Author Archives: shaun

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Why do many people think that Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple are rivals? They hardly compete directly. Sure, Facebook and Google both sell targeted Web-based advertisements. But they offer such different services that they don’t share a core mission. Apple makes its money selling devices and mobile apps. Microsoft sells computer software and video game consoles. Google makes a free suite of applications that could challenge Microsoft Office. But it has not. Google also runs a social network that no one uses. And it gives away a mobile smartphone operating system. All four seem to be safely in control of distinct missions and markets. They intersect only slightly.

But these companies are not just focused on dominating a particular device or service like your phone or Web search. Short-term revenue and market capitalization only serve to finance their long-term vision. Each is scheming to win the marathon ahead: to become the operating system of your life.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/fred-vogelsteins-dogfight.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

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AS the N.B.A. season gets under way, there is no doubt that the league’s best player is 6-foot-8 LeBron James, of the Miami Heat. Mr. James was born poor to a 16-year-old single mother in Akron, Ohio. The conventional wisdom is that his background is typical for an N.B.A. player. A majority of Americans, Google consumer survey data show, think that the N.B.A. is composed mostly of men like Mr. James. But it isn’t.

I recently calculated the probability of reaching the N.B.A., by race, in every county in the United States. I got data on births from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; data on basketball players from basketball-reference.com; and per capita income from the census. The results? Growing up in a wealthier neighborhood is a major, positive predictor of reaching the N.B.A. for both black and white men.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/in-the-nba-zip-code-matters.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

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You probably know the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”: Slim Pickens, playing the pilot of the B-52 that has been ordered to attack Russia by his bonkers commander, General Ripper, is reviewing the contents of the crew’s survival kit. It contains among other essential items $100 in gold, nylon stockings and “one issue of prophylactics.” At the end of the list he remarks, “Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”

If you look closely at Pickens’s lips, they seem to be framing something other than the word “Vegas.” Indeed they are: “Dallas.” The first critics’ screening of the new film had been scheduled for Nov. 22, 1963. Unfortunate timing, as it turned out. Kubrick re-dubbed the line, substituting the name of another city where gold, nylon stockings and prophylactics always come in handy. It is said that the original city remains intact in the French-subtitled version. Figurez-vous.

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– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/a-bad-day-to-die.html?ref=todayspaper

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Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has been variously described as characterized by shallow emotions (in particular reduced fear), stress tolerance, lacking empathy, coldheartedness, lacking guilt, egocentricity, superficial character, manipulativeness, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and antisocial behaviors such as parasitic lifestyle and criminality.

So which professions (other than ax murderer) have the most psychopaths? What about the least?

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Their key finding was that the total number of mutual friends two people share — embeddedness, in social networking terms — is actually a fairly weak indicator of romantic relationships. Far better, they found, was a network measure that they call dispersion.

This yardstick measures mutual friends, but also friends from the further-flung reaches of a person’s network neighborhood. High dispersion occurs when a couple’s mutual friends are not well connected to one another.

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Their dispersion algorithm was able to correctly identify a user’s spouse 60 percent of the time, or better than a 1-in-2 chance. Since everyone in the sample had at least 50 friends, merely guessing would have at best produced a 1 in 50 chance. The algorithm also did pretty well with people who declare themselves to be “in a relationship,” correctly identifying them a third of the time — a 1 in 3 chance compared with the 1 in 50 for guesswork.

Particularly intriguing is that when the algorithm fails, it looks as if the relationship is in trouble. A couple in a declared relationship and without a high dispersion on the site are 50 percent more likely to break up over the next two months than a couple with a high dispersion, the researchers found. (Their research tracked the users every two months for two years.)

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– http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/spotting-romantic-relationships-on-facebook/?_r=0

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“It wasn’t until after World War II, however, that Halloween costume manufacturing became big business. With the rise of television in the 1950s and the popularity of TV shows such as The Adventures of Superman, Zorro, and Davy Crockett, Ben Cooper obtained the licenses to many of these live-action shows and began mass producing inexpensive representations of them in costume form for less than $3 each, which amounts to about 12 bucks these days. The company distinguished itself with speed: It would rapidly buy rights, produce costumes and get them onto store shelves, which opened a whole new world of costuming to children. By the 1960s, Ben Cooper owned between 70 and 80 percent of the Halloween costume market, offering pretty much any pop culture reference in costume form.”

– http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/10/ben_cooper_costumes_how_the_popular_plastic_outfits_reinvented_halloween.html

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