No baby, you really ARE beautiful…
Carry a lie detector in your pocket:
The Love Detector is based on layered voice analysis, a system that was developed for security work by Nemesysco, an Israeli company, and adapted for personal use by V Worldwide, the international distributor.
The Love Detector relies on a simplified form of the technology, said Richard Parton, chief executive of V Worldwide. The security version applies 8,000 algorithms to 129 parameters of a speaking voice, assessing, among other things, levels of emotion, embarrassment and concentration as well as whether what is said reflects certainty, uncertainty or outright lies.
When this reporter tried it informally, both in person and over the phone, the results were arguably accurate; the software detected the split in my attention as I took notes, though it misinterpreted my skepticism about the product as condescension.
Buy one here.
Some versions of the new product will put James Bond to shame:
Later this year V plans to introduce a simplified version built into sunglasses, with light-emitting diodes to signal emotional intensity and truth or falsehood.
Here is one article about the product. Here is the whole story. The article notes that many people will use the product to assess their own emotions, not just the person they are trying to court.
Stuck with that gift certificate?
Swap it in for a gift certificate from a different store. Tens of thousands of people have used certificateswap.com, a central clearinghouse for such exchanges.
Here is the full story.
There is, of course, a bid-ask spread for such swaps. So a $25.00 certificate from The Gap brings you $23.00 of value at the clearinghouse. For Walden Books you can the lesser sum of $22.00. The discount on Sears certificates is especially noticeable, you get only $40 in value for a $50 certificate. Who needs another lawnmower anyway? Here is a fuller list of prices. My perusal suggests that Niketown has the biggest percentage discount, Bath & Body Works has the smallest, I suppose everyone needs soap.
Thanks to Daniel Akst for the pointer.
Don’t miss the gorilla
Picture yourself watching a one-minute video of two teams of three players each. One team wears white shirts and the other black shirts, and the members move around one another in a small room tossing two basketballs. Your task is to count the number of passes made by the white team – not easy given the weaving movement of the players. Unexpectedly, after 35 seconds a gorilla enteres the room, walks directly through the farrago of bodies, thumps his chest and, nine seconds later, exits. Would you see the gorilla?
Fifty percent of all observers do not see the gorilla.
This is called inattentional blindness, the link offers some further examples and tests. The bottom line: if you are concentrating on one static task, you often fail to notice dynamic movement. This is one reason why you should not drive and talk on your cell phone at the same time.
The quotation is from the March issue of Scientific American. Here is the the original research. Here are some additional studies, also look here. Here is a page of video exercises, although now you know what and who to look for.
The bottom line for economics? Neither investors nor voters need be rational in procedural terms. Searching more does not guarantee a better outcome. An “obvious” bubble can catch large numbers of investors unaware. And we, as voters, can fixate on some aspects of candidates and miss entirely their most important qualities.
British national patrimony
Thirty years ago the British government drew up a list of 35 privately-owned paintings, on British territory, that should be kept in Britain for reasons of national heritage. The pictures were deemed “of such outstanding quality that they should not under any circumstances be allowed to leave the country.” Many were hanging in country homes, and many have since been acquired by British public sector museums. The British government will help institutions bid more heavily for such pictures, to keep them in the country.
N.B.: Not a single British work is on the list.
Here is the full story.
My take: On one hand, the cosmopolitan British perspective is to be applauded. But why oh why does the British government feel it is a superior artistic investor? Taxpayers never see this money again and most of them never go see the pictures. Don’t cite museum visitorship statistics to me, most people never see the pictures or would know if they are gone. And with the Louvre just a few hours across the Chunnel, it is really necessary to stop a Poussin from going to the United States? Odd that a national patrimony policy should grant its biggest subsidy to foreign tourists and to the reputations of foreign artists.
Winner’s curse revisited
1. Cable giant Comcast offered $54 billion to buy Disney.
2. Comcast shares fell eight percent yesterday.
Need I say more? Furthermore the evidence suggests that Comcast later may be dismantled or itself become a takeover target.
Stock market facts
1. The earliest known example of an organized market for equities dates from Rome, second century B.C.
2. Nathan Mayer Rothschild arranged his own personal transportation to the Battle of Waterloo, which he viewed from a distance. He bribed a ship to hurry him back to London, where he traded on his information of a British victory.
3. In 1913, 52.3 percent of all traded securities in London were non-British in origin. Great Britain exported seven percent of its gdp in the form of foreign investment, a figure which no developed nation has equalled since.
4. In 1929 less than two percent of all American households were buying stocks on margin. At the peak of the boom the average P/E ratio for NYSE-listed stocks was 16 to 1, which is not especially high by subsequent standards.
5. In 1958-9 dividend yields on stocks fell below bond rates in the U.S. and U.K., for the first time. They have stayed below ever since. At the time this was a source of shock and worry, the Modigliani-Miller theorem was not yet widely understood.
The above facts are from B. Mark Smith’s engaging The Equity Culture: The Story of the Global Stock Market.
Addendum: Michael Ward writes:
I recently came across a passage that identifies an even earlier example than second century BC Rome. Archeologists have uncovered evidence of what amounts to a stock market operating almost 2600 years ago. The following passage is set in a discussion of life among the subject peoples of Cyrus the Great, 559-530 BC, but also refers to archeological findings from the late Chaldean period and early Achaemenid period, roughly 650-500 BC. The passage reads:
“One more feature of contemporary economic life is strangely modern. In earlier times the high temple officials obtained as perquisites of their offices the right to certain of the sacrifices on certain days. These prebends were now bought and sold on the open market, not only for a given day, but for a small fraction of a day. The temple had become a huge corporation, shares of which could be transferred on what almost corresponded to our modern stock exchange.”
[A.T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 85]
Second Addendum: The Rothschild fact is wrong, thanks to Jay McCarthy for the right answer.
N. Gregory Mankiw vs. John Kerry
Free-trader Daniel Drezner offers full coverage of Mankiw’s pro-outsourcing testimony before Congress. Brad DeLong defends Mankiw, free trade and outsourcing. John Kerry attacks Mankiw’s words and his campaign. He also dismisses a voter-calling service that had been routing its phone calls through Canada.
My idea: Unless a candidate supports free trade, his party can only drive supporters to the polls with American-made cars.
Update: The Kerry family fortune operates 57 factories in foreign countries.
The new Michelin winners
The Michelin dining guide will upgrade three restaurants, all in France, to three-star status. One three-star restaurant will be demoted to two stars. The Michelin three-star designation is the highest a restaurant can obtain, right now there are only twenty-seven three-star restaurants in the world.
Perhaps it is no accident that only three stars are used for the world’s most rigorous restaurant system (Gault-Milleau, in contrast, has a scale up to twenty). The smaller the number of stars, the harder it is to inflate the standard. If the scale has one hundred steps, no one can really tell if a “73” restaurant is pushed up to a “75” rating by mistake. Ratings inflation can slip in over time. But everyone knows if a restaurant is elevated to three-star status by mistake.
Michelin precommits to quality rankings and takes great care to preserve its name as a restaurant “gold standard.” It is commonly believed that the number of three-star restaurants in France is capped, in fact it has remained close to twenty-one since the mid-1930s. Furthermore it is harder to get back a third star once you have lost it, than to win it in the first place, see the first link for more information.
French cooking may be suffering under excess taxes and labor market regulation, but French food criticism is alive and well, in this case under corporate auspices and subsidy. The Red Guide does not make money on its own terms, but rather serves to advertise the parent company and burnish its image. It is a classic instance of the private production of public goods.
So the next time that Roger Ebert gives a movie either a “thumbs up” or a “thumbs down,” this is a signal that he is offering a truly important evaluation.
Fact of the day
In 1960 Taiwan was poorer than the Congo, here is the source.
More common sense from Andrew Sullivan
Why are deficits a problem today? Read here.
Andrew also offers this scary tidbit about liberal bias in academia.
Markets in everything, part III
Had your fill of match.com? But lacking in guts today? Try an on-line break-up. Did you know you can hire someone to do it for you?
Breakupservice.com, founded in 2002, offers a range of options for heartbreakers who have $50 but not, as cofounder and president Ren Thompson puts it, “the nerve, or the know-how,” to write their own good-byes. According to Thompson, between 1,200 and 1,500 men and women annually turn to the Dublin, Calif.-based company for a custom-tailored “Dear John” or “Dear Jane” letter with that special admixture of grace, verve, tact, and distance.
For the less old-fashioned, Thompson or one of his six breakup representatives also break the news by means of a “Happy Ending counseling call” lasting roughly 15 minutes on average. The conversation doesn’t always begin on a happy note. The most common reactions, Thompson says, are “Is this some kind of joke?” or “Are you recording this?” But once people get over the skepticism, Thompson says, it’s a learning experience. “They have an inkling there’s a problem. Now they have some real closure with real answers. We try to help them look at it as a new beginning.”
Starting afresh is also behind the philosophy at LadyLoveWriter.com and its male-oriented counterpart LoveWriter.com. For $89, New Jersey-based scribe Erica Klein (who works by day as a direct-mail copywriter) will conduct a telephone consultation and compose “The Gentle Breakup Letter,” which she e-mails to the client to write out in his or her own handwriting. Would-be heartbreakers answer eight key informational questions on the order form and then choose from three “emotional styles”: “Light and Casual,” “Straightforward But From the Heart,” or “Super-Romantic” (though Klein can’t recall any client opting for the latter).
“We’re good at caring and compassion,” noted Klein.
Just look at one company’s client testimonials:
I met what I thought was a sweet girl. We dated a couple of times then I realized she was completely psycho. She would not take any of the hints I gave as I didn’t want her around but one phone call with a follow-up letter from breakupservice.com did the trick I never heard from her again. Thanks! Charlie M.
One of the companies also performs furniture and pet retrieval, for fees ranging up to $400.
Here is a previous installment of Markets in Everything.
Victory songs are for the birds
Sports fans are not the only ones to celebrate a win with a rousing tune – a chirpy African bird does the same, researchers have revealed.
Mate pairs of the tropical boubou belt out their special victory song after they have deterred would-be invaders from their territory, suggest Ulmar Grafe and Johannes Bitz at the University of Würzburg, Germany.
The discovery was made by accident, the scientists happily admit. They were investigating the birds’ musical repertoire in the Ivory Coast when they noticed that whenever they packed up their equipment and left the bird territories, the birds would trill a particular tune.
To investigate this further, Grafe and Bitz then tried broadcasting recordings of the duets commonly used by boubous in territorial confrontations. They found most mate pairs that stood their ground against the recorded intruders burst into song shortly after the tape was switched off.
“There’s a whole neighbourhood of birds listening into these conflicts, so it’s important to advertise a victory,” says Grafe, a behavioural ecologist. “We think it’s not only to let the loser know they’ve lost, but to let others know that one has been victorious – it serves to lessen further conflicts over territory.”
He adds that there are few animals which vocally celebrate a win in this way. And the tropical boubou is the first documented to perform a duet. “It’s sort of like a rugby team, a whole team display – I don’t know of any other animal example,” he told New Scientist.
I’ll really be impressed when they can hum “We Will Rock You.”
Here is the full story. Thanks to Spitbull.com for the pointer.
The economics of newspapers
Brother Weinberger writes,
“Dan: The real threat to traditional journalism isn’t blogging. It’s eBay, the largest classified ads publisher.”
Anyway, he is absolutely right. Classified advertising accounts for 50 percent of the profits of newspapers, and eBay is taking that franchise away. Without classifieds, newspapers are not a business. They are charity cases.
From the ever-perceptive Arnold Kling.
Food for thought
“A medical examiner’s report on the death of diet guru Dr. Robert Atkins suggests that he had a history of heart attack, congestive heart failure and hypertension…at his death Dr. Atkins [a six-footer] weighed 258 pounds…”
From today’s Wall Street Journal. I’ll agree we can’t draw firm inferences here, but there is always Bayesian updating.
Improving RSVP rates, continued…
Yesterday I asked whether we might increase the rate at which people RSVP, thereby improving the planning of parties.
Bob McGrew of CardinalCollective.com suggests a system of raffles. Give out tickets to people who RSVP yes early on and at the actual event choose a winner. Ridicule the winner and do not grant the prize if it turns out he did not show up for the party. Arianto Patunru proposes a related idea. You receive a ticket in the mail, which you activate by calling in a positive RSVP. You then need the ticket to get in the front door. The tickets are read by a machine, so you can’t make personal pleas to be forgiven. And of course you can’t take cell phone calls from your stranded non-RSVPed friends at the entrance.
Bob McGrew also suggests allowing people to respond with a probability of acceptance, rather than a simple yes or no. (It is an interesting question whether people will undershoot or overshoot with their expressed probabilities, I would predict undershooting so the host feels good when the guest actually comes.) Allowing more information might seem like a no brainer but it runs risks as well. People who would otherwise give a definite answer might instead defer their decision and send you a number like 0.84681. And what do you do with all the numbers you get? Estimate a probability density function?
How about the straightforward approach? The old-fashioned Will Baude suggests a greater reliance on social conventions.
My best idea? Have fewer parties. So many social affairs are about signalling in the first place, and we all know that market economies overinvest in costly signals. Stay home and read your favorite blogs.