Your flight has an impact. Plane Stupid’s new cinema ad, written and commissioned by creative agency Mother and made by production company Rattling Stick. Director Daniel Kleinman.
You will probably find it either daring or tasteless depending on which side of the green line you stand. The fact is that flying imposes negative externalities on the environment. If this video’s primary objective is to stimulate discussion on the problem it is a hit. However, the group that came up with it seems to be looking at the wrong solution - they want to limit commercial flying in order to reduce its impact on nature. This could hardly work. A much better way to tackle the issue is to invest heavily in research and implementation of better flight technologies that would increase efficiency and reduce emissions.
I used to follow Belle de Jour - the diary of a London call girl - back in the days when I was still living in the UK capital. It was titillating and seemed authentic despite the anonymity of the author. The writing was excellent and the subject matter was naturally quite interesting. I was not surprised when the blog won the Guardian best written blog award in 2003. The online success was followed by a few books that proved quite popular (but I never read). However, the identity of the author remained elusive. Until now.
Behold, Belle de Jour is Dr Brooke Magnanti, a PhD in informatics, epidemiology and forensic science. She is a specialist in neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology currently working at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health. In an interview for the Sunday Times she confirms that she was a call girl for 14 months:
From 2003 to late 2004, Brooke worked as a prostitute via a London escort agency; she started blogging as Belle de Jour — after the Buñuel film starring Catherine Deneuve as a well-to-do housewife who has sex for money because she’s bored — shortly into her career as a call girl, after an incident she thought funny enough to write down.
She charged £300 an hour for her services, of which she got £200. The average appointment lasted two hours; she saw clients two or three times a week, “sometimes less, sometimes a great deal more”. How many men has she slept with for money? “A lot.” Dozens? Hundreds? “I can’t honestly remember,” she says, laughing. “Somewhere between dozens and hundreds.”
Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains including job performance, mental health, sports, business, and combat. Many authors have suggested that overconfidence — defined here as believing you are better than you are in reality — is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, resolve, morale, persistence, and/or the bluffing of opponents. However, too much overconfidence can cause arrogance, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters, and wars, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing accurate beliefs. Here, we present an evolutionary model that shows overconfidence actually maximizes individual fitness and populations will tend to become overconfident, as long as the resources at stake during conflicts exceed twice the cost of competition. This is because overconfident individuals make more challenges when there is uncertainty about the strength of opponents (and thus the outcome of conflicts), while less confident individuals shy away from many conflicts they would win. Where the value of a prize is at least twice the cost of trying, overconfidence is the best strategy. The model suggests that the conditions under which humans would have evolved to have a “rational” unbiased view of their own capabilities are exceedingly rare, and it helps to explain why resource-rich environments can paradoxically create more conflict. Moreover, the fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable may be one reason why overconfidence persists today in politics, business, and finance, even if it causes occasional disasters.
I have been at both ends of the confidence spectrum. My experience and anecdotal evidence suggest that overconfidence indeed is the way to go most of the time. The funny thing is that in such a state I feels better about myself and the task at hand. I guess this is nature’s way to show me what works best.
Of course, there can always come that painful moment when ability and luck come short. In such a case I suggest - panic. Then get over it as fast as you can and try, try again.
Academic Earth streams lectures from Harvard, MIT, Yale, Berkley, Stanford and Princeton. The web site is clean and easy to navigate. Everything is free.
“Barack thinks with his mind open,” said Charles Ogletree, a law professor at Harvard. “Larry thinks with his mouth open.”
On the president-elect and his top economic advisor. The source article is here.
On another note, Larry Summers’ career swings remind me that the greatest setbacks to intellectual development come from the ever increasing push for political correctness. In the impossible task not to offend anyone in any imaginable way, some of the most progressive people choose to burn daring intellectuals in mass media bonfires for challenging noble ideas that rest on false premises. This is wrong. The consequences of persecutions against individuals who only hypothesize things that are at odds with convenient notions go beyond them losing jobs and career prospects - the chilling effect becomes a silent killer of ideas. In Larry Summers’ case, he just suggested an explanation to the current situation in tier 1 academia. He might, or might not have belived that the underrepresentation of women in certain sciences is due to innate differences between the sexes. But those two are facts and linking them does not spell the end of the world. Larry’s idea did not postulate that the most brilliant mathematician alive cannot be a woman but rather that she will most likely be in the company of five men with almost similar abilities at the top.
For the first time, a gene is being linked to increased susceptibility to the placebo effect, the mysterious capacity some people have to benefit from sham treatments. (link to source)
I wonder whether prayer works in the same way. If it did, there is a whole new (literal) meaning to Karl Marx’s religion is the opiate of the people. But before you jump on the God worship/alternative medicine wagon have in mind that neither prayer nor the placebo effect help solve the underlying problem. They just might alleviate the symptoms for a small subset of the population.
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