corduroy, ever. (Except for 11|11|1111, but I’m pretty sure the people of that time had yet to discover essential comforts like modern medicine, indoor plumbing, and finely waled fabrics.)
Honestly though, I like Rick Perry now more than ever. How he handled that moment is incredibly endearing and anti-political. And I understand a lot about the GOP by noticing that every time one of their candidates does something likable his popularity among the base is eroded.
When he made his red-meat candidacy announcement this summer, I was frightened, and the GOP insiders already had him in the White House. Then when he appealed to his party’s heart to defend financial aid for the undocumented in Texas, me and the GOP switched places. When he gave that speech in New Hampshire that went viral, I thought he came across as a guy you could hang with. Everybody else said he must be on drugs. Bill Clinton talks like that and he’s our buddy Bubba.
Jonah Lehrer describes an fMRI experiment published in Nature by Tricomi, Rangel, Camerer, and O’Doherty. Subjects were first randomly assigned to be rich or poor and given an endowment accordingly. Then they were put in the scanner.
…the scientists found something strange. When people in the “rich” group were told that a poor stranger was given $20, their brains showed more reward activity than when they themselves were given an equivalent amount. In other words, they got extra pleasure from the gains of someone with less. “We economists have a widespread view that most people are basically self-interested and won’t try to help other people,” Colin Camerer, a neuroeconomist at Caltech and co-author of the study, told me. “But if that were true, you wouldn’t see these sorts of reactions to other people getting money.”
I find it helpful to step back and think through how we can come to conclusions like this. Some time ago, neuroscientists correlated certain brain activity measurements with the state of happiness. They did this either by having the subject report when he was happy and then measuring his brain, or by observing him making choices that, presumably, made him happy and then measuring his brain.
Once we have the brain data we no longer need to ask him whether he is happy or make inferences based on his choices, we can just scan his brain to find out. And that allows us to conclude that the rich are less happy receiving $20 than when the poor get $20.
But still, if we wanted to we could just ask them. We might learn something. What would we do if the subjects responded that in fact they would be happier having the $20 for themselves? Would we conclude that they are lying?
Also we might learn something from just letting them decide for themselves whether to give money to the poor. What would we conclude if we see, as we do indeed see in the world, that they do not? That they don’t understand as well as we do what makes their brain happy?
Either way we have a real problem. Because our original reason for associating the specific brain activity with happiness was based on either believing they are honest about what makes them happy or believing that the choices they make reveal what makes them happy. But now in order to apply what we learned we are forced to reject those same premises.
Here’s what you already know: it’s a parasite that reproduces in the digestive system of cats. The eggs are excreted out and the vehicle is consumed by other animals in whose brains the eggs develop. Only when those brains are consumed by other cats does the cycle continue. In order to facilitate this process, chemicals are secreted inside the hosts’ brain to make them do things to increase the chance they will be eaten by cats. For example, rats with toxoplasma in their brains are not afraid of cats.
Here’s what’s new: toxoplasma is transferred from host to host through sexual contact in order to get closer to cats.
These are Toxoplasma cysts moving from rat to rat, so this exchange is kind of like a side track on the parasite’s life cycle. But it still benefits Toxoplasma, because it means it can infect even more potential prey that may get eaten by cats. And so the logic applies once more: if Toxoplasma can raise the odds of getting from infected males to uninfected females, it may have more reproductive success.
You know where this is going–it’s turning into a David Cronenberg horror movie with an all-rodent cast. Vyas wondered if there’s any difference in how female rats mate with infected and uninfected males. So he and his colleagues put a male rat with Toxoplasma at one end of a two-armed maze, and an uninfected male in the other arm. Females then got to choose which rat to approach. Vyans found that they preferred the infected males, spending more time with them and mating more often.
Creative output seems to come in bursts. You have periods of high productivity spaced by periods where you get relatively few good ideas. During the flurries everything seems to come easy and you have more ideas than you can work on at once. During the lulls you wonder if you are still the same person.
What if the pattern can be explained without assuming that your creative energy fluctuates at all? Suppose that ideas of various qualities arrive according to some distribution that is constant over time, but what changes about you is simply the standard you hold them to. Sometimes you are very self-critical and the marginal ideas that come to you don’t seem worth pursuing, so you don’t pursue them. You go through a lull.
Other times you are confident that you can develop your ideas and you do.
If you are trying to come up with a slogan for an ad campaign you have to decide how picky you are going to be with the grammar. For example suppose that there is a grammatical and a more colloquial way to write your slogan. Which do you go with?
Your audience has grammar snobs and regular people. Whichever way you write your slogan it’s going to look natural to one group and un-natural to the other. And the group that stumbles over the syntax is going to be at least somewhat distracted from the message. You have this problem whether you decide to bend toward the grammar snobs or the regular people.
But one thing tips the balance in favor of the ungrammatical slogan. In advertising, you are looking for anything that gets your audience to stop and spin some brain cycles in the presence of your ad. You will smuggle in your brand alongside. You get this benefit only with the ungrammatical. The grammar snobs, annoyed with your slogan are programmed to turn it over, diagram it and correct it. In effect you will cause them to construct variations of your ad campaign inside their own heads.
This is a good thing. Never mind that they will curse you for your trespasses. There’s no such thing as bad publicity. Indeed you hope for their curses. Nothing could be better than having them shout from the rooftops all the ways that your slogan, the one that urges everyone to buy your product, should be rewritten in order to make it more palatable.
Here’s a previous post on krafty konstructions.
The standoff between Herman Cain and his accusers offers us some interesting strategy to contemplate. The accusers are muzzled by a non-disclosure agreement they signed as a part of their settlement with the National Restaurant Association, where they worked alongside Mr. Cain. But lets walk down the tree to the node where the NDA has to be enforced.
One of the accusers has gone public with the allegation. To enforce the NDA is to admit that the NDA exists, which in turn is an admission that there was a settlement, which for all practical purposes is an admission that the allegations are true. Now, back here at the beginning of the game tree, should the accusers consider this a credible threat?
Perhaps. Because the allegations will be devastating whether or not Mr. Cain confirms the settlement. By then he would have little to lose, and at that stage the presumed penalties mandated by the NDA plus plain old retribution would be motivation enough.
(Let’s admire but ultimately ignore as unrealistic the gambit of not enforcing the NDA as a way of “proving” that there is no NDA because there was never any settlement with these accusers.)
However, it appears that the settlement is actually a contract between the NRA and the accusers. If that is the case then the decision to enforce it may not be Mr. Cain’s. Does the NRA have any credible motivation to do so?
Maybe not, but in some ways this arrangement may strengthen Mr. Cain’s position. Imagine that the accuser’s lawyer holds a press conference and publicly asks “Mr. Cain, my client is subject to a Non-Disclosure agreement arising from a sexual harrassment settlement in which you were the harasser. You deny this. Since the accusations are false you should be perfectly willing to release them from the NDA. Please prove to the American people that you are telling the truth by waiving it.”
Mr. Cain wiggles out of this one by publicly saying “Yes, I have nothing to hide. The NDA should be waived” and then by privately urging the NRA to do no such thing. The NRA can of course deny that there was any agreement and indeed the agreement probably requires them that because it presumably prohibits all parties from talking about it.
Measuring social influence is notoriously difficult in observational data. If I like Tin Hat Trio and so do my friends is it because I influenced them or we just have similar tastes, as friends often do. A controlled experiment is called for. It’s hard to figure out how to do that. How can an experimenter cause a subject to like something new and then study the effect on his friends?
Online social networks open up new possibilities. And here is the first experiment I came across that uses Facebook to study social influence, by Johan Egebark and Mathias Ekstrom. If one of your friends “likes” an item on Facebook, will it make you like it too?
Making use of five Swedish users’ actual accounts, we create 44 updates in total during a seven month period.1 For every new update, we randomly assign our user’s friends into either a treatment or a control group; hence, while both groups are exposed to identical status updates, treated individuals see the update after someone (controlled by us) has Liked it whereas individuals in the control group see it without anyone doing so. We separate between three different treatment conditions: (i) one unknown user Likes the update, (ii) three unknown users Like the update and (iii) one peer Likes the update. Our motivation for altering treatments is that it enables us to study whether the number of previous opinions as well as social proximity matters.2 The result from this exercise is striking: whereas the first treatment condition left subjects unaffected, both the second and the third more than doubled the probability of Liking an update, and these effects are statistically significant.
“I got caught up with the hoopla and the filming of the TV show that when I probably should have ended my relationship, I didn’t know how to and didn’t want to disappoint a lot of people,” the post said.
I was working on a paper, writing the introduction to a new section that deals with an extension of the basic model. It’s a relevant extension because it fits many real-world applications. So naturally I started to list the many real-world applications.
“This applies to X, Y, and….” hmmm… what’s the Z? Nothing coming to mind.
But I can’t just stop with X and Y. Two examples are not enough. If I only list two examples then the reader will know that I could only think of two examples and my pretense that this extension applies to many real-world applications will be dead on arrival.
I really only need one more. Because if I write “This applies to X, Y, Z, etc.” then the Z plus the “etc.” proves that there is in fact a whole blimpload of examples that I could have listed and I just gave the first three that came to mind, then threw in the etc. to save space.
If you have ever written anything at all you know this feeling. Three equals infinity but two is just barely two.
This is largely an equilbrium phenomenon. A convention emerged according to which those who have an abundance of examples are required to prove it simply by listing three. Therefore those who have listed only two examples truly must have only two.
Three isn’t the only threshold that would work as an equilibrium. There are many possibilities such as two, four, five etc. (ha!) Whatever threshold N we settle on, authors will spend the effort to find N examples (if they can) and anything short of that will show that they cannot.
But despite the multiplicity I bet that the threshold of three did not emerge arbitrarily. Here is an experiment that illustrates what I am thinking.
Subjects are given a category and 1 minute, say. You ask them to come up with as many examples from that category they can think of in 1 minute. After the 1 minute is up and you count how many examples they came up with you then give them another 15 minutes to come up with as many as they can.
With these data we would do the following. Plot on the horizontal axis the number x of items they listed in the first minute and on the vertical axis the number E(y|x) equal to the empirical average number y of items they came up with in total conditional on having come up with x items in the first minute.
I predict that you will see an anomalous jump upwards between E(y|2) and E(y|3).
This experiment does not take into account the incentive effects that come from the threshold. The incentives are simply to come up with as many examples as possible. That is intentional. The point is that this raw statistical relation (if it holds up) is the seed for the equilibrium selection. That is, when authors are not being strategic, then three-or-more equals many more than two. Given that, the strategic response is to shoot for exactly three. The equilibrium result is that three equals infinity.
It gives me a forum to tell the world that when you see me texting during your talk, I am not actually texting but rather I am emailing myself a thought that was inspired by your talk that I might write about on my blog later on.
My street is a Halloween Mecca. People flock from neighboring blocks to a section of my street and to the street just North of us. (Ours is an East-West street as are most of the residential streets in the area.) And I have noticed that in other neighborhoods in the area and in other places I have lived there is usually a local, focal Halloween hub where most of the action is.
And on those blocks where most of the action is the residents expect that they will get most of the action. They stock more candy, they lavishly decorate their yards, and they host haunted houses. They even serve beer. (To the parents)
I think I have figured out why we coordinated on my street.
In a perfectly symmetric neighborhood lattice, trick-or-treating is more or less a random walk. With a town full of randomly walking trick-or-treaters every location sees on average the same amount of traffic. Inevitably, one location will randomly receive an unusually large amount of traffic, those residents will come to expect it next year, decorate their street, and reinforce the trend. Then it becomes the focal point.
In this perfectly uniform grid, any location is equally likely to become that focal point. That is the benchmark model.
But neighborhoods aren’t symmetric. One particular asymmetry in my neighborhood explains why it was more likely that my street became the focal point. Two streets to the South is a major traffic lane that breaks up the residential lattice. In terms of our Halloween random walk, that street is a reflecting barrier. People on the street just to the South of us will all be reflected to our street. In addition we will receive the usual fraction of the traffic from streets to the North. So, even before any coordination takes hold our street will see more than the average density of trick-or-treeters. For that reason we have a greater chance of becoming the focal point. And we did.
- You can’t tickle yourself but someone can hold your hand and tickle you with it. (Try it)
- Syncopated rhythms trigger an automatic response where you bob your head or tap your feet because your brain demands that the missing beats be counted. In a strong sense, the music causes you to dance to it.
- Even though it would take you several minutes to list all 50 States, you know right away that there is no state that begins with E.
- If you are eloping, it is easier to back out at the last minute because there aren’t hordes of guests coming from all over expecting a wedding. Therefore marriages that begin with elopement will tend to last longer.
This one is just not fair:
But that’s a statistics question. Here’s the game theory question.
What percentage of students in the class will answer A) to this question?
A) Less than 50%
B) 50%
C) Greater than 50%
This article surveys the frontiers of toilet-reading science. Few downsides, some upsides.
No writer owned the arena of toilet reading more than Henry Miller. He read truly great books on the lavatory, and maintained that some, Ulysses for instance, could not be fully appreciated elsewhere. The environment was one that enriched substantial works – extracted their flavour, as he put it – while lesser books and magazines suffered. He singled out Atlantic Monthly.
Cheap Talk 