Tweet Trove 4 (6-12 December, 2009)

Apologies for the delay in posting this one - No connectivity for most of yesterday and when finally I could access the Internet, data seemed to be percolating through thick molasses.

Arts, Culture, Literature

Classic Twitterature - University of Chicago students reinterpret great works of literature into Twitter-speak: http://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local-beat/Classic-Twitterature-78848847.html

When bad covers happen to good books: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/books/review/Queenan-t.html?_r=4&ref=books

Are Writers Using TMA (Too Many Acronyms)? : http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=78&aid=173933

Business and Economics

The wonderful world of Walt Disney (infographic) : http://www.busmanagement.com/news/walt-disney-productions/

Education, e-Learning

How iPhone Could Reboot Education - Abilene Christian University has a go: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/12/iphone-university-abilene/

Top 125 Workplace eLearning Posts of 2009: http://www.elearninglearning.com/wpblog/top-elearning-posts-2009/

Humor

Parenthood be not proud: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2009/12/04/traister_parenting_makes_me_dumb/index.html

Facebook suggestions (ahem) : http://xkcd.com/672/

Internet, Science and Technology

In the Brain, Seven Is A Magic Number: http://www.physorg.com/news178220995.html#top

Gallery: The Year's Most Amazing Scientific Images | Popular Science: http://www.popsci.com/science/gallery/2009-12/gallery-years-most-amazing-scientific-images

BusinessWeek -Beware Social Media Snake Oil: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_50/b4159048693735.htm?chan=magazine+channel_top+stories

11 Google Chrome Extensions, For Starters: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/05/11-chrome-extensions-for-starters/?utm_source=feedburner

Etcetera

"Can you break your culture of silence?" - Sunitha Krishnan's fight against sex slavery: http://on.ted.com/287S

If you can save some trees, why not save some lettuce? http://cafehayek.com/2009/12/save-the-spinach.html

Tweet Trove 3 (29 November-5 December, 2009)

Arts, Culture, Literature

Top Words of 2009: http://www.languagemonitor.com/news/top-words-of-2009

Business and Economics

Do prostitutes want prostitution to be legal? Is a pimp no different than a corporate manager? More Q&A: http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/superfreakonomics-book-club-sudhir-venkatesh-answers-your-prostitution-questions/#more-22489

The dark side of Dubai: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/the-dark-side-of-dubai-1664368.html

Education, e-Learning

The Psychology of Achievement In Playing Games: http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/awesome-by-proxy-addicted-to-fake.html

e-book: Theory and Practice of Online Learning (caution: 484 pages; pdf): http://www.aupress.ca/books/120146/ebook/99Z_Anderson_2008-Theory_and_Practice_of_Online_Learning.pdf

Discursive Learning:Knowing "What is missing in educational curriculum is this sense of play, this sense of tinkering." http://discursive-learning.blogspot.com/2009/11/knowing.html

EnerCities - The First Serious Game On Facebook: http://seriousgamesmarket.blogspot.com/2009/12/enercities-first-serious-game-on.html

Humor

Elementary My Dear Watson: http://www.thedoghousediaries.com/?p=1096

Why Twitter? http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-24/

If the Bible was magazines: http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1795235

Internet, Science and Technology

Is slavery the new green energy? http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/03/cycling-energy-slavery

How our brains build social worlds: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427370.500-how-our-brains-build-social-worlds.html?full=true

TwHistory: http://www.twhistory.com/?page_id=2. Intriguing use of Twitter.

An alternate oral history of the last decade - If Al Gore had won: http://2010.newsweek.com/essay/if-gore-had-won.html

The journey of a tweet -- How 'tweets' become worldwide news within a matter of minutes? http://www.ngonlinenews.com/news/the-journey-of-a-tweet/

Periodic table - social media elements: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eyecube/3302969531/sizes/l/, Internet: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/2053007240/sizes/l/, 28 more periodic tables: http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/redeye/2009/12/not-your-grandmothers-periodic-tables-30-charts-that-have-nothing-to-do-with-chemicals.html

The Seattle Times is using Google Wave to catching a killer: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/30/google-wave-manhunt/

Etcetera

The World's 18 Strangest Roads: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/4338387.html?page=1

What TED didn’t get about India: http://www.financialexpress.com/news/column-what-ted-didnt-get-about-india/539729/0

Rectangles Vs. Triangles: The Great Sandwich Debate : http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120914097

Top 100 global thinkers: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/30/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=full

Tweet Trove 2 (21-28 November, 2009)

Arts, Culture, Literature

"Publishing is changing. I’m ready to see what it turns into and change my expectations with it." http://bit.ly/1weHjv

How Twitter Makes You A Better Writer: http://www.copyblogger.com/twitter-writing/

Business and Economics

The amazing world of Coca-Cola (infographic): http://www.busmanagement.com/news/coca-cola/

Education, e-Learning

Educational games and interactivities from National Geographic: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/channel/games

2009-2014 forecasts of the US market for e-learning: http://tinyurl.com/ydypry8. (Caution: pdf)

A Quick Guide to Social Learning - 100+ examples of the use of social media in learning: http://c4lpt.co.uk/handbook/examples.html

Humor

Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn From Twilight: http://www.wired.com/underwire/2009/11/twilight-lessons-girls-learn/

Internet vices: Twitter is crack cocaine? Facebook = cranberry vodka? http://www.patrickmoberg.com/internet-vices/

The Chronicles of Narnia? http://xkcd.com/665/

8 ways to kill an idea: http://www.samiviitamaki.com/?p=336

Internet, Science and Technology

Evolution of storage (infographic) : http://www.flickr.com/photos/7979419@N02/4131812966/sizes/l/

The story of the Titanic Gulp - big *is* beautiful: check out this lovely piece on how whales dine: http://bit.ly/6aBfh6

"Wikipedia is now part of the establishment" Fears over future of Wikipedia as 49,000 volunteers leave site: http://bit.ly/6PnDHN

A useful compendium: Jane Hart's Guide to Social Learning: http://icio.us/db40th

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design: 6 Bones of Contention: http://bit.ly/6mpg6N

Google Image Search meets the Visual Thesaurus: Google Image Swirl -- http://image-swirl.googlelabs.com/

Top 5 Misconceptions About The LHC : http://bit.ly/8tBx8G

Silence! The Last of the Giant Radio Telescopes Is Listening to the Universe http://bit.ly/1x4wzo

SETI: Building a Better Alien-Calling Code -- http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/11/better-seti-code/

Why Fiction is Valuable: Two Economists Discuss Fiction

Tyler Cowen's and Robin Hanson's opinion: It’s about signaling (a term of art in economics). Your preferences in fiction, and the way you articulate those preferences, signal your attitudes, values, and ideas to others. Fiction thus serves as a way of “getting people in touch with each other.”

Basically, they are saying, you read the kind of stuff you do because of it serves as a social marker: it benefits you personally by helping you connect with similar people.



Cowen points out that the kind of fiction you read signals to the people what you are capable of learning about the world and that you look to form alliances and associations with people who also appear to learn the same things.

Does that explain why people (ok if not all, at least the avid readers) check the bookshelves of people they visit? I accept that Cowen's and Hanson's contention probably does explain a part of the picture. One thing that reading and choice of reading material allows you to do is to present to the others that "I am this sort of a person with these kind of tastes."

But I am not entirely convinced by the argument. The same can be postulated about virtually anything — music, movies, food.

Reading fiction is not valuable only for what it "signals" about you (as too is the case with music, movies, and food). I am sure pleasure plays a significant role in it — to be a part of worlds (and themes, values, etc) that you find interesting and appealing. And the opportunity to create and recreate these worlds with your own imagination.

The embedded video is only an excerpt. To view the complete video (or in case you are unable to view the embedded video) visit this link at Bloggingheads.tv: Does Fiction Weaken Your Grasp of Reality?

Robert Frost: Poet Economist

Frost's famous The Road Not Taken is as good an exploration of the economist's idea of opportunity cost as you might wish for. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening touches on the same subject and, for me, is a far more haunting poem. Then there's Mending Wall, an inquiry into whether property rights make for a civilised society - do good fences really make good neighbours? I realise I am not winning Robert Frost any new fans here.

Tim Harford unearths economics in unexpected places, including the poems of Robert Frost (poems) and in 9 other books.
Top 10 undercover economics books by Tim Harford.

Multiple-Choice Question of the Day

Left would seek probe into the IPL auction because (Select all that apply):

• (It is) outrageous gambling.
• It will not only spoil the future of this game but make every youngster not a good sportsman but a man hungry for money.
• Now when the advertisement world has determined the price tag for the individual cricketers in the auction, all the money will be made from the innocent sport-loving fans.
• It has become a business for which money decides every thing.
• P T Usha, Milkha Singh, Shiny Wilson, A Nachappa are the stories of the past. Is not the concern of the country as a whole?

Did you select all of the above?

You didn't. Don't you think that the whole episode was "unbelievable and shameful?" And it should be "thoroughly probed by a government agency. "

You don't? The Left does.

And in India the Left is always right.

The 15 Richest Fictional Characters

The Forbes' annual listing of fiction's 15 wealthiest characters. This year's selections include a duck, an alien, and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Aggregate (fictional) net worth? $137 billion.

Virtual Shakespeare

Shakespeare has a very rich lore and fantasy environment second only to Tolkien, . . . Both have elves.

Professor Edward Castronova and colleagues in the Synthetic Worlds Institute at the University of Indiana have built a virtual gameworld - Arden - around the Shakespeare's plays.

Lest you mistake Arden for just another virtual game:

An economist by training, Prof Castronova has led attempts to quantify the economic activity and impact of virtual worlds - be that in the games themselves or in the real world when people pay cold cash for virtual goods.

Arden, said Prof Castronova, was an attempt to go much further than this after the fact analysis. It will give social scientists an entire populated world on which to perform experiments - something always lacking in the real world.

"We're interested in social dynamics and economics," he said.

Read: The Bard Helps Digital Experiment

Are you Feeling Lucky?

On Google's clean, white homepage the little "I'm Feeling Lucky" button has survived in spite of many changes to the page in all these years. Did you know that it costs Google around $110 million in annual revenue? The button takes searchers directly to the top search result and this doesn't allow Google to show search ads on one percent of all its searches.

Then why does Google keep such a costly button around?

Has our Prime Minister Lost it?

PM Manmohan Singh has asked businesses not to fuel a rich-poor divide with excessive salaries and greedy behavior:

Resist excessive remuneration to promoters and senior executives and discourage conspicuous consumption," he said. "Rising income and wealth inequalities, if not matched by a corresponding rise of incomes across the nation, can lead to social unrest.

He also added:

We cannot afford the wasteful lifestyles of the Western world. Conspicuous consumption must be reduced.

Seriously, is this guy an economist? As far as my limited knowledge of economics goes, spending and consuming is one good way (the best way) to ensure that the benefits of wealth are distributed to all involved in the manufacture of what (whether goods or services) was consumed.

Manmohan Singh's primary theme in his speech to the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) seems to be the idea of equitable distribution of wealth. Hence all that beef in the PM's speech about "wasteful lifestyles" and "conspicuous consumption." The way to spread wealth is that someone spends it — whatever be that person's lifestyle. The wealth will eventually trickle down to all in the manufacturing and supply chain.

The way to ensure that the a rich-poor divide doesn't grow wider is not by recommending that the salaries of senior executives in any industry be limited but by making sure that businesses and industries have enough incentives to grow and create more and more jobs. If the government can do that, then perhaps it won't have to keep up the pretence of being humane and compassionate and the PM can stop being stupid and directing the industry about how it should be doing its business and paying its employees.

If you Want to Understand Inequality Today . . .

. . . you must first understand Harry Potter.

Alex Tabarrok writes in Marginal Revolution:

[. . .] Rowling's success brings with it inequality. Time is limited and people want to read the same books that their friends are reading so book publishing has a winner-take all component. Thus, greater leverage brings greater inequality. The average writer's income hasn't gone up much in the past thirty years but today, for the first time ever, a handful of writers can be multi-millionaires and even billionaires. The top pulls away from the median.

The same forces that have generated greater inequality in writing - the leveraging of intellect, the declining importance of physical labor in the production of value, cultural and economic globalization - are at work throughout the economy. Thus, if you really want to understand inequality today you must first understand Harry Potter.

The Taming of Indian Street Food

From The New York Times:

[. . .] as incomes rise and ways of eating change, the inevitable has happened. Street food, that emblem of raucous, messy, urban India, is slowly being tamed.

In recent years, it has begun to come indoors, get sterilized, and go upmarket.
[. . .]

So we have fast-food chains where cooks use gloves, food is served in disposable plastic cups and plates, pani puri (a.k.a gol gappa, or phoochka) is prepared with mineral water, five star hotels serve chaat with a bottle of champagne, and pani puri spiked with vodka is favorite cocktail snack.

Economics of Attention

Because of this information explosion, we no longer read - we skim. The news that used to last a day now lasts just a few hours, simply because we need to pay attention to the new news. So it is becoming increasingly difficult to juggle all the news sources and keep on top of things. [. . .]

Things get more interesting when we realize that our attention crisis is not only our problem. It is also a big problem for news sites, blogs, search engines and online retailers. Our scarcity of attention hurts their economics. The web sites that contain content relevant to us have a big incentive to make sure that we find it. [. . .]

The basic ideas behind the Attention Economy are simple. Such an economy facilitates a marketplace where consumers agree to receives services in exchange for their attention. The ultimate purpose is of course to sell something to the consumer, but the selling does not need to be direct and does not need to be instant. For example news feeds illustrate the point well, since they ask for consumers attention in exchange for the opportunity to show him/her advertising. The Search engines are similar in that respect, because they show ads in exchange for helping users find answers online.

It is important to realize that the key ingredient in the attention game is relevancy. As long as a consumer sees relevant content, he/she is going to stick around - and that creates more opportunities to sell. [. . .]

The Read/Write Web analyses The Attention Economy and how the web is affecting our "attention space."

Jobs Americans Won't do

Apart from software coding, there are quite a few jobs that the U.S. now needs to outsource or turn to immigrants. Why? Because Americans just won't do certain jobs, especially the dirty, difficult ones.

And this trend of refusing work now seems to be moving up the value chain.

Little wonder why the U.S. needs to draw deeply from the global labor pool.