March 11, 2016
Liar’s Poker is a non-fiction, semi-autobiographical book by Michael Lewis describing the author’s experiences as a bond salesman on Wall Street during the late 1980s. Two important figures in that history feature prominently in the text, the head of Salomon Brothers’ mortgage department Lewis Ranieri and the firm’s CEO John Gutfreund. The book’s name is taken from a high-stakes gambling game popular with bond traders.
First published in 1989, it is considered one of the books that defined Wall Street in that era, along with Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s ‘Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco,’ and the fictional ‘The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe.’ The book captures an important period in the history of New York’s financial markets. Continue reading →
Posted in Games, Language, Money |
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March 10, 2016
Shoe-throwing (also called shoeing) and showing the sole of one’s shoe as an insult are forms of protest in many parts of the world. Posters of George W. Bush’s face have long appeared through the Middle East with shoes attached to them, and some people have called former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ‘kundara,’ meaning ‘shoe.’ Shoeing received widespread attention after Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at then President George W. Bush during a 2008 press conference in Baghdad.
‘This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!’ yelled al-Zaidi in Arabic as he threw his first shoe towards the president. ‘This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq!’ he shouted as he threw his second shoe. President Bush ducked twice, avoiding being hit by the shoes. Since the al-Zaidi incident, copycat incidents in Europe, North America, India, China, Hong Kong, Iran, Turkey, and Australia have been reported. Shoes are considered unclean in the Arab World, but Matthew Cassel of ‘The Electronic Intifada’ has expressed the opinion that the Western media overplayed the phenomenon as being ‘Arab’ in particular.’
Posted in Humor, Politics, War |
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March 9, 2016
Pregaming (called prefunking in Europe and preloading or prinking in the UK), is the process of getting drunk prior to going out socializing in a manner as cost-efficient as possible. Although typically done before a night out, pregaming can also precede other activities, like attending a college football game, large party, social function, or another activity where possession of alcohol may be limited or prohibited. The name ‘pregaming’ spread from the drinking that took place during tailgate parties before football games to encompass similar drinking periods.
Pregaming first became popular in the US in the 1990s, becoming a common practice after MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) pressured the federal government to coerce states into increasing the legal drinking age to 21 nationwide. It is also an unintended consequence of alcohol laws that prohibit happy hours and other discounts on alcohol, as well as rising tuition and other costs for students. Pregaming minimizes the cost of purchasing alcohol at local bars and clubs and can reduce the problems associated with obtaining and using fake identification listing an age permitting legal consumption of alcohol. Continue reading →
Posted in Drugs, Games |
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March 8, 2016
To have a chip on one’s shoulder refers to the act of holding a grudge or grievance that readily provokes disputation. The expression comes from the ancient right of shipwrights within the Royal Navy Dockyards to take home a daily allowance of offcuts of timber, even if good wood had to be cut up for this purpose. The privilege was instated as a prescriptive right from 1634. By 1756, the privilege was costing taxpayers too much in lost timber for warship repair and construction, and a decision was then made by the Navy Board to limit the quantity a shipwright could carry home. A warrant was issued to the Royal Dockyards to reduce the quantity of chips by ordering shipwrights to carry their bundles under their arms instead of on their shoulders, as one could not carry as much timber in this fashion.
There was an incident on the very first day the law was enforced: ‘Then came John Miller, shipwright, about thirty feet before the main body of the people, on which the Master Shipwright ordered him to lower his chips. He answered he would not, with that the Master Shipwright took hold of him, and said he should. He, the said Miller replied, ‘Are not the chips mine? I will not lower them.’ Immediately the main body pushed on with their chips on their shoulders, crowded and forced the Master Shipwright and the First Assistant through the gateway, and when out of the yard give three huzzas.’
Posted in Language, Money |
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March 5, 2016
Kindness priming is an affect-dependent cognitive effect in which subjects will display a positive affect following exposure to kindness. Individuals who are exposed to an act of kindness – the priming – subsequently notice more of the positive features of the world than they would otherwise. A person receiving a free voucher from a stranger, for example, may become more inclined to perceive the intentions of others around them as good.
It is hypothesized that kindness priming involves the same cognitive circuitry that enables memory priming. By activating neural representations of positive affect, an act of kindness stimulates increased activity in related associative networks. It is therefore more likely that subsequent stimuli will activate these related, positive networks, and so the positive affect continues to be carried forward in a feed forward manner. Additionally, kindness priming has also been shown to inoculate against negative stimuli in the short term, thus temporarily improving an individual’s resilience. Continue reading →
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March 4, 2016
Affective forecasting (also known as the ‘hedonic forecasting mechanism’) is the prediction of one’s affect (emotional state) in the future. As a process that influences preferences, decisions, and behavior, affective forecasting is studied by both psychologists and economists, with broad applications.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman and business school professor Jackie Snell began research on hedonic forecasts in the early 1990s, examining its impact on decision making. The term ‘affective forecasting’ was later coined by psychologists Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert. Early research focused solely on measuring emotional forecasts, while subsequent studies examined accuracy, revealing that people are surprisingly poor judges of their future emotional states. For example, in predicting how events like winning the lottery might affect their happiness, people are likely to overestimate future positive feelings, ignoring the numerous other factors that might contribute to their emotional state outside of the single lottery event. Continue reading →
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March 3, 2016
Drapetomania [drah-pay-too-mey-nee-uh] was a supposed mental illness described by American physician Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851 that caused black slaves to flee captivity. Today, drapetomania is considered an example of pseudoscience and part of the edifice of scientific racism. The term derives from the Greek ‘drapetes’ (‘runaway [slave]’) and ‘mania’ (‘madness, frenzy’). In ‘Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race,’ Cartwright points out that the Bible calls for a slave to be submissive to his master, and by doing so, the slave will have no desire to run away.
Cartwright described the disorder – which, he said, was ‘unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers’– in a paper delivered before the Medical Association of Louisiana that was widely reprinted. He stated that the malady was a consequence of masters who ‘made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals.’ Continue reading →
Posted in Health, Politics |
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March 2, 2016
A sneakerhead is a person who collects, trades or admires sneakers as a hobby. The birth of sneakerhead culture in the United States came in the 1980s and can be attributed to two major sources: basketball, specifically the emergence of Michael Jordan and his eponymous Air Jordan line of shoes released in 1985, and the growth of hip hop music. The boom of signature basketball shoes during this era provided the sheer variety necessary for a collecting subculture, while the Hip-Hop movement gave the sneakers their street credibility as status symbols.
Several popular brands and styles of sneakers have emerged as collectors items in the sneakerhead subculture, including Air Jordans, Air Force Ones, Nike Dunks, Nike Skateboarding (SB), Nike Foamposites, Nike Air Max, and in the past few years, the Nike Air Yeezy. Shoes that have the most value are usually exclusive or limited editions. Also certain color schemes may be rarer relative to others in the same sneaker, inflating desirability and value. Recently, sneaker customs, or one-of-a-kind sneakers that have been hand-painted, have become popular as well.
Posted in Art, Games, Money |
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March 1, 2016
The bandwagon effect is a phenomenon whereby the rate of uptake of beliefs, ideas, fads and trends increases the more that they have already been adopted by others. As more people come to believe in something, others also ‘hop on the bandwagon’ regardless of the underlying evidence.
The tendency to follow the actions or beliefs of others can occur because individuals directly prefer to conform to social pressure, or because individuals derive information from others. The former has been used to explain Asch’s conformity experiments, a series of studies directed by Polish American social psychologist Solomon Asch studying if and how individuals yield to or defy a majority group and the effect of such influences on beliefs and opinions. Continue reading →
Posted in Health, Money, Philosophy |
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February 29, 2016
Political parties in the US hold conventions to select the party’s nominee for President, as well as to adopt a statement of party principles and goals known as the ‘platform.’ Since the 1970s, voting has for the most part been perfunctory; the selection of the major parties’ nominees have rarely been in doubt, so a single ballot has always been sufficient.
If there is no single candidate receiving a majority of delegates at the end of the primary season, a scenario called a brokered convention results, where a candidate is selected either at or near the convention, through political horse-trading and lesser candidates compelling their delegates to vote for one of the front runners. The closest to a brokered convention in recent years was at the 1976 Republican National Convention, when neither Gerald Ford nor Ronald Reagan received enough votes in the primary to lock up the nomination. Since then, candidates have received enough momentum to reach a majority through pledged and bound delegates before the date of the convention. Continue reading →
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February 28, 2016
‘The Design of Everyday Things‘ is a 1988 book by cognitive scientist and usability engineer Donald Norman on design’s role in enabling communication been objects and their users, and how to optimize that conduit to make the experience more effective. One of the main premises of the book is that although people are often keen to blame themselves when objects appear to malfunction, it is not the fault of the user but rather the lack of intuitive guidance that should be present in the design. In the book, Norman introduced the term ‘affordance’ as it applied to design, defining it as things that afford the opportunity for an organism to perform an action.
For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling. 20th century American psychologist James J. Gibson originally coined the term ‘affordance’ to describe changes made to one’s environment to make them more usable, such as carving stairs into a steep hill. Norman also popularized the term ‘user-centered design’ to describe design based on the needs of the user, leaving aside what he deemed secondary issues like aesthetics. User-centered design involves simplifying the structure of tasks, making things visible, getting the mapping right, exploiting the powers of constraint, designing for error, and explaining affordances.
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February 27, 2016
Psychological pricing (also known as ‘price ending’ and ‘charm pricing’) is a pricing/marketing strategy based on the theory that certain prices have a psychological impact. Consumers tend to perceive ‘odd prices’ as being significantly lower than they actually are, mentally rounding to the next lowest monetary unit. Thus, prices such as $1.99 are associated with spending $1 rather than $2. Now that many customers are used to odd pricing, some restaurants and high-end retailers psychologically-price in even numbers in an attempt to reinforce their brand image of quality and sophistication.
In a traditional cash transaction, fractional pricing imposes tangible costs on the vendor (printing fractional prices), the cashier (producing awkward change) and the customer (stowing the change). These factors have become less relevant with the increased use of checks, credit and debit cards and other forms of currency-free exchange; also, the addition of sales tax makes the pre-tax price less relevant to the amount of change (although in Europe the sales tax is generally included in the shelf price). Continue reading →
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