Month: January 2013

Predicting Deception

a text analysis program correctly classified liars and truth-tellers at a rate of 67% when the topic was constant and a rate of 61% overall. Compared to truth-tellers, liars showed lower cognitive complexity, used fewer self-references and other-references, and used more negative emotion words.

61% is not very useful (close to a coin toss), but it is an interesting start. of course, this research suffers from the usual problems (only 5 samples, wtf?), but given a few 100K samples, might be much more accurate.

Events becoming franchises

In recent years we’ve seen a trend of globalization that’s relatively new: local bottom-up culture, events and ideas spread virally across the world and become branded products.

an interesting phenomenon, and i’d rather take restaurant day (where you play restaurateur for a day) over restaurant week, a terrible idea.

Word prevalences

“amicorum meorum vivorum et mortuorum”, which means “of my friends living and dead”, was popular between the years 1150 and 1240 but not at other times. And the phrase “Francis et Anglicis”, which is a form of address meaning “to French and English”, was phased out when England lost Normandy to the French in 1204.

by using the word distribution of documents with known dates as standard tree rings.

Hudson Yards construction

how the penn station tracks will be covered without interrupting trains

Pronounceable decades

I look forward to again living in a decade people can actually pronounce: no one says oughts or tens, but twenties is just fine. this is probably also why radio stations are stuck in the nineties.

Deficit states

I finally figured out why the red states are called red: they take more federal money than they contribute.

TED discovers community biotech

My friends at Genspace finally get the attention they deserve.

Flu zombies

exposure to the influenza virus measurably increases your desire for socializing over the following 2 days, and increases particularly your desire to socialize in large groups. !!!

The first 100m gathering

have you ever been to an event with 100m other people? me neither. some are calling this the largest gathering in human history.

Held every 12 years at 1 of 4 places in India, the Kumbh Mela lasts nearly 2 months and is considered to be an especially auspicious time to bathe in the holy river for purification from sin. In 2001, the last time the festival took place, more than 40M people gathered in an area smaller than 20 sq km. This year, the predicted number of visitors tops 100M.

resilient NYC

the report from the sandy commission is now available. the atlantic has a good summary.

The report’s recommendations were based on 5 characteristics of resiliency: spare capacity (e.g. establishing backup systems, such as alternative transportation routes), flexibility (favoring “soft” solutions that can be modified over time, like improved hazard maps and evacuation plans), limited failure (designing infrastructure networks, especially power grids, to shutdown in pieces instead of wholes), rapid rebounds (initiating preemptive response strategies, like creating fleets of portable generators), and constantly learning.