A Short Course in Behavioral Economics

in Business, Economics, Online Courses | October 9th, 2008

Here’s a course for our his­tor­i­cal moment.…

Behav­ioral economics—“the study of how think­ing and emo­tions affect indi­vid­ual eco­nom­ic deci­sions and the behav­ior of markets”—is a rel­a­tive­ly new dis­ci­pline. This approach to eco­nom­ics, which mar­ries psy­chol­o­gy and eco­nom­ics and dis­cards the assump­tion that every eco­nom­ic actor is ratio­nal, was devel­oped part­ly by Richard Thaler, Direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Deci­sion Research at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness. Now, thanks to the Edge.org, you can fol­low a short class on the sub­ject. It’s taught by Thaler him­self and he’s joined by Har­vard econ­o­mist Send­hil Mul­lainathan and Nobel Lau­re­ate Daniel Kah­ne­man.

The course, deliv­ered in text and video, is being rolled out week­ly on the Edge web site in six install­ments. You can find Weeks 1 and 2 here and here. And you can check back for new install­ments here (scroll to the very bot­tom of the page.)

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NPR’s Planet Money Podcast

in Business | October 2nd, 2008

This is worth a quick men­tion: If you’re try­ing to make sense of our rapid­ly chang­ing (and these days dete­ri­o­rat­ing) econ­o­my, then you’ll want to spend some time with NPR’s Plan­et Mon­ey. The pod­cast has been tak­ing an expert look at the day-to-day break­down of the finan­cial sys­tem and gov­ern­ment efforts to bail it out. Plus, it’s been keep­ing an eye on how the fias­co poten­tial­ly affects you. To stay on top of things, you can grab the pod­cast here: iTunes — Rss Feed. Also see the Plan­et Mon­ey Pod­cast web site here.

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The Financial Crisis Explained

in Business, Current Affairs | September 25th, 2008

NPR’s Fresh Air has been doing a very good job of demys­ti­fy­ing the finan­cial cri­sis. Here, we have an inter­view with the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning finan­cial jour­nal­ist, Gretchen Mor­gen­son. As you’ll see, the pro­gram (iTunes — RSS Feed — Stream Here) does an excel­lent job of con­nect­ing many small dots, explain­ing pre­cise­ly how the reck­less­ness of Wall Street threat­ens to spill over into Main Street and beyond, harm­ing our indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive finan­cial future. Even if you live out­side the US, this all prob­a­bly applies to you. Def­i­nite­ly worth a lis­ten.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ten Days That Shook The Finan­cial World

This Amer­i­can Life Demys­ti­fies The Cred­it Cri­sis

The 2008 Bailouts V. The Great Depres­sion Bailouts

 

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Download Cory Doctorow’s Technology Writings (Free New Book)

in Books, Business, Technology | September 10th, 2008

A quick fyi: Boing­Bo­ing blog­ger Cory Doc­torow has released a new col­lec­tion of essays called Con­tent: Select­ed Essays on Tech­nol­o­gy, Cre­ativ­i­ty, Copy­right, and the Future of the Future. As he sum­ma­rizes it, the book fea­tures “28 essays about every­thing from copy­right and DRM to the lay­out of phone-key­pads, the fal­la­cy of the seman­tic web, the nature of futur­ism, the neces­si­ty of pri­va­cy in a dig­i­tal world, the rea­son to love Wikipedia, the mir­a­cle of fan­f­ic, and many oth­er sub­jects.” You can down­load a free PDF ver­sion here, or pur­chase a hard copy here. Also don’t miss the free tech/copyright writ­ings by Lar­ry Lessig below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load a Free Copy of Cory Doctorow’s Best­seller, Lit­tle Broth­er

Free Down­load of Cory Doctorow’s Graph­ic Nov­els

Lawrence Lessig’s Free Cul­ture: Avail­able in Text or Audio (For Free)

The Future of Ideas: Down­load Your Free Copy (and More)

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The Gas Mileage Illusion (and the Future of Electric Cars)

in Business, Science, Video - Science | June 26th, 2008

Giv­en the sud­den nation­al obses­sion with the price of oil & gas, it seems worth flag­ging this bit of video put togeth­er by two pro­fes­sors from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty. Some may find their per­spec­tive on gas mileage rather obvi­ous, oth­ers not. Either way, it can’t hurt to get their point across.

Sep­a­rate­ly, here’s a quick piece on the state of elec­tric cars and when they may be ready for prime time. You’ll learn here about the Tes­la Road­ster, a high-per­for­mance elec­tric sports car, that goes from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.9 sec­onds and gets the equiv­a­lent of 256 miles per gal­lon. Pret­ty impres­sive, even if it costs $109k.

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Not Sure What to Title This: Just Some Video Goodness

in Business | June 15th, 2008

The Sam­sung f480, which is essen­tial­ly an iPhone clone, may not have scored too many points with the tech crit­ics. But its gueril­la mar­ket­ing on YouTube deserves some cred­it. Make a real­ly cre­ative video, sneak in some social com­men­tary, add some prod­uct place­ment at the very end, put it on YouTube, and watch it go viral:

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The Automated Publishing House

in Books, Business, Language Lessons, Media, Technology | April 14th, 2008

The New York Times has a great arti­cle on a pro­fes­sor of man­age­ment sci­ence who has found­ed an almost com­plete­ly auto­mat­ed pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny. The 200,000 books he’s pub­lished sound, well, ter­ri­ble, and ter­ri­bly over­priced: “Among the books pub­lished under his name are ‘The Offi­cial Patient’s Source­book on Acne Rosacea’ ($24.95 and 168 pages long); ‘Stick­ler Syn­drome: A Bib­li­og­ra­phy and Dic­tio­nary for Physi­cians, Patients and Genome Researchers’ ($28.95 for 126 pages); and ‘The 2007–2012 Out­look for Tuft­ed Wash­able Scat­ter Rugs, Bath­mats and Sets That Mea­sure 6‑Feet by 9‑Feet or Small­er in India’ ($495 for 144 pages).”

But Philip M. Park­er, the man behind them, is noth­ing if not ambi­tious. He’s also pro­gram­ming his machines to gen­er­ate lan­guage-learn­ing cross­words (i.e. clues in one lan­guage, answers in anoth­er), acros­tic poet­ry, and even scripts for game shows and videogames. All of this reminds me of a nov­el by Neal Stephen­son, The Dia­mond Age. In it, engi­neers of the future design a sort of arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent primer for young girls–the book gen­er­ates sto­ries and lessons on the fly. Maybe Park­er’s read this one before.

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One Laptop Per Child vs. Intel

in Business, MIT, Technology, Web/Tech | January 5th, 2008

The New York Times ran a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle today about the feud between Intel and the One Latop Per Child pro­gram run by MIT’s Nicholas Negro­ponte. If you haven’t heard about it, the ini­tia­tive is intend­ed to devel­op a rea­son­ably priced ($200) lap­top for pri­ma­ry school chil­dren in the third world. The mod­el they’re sell­ing now comes with a lot of cool fea­tures: mesh tech­nol­o­gy so a group of stu­dents can share one wifi con­nec­tion; low pow­er con­sump­tion and the abil­i­ty to recharge bat­ter­ies with solar cells or even a hand crank; a lin­ux oper­at­ing sys­tem and open source soft­ware.

I sus­pect that last fea­ture is caus­ing the biggest prob­lem for Intel. Accord­ing to the Times, com­pa­ny sales reps actu­al­ly tried to per­suade sev­er­al coun­tries to ditch the OLPC in favor of a more expen­sive machine run­ning Microsoft Win­dows. I don’t know about you but I have a hard time imag­in­ing dis­ad­van­taged Peru­vian first-graders keep­ing up with their secu­ri­ty updates, trou­bleshoot­ing the less-than-stel­lar Win­dows wifi util­i­ty or shelling out for that upgrade to Vista.

Maybe those kids need oth­er things more than they need lap­tops, but it can’t hurt. In any case it’s hard to believe how bad­ly Intel man­aged this saga in terms of pub­lic rela­tions. Think of the chil­dren, guys!

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