The Captain of the Costa Concordia has come under widespread criticism for abandoning ship before all passengers were taken to safety. The Guardian posted an article that examined where this cultural expectation, for captains to go down with their ship, originated from:

There are three “romantic demands” placed on modern captains, according to one author who was writing a month after the sinking of the Titanic. They were:

• The cry “women and children first” should be heard.
• All men aboard (except for foreigners) should be heroes.
• The Captain should be a superhero

The author traces the origin of these three requirements to the Birkenhead, one of the British Royal Navy’s earliest steamships that sank in 1852. In that doomed vessel hundreds of troops and officers lost their lives as they evacuated the women and children.

Read more about the wider historical context of the cultural expectation for the captain to be the last one leaving a sinking ship, some of the racial undertones this belief involves, and what this all means for Captain Schettino over here.

Source: The Guardian

Via: Marginal Revolution

In the Indian State of West Bengal one third of the positions for leaders of village councils are randomly reserved for women. Researchers found that this had fascinating effects on girls and women in those regions:

• In villages where there were no female leaders, parents were 45% less likely to want their daughters to graduate from school or continue their studies past a certain age in comparison to their aspirations for their sons. This gap was reduced by 25% in villages that did have female leaders.
• Adolescent girls themselves were 32% less likely to want to continue their studies past a certain age in villages without female leaders. In villages that did have female leaders this gap was completely erased.
• This difference in aspirations translates into concrete results: In villages without female leaders boys are 6% more likely to attend school and 4% more likely to be literate. There is no difference between boys and girls in villages with female leaders.
• In villages with female leaders the gap between the difference in time that girls and boys have to spend doing chores shrinks by 18 minutes.
• However, for some reason, all of these results are only seen in villages where women held positions of power for at least two governing cycles.

Source: MIT News

Kodak, the company known for its cameras and film, is a company that The Economist notes, was started “at the end of the 19^th century”, dominated the 20^th century, and did not last long in the 21^st century. Last week the company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Economist reports:

• The company once had a 90% market share in North America and earned 70% margins.
• During the era of its dominance the company invested significant amounts in research and development. This would become the company’s undoing as it helped pioneer the very digital cameras that have cannibalized the company’s markets.
• Kodak’s experience shows that identifying future technology trends is rather easy but adapting a company to respond to them is incredibly difficult.

To read about the experience of other companies that suffered the same fate as Kodak as well as contemporary businesses that might be in danger of falling victim to the same experience, click here.

Source: The Economist

The Washington Post took a look at some of the hidden costs of being poor. Some of the things they found include:

• The poor don’t have access to cars to travel to large superstores with the lowest prices. Instead they must go to corner shops where prices are higher
• Even though they have to work more for lower wages the poor are forced to spend more time on buses and to do things like laundry at the local laundromat since they aren’t able to afford their own washing machines
• Interest rates for loans can reach hundreds of percent even at a time when the Federal Reserve is lending to banks at a fraction of a percentage point
• The poor sometimes have to pay more for rent than the rich would have to pay in annual mortgage payments for the same house

Read the entire five page report to find out more about the struggles that the poor in America must contend with over here.

Luis von Ahn, the creator of the reCAPTCHA system which websites use to protect against automated spambots and Google uses to have humans translate difficult to understand words in books, is working on a new initiative that aims to sell translation services to businesses. The New Scientist reports:

• Individuals who hope to pick up a new language can go to Duolingo and get free language classes. After taking the classes the users are then given the opportunity to practice on their own by translating new sentences or rating the accuracy of other people’s translations
• This information is then used to provide paid translation services for other individuals and businesses
• To ensure that the translation is accurate multiple visitors are asked to translate the same sentence
• Challenges for the service include the translation of idioms and languages such as Mandarin that have extremely nuanced meanings
• With enough people the service is extremely fast. The site’s creators estimate that 1 million students could translate the entirety of Wikipedia in just 80 hours

To read more about how the service works, and what it’s future might hold click here.

Source: New Scientist

Via: Marginal Revolution

The Daily ran some projections and found that parents of the class of 2034 could be paying $422,320 in today’s dollars for college. They note that:

• With current trends the inflation adjusted price for tuition will doubt at private universities and triple at public ones
• The after-inflation-adjusted price for college has risen by an average of 3.08% at private university and 2.96% at public ones over the past 30 years
• Yet the incomes of families with children have risen by just 1% a year since 1987

To read about the implications this might have for student debt as well as the grants and loans that might help ease some of the pain, click here.

Source: The Daily

Via: Newmark’s Door

CrunchBase advertises itself as a “free database of technology companies, people, and investors.” Going through the data the writers at TechCrunch looked at the life of successful start-up companies in the past decade or so and found that:

• The average successful company raises $25.3 million and sells for $196.8 million, for a 676% investor return
• Companies that have an IPO instead of selling raise an average of $580.3 million and go public with a market capitalization of $2.3 billion for a first-day return of 303%
• Older companies aren’t necessarily worth more – if you get an early offer it might be worth it to sell

To see some neat graphs and learn more about the likely fate of your potentially successful start-up click here.

Source: TechCrunch