Michael Nielsen’s blog is hard to follow. However, this post, on rules for ‘rewriting’ (I’d say rules for writing) is spot-on. Highlights:
The University of Oxford has published some sample interview questions, including:
In my admissions interview, I was asked if I thought boxing should be banned. When I answered no, the tutors asked whether I would therefore support televised gladitorial combat to the death. I think I got of lightly compared to a friend who was asked “If you were a roundabout, what song would you sing?”
Very slowly, I am learning about investment and investing. I do believe that investing requires learning: I am firmly in the ‘value’ school. From the various books I have read and people to whom I have spoken, this is the wisdom I have distilled to date, with sources and my subsequent embellishments.
I hope to learn much, much more, but this isn’t a bad start.
Via the blog Cheep Talk, I came across a good example for the policy analysis unit of my Masters course.
The New York Times reports that although people say that they make healthier choices when calorie-counts are displayed on fast-food menus, based on evidence from their receipts, the opposite is in fact true. At least in some areas, people are, on average, ordering more calories than before the labelling requirements were introduced.
This is a useful counter-factual for the type of ‘libertarian paternalism’ promoted in Sunstein and Thaler’s pop-policy book, Nudge.
For what it’s worth, I think that this example may be skewed by the demographic in the poorer areas in which receipts were collected. Perhaps people are maximising their calories per dollar. This is, in many ways, the natural human instinct.
The recession may also play a role here. I would be interested to know if this receipt-collection exercise had a control – a measurement of whether calorie consumption had gone up in similar cities where these measures had not be introduced. Without that, how can you rule out the possibility that people comfort-eat in a recession?
I think of a number of ideas about new concepts, products and companies every day. The overwhelming majority of these ideas are terrible. However, occasionally I think of something worth developing further. My first step is to check to see if I got there too late. A couple of quick Google searches and normally I will have proved that there are indeed no new things under the sun.
This morning I thought: “What if, instead of donating your surplus computing capacity (idle processor time, storage or bandwidth) to a project like Seti@home, you could set a price for that capacity and trade it on a global marketplace? You could enter your input prices, which would mainly reflect your power/energy costs, and then the market would allocate computing tasks in an efficient manner.”
I followed it up further and I am far from the first person to have this idea, it seems.
I am not annoyed that I didn’t get there first – in retrospect, it’s an obvious idea. I would, however, have been annoyed if I had put time into this idea before realising that others were working on it. In this way, the internet saves me years of thinking time.
A simian friend of mine has recently started a blog about his quest to find the perfect burger in London. He’s asked if I’ll help on this quest (of course!) I am hoping that it might turn into a London version of Tyler Cowen’s Ethnic Dining Guide, albeit with a more restricted menu. Tyler would be pleased to note that there are at least two BBQ places (and a crabshack) on the itinerary.
Incidentally, I don’t currently link to my blogging friends enough. This I shall remedy.
I am constantly amazed by the concept of Open Source software. Not because it’s free (in either sense) as a one-time download, but because it constantly gets better, typically at no extra charge.
My joy at living in a world where people who are better at technology than I am distribute to me the fruits of their superior knowledge and hard labour, continually, at no extra cost, is hard to describe.
I log into WordPress, and somebody just improved their plugin. I pick up an Android phone and it works better than it did yesterday. My browser just got better. My operating system just improved. My search engine gives me more options today.
To me, open source is the answer to that depressing feeling of taking something new and shiny, and having the bliss gradually wear off. Open source software is for future-orientated optimists. Okay, so my Android handset is not yet an iPhone, but one day it will be better.
I must not have being paying attention to The Economist‘s (excellent) business travel blog because only after reading this post did I shake off my complacent but long-held assumption that Gulliver was male.
Update: After now reading this post, I am assuming that there is more than one Gulliver, or that the name is assumed by any Economist correspondent with a business-travel story.