outsourcethinking

Work-on-demand

I’m suspecting European visitors will need some context: early in the mornings in many large US cities groups of workers (usually Hispanic) stand around certain street corners waiting for work. Contractors show up and select groups of them and then pay them at the end of the day. From a contractor’s perspective, it a great way of load balancing on a daily basis and not paying taxes/social security fees. The workers are happy because (a) they get work, (b) there is the chance that their hard work will be noticed and asked to stay on a more permanent basis.

Honey Wagon

You know you have it good when this is your rubbish truck.

Steven Pinker on the Genome

Nice article by Steven Pinker highlighting the search for meaning in in the human genome. He details nicely how even if we map the whole genome, it is unlikely that we will receive definitive diagnosis- we will most likely be told that we are x times more susceptible to this condition or the other. As he points out, this is not very useful information at the individual level.

But if you want to know whether you are at risk for high cholesterol, have your cholesterol measured; if you want to know whether you are good at math, take a math test. And if you really want to know yourself (and this will be the test of how much you do), consider the suggestion of François La Rochefoucauld: “Our enemies’ opinion of us comes closer to the truth than our own.”

The Crisis of Credit Visualized

Straightforward explanation. I am looking forward to part II, featuring the stimulus package.

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Barry Schwartz on Wisdom

From TED 2009.

The Places We Live

An interactive exhibition on slum dwelling around the world, by Jonas Bendiksen

Jetlev Flyer

Yes, I know it looks ridiculous. But this can’t be ignored as it will take you at 75kph across the water. Still no word on pricing. Isn’t it just a very strong water pump and a couple of nozzles?

[[ JetLev ]]

The universe

From the excellent xkcd

The Black Swan: Why is this new?

I have come across the term “Black Swan Event” several times in the past few weeks, mostly in reference to the recent and ongoing financial turmoil in the world markets. I hadn’t heard the term before and so searched Buzzwhack’s compendium of office jargon for a humorous definition but didn’t find anything. I did some more digging and found a brief description on wikipedia which left me puzzled. By coincidence, a coworker had just received Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book and so I borrowed it to try to figure out what all the fuss was about.

Taleb spends over three hundred pages talking about the nature of “Black Swan” events but i couldn’t bring myself to read more than a few lines of different chapters. I kept looking for anything about the “Black Swan” theory that would make it useful above and beyond what is already known about paradigm shifts, the human mind and statistics.

In a nutshell, according to Taleb a “Black Swan” is anything that fits the following definition and corollary:

a) Significant events that cannot be predicted which have a very large impact.
a’) Humans offer post-hoc explanations of how the event might have been predicted, reducing their belief in the true randomness of the event.

That’s it. The rest of the book is a long list of anecdotes of how a+a’ have played out again and again in the history of mankind as the result of shortcomings in the way that human minds process information, i.e. cognitive biases.

Why is this useful?

For those of you that are interested, here’s the recipe on how to peddle academic pseudo-theories to the masses and make a fortune:

Step 1) Select some existing academic work in the field(s) of interest. (in this case: Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts and lots of work on cognitive biases)
Step 2) Choose examples from history where it is obvious the theories you chose played a role in the outcome of events.
Step 3) Find an obscure but catchy term to label your new “theory” (see The Tipping Point (debunked), long tail (problematic) for other examples of this sort of nonsense)
Step 4) Publish the book and wait to be booked as keynote speaker for conferences.
Step 5) Profit.

Just to be clear, I am not arguing that Taleb is plagiarizing, but rather that he adds precious little to our existing understanding of high impact improbable events. There’s nothing new to the term “Black Swan” because it has no explanatory power, it’s just a repackaging job. Understanding and getting better at predicting these types of events will only be helped by the underlying science (i.e. cognitive science, statistics) and not a new umbrella theory.

Fun with wind energy

Wind Turbine Disintegration in Denmark:

…same in slow motion:

Awww…