See-to-learn's favorites

What is hivemined?

2011-10-31T05:06:31Z

A replacement for google reader. Basically an RSS reader with a bit of social thrown in.

Google Reader

2010-10-08T00:52:00Z

@bros

When asked to read a five-minute essay about a social space for my Fieldwork and Ethnography seminar, this is what I came up with. (Keep in mind I was trying to explain it to people who have never heard of it.)

I’m being followed by fifty-nine people. I’m following all of them, too; each relationship is more or less reciprocal. All of us routinely visit the bazaar-like space of Google Reader, an online community in the guise of an RSS aggregator. The point of an RSS aggregator is simple: bringing the diverse content of numerous blogs, news sources, and entertainment sites together in one place for convenient, personalized consumption. Google Reader takes this idea a step further by allowing each user to share especially interesting content with friends and to view and comment on content shared by others. As a result, the application is as much a form of social networking as it is a way to catch up on headlines, media reviews, and ridiculous pictures of cats. I started out by following only the content posted by real-life friends and acquaintances--my roommate, my boyfriend, my co-workers, and so on. However, after we commented on each other’s shares enough, we began to notice that friends of friends seemed to share our interests and make us laugh, too. It wasn’t long before my small list of friends grew to include not only friends of friends, but complete strangers. Among my “sharebros” (our term for people who follow each other), I can count a few of the internet hipster blogger elite, quite a few salespeople and writers, a number of musicians, and various academics who represent nearly all disciplines, ages, and regions. Many have become friends as a direct result of our finding common bonds through Reader--sometimes in the ways our research topics intersect, or in a basic shared love of food, fashion, or unusual humor.

Describing the actual experience of Reader is an elusive task, mainly because its contents represent myriad forms of authorship and appropriation that defy easy definition. The interface is simple enough: the source feeds a user subscribes to are listed by title on the left side of the screen, and the user can view a source’s content by clicking on its entry in the list. Immediately above the list of feeds is a list of people that a user follows. It is possible to view each sharebro’s “shares” in the same way; clicking on a person’s name reveals everything he or she has chosen to post. Both the user list and the source list stay in one place; users can scroll through content in the main frame of the window. Whether content is from a blog or a friend, one has the option to “Like,” “Share,” or “Share with Note” on each post. If the post is from a sharebro, one can also add comments; however, “liking” or “resharing” someone else’s content is high praise. Socially speaking, it cements the bond of your shared interests and shows public approval of someone else’s choice.

When I browse Reader, there is comfort in familiar motion. My fingers somehow automatically know to press “J” if I want to read ahead, and “K” if I want to go back to something. Touching the smooth keys of my laptop in repeated, measured form is a kind of cyborg meditation; I’m not clearing my mind, but filling it and training for my day of processing and responding to information. It’s the perfect exercise to pair with drinking coffee. Although I read enough blogs that I rarely have time for them all, beginning my day with headlines, jokes, and camaraderie is soothing. I feel not only informed, but reassured. Staring at a screen before entering the world affirms that wherever I am, I am aware of what’s going on around me and I’m part of an easily accessible, familiar social network.

Users, at least among my Reader contacts, have one main trait in common: we spend a lot of time on the internet and we value very specific informational and cultural literacies. Although we differ on many points, there are some things most of us agree upon, like terminology. “#gg,” for example, stands for “grandma glance.” The term is derived from the Fabolous song “Not Give a Fuck,” in which the speaker claims to wear a throwback jersey “so old it’ll make your grandma glance” (RapGenius 2010). Basically, writing “#gg” on another person’s share is a diss, because it means everyone--even someone less hip to online culture, like a stereotypical grandma--has seen it. On the flip side, if someone awards you a series of plus signs in a comment, you’ve said something supremely witty. But Reader’s not just mindless novelty. Newness is important, but only because it presupposes existing, shared knowledge. We have inside jokes, like malaprops and one sharebro’s bizarre obsession with the JFK assassination. Avoiding a #gg is a bit about prestige, but it’s also about respecting our sharebros’ history together. As friends, we remember each other’s interests, and share things “@” each other with those interests in mind. For example, shares @ me might make fun of my fascination with LaToya Jackson, but they might also be vintage clothing ads that people know I will like, or even links to projects that might help inform my thesis research.

Most comments are friendly, even in the context of lively debate, and the right joke or insight can even earn new friends. The strange thing about debate on Reader is there’s not much attention to scale; we can fight just as earnestly and fiercely about Morrissey as we can about education reform. And it’s not always polite. Even though I am linked to people I see everyday “IRL” (in real life), I’m also connected to strangers with very different values--some of whom still see the internet as a somewhat anonymous space for recreational antagonism. At this point, most of us try to stay out of the most intense fights. A year ago today, most of us were involved in the worst flame war I’ve ever seen, and I was at the center of it. Unlike most debates, this had little to do with politics or tastes, and everything to do with an innocuous less-than-three-style heart. I’d written the heart on many especially cool shares, but some strangers--friends of my sharebro--said that writing things like that was pointless and irritating. (In this particular case, I had started a comment thread with the far less glamorous "Cooool," but my friend and roommate immediately followed with the ubiquitous heart.) Although lots of people hurried to our defense, the thread somehow devolved into mean-spirited comments about my appearance, and battle lines were drawn according to the old rap delineations of “East Coast,” “West Coast,” and “Dirty South.” People with real life connections stayed loyal to each other online, and a comment that seemed frivolous translated into a lot of IRL emotions. A weird side effect of this fight, though, was that a lot of strangers became friends. When the absurdity of the whole thing reached its logical limits, a guy from New York whom I didn’t know posted a picture of a heart flanked by a city skyline and American flags with the caption “10/7 Never Forget.” Those who either sympathized with me or were simply appalled by the length and intensity of such a trivial fight banded together. We just started making jokes again.

The diversity of Reader is both its triumph and its curse: we learn a lot, but we also fight over everything. Still, most of us would argue that our engagement is worth the payoffs. Users are able to share content from all over the internet, sometimes of their own creation, and they also can edit and reshape others’ content to be more concise or, occasionally, more funny or editorial. As consumers, we’re appropriating content in ways that amuse each other and critique the world we live in.

While some shares are more serious than others, many of us have been able to translate our relationships into useful social connections and tangible public action. Our connections spill not only into other social media like Facebook and Twitter, but also into our real-world lives. During my last trip to New York, I met two sharebros for the first time. We spent a total of seven hours consuming pizza and beer and stories, and it felt like hanging out with any of my other friends. On other occasions, we’ve used Reader as a way to organize academic collaborations across the country, and even mount formal protests on a more local basis. The first ever Sharebro Census was taken a few months ago, and just this week, one guy used our user information to make a map of where we’re all located. Even though I still haven’t met many of my favorite online friends, our relationships are no less real than those I have with people I see in person every day. It’s possible, for instance, to miss people I’ve only ever chatted with. Ultimately, Reader is a highly creative medium for curation. It’s a way of proving one’s own cultural capital by blurring the distinctions between high and low culture, and it forces us to accept a weird brand of democracy.

The Unsocial Network: Why Google Is Wrong to Kill Off Google Reader

2011-10-21T14:06:04Z

I wrote a pretty sober piece about the death or near-death of Google Reader yesterday, but after reading Sarah Perez and Austin Frakt and after thinking about just how much I use Google Reader every day, I’m beginning to revise my initial forecast. Stay calm is quickly shifting toward full-bore Panic Mode.

First of all, how do you think I found Sarah’s piece? From a share in Google Reader. How did I easily and quickly archive both Austin’s and Sarah’s posts so that I could access them in the future for a post like this one? Again, Google Reader. How can I quickly search a variety of excellent sources, or dig back through my own writing in a quick and efficient manner? Yeah, you guessed it. As Sarah notes, Reader is a “carefully constructed “human curated” list of shares. It is, and will be up until the day it disappears, one of the most regular and enjoyable news consumption behaviors I engage in every day.” And it’s a tool for writers like myself as well.

When Google killed Buzz, everyone in Reader started to worry. Keep your hands off my Reader! we all said. But Google didn’t listen. This may be because nobody has worked on Google Reader in years – the service has been alone with its loyal users for a long time without updates or changes. We like it this way.

For one thing, Reader is only sort of a social network. In many senses it’s an anti-social network. Not in the sense that people in Reader are anti-social so much as the point is to harbor a small enclave of carefully selected people and create a safe-haven of sorts where that “carefully constructed human curated” list of shares and insights can flourish. In Reader, you don’t go after as many friends as possible. You certainly don’t see anyone from high school. Nobody shares photos of their kids. The discussions that do blossom are almost always very smart and focused. It’s the internet if the world were a more prefect place.

The microcosm that is Google Reader is a valuable and important piece of social media. It’s a shame that Google doesn’t recognize this. Why not create a Google Reader Plus for everyone on Plus and just leave Reader itself alone? This seems like a simple solution to a non-problem. Google would reward its most loyal users, while expanding its RSS service to everyone else.

So what about it, Google? Preserve this piece of technological genius for those of us who’ve been sticking with you for so long.

Sign the petition to save Google Reader.

Follow me on Twitter or Facebook. Read my Forbes blog here.

The World Is Surprisingly Angry About the End of Google Reader

2011-10-25T20:14:24Z

The demise of Google Reader's share features is affecting everyone from RSS-junkies to Iranian freedom fighters, and many of them are very displeased. Google Reader itself is very much alive and well, and in fact, the RSS reader will soon sport a slick-looking redesign. However, at some point this week, the ability to follow, friend and share links within Reader will cease to exist, as Google pushes people to use Google+ for those kinds of things. Along with it, the myriad communities that depended on Reader for years for everything from meeting new people to organizing protests will just have to figure something else out. It turns out Google wasn't so bad at social networks, after all.

Displeased is actually not a strong enough word to describe these sentiment. These people are pissed, and they're fighting back. (There are already protests planned outside of Google offices and a petition--using Google Docs, of course--to save Reader's social features.) The dissenters divide into two camps: Iranians and the Sharebros.

Iran

You've undoubtedly heard a lot about how the Iranian protests of 2009 were driven by Twitter. They were, and the government responded immediately, imposing firewalls and other censorship measures in an effort to quash the uprising. Ultimately, pretty much every single social network was banned in Iran over the past couple of years, leaving Iranians without a free speech forum--except Google Reader. As an Iranian blogger who goes by Amir explains, "Google Reader is not in a separated domain (like any other Google product) and thanks to https protocol, it is hard to filter by government." Amir and other Iranians are worried that Google+, which lives in a subdomain that could be more easily blocked, will suffer the same fate as the other social networks:

Popularity map for Google Reader shows that Google Reader is the 1st popular website in Iran, despite the fact that many users which are using VPN or proxies and are not counted! Then it makes sense why Google Reader matters for Iranian and why integrating it with Google+ will makes it like any already available and banned website like facebook!

Alan Green, the Google programmer saddled with breaking the bad news on the company's official blog, has received nearly 500 comments on his Google+ post announcing the changes, many of them from angry Iranians who believe their freedom of speech is in jeopardy. He hasn't responded to a single one.

The Sharebros

Sharebros identify themselves simply as "person(s) whom one is following and followed by on Google Reader (as formally recognized by a Google Reader founder)," but their devotion to Reader is uncanny. Like more well known online communities like Reddit or 4chan, they've developed their own glossary of hashtags and lexicon of pictograms. ( -_- denotes "dissatisfaction or defeat.") The community doesn't just exist online, either. They have #sharebro parties, and many of them say they've met some of their closest friends via Google Reader. At least one Sharebro met his wife.

We talked to a number of Sharebros about the changes, and their arguments against axing the social features were about half as compelling as their stories about how Google Reader changed their lives. Richard Berger told The Atlantic Wire about how he ditched email and now primarily communicates with his mother via Google Reader. "Reader is the best way to share and discover content on the internet, period," says Richard.

Another, Stu Watson formed a band, No Sky God, with his friend James who he met through Google Reader. They just put out a 12" record featuring Nat Baldwin, the bassist from Dirty Projectors. "James and I would likely have never met without Reader," Stu wrote in an email, "but more importantly the social aspects of Reader allowed us to get to know each other in a more intimate and ultimately meaningful way than if we had, say, just been Facebook friends or something." Stu tells us that people in the Sharebro sphere are already working on coding their own Reader replacement--they don't want to use Google+.

The most compelling Sharebro story comes from Ramey Moore. In a Reader forum post, Ramey tells the story about how he and his wife, who's expecting a child soon, "first met at a #sharebro event, scheduled and organized solely through Reader." The (long) post concludes:

I am 100% certain that even if someone at Google cares or commiserates with me that nothing will change. … Basically, this is a panegyric. An elegy. A final funeral oration. A fuck you to those who want to kill something that works and try to build a Frankenstein's Monster that will probably choke to death on its own blood. Reader works as is, this move is just a sad attempt to jump-start an already failed Buzz 2.0.

That's it, I'm done. If anyone cares I'm going to be trying to imagine how to delete G+.

At least one protest organized by Sharebros is scheduled to gather tomorrow at Google's DC headquarters. Meanwhile, the petition to save Reader's social features has gathered thousands of signatures. And despite all the backlash from their most devoted users, the Google Reader teams has yet to respond. We reached out for a response and haven't heard back.

You can now access thousands of scientific articles (written by some of history's greatest minds) for free [This Is Awesome]

2011-10-26T21:37:12Z

When it comes to old academic societies, there isn't an organization on Earth that can hold a candle to Britain's Royal Society. Founded all the way back in 1660, The Royal Society has been pumping out peer-reviewed scientific literature since 1665, when the first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society made its debut. More »

Цитата #413969

2011-10-28T06:46:01Z

он: что делаешь?
она: я на уроке физики, а ты?
он: а я на информатике
она: что у вас за школа, как не спрошу, так ты на информатике!!
он: я учитель информатики

Напечатали!

2011-10-28T13:40:08Z

Сейчас позвонили из издательства Corpus и сказали, что книжка уже напечатана и сегодня отправляется на склад из типографии (как-то так). И что в магазины начнет поступать во вторник или в среду.
Совершенно не ожидал, что напечатают так быстро. Прямо не верится!

~~Вот получу авторские и~~
~~уйду в запой~~
~~заставлю своих студентов ее читать~~
~~сдохну с чистой совестью~~

Будем теперь откликов ждать. Подозреваю, что реакция будет более бурная и менее однозначная, чем на "Рождение сложности", т.к. тема всем интересна, а содержание "зацепит" не только креационистов.

UPD.
Оглавление.

Том 1.
Предисловие
1. Двуногие обезьяны
2. Очеловечивание
3. От эректусов к сапиенсам
4. Мы и наши гены
5. Другое человечество
6. Великое расселение сапиенсов
7. Происхождение человека и половой отбор

Том 2.
1. В поисках душевной грани
2. Душевная механика
3. Генетика души
4. Общественный мозг
5. Эволюция альтруизма
6. Жертвы эволюции
Заключение

The Crisis That Hit Physics 100 Years Ago

2011-10-28T19:15:23Z

One hundred years ago, the greatest scientific minds of Europe met to address a perilous state of affairs. During the previous 20 years, curious scientists had uncovered new phenomena — including X-rays, the photoelectric effect, nuclear radiation and electrons — that were rocking the foundations of physics.

While researchers in the 19th century had thought they would soon describe all known physical processes using the equations of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell, the new and unexpected observations were destroying this rosy outlook. Leading physicists, such as Max Planck and Walther Nernst, believed circumstances were dire enough to warrant an international symposium that could attempt to resolve the situation.

It was the start of the quantum revolution.

Reverberations from this meeting are still felt to this day. Though physics may still sometimes seem to be in crisis, with researchers yet to find the Higgs boson and lacking a complete understanding of dark matter and dark energy, what we do know about these mysteries is only possible thanks to the foundations laid down at the first Solvay Council.

From Oct. 30 to Nov. 3, 1911, 18 luminaries came together as part of the invite-only conference in Brussels, Belgium known as the Solvay Council. Funded and organized by the wealthy chemist Ernest Solvay, the guest list is an impressive collection of top scientists from the time.

Along with Max Planck, often called the father of quantum mechanics, there was Ernest Rutherford, discoverer of the proton, and Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes, discoverer of superconductivity as well as the chemist Marie Curie and mathematician Henri Poincaré. The youngest member of this group was a 32-year-old Albert Einstein.

As scientists sometimes tend to do, the assembled members spent their time arguing about their field.

“The congress in Brussels resembled the lamentations on the ruins of Jerusalem,” Einstein later wrote to his friend, the engineer Michele Besso. “Nothing positive came out of it.”

The “temple” whose destruction many of the researchers were lamenting was the theories of classical physics, which had dominated scientific thinking in the previous century. Classical mechanics had managed to describe the movement of the planets, the behavior of electricity and magnetism and the relationship between solid, liquids and gases. But newly observed phenomena were pointing to problems. Light, for instance, had been heretofore described as a wave yet some experiments were suggesting this was an inadequate model.

Einstein himself was firmly in favor of the new tide, the way of quantum mechanics. Based on a theory of Planck’s, he advocated for the then-radical idea that light could behave as both a wave and a particle (or quantum). While we now know such a position to be true, observations at the time were not strong enough to wholeheartedly support this conclusion. It would not be until the 1920s that particles of light would be called photons.

Proceedings from the Solvay Council show how different physicists’ worldview was from our modern understanding. The gathered members “probably all agree that the so-called quantum theory is, indeed, a helpful tool but that it is not a theory in the usual sense of the word, at any rate not a theory that could be developed in a coherent form at the present time,” wrote Einstein.

At the time, theories describing light quanta and particle-wave duality had no rigorous experimental justification. Many of the scientists at the conference likely still believed in the now-outdated concept of a luminiferous ether, which supposedly was the medium through which light waves traveled, just as water waves travel through the ocean.

Einstein took issue with the conservatism of his fellow conference goers. Planck, he wrote, “stuck stubbornly to some undoubtedly wrong preconceptions,” while Poincaré “was simply negative in general, and, all his acumen notwithstanding, he showed little grasp of the situation.”

Despite its goals, the 1911 meeting accomplished little. At its conclusion, Ernest Solvay addressed the scientists, saying, “In spite of the beautiful results achieved at this congress, you have not solved the real problems that remain at the forefront.” It would take at least two decades before experimental evidence and scientific debates firmly established quantum mechanics as a true theory.

But this first conference led to Solvay establishing an annual meeting for leading scientists to gather and discuss the issues of the day. The famous Fifth Solvay Conference in 1927 saw Einstein sparring once again with attendees, though this time with Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg about how quantum mechanics had gone too far and reduced the behavior of subatomic particles to probabilities. (“God does not play dice with the universe,” Einstein supposedly declared.)

Image: Couprie/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Seated (L-R): Walther Nernst, Marcel Brillouin, Ernest Solvay, Hendrik Lorentz, Emil Warburg, Jean Baptiste Perrin, Wilhelm Wien, Marie Curie, and Henri Poincaré.

Standing (L-R): Robert Goldschmidt, Max Planck, Heinrich Rubens, Arnold Sommerfeld, Frederick Lindemann, Maurice de Broglie, Martin Knudsen, Friedrich Hasenöhrl, Georges Hostelet, Edouard Herzen, James Hopwood Jeans, Ernest Rutherford, Heike Kamerlingh Onnes, Albert Einstein, and Paul Langevin.

Utopia is creepy

2011-10-29T16:37:04Z

Works of science fiction, particularly good ones, are almost always dystopian. It's easy to understand why: There's a lot of drama in Hell, but Heaven is, by definition, conflict-free. Happiness is nice to experience, but seen from the outside it's pretty dull. But there's another reason why portrayals of utopia don't work. We've all experienced the "uncanny valley" that makes it difficult to watch robotic or avatarial replicas of human beings without feeling creeped out. The uncanny valley also exists, I think, when it comes to viewing artistic renderings of a future paradise. Utopia is creepy - or at least it looks creepy. That's probably because utopia requires its residents to behave like robots, never displaying or even feeling fear or anger or jealousy or bitterness or any of those other messy emotions that plague our fallen world. I've noticed the arrival recently of a new genre of futuristic YouTube videos. They're created by tech companies for marketing or brand-burnishing purposes. With the flawless production values that only a cash-engorged balance sheet can buy you, they portray a not-too-distant future populated by exceedingly well-groomed people who spend their hyperproductive days going from one screen to the next. (As seems always...

Daniel Kahneman: How cognitive illusions blind us to reason

2011-10-29T23:06:34Z

Why do Wall Street traders have such faith in their powers of prediction, when their success is largely down to chance? Daniel Kahneman explains how cognitive illusions skew our thinking

Many decades ago, I spent what seemed like a great deal of time under a scorching sun, watching groups of sweaty soldiers as they solved a problem. I was doing my national service in the Israeli army at the time. I had completed an undergraduate degree in psychology, and was assigned to the army's psychology branch, where one of my duties was to help evaluate candidates for officer training. We used methods that had been developed by the British army in the second world war.

One test, called the "leaderless group challenge", was conducted on an obstacle field. Eight candidates, strangers to one another, were instructed to lift a long log from the ground and carry it to a wall about six feet high. The entire group had to get to the other side of the wall without the log touching either the ground or the wall, and without anyone touching the wall. If any of these things happened, they had to declare it and start again.

There was more than one way to solve the problem. A common solution was for the team to send several men to the other side by crawling over the log as it was held at an angle, like a giant fishing rod, by other members of the group. Or else some soldiers would climb on to someone's shoulders and jump across. The last man would then have to jump up at the pole, held up at an angle by the rest of the group, shin his way along its length as the others kept him and the pole suspended in the air, and leap safely to the other side. Failure was common at this point, which required them to start all over again.

As a colleague and I monitored the exercise, we made a note of who took charge, who tried to lead but was rebuffed, how cooperative each soldier was in contributing to the group effort. We saw who seemed to be stubborn, submissive, arrogant, patient, hot-tempered, persistent, or a quitter.

We sometimes saw competitive spite when someone whose idea had been rejected by the group no longer worked very hard. And we saw reactions to crisis: who berated a comrade whose mistake had caused the whole group to fail, who stepped forward to lead when the exhausted team had to start over. Under the stress of the event, we felt, each man's true nature revealed itself.

After watching the candidates make several attempts, we had to summarise our impressions of soldiers' leadership abilities and determine, with a score, who should be eligible for officer training. The task was not difficult, because we felt we had already seen each soldier's leadership skills.

Some of the men had looked like strong leaders, others had seemed like wimps or arrogant fools, others mediocre but not hopeless. Quite a few looked so weak that we ruled them out as candidates for officer rank. When our multiple observations of each candidate converged on a coherent story, we were confident in our evaluations and felt that what we had seen pointed to the future. The soldier who took over when the group was in trouble and led the team over the wall was a leader at that moment. The obvious best guess about how he would do in training, or in combat, was that he would be as effective then as he had been at the wall. Any other prediction seemed inconsistent with the evidence before our eyes.

Because our impressions of how well each soldier had performed were generally coherent and clear, our formal predictions were just as definite. We rarely experienced doubts or formed conflicting impressions. We were quite willing to declare: "This one will never make it," "That fellow is mediocre, but he should do OK," or "He will be a star." We felt no need to question our forecasts, moderate them, or equivocate. If challenged, however, we were prepared to admit: "But of course anything could happen."

We were willing to make that admission because, despite our definite impressions about individual candidates, we knew with certainty that our forecasts were largely useless. The evidence was overwhelming. Every few months we had a feedback session in which we learned how the cadets were doing at the officer training school and could compare our assessments against the opinions of commanders who had been monitoring them for some time. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible. Our forecasts were not much better than blind guesses.

We were downcast for a while after receiving the discouraging news. But this was the army. Useful or not, there was a routine to be followed and orders to be obeyed. Another batch of candidates arrived the next day. We took them to the obstacle field, we faced them with the wall, they lifted the log, and within a few minutes we saw their true natures revealed, as clearly as before. The dismal truth about the quality of our predictions had no effect whatsoever on how we evaluated candidates and very little effect on the confidence we felt in our judgments and predictions.

What happened was remarkable. The evidence of our previous failure should have shaken our confidence in our judgments of the candidates, but it did not. It should also have caused us to moderate our predictions, but it did not. We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses, but we continued to feel and act as if each of our specific predictions was valid. I had discovered my first cognitive illusion.

Looking back, the most striking part of the story is that our knowledge of the general rule that we could not predict had no effect on our confidence in individual cases. We were reluctant to infer the particular from the general. Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

In 1984, my collaborator Amos Tversky and I, and our friend Richard Thaler, now a guru of behavioural economics and co-originator of "nudge" theory, visited a Wall Street firm. Our host, a senior investment manager, had invited us to discuss the role of judgment biases in investing. I knew so little about finance that I did not even know what to ask him, but I remember one exchange. "When you sell a stock," I asked, "who buys it?" He answered with a wave in the vague direction of the window, indicating that he expected the buyer to be someone else very much like him. That was odd: what made one person buy and the other sell? Most of the buyers and sellers know that they have the same information; they exchange the stocks primarily because they have different opinions. The buyers think the price is too low and likely to rise, while the sellers think the price is high and likely to drop. The puzzle is why buyers and sellers alike think the current price is wrong. What makes them believe they know more about what the price should be than the market does? For most of them, that belief is an illusion.

Most people in the investment business have read Burton Malkiel's wonderful book A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Malkiel's central idea is that a stock's price incorporates all the available knowledge about the value of the company and the best predictions about the future of the stock. If some people believe that the price of a stock will be higher tomorrow, they will buy more of it today.

This, in turn, will cause its price to rise. If all assets in a market are correctly priced, no one can expect either to gain or to lose by trading. Perfect prices leave no scope for cleverness, but they also protect fools from their own folly. We now know, however, that the theory is not quite right. Many individual investors lose consistently by trading. The first demonstration of this startling conclusion was collected by Terry Odean, a finance professor at University of California Berkeley who was once my student.

Odean began by studying the trading records of 10,000 brokerage accounts of individual investors spanning a seven-year period. He was able to analyse every transaction the investors executed through that firm, nearly 163,000 trades. This rich set of data allowed Odean to identify all instances in which an investor sold some of his holdings in one stock and soon afterward bought another stock. By these actions the investor revealed that he (most of the investors were men) had a definite idea about the future of the two stocks: he expected the stock that he chose to buy to do better than the stock he chose to sell.

To determine whether those ideas were well founded, Odean compared the returns of the two stocks over the course of one year after the transaction. The results were unequivocally bad. On average, the shares that individual traders sold did better than those they bought, by a very substantial margin: 3.2 percentage points per year, above and beyond the significant costs of executing the two trades.

It is important to remember that this is a statement about averages: some individuals did much better, others did much worse. However, it is clear that for the large majority of individual investors, taking a shower and doing nothing would have been a better policy than implementing the ideas that came to their minds. Later research by Odean and his colleague Brad Barber supported this conclusion. In a paper titled "Trading Is Hazardous to Your Wealth" they showed that, on average, the most active traders had the poorest results, while the investors who traded the least earned the highest returns. In another paper, titled "Boys Will Be Boys", they showed that men acted on their useless ideas significantly more often than women, and that as a result women achieved better investment results than men.

Of course, there is always someone on the other side of each transaction; in general, it's financial institutions and professional investors, ready to take advantage of the mistakes that individual traders make in choosing a stock to sell and another stock to buy. Further research by Barber and Odean has shed light on these mistakes. Individual investors like to lock in their gains by selling "winners", stocks that have appreciated since they were purchased, and they hang on to their losers. Unfortunately for them, recent winners tend to do better than recent losers in the short run, so individuals sell the wrong stocks. They also buy the wrong stocks.

Few stock pickers, if any, have the skill needed to beat the market consistently, year after year. Professional investors, including fund managers, fail a basic test of skill: persistent achievement. The diagnostic for the existence of any skill is the consistency of individual differences in achievement. The logic is simple: if individual differences in any one year are due entirely to luck, the ranking of investors and funds will vary erratically and the year-to-year correlation will be zero. Where there is skill, however, the rankings will be more stable. The persistence of individual differences is the measure by which we confirm the existence of skill among car salespeople, orthodontists or golfers.

Mutual funds are run by highly experienced and hardworking professionals who buy and sell stocks to achieve the best possible results for their clients. Nevertheless, the evidence from more than 50 years of research is conclusive: for a large majority of fund managers, the selection of stocks is more like rolling dice than like playing poker. Typically at least two out of every three mutual funds underperform the overall market in any given year.

More important, the year-to-year correlation between the outcomes of mutual funds is very small, barely higher than zero. The successful funds in any given year are mostly lucky; they have a good roll of the dice. There is general agreement among researchers that nearly all stock pickers, whether they know it or not – and few of them do – are playing a game of chance.

The subjective experience of traders is that they are making sensible educated guesses in a situation of great uncertainty. In highly efficient markets, however, educated guesses are no more accurate than blind guesses.

Some years ago I had an unusual opportunity to examine the illusion of financial skill up close. I had been invited to speak to a group of investment advisers in a firm that provided financial advice and other services to very wealthy clients. I asked for some data to prepare my presentation and was granted a small treasure: a spreadsheet summarising the investment outcomes of some 25 anonymous wealth advisers, for each of eight consecutive years. Each adviser's score for each year was his (most of them were men) main determinant of his year-end bonus. It was a simple matter to rank the advisers by their performance in each year and to determine whether there were persistent differences in skill among them and whether the same advisers consistently achieved better returns for their clients year after year.

To answer the question, I computed correlation coefficients between the rankings in each pair of years: year 1 with year 2, year 1 with year 3, and so on up through year 7 with year 8. That yielded 28 correlation coefficients, one for each pair of years. I knew the theory and was prepared to find weak evidence of persistence of skill. Still, I was surprised to find that the average of the 28 correlations was 0.01. In other words, zero. The consistent correlations that would indicate differences in skill were not to be found. The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill.

No one in the firm seemed to be aware of the nature of the game that its stock pickers were playing. The advisers themselves felt they were competent professionals doing a serious job, and their superiors agreed. On the evening before the seminar, Richard Thaler and I had dinner with some of the top executives of the firm, the people who decide on the size of bonuses.

We asked them to guess the year-to-year correlation in the rankings of individual advisers. They thought they knew what was coming and smiled as they said "not very high" or "performance certainly fluctuates". It quickly became clear, however, that no one expected the average correlation to be zero.

Our message to the executives was that, at least when it came to building portfolios, the firm was rewarding luck as if it were skill. This should have been shocking news to them, but it was not. There was no sign they disbelieved us. How could they? After all, we had analysed their own results, and they were sophisticated enough to see the implications, which we politely refrained from spelling out. We all went on calmly with our dinner, and I have no doubt that both our findings and their implications were quickly swept under the rug and that life in the firm went on as before. The illusion of skill is not only an individual aberration; it is deeply ingrained in their culture. Facts that challenge such basic assumptions – and thereby threaten people's livelihood and self-esteem – are simply not absorbed. The mind does not digest them. This is particularly true of statistical studies of performance, which provide base-rate information that people generally ignore when it clashes with their personal impressions from experience.

The next morning, we reported the findings to the advisers, and their response was equally bland. Their own experience of exercising careful judgment on complex problems was far more compelling to them than an obscure statistical fact. When we were done, one of the executives with whom I had dined the previous evening drove me to the airport. He told me, with a trace of defensiveness: "I have done very well for the firm and no one can take that away from me." I smiled and said nothing. But I thought: "Well, I took it away from you this morning. If your success was due mostly to chance, how much credit are you entitled to take for it?"

Cognitive illusions can be more stubborn than visual illusions. When my colleagues and I in the army learned that our leadership assessment tests had low validity, we accepted that fact intellectually, but it had no impact on either our feelings or our subsequent actions. The response we encountered in the financial firm was even more extreme. I am convinced that the message that Thaler and I delivered to both the executives and the portfolio managers was instantly put away in a dark corner of memory where it would cause no damage.

Why do investors, both amateur and professional, stubbornly believe that they can do better than the market, contrary to an economic theory that most of them accept, and contrary to what they could learn from a dispassionate evaluation of their personal experience? The most potent psychological cause of the illusion is certainly that the people who pick stocks are exercising high-level skills. They consult economic data and forecasts, they examine income statements and balance sheets, they evaluate the quality of top management, and they assess the competition. All this is serious work that requires extensive training. Unfortunately, skill in evaluating the business prospects of a firm is not sufficient for successful stock trading, where the key question is whether the information about the firm is already incorporated in the price of its stock. Traders apparently lack the skill to answer this crucial question, but they appear to be ignorant of their ignorance. As I had discovered from watching cadets on the obstacle field, subjective confidence of traders is a feeling, not a judgment.

© Daniel Kahneman. This is an extract from Daniel Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Allen Lane, £25)

Забота о подрастающем поколении в Луганске...

2011-10-18T09:28:46Z

http://www.dfact.net/news/show/2011-10-17/2918_v-luganske-zakryvayut-edinstvennuyu-v-ukraine-pravoslavnuyu-gimnaziyu-i-shkolu-multiplikacii

http://dfact.net/news/show/2011-10-17/2923_v-luganske-polovina-detsadov-do-six-por-bez-o

...

Про житомирских ментяр

2011-10-10T13:39:55Z

http://censor.net.ua/news/184358/v_jitomire_pyanyyi_militsioner_rasstrelyal_posetiteleyi_kafe_emu_meshali_pristavat_k_devushkam\

http://news.zn.ua/SOCIETY/militsionery_nachali_strelbu_v_zhitomirskom_kafe_posle_dozy_jack_danie

...

Мед. Продолжение эпопеи.

2011-10-28T09:09:15Z

Ну так вот. Закон про мед с пыльцой вступил в силу. Немецкие пчеловоды встречались с минстром потребления, чтобы обезопасить себя от дальнейших последствий вроде признания пыльцы примесью. Пока там еще не ясно, что будет дальше.
Тем временем провели массовые проверки меда с прилавков и в некоторых землях обнаружили канадский мед с пыльцой трансгенной кукурузы. Кто бы сомневался. Мед изъят из продажи и ждет.
Общество немецких пчеловодов вдруг озаботилось судьбой канадского меда и требует разъяснений, что с ним делать.
Сделан запрос в EFSA. EFSA заключило, что опасности для здоровья мед не представляет, хоть и находится вне закона.

А поскольку вне закона, значит должен быть уничтожен - мнение Зеленых. Внимание, еще раз - нормальный, никак не вредящий здоровью качественный продукт должен быть уничтожен. Депутат Бундестага возмущена - зеленым важнее следовать своей идеологии, нежели выступать против уничтожения полезного и безопасного продукта питания.

Ладно там с медом. Наш институт занимается изучением трансгенных растений. Десяток лет тому назад размечтались и построили целые Ньювасюки, который пафосно назвали биопарком. Лаборатории, теплицы по последнему слову техники. Все для биотехнологических стартапов. И вот уже много лет стоит эта красотища ... пустая. А кому оно надо, когда раз в год налетают гринписовские орки и уничтожают посевы? Понятно, надо что-то делать. Ну вот одна из монсант (пока не буду называть какая), так уж и быть, согласилась снять поля, теплицы и лаборатории для своих нужд. Нетрансгенных, конечно же, они тоже к коньюнктуре чувствительны, а классически селекционных. Но при одном условии, чтобы институт ни в коем случае не допустил переопыления с нашими экспериментальными трансгенами, в противном случае за переопыление будет финансово наказан. Закон такой. Лично для нас это означает свертывание экспериментальных программ. А речь идет, между прочим, о трансгенной пшенице с увеличенным содержанием белка. Мало нам орков с тяпками и улиями, теперь еще и фирмы.

Теперь взгляните на эту эпическую картину издалека, дорогие налогоплательщики. Экспериментальные исследования, которые проводятся на ваши деньги, проводиться не могут, потому что зеленые орки против. Это раз. А с другой стороны, фирма диктует условия институту, который существует на ваши кровные, какие исследования он может проводить, а какие нет. А все через прелестные законы о пыльце.

И в завершение, еще немного пыльцы. stanpolozov сходил в телевизор и что-то там говорил на тему ГМО. Откровенно говоря, слушала в пол-уха, пока не дослушала до какой-то там экспертши, которая на голубом глазу утверждала про межвидовое переопыление. Эта пыльца уже немного в печенках, если честно.

Can you be a little less specific?

2011-10-29T01:57:48Z

Game theorists are beginning to produce rational models of deliberate vagueness

Seinfeld’s George Costanza was once invited “up for coffee” at the end of a romantic evening, and refused: caffeine would keep him awake, he explained to his perplexed date. Later, aghast, he realised: “coffee doesn’t mean coffee! Coffee means sex!”

Well, indeed – but few people, if they are wise, will baldly suggest the sex. A little ambiguity is called for. Now game theorists – masters of the mathematisation of human interaction – are beginning to produce rational models of deliberate vagueness.

Andreas Blume and Oliver Board, two economists at the University of Pittsburgh, offer up just such a model. They point out that perhaps it is too much trouble to be specific, as with a business contract offering a fee plus “reasonable expenses”. This isn’t always the reason. “Coffee” has two syllables, “sex” has only one, and surely George’s date could have made her intentions plainer without much effort.

Perhaps it’s just a matter of social norms: it would have been shocking for George’s naughty-but-nice date to ask him to sleep with her, so instead she hinted that an attempt at seduction might not be rebuffed.

But there is often a logic behind such norms – for example, the opportunity to tweak the message depending on how it is received. If George seemed taken aback by the invitation for “coffee”, his lady friend would have retained plausible deniability. If he seemed interested but hesitant, she could have clarified the message by slipping into something more comfortable.

Alan Greenspan, the mumbling maestro of mixed messages, played the markets with one vague declaration after another, each one a nudge – but not a shove – in the direction he preferred.

The Blume-Board paper lurks on the boundary between philosophy and mathematics – and, ironically, it is extremely precise about what “vagueness” means. A working paper from the economists Florian Ederer, Richard Holden and Margaret Meyer has a more practical bent, examining the boss who finds it useful to be vague about performance bonuses.

The scenario here is one of an employer who cares about two tasks and an agent who finds it easier to do only one of them. Imagine a journalist who must both write words and spell them correctly: the boss needs both of these jobs done well, within reason: a mass of spelling mistakes is no use and neither is a tiny number of correctly spelled words.

The challenge is to design appropriate performance pay for the job, and the difficulty is, there are two types of journalist: those who find it easy to churn out reams of copy, and those who find it easy to spell correctly. The boss doesn’t know which type of journalist she is hiring. It would be easy to demand the impossible, and find no takers for the job; or to pay over the odds; or to hire a journalist but then inadvertently give him an incentive to neglect half the job.

In some important cases, say Ederer, Holden and Meyer, the boss will want to be deliberately ambiguous about what sort of performance will be rewarded. Will the bigger reward go to the careful speller or to the hasty typist? One type of ambiguous contract has the boss tossing a coin and rewarding either one type of achievement or the other. An alternative contract – a variant of “you cut the cake and then I’ll choose” – allows the boss to choose one of two performance metrics after she has seen what kind of performance has actually been produced.

There’s a cost to all this ambiguity, of course: it’s risky for the journalist, who must then be compensated. Nevertheless this can be a price worth paying.

We’re used to thinking of ambiguity as a flaw in contracts, agreements and management styles. But when your boss gives you vague directions or bases your performance bonus on inconsistent and ever-changing criteria, perhaps there’s method in the madness.

Also published at ft.com.

Marginal Revolution, articulated

2011-10-22T12:05:37Z

The minivan driver who knocked Wang down, and then ran over her deliberately, has since surrendered to the police, but offered a curious explanation for his action. He said he had been talking on his mobile phone when he hit the girl, but decided to run her over because it would have cost him less to pay off a dead girl’s parents than to pay for her hospital expenses.

“If she had died, I would have been required to pay only about 20,000 yuan (about Rs 1.5 lakh) in compensation, but if she were injured, it would cost me hundreds of thousands of yuan in hospital expenses,” he said.

Here is more and for the pointer I thank Karthik S.

женщины конеш не любят-когда им отказывают)),но обожают-когда

2011-10-11T18:49:39Z

женщины конеш не любят-когда им отказывают)),но обожают-когда отказывают другим женщинам))

вот счас показывали про рисунки детей, по которым психологи

2011-10-29T19:49:51Z

вот счас показывали про рисунки детей, по которым психологи определяют подвергались ли дети насилию. подумалось - в 9 лет я уже рисовал голых девак. в подробностях. а тут какие-то коты с пушистыми хвостами

Now... I can die in peace!

2011-10-23T11:45:20Z

Submitted by: doktor_zlo
Posted at: 2011-10-22 14:44:03
See full post and comment: http://9gag.com/gag/396183

В Великобритании из-за скандалов упразднен Уэльский университет

2011-10-23T06:41:00Z

После серии скандалов с дипломами и визами упразднен второй по величине в Великобритании Уэльский университет. Руководство вуза со 120-летней историей ушло в отставку. Его существование было прекращено вслед за серией разоблачений.

Watts wrote a check he couldn't cash

2011-10-23T15:36:47Z

That wacky climate change denier and radio weather broadcaster Anthony Watts took a brave step a while back, and I commend him for it. He was enthused about an independent research project, the Berkeley Earth Project, that would measure the planet's temperature over the last centuries and compare it to the work of NOAA and NASA on earth's temperature — he apparently expected that it would show that NASA and NOAA had been inflating the data. He was so confident that he went on the record saying:

I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.

Excellent! That's a good scientific attitude.

So the results have been published, and they look like this:

Results from the Berkeley Earth project data fits existing NASA and NOAA temperature records like a glove

You can probably see the NASA/NOAA data wiggling beneath the dark bold line of new data from the Berkeley Earth Project. They're rather…close. Intimate, even.

What do you think Anthony Watts' response was?

I consider the paper fatally flawed as it now stands, and thus I recommend it be removed from publication consideration by JGR until such time that it can be reworked.

Yep. Didn't give the results he wanted. Therefore, the experiment is bad.

(Also on FtB)

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