Category: Web/Tech

Assorted links

by  Tyler Cowen in

1. How to keep your job, by Tyler Cowen.  This recommendation works only in some sectors, not all.

2. Carlo Maria Cipolla's Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.  Arguably some of them are…stupid.

3. How do we know NBA players are trying harder in the playoffs?  Can you find a good quantitative metric?  What does this imply for labor economics and JB Clark?

4. Should we let private equity hold a majority stake in banks?  Read this piece and be tempted by the idea…

5. Will Kindle DX save newspapers?  Probably not.

6. The Flores "hobbit" had really long feet; probably a separate offshoot then!

The Twitter barrage

by  Tyler Cowen in

In the last forty-eight hours I have acquired many hundreds of new Twitter followers for my Twitter posts, yet for no apparent reason.  I've probably doubled my number of followers over the last two days and that includes a concentrated swarm of followers with Russian or Ukrainian names (what about Belarus?).  Today I can click on my email every few minutes and have a bunch of new followers.

Yet I have done nothing notable over that same time period nor have I received significant media coverage.  What accounts for this equilibrium?  What is the underlying model of social contagion?  One model is simply that these followers have been queued for weeks by Twitter and the notices are being released only now; does that accord with your experience as a Twitter user?

Old people love Kindle

by  Tyler Cowen in

Citing this Amazon forum, Publishers Lunch Deluxe reports:

We extracted about 75 percent of the responses on age (representing about
700 responses, taking equally from the earliest and most recent postings,
which show very similar age distributions). Per John Makinson's quip at an
LBF panel, over half of reporting Kindle owners are 50 or older, and 70
percent are 40 or older. Here is the full age bracket distribution:

0 – 19: 5%
20 – 29: 10%
30 – 39: 15%
40 – 49: 19.5%
50 – 59: 23%
60 – 69: 19.5%
70 – 79: 6%
80+: 2%

The comments themselves are as illuminating as the numbers. So many users
said they like Kindle because they suffer from some form of arthritis that
multiple posters indicate that they do or do not have arthritis as a matter
of course. A variety of other impairments, from weakening eyes and carpal-tunnel-like
syndromes to more exotic disabilities dominate the purchase rationales of
these posters. Which in turn explains Amazon's pseudo-statistical case that
e-book purchases are incremental/additive, rather than cannibalistic of
their print sales. Countless people report being able to read much more
with Kindle because it overcomes physical obstacles or limitations that had
made reading difficult for them previously.

I thank S. for the pointer.

Markets in less than everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

But to other writers and editors, the Kindle is the ultimate bad idea whose time has come. Anne Fadiman,
the author, was relieved to learn that her essay collection, “Ex
Libris,” was not available on Kindle. “It would really be ironic if it
were,” she said of the book, which evokes her abiding passion for books
as objects.

Here is the article, interesting throughout.