"behavioral economics" entries

Four short links: 10 August 2010

Four short links: 10 August 2010

Rational Smoking, Latency Poor, NLP Cites, Security Podcast

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | August 10, 2010
  1. Smoking and Ill Health: Does Lay Epidemiology Explain the Failure of Smoking Cessation Programs Among Deprived Populations? — Here we pose the question of whether the poorer life chances of those who continue to smoke in effect constitute a rational disincentive to their avoidance or cessation of smoking. (via bengoldacre on Twitter)
  2. Scaling the New Bar for Latency in Financial Networks — Since the first trade to the market gets the best price, the delivery of a buy or sell order must be as fast as possible. Just a little more than a year ago, firms were concentrating on removing milliseconds from their network; today, a mere 250 nanoseconds make a difference. (via economicsnz on Twitter)
  3. Cataloging Bibliographic Data with Natural Language and RDF (OKFN) — In the grand tradition of W3C IRC bots, I’ve started some speculative work on a robot that tries to understand natural language descriptions of works and their authors and generates RDF. It is written in Python and uses ORDF, the NLTK and FuXi.
  4. Eurotrash Security — European infosec podcast. Latest episode features Ivan Ristic on SSL. (via ivanristic on Twitter)
Four short links: 30 July 2010

Four short links: 30 July 2010

Game Mechanics, Data Privacy, Wesabe Open Source, and Monkey Economics

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 30, 2010
  1. The No-Twinkie Database — These are all the Twinkie Denial Conditions described in my “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” Designer’s Notebook columns. Each one is an egregious design error, although many of them have appeared in otherwise great games. A collection of “don’t do this” for app designers. (via waxy)
  2. Cloud Privacy Heat Map (Forrester) — a map showing the degree of legal support for privacy and data protection across various jurisdictions. (via azaaza on Twitter)
  3. Wesabe on GitHub — Wesabe has closed, but is open sourcing its code.
  4. Laurie Santos TED Talk — monkeys make similar irrational decisions as we do. “The errors we make are predictable and immune to evidence.” Sound like you? Watch this excellent talk.
Four short links: 21 July 2010

Four short links: 21 July 2010

Health, Profit, Policy, and Semantic Web Software

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 21, 2010
  1. The Men Who Stare at Screens (NY Times) — What was unexpected was that many of the men who sat long hours and developed heart problems also exercised. Quite a few of them said they did so regularly and led active lifestyles. The men worked out, then sat in cars and in front of televisions for hours, and their risk of heart disease soared, despite the exercise. Their workouts did not counteract the ill effects of sitting. (via Andy Baio)
  2. Caring with Cash — describes a study where “pay however much you want” had high response rate but low average price, “half goes to charity” barely changed from the control (fixed price) response rate, but “half goes to charity and you can pay what you like” earned more money than either strategy.
  3. Behavioural Economics a Political Placebo? (NY Times) — As policymakers use it to devise programs, it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked to solve problems it wasn’t meant to address. Indeed, it seems in some cases that behavioral economics is being used as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics. (via Mind Hacks)
  4. Protege — open source ontology editor and knowledge-base framework.