I’ve been noticing a lot of articles in the news lately, all citing The Journal of Consumer Research. Odds are that it’s because newspeople are paying more attention to consumption thanks to America’s holiday traditions, but that doesn’t make it bad. In fact, I’m impressed with some of the stuff that they’re doing research on. I wonder who pays for it, but regardless, they are interesting questions.
Unless you’ve got access to it through a university account or otherwise, one of the best options is their Publicity page, followed by the usual googling of the study’s authors to find out more about how it was actually done.
Bruce Wayne drinks ginger ale at parties to help keep his body and mind in top shape. I don’t have a good source for this, in that there’s no single authoritative reference that I can link to.
There’s also Wikipedia. Just go to the Batman page, and then search in the page for “ginger ale”.
This makes me happy, because I like Batman/Bruce Wayne, and I also like ginger ale. Generally when I’m at a bar, there’s whiskey and a slice of lime involved, but this isn’t a bad idea for ending the night if I have to drive.
Also, Batman used ginger ale as a replacement for champagne. Something worth remembering for NYE. Happy 2012, everyone!
When singing (or in this case, rapping) along with Kanye, do we say a certain racially insensitive word or do we censor ourselves?
Valid arguments were made for both sides.
Saying the N-word
Pro: Remaining true to Kanye’s artistic vision, saying his words, each of them, exactly as he intended, even the ones that might not be so artistic.
Con: Inciting a full-scale race riot and/or getting our arses kicked.
Not saying the N-word
Pro: Showing our support at the ugliness of the word, the hatred of a term filled with venom.
Con: Drawing even more attention to the word as a mostly white audience goes mute, leaving only Kanye to say it, thus inciting a full-scale race riot and/or getting our arses kicked.
We ultimately decided to self-censor, but we also faced another dilemma: what word do we say in its place? Sure, Kanye helped us with “Now I ain’t saying she’s a golddigger, but she ain’t messing with no broke, broke,” but there was nothing to save us from Jesus Walks’ lyrics in which restless (N-words) might snatch your necklace or jack your Lexus before being told who Kanye West is.
Rap music is all about the rhythm and flow of the words, so it’s not really possible to just replace the N-word with a more politically correct term – “Now I ain’t saying she’s a golddiger, but she ain’t messing with no broke African-Americans.”
I feel like this is a real problem for white rap fans.
Eminem doesn’t drop n-bombs. Chamillionaire also stopped cursing — and his records don’t feel like they’ve been toned down.
But megastars like Kanye and Jay Z haven’t. Not to mention that even if they did, there’s a long legacy of music that we aren’t going back and re-cutting, like some rap version of George Lucas, trying to uncover the “original artistic vision”.
I’ve personally started using ‘brother’ in my head since it’s the most reasonable approximation that doesn’t destroy the continuity (“Where’d you get the beauty scar, tough guy? Eating pineapple?”), ends in -er, and it’s not terrible for rhymes that require the hard ‘g’ sound. Plus, in “Golddigger”, you get a nice consonance on the ‘b’: “I ain’t sayin’ she a golddigger, but she ain’t messin with no broke brother”.
I do think this is interesting, because racism is an issue that’s gone on for generations, and I wonder if things like Kanye saying “okay just this once” is a way of breaking the ice and improving the social (not economic) situation. It’ll be interesting to see how this progresses over the next 40 years.
I read an article today about Steve Jobs on Obama, and I know everyone gets all excited when it’s a Jobs quote, but I think his take on this is right, and if anything, the fact that he said it might push some people to pay attention.
‘You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” Steve Jobs told President Obama at the beginning of a one-on-one session the president requested early last year. As described in the authorized biography by Walter Isaacson, Apple’s founder said regulations had created too many burdens on the economy.
Jobs was an Obama supporter, but his just-disclosed comments are typical of a new frustration with Washington among Silicon Valley executives. Their high-tech companies are supposed to be the country’s engine for growth, but the federal government is gumming up the works.
Mr. Isaacson reports that Jobs offered to Mr. Obama to “put together a group of six or seven CEOs who could really explain the innovation challenges facing America.” But after White House aides got involved with planning the dinner, it became unwieldy and Jobs pulled out.
When a smaller dinner was arranged last February, the result was more estrangement of Silicon Valley from Washington. Mr. Obama was seated between Jobs and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The dinner also included top executives from companies such as Google, Cisco and Oracle.
According to Mr. Isaacson, Jobs “stressed the need for more trained engineers and suggested that any foreign students who earned an engineering degree in the U.S. should be given a visa to stay in the country.” The president reportedly replied that this would have to await broader immigration reform, which he said he was unable to accomplish.
“Jobs found this an annoying example of how politics can lead to paralysis,” Mr. Isaacson writes. “The president is very smart, but he kept explaining to us reasons why things can’t get done,” Jobs said. “It infuriates me.”
Jobs told Mr. Obama that Apple employs 700,000 factory workers in China because it can’t find the 30,000 engineers in the U.S. that it needs on site at its plants. “If you could educate these engineers,” he said at the dinner, “we could move more manufacturing jobs here.”
One of the benefits of free trade, including in the movement of labor, is that skills would go where they are most valued. Jobs made the point that Silicon Valley is mystified by a policy that instead educates foreigner engineers at top U.S. universities, then sends them home immediately.
Among the attendees at the dinner was venture capitalist John Doerr, who during an Internet conference in 2008 described the absurdity memorably: “I would staple a green card to the diploma of anyone that graduates with a degree in the physical sciences or engineering in the U.S.”
Foreign nationals in the U.S. now account for 70% of doctorates in electrical engineering and half the master’s degrees. They would be more productive if permitted to remain in the U.S. Academic studies estimate that a quarter of technology businesses started in the U.S. since 1995 have had at least one foreign-born founder. Half of Silicon Valley startups are founded by foreigners.
The U.S. issues 140,000 green cards a year, which is not enough to meet demand even in this soft economy. Worse yet, the work-permit laws say that the residents of no country can get more than 7% of the permits. This is fine for Andorra and Liechtenstein but not for India and China, which have 18% and 19% of the world’s population, respectively. The National Foundation for American Policy calculates the 7% limit means a backlog of 70 years of applications from prospective Indian workers and 20 years from Chinese ones.
Vivek Wadwha is a native of India who started two tech companies in the U.S. before becoming an academic specializing in immigration. He recently testified to Congress that the U.S. is “giving an unintentional gift to China and India by causing highly educated and skilled workers, frustrated by long waits for visas, to return home.”
There’s little prospect of reform, even though Mr. Doerr’s staple-a-green-card idea has been endorsed by everyone from Mitt Romney to Chuck Schumer, the Democratic senator from New York. Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican, proposes the Staple Act (an acronym for Stopping Trained in America Ph.D.s from Leaving the Economy). As Pia Orrenius, author of “Beside the Golden Door,” says, letting more skilled workers stay in the U.S. is “as close to a free lunch” as the economy can get.
Jobs himself was the biological son of an immigrant professor father from Syria, who was lucky enough to be a graduate student in the U.S. in the 1950s when it was easier for foreigners to stay. (Jobs was adopted as a newborn.)
The culture of Silicon Valley is defined by engineers who approach problems logically, searching for the most elegant solution. Washington is different. Members of both parties prefer scoring political points on immigration even though this delays smarter approaches. It’s no wonder that people like Jobs who value innovation find Washington so infuriating.
I think that he’s right. I’ve been lightly involved with the IDEA Act going through Congress (thanks Craig Montuori and Tarik Ansari) which is trying to fix some of these issues.
The thing is, the IDEA Act is focused on entrepreneurs, but it’s also nuts that we kick out people who we have trained up to a very high standard who just want jobs. Not just jobs. Taxable jobs. High tax bracket jobs. For all the people freaked out about the economy, and how there are a lot of people not paying taxes (47% of Americans?), by keeping foreign-born, high-wage earners here, we’ll be benefiting by getting more money in taxes, which means lower tax rates for everyone else (what happens to the taxes after they’re taken is a totally different story, but…one piece at a time). Otherwise, we’re wasting money by training people to build up the economies of other countries.
Remember, it’s not “dey took our jerbs”, it’s “our jerbs got replaced by different types of jerbs that America isn’t doing a good job of training citizens for”
To reach more women, who account for about 10% of U.S. motorcycle owners, Harley dealers hold “garage parties,” such as one attended recently by Ms. Ruschman and several dozen other women. Scott Miller, marketing director of the Mentor dealership, spray-painted his hair pink and extolled the psychic benefits of cycling. “It’s about your ability to kind of extend your personality,” he said as the women sipped wine. “Or develop a new one.”
Harley pitches models with lower seats as easier for women to handle. The Harley website has a video showing how even a small woman can use leverage to pick up a bike of 550 pounds or more if it topples over. “The muscles that make it possible are in your legs and your butt,” the video explains.
Classy move…it seems like they thought through the feelings and mental state of what stops women from getting into riding motorcycles, and then went out to deal with the issue head-on. Much better than just making a new bike but not following through on getting women to enjoy motorcycling. There’s a lot to learn from this — excellent move on product-design-product-management. Might be interesting to watch these guys in the future.
In her influential research, Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mindset — they tend to agree with statements such as “You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it” — and those with a growth mindset, who believe that we can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy. While people with a fixed mindset see mistakes as a dismal failure — a sign that we aren’t talented enough for the task in question — those with a growth mindset see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education.
…
It turned out that those subjects with a growth mindset were significantly better at learning from their mistakes.
There is some serious gold here. Granted, nearly every time I see this discussed, it’s the same paper, so I’d love to see some peer-review and Devil’s Advocacy on the subject, but I can think of several examples where I’ve seen this effect, as well as heard about it from others.
Or, if we’re reducing psychology to phrases that would fit on a bumper sticker, “no matter if you think you can or you can’t, you’re right”
Unlike homo economicus, that imaginary species featured in macroeconomics textbooks, Kahneman and Tversky demonstrated that real people don’t deal with uncertainty by carefully evaluating all of the relevant information. They stink at statistics and rarely maximize utility. Instead, their choices depend on a long list of mental short cuts and intemperate emotions, which often lead them to pick the wrong options.
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Football coaches have performed just as badly. Although it’s now clear that their biases have a meaningful impact—a coach immune to loss aversion would win one more game in three seasons out of every four—their collective decision-making hasn’t improved.
This same theme applies to practically all of our thinking errors: self-knowledge is surprisingly useless. Teaching people about the hazards of multitasking doesn’t lead to less texting in the car; learning about the weakness of the will doesn’t increase the success of diets; knowing that most people are overconfident about the future doesn’t make us more realistic. The problem isn’t that we’re stupid—it’s that we’re so damn stubborn.
I’m mixed on this one. I know we all suffer from logical fallacies and mental shortcuts (Las Vegas magicians exploit these mental shortcuts hundreds of times per night), but there’s something here that I think is very important.
The example mentioned in the article of “think of the lives lost” versus “think of the lives saved” is a good example of making people think about losses (the psychological reframing), but from an economic and mathematical view, what they’re doing is inverting the question. It’s not about fancy math or statistics tricks, it’s just about remembering that sometimes there’s another way (the opposite) to look at whatever you’re being asked, and sometimes it changes your decision.
It’s surprising how often things come up that can be fixed by thinking with this trick.
OK, Internet. You and I need to have a talk. Nina beat you all again. She won/tied in the previous challenge, and took the cake on this one.
This morning I asked Why does Jack Donaghy look up when he drinks?. Alec Baldwin is in New York right now, in the middle of Hurricane Irene. So naturally, he’s replying to people on Twitter.
I am a big fan of 30 Rock. Great writing, acting, etc.
Alec Baldwin is awesome as Jack Donaghy. There’s one thing that he does for the character that sticks out, and I don’t entirely understand it.
When someone is smiling, it means they’re happy. If there are tears running down their face and their mouth is turned downward, it means they’re sad. These are obvious facial cues.
Every time Donaghy takes a drink on the show, he looks up at the ceiling.
This is the best image I could find, but he does it every single time in the show. I don’t understand what it means. Why is that consistently a part of the character. Does Alec Baldwin naturally look up at the ceiling when he drinks?
Internet — it’s your turn again. $20 for a credible answer to this question. Either something referencing an acting class, face-eye psychology info, or a more official source.
I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.
Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable.
To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.
The Waiter Rule also applies to the way people treat hotel maids, mailroom clerks, bellmen and security guards. Au Bon Pain co-founder Ron Shaich, now CEO of Panera Bread, says he was interviewing a candidate for general counsel in St. Louis. She was “sweet” to Shaich but turned “amazingly rude” to someone cleaning the tables, Shaich says. She didn’t get the job.
Shaich says any time candidates are being considered for executive positions at Panera Bread, he asks his assistant, Laura Parisi, how they treated her, because some applicants are “pushy, self-absorbed and rude” to her before she transfers the call to him.
Just about every CEO has a waiter story to tell. Dave Gould, CEO of Witness Systems, experienced the rule firsthand when a waitress dumped a full glass of red wine on the expensive suit of another CEO during a contract negotiation. The victim CEO put her at ease with a joke about not having had time to shower that morning. A few days later, when there was an apparent impasse during negotiations, Gould trusted that CEO to have the character to work out any differences.
Bruce Wayne drinks ginger ale at parties to help keep his body and mind in top shape. I don’t have a good source for this, in that there’s no single authoritative reference that I can link to.
