Move over Google+ and Tumblr, there’s a new star in social media town. Pinterest, a Palo Alto-based startup, is quietly becoming one of the most-trafficked social networking sites on the web.
The still-invite-only, one year-old digital pin-board site attracted nearly 11 million visitors in the week ending December 17, according to data intelligence company Hitwise. Hitwise counts Pinterest as one of the top 10 websites in the social networking and forums category.
In Silicon Valley, all the Sturm und Drang of 2011 seemed as relevant as the Cricket World Cup. High unemployment? Crippling debt? Not in Silicon Valley, where the fog burns off by noon and it’s an article of faith that talented, hard-working techies can change the world and reap unimaginable wealth in the process. “We live in a bubble, and I don’t mean a tech bubble or a valuation bubble. I mean a bubble as in our own little world,” says Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. “And what a world it is: Companies can’t hire people fast enough. Young people can work hard and make a fortune. Homes hold their value. Occupy Wall Street isn’t really something that comes up in daily discussion, because their issues are not our daily reality.”
It was never clearer than in 2011 that Silicon Valley exists in an alternate reality—a bubble of prosperity. Restaurants are booked, freeways are packed, and companies are flush with cash. The prosperity bubble isn’t just a state of mind: Times are as good as they’ve been in recent memory. The region gets 40 percent of the country’s venture capital haul, up from 31 percent a decade ago, according to the National Venture Capital Assn. And the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics recently reported that growth of the area’s job market led the nation, jumping 3.2 percent, triple the national rate. Even real estate, a cesspool of despair in the rest of the country, is humming along. It’s next to impossible to get a table on a weekend night at the Rosewood in Menlo Park, a watering hole for Sand Hill Road’s technology financiers where the olive-oil-poached steelhead goes for $36. The closest we got to “Occupy: Cupertino” was the line outside Apple stores in October for the iPhone 4S.
A humorous anaesthetic colleague recently repeated the following popular saying while an operating table was being repaired with a mallet: “typical orthopaedic surgeon—as strong as an ox but half as bright.” Making fun of orthopaedic surgeons is a popular pastime in operating theatres throughout the country. This pursuit has recently spread to the internet; a humorous animation entitled “orthopedia vs anesthesia” had received more than half a million hits at the time of writing.1 Several comparisons of orthopaedic surgeons to primates have been published, and the medical literature contains suggestions that orthopaedic surgery requires brute force and ignorance.And I don't feel very comfortable categorizing this under 'Research Papers' category below.
Objective To compare the intelligence and grip strength of orthopaedic surgeons and anaesthetists.Participants 36 male orthopaedic surgeons and 40 male anaesthetists at consultant or specialist registrar grade.Main outcome measures Intelligence test score and dominant hand grip strength.Results Orthopaedic surgeons had a statistically significantly greater mean grip strength (47.25 (SD 6.95) kg) than anaesthetists (43.83 (7.57) kg). The mean intelligence test score of orthopaedic surgeons was also statistically significantly greater at 105.19 (10.85) compared with 98.38 (14.45) for anaesthetists.Conclusions Male orthopaedic surgeons have greater intelligence and grip strength than their male anaesthetic colleagues, who should find new ways to make fun of their orthopaedic friends.
An audience expresses appreciation for a good performance by the strength and nature of its applause. The thunder of applause at the start often turns quite suddenly into synchronized clapping, and this synchronization can disappear and reappear several times during the applause. The phenomenon is a delightful expression of social self-organization that provides an example on a human scale of the synchronization processes that occur in numerous natural systems, ranging from flashing Asian fireflies to oscillating chemical reactions. Here we explain the dynamics of this rhythmic applause.Paper here.
Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health, to sports, business, and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence-believing you are better than you are in reality-is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence, or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success. However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here, we present an evolutionary model showing that, counter-intuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations will tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared to the cost of competition. In contrast, "rational" unbiased strategies are only stable under limited conditions. The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters, and costly wars.Paper here.
She cited colleagues who have advanced theories that humans first domesticated cereal crops to make beer, not just bread, and that humans evolved to associate ethanol, which is present in ripe fruit, with satiety. The various lines of evidence indicate that beer may well be as old as cooking itself, which began at least 250,000 years ago. “When people started harnessing fire and cooking, they probably started making beer”Article here.
This paper examines the impact on agricultural development of the introduction of barbed wire fencing to the American Plains in the late nineteenth century.Without a fence, farmers risked uncompensated damage by others’ livestock. From 1880 to 1900, the introduction and near-universal adoption of barbed wire greatly reduced the cost of fences, relative to the predominant wooden fences, especially in counties with the least woodland. Over that period, counties with the least woodland experienced substantial relative increases in settlement, land improvement, land values, and the productivity and production share of crops most in need of protection. This increase in agricultural development appears partly to reflect farmers’ increased ability to protect their land from encroachment. States’ inability to protect this full bundle of property rights on the frontier, beyond providing formal land titles, might have otherwise restricted agricultural development.Paper here.
"Uzzi and his Northwestern colleagues analyzed a year and a half of trades — more than a million transactions — made by 66 day traders at a single firm. Parsing the trading behavior down to a scale of seconds revealed sweet spots of synchronization —seconds to minutes when many traders were engaged in frenetic activity. On average the traders made money on 55 percent of their trades, but those who were in sync with their peers profited 60 percent of the time.
“I love the counterintuitive nature of the finding,” says complex-networks expert Albert-László Barabási of Northeastern University in Boston. “The dogma is that the successful investors are the Buffets — those who swim against the current. Yet this study shows that when it comes to day trading, going with the wave has real benefits.”
A peculiar aspect of the emergent intelligence is its lack of intentional coordination. There wasn’t a preestablished crowd for traders to glom onto, nor a leader to follow. The assessment suggests instead that instant messaging among traders helped couple their behavior. Instant messaging volume went up and down with trading volume, and the flow of instant messaging became less random as traders got more in sync, the researchers found."Article here.
