Month: February 2008

The How of Happiness

An easy-to-follow, life-changing approach designed to increase happiness and fulfillment in everyday life furnishes a comprehensive guide that redefines what happiness and what it is not and introduces activities, including exercises in practicing optimism, tips on how to savor life’s pleasures, and an emphasis on staying active to achieve a happier life.

intrigued

Technology Diffusion

Broadly, 2 sets of obstacles stand in the way of technological progress in emerging economies. The first is their technological inheritance. Most advances are based on the labours of previous generations: you need electricity to run computers and reliable communications for modern health care, for instance. So countries that failed to adopt old technologies are at a disadvantage when it comes to new ones. Mobile phones, which require no wires, are a prominent exception. Yet it would be wrong to be gloomy about the technological outlook of emerging economies. The channels of technology transfer have widened enormously over the past 10 years. Technological literacy has risen, especially among the young. But all this has helped emerging economies mainly in the first stage: absorption. The second stage—diffusion—has so far proved much more testing.

diffusion patterns

FreakAngels

23 years ago, 12 strange children were born in England at exactly the same moment. 6 years later, the world ended. This is the story of what happened next. So welcome to Whitechapel, some years from now, just barely above ground in a flooded England, where a clan of 11 strange people with purple eyes – the Freakangels – have carved out some sort of a life for themselves. A life that starts to show big cracks when a girl called Alice from Manchester turns up with a shotgun and a grievance, having met the lost, prodigal last Freakangel, who had very different ideas about what they should do with themselves and this flooded future England. Because the Freakangels have a big secret: Something very bad is their fault.

Click Boost

the authors suggest that relevance rank should be informed by click data, but note that “such steps are likely to amplify the search bias toward already popular sites.” In the talk, an audience member also noted that such steps may be susceptible to click spam, which is even easier to do than link spam for those wanting to manipulate search results. Finally, they noted strong recency and 24 hour trends in traffic data, saying that “47% of the clicks at any given time are predicted by the clicks from the previous day at the same time” and that, though the clicks from the previous 3 hours are a strong predictor of clicks for the current hour, after 4 hours, “the requests from the previous day yield higher precision and recall.”

Jihadi complaining

The Journal has obtained correspondence, purportedly between Abu Izzadeen and Facebook, which took place after his profile was banned by the site’s administrators. In it Izzadeen urges the administrators to “reconsider your hasty and unjust decision,” going on to write “Inshallah (God willing) I can return to making use of your otherwise fantastic site”. After the appeal was rejected Izzadeen ended the correspondence by writing: “You are mad. I joined this site so my supporters could add me and show their support. I am not surprised. [You take] any opportunity to stamp the ummah under your heel. This is why we rise up.”

FAIL. customer service indifference saves the day.

Commitment Contracts

stickK is designed to promote a healthier lifestyle by allowing users to create “Commitment Contracts” that oblige them to follow through with commitments such as exercise and quitting smoking.

behavioral econ startup. the contacts pledged so far have an average value of $50. this should be interesting once we are talking real money