Trying to dress up to earn respect? You should do the opposite writes Shirley S. Wang:

• In one experiment scientists found that if shoppers at luxury stores wore gym clothes then shop assistants are more likely to think that they are about to make a big purchase.
• This is because their informal clothes signify that they are familiar with the environment of the luxury store and don’t feel the need to dress specially for it.
• Bearded professors who wear t-shirts are more respected by students than clean shaven professors that wear a tie.
• Those who use unconventional PowerPoint designs are considered to be more likely to win business competitions than those who stick with the tried and tested.
• There are limits to this. When society thinks that people have mistakenly flouted a norm – by wearing a red bowtie instead of a black one – then people think lowly of them.
• It is only when society thinks that an individual is intentionally flouting a norm that people are impressed by how unimpressive they are.

Read more about the limitations of this finding, other situations where it applies, and more over here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Olivier Knox took a look at the history of the telephone of the American President:

• Before the American President has a phone call with another world leader, they are given a dossier with key information about their counterpart including their personality, the health of them and their family members, relationship issues, political pressures, and whether or not they like to joke.
• Scripts aren’t prepared beforehand although talking points often are.
• Each country has its own idiosyncrasies. Calls with the Chinese usually take a long time because they’re very formal and are required to start with a restatement of America’s Chinese policy. Sixty minute calls can have as little as 10 minutes of actual discussion of the issues at hand.
• The phone call can be made from anywhere in the White House, the Presidential plane and limousine, and, when the President is travelling, calls can even be made through guest telephones in hotel rooms – although the President has to be more careful about what they say then.
• Presidents generally prefer video conferences because it gives them key information about their counterpart’s body language. However only a few countries have the capability for secured videoconference – mostly those that America has helped set up the technology for.
• The calls aren’t recorded, although national security staffers listen in on the call and type up an internal, informal transcript that is kept secret. A summary is then sometimes released to the press.
• With some countries there is a race to release the summary of the call and frame the conversation in the media.
• The White House first got a telephone under President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877. The number was “1”.
• Contrary to the myth popularized by Hollywood there was never a red telephone line between the White House and the Kremlin. It was initially a teletype connection and these days the connection involves the use of secured emails.

Read more about the foreign leaders who are able to get through immediately, those who are not, famous phone calls including the call in September 2013 to Iranian President Hassan Rouhaniy, and more over here.

Source: Yahoo News

The Economist took a look at how law schools misrepresent the number of graduates that are able to get jobs:

• US News publishes an annual ranking of the top law schools in America. One of the metrics it tracks is the proportion of graduates who get a job.
• There are a few weird discrepancies in the data. Even though one law school is ranked ninth for scores on tests, it had the highest proportion of students who found a job after graduation.
• This is because several schools have set up programs where they pay their graduates for about a year after they get their degree. Such programs can account for up to 22% of each class.
• The universities are essentially spending a few million dollars to boost their rankings and make their school look more attractive.
• The schools argue that they’re not trying to manipulate statistics. Rather the programs are investments in the community as they often serve those with low incomes, and that this is valuable job experience for graduates.
• Yet the jobs are usually not well paid and many students will have decided to take on six figure debts to go to law school – perhaps being misled about the number of jobs that would be available

Read more over here.

Source: The Economist

Amazon recently announced that it was increasing the price of its Prime membership to $99. The membership guarantees that millions of Amazon’s items will be delivered within two days. Zachary M. Seward took a look at its price:

• When Amazon Prime first launched it was priced at $79 a year. A wide misconception is that this price was chosen because it was a prime number.
• Rather, the “Prime” refers to the prime location that items that are delivered within two days occupy in Amazon’s warehouses.
• If the price of Prime had kept up with inflation, the service would cost $94.26 today.
• However Prime itself has involved and now it also offers customers video streaming and e-book rentals.

Read more about how the price of Amazon Prime was first set, why Amazon wanted to make sure it didn’t “hemorrhage money”, and more over here.

Source: Quartz

The United States uses body language experts to analyze foreign leaders writes Ray Locker:

• The program is called “Body Leads” and $300,000 has been spent on it since 2009.
• The researchers behind the project believe that each individual’s body language is as unique as their DNA and can be used to better understand the true intentions of foreign leaders.
• Vladimir Putin, for example, walks in an odd way that indicates “a strong will that he survive and an impetus to balance and strengthen the body….this is a deep, old, profound loss that he has learned to cope with, magnificently”

Read more about the program, its history, and its analysis over here.

Source: USA Today

Via: National Journal

Caitlin Dewey wrote about the market for a bride’s gown:

• Wedding dresses cost a lot of money in part due to the price of the material and the quality of the workmanship.
• Yet a big part of the price of a dress is the markup – which can be around 200%.
• Sellers can get away with this because of asymmetric information. Since most people (plan to) only get married once, they’re not experienced in purchasing wedding dresses and so don’t know how much a ‘reasonable’ price is.
• The cost of the dress is also used to indicate social status and signal the bride’s commitment to her husband.
• However this means that a company could come in and create a big market for itself by offering a cheap wedding dress.
• H&M has done precisely that by offering a wedding dress for the relative bargain of $99.

Read more over here.

Source: The Washington Post

Former American General Stanley McChrystal has launched a company that teaches executives how to use battlefield tactics in the corporate world:

• Three years ago McChrystal gave an interview to Rolling Stone that eventually got him fired. In need of a job he launched a startup that organized training courses for business leaders.
• The McChrystal Group points out that Al Qaeda was like Napster. Both were fast-moving, unpredictable, and something that established institutions didn’t quite know how to battle or defeat.
• General McChrystal upgraded the American military to counter the threat. Between 2004 and 2006 special ops missions in Iraq increased from 20 to 300.
• One company says that going through the training course (which involves burpees and puzzle solving challenges) helped the company grow earnings per share 39% by allowing them to react to unexpected weather events and to fight off a “YouTube attack ad”.
• Another company is using the training course to learn how to avoid being killed by newer competitors.

Read more about the companies that are trying out the course, what the course entails, and how the battlefield compares to the boardroom over here.

Source: Newsweek

This economy has been tough for everyone. When we last checked in on IBM’s supercomputer, Watson, it was sending resumes with a requested salary of a billion dollars to the top companies around the world. As it turns out these days it is flipping burgers at a fast food joint for, we presume, minimum wage:

• Watson has been scanning the world’s recipes to identify patterns in ingredients and cooking methods.
• It is then using this data to create new dishes that are likely to appeal to the human palate.
• Its ideas so far have included a “Swiss-Thai asparagus quiche” and an “Austrian chocolate burrito”.
• Interested customers can go to a food truck in Las Vegas to see the supercomputer at work.

Read more about the initiative over here.

Source: Time

Via: Marginal Revolution

One Zombie Apocalypse has already begun writes Erica E. Phillips:

• Zombies are generally thought to crave fresh human brains. The increasing amount of academic resources devoted to studying them indicates that they have been successful in attaining it.
• In the past five years there have been 20 scholarly books with the word ‘zombie’ in the title.
• JSTOR, an archive of academic journals has also recorded a significant uptick in the number of papers that refer to Zombies.
• An increasing number of college courses allow students to study zombies.
• Fields such as economics (“The economics of the Undead“), media studies (“Zombie sexuality”), and literature have tackled the subject.
• Defenders of the trend point out that Zombie studies are used to analyze more serious topics such as slavery, religion, and even post-traumatic stress disorder.

Read more about those who think that this is all a waste, the places where you can study zombies, and more over here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Ellen DeGeneres’ now famous Oscar Selfie was paid for by Samsung writes Suzanne Vranica:

• As an official sponsor of the event Samsung had negotiated to have its phone integrated into the show.
• It also paid for five full minutes of commercials. All of this is estimated to have cost Samsung $24 million.
• Ellen DeGeneres had come up with the idea to take a selfie during rehearsals and Samsung employees taught her how to use the Samsung phone to take the shot.
• The stunt was effective. Samsung was being mentioned 900 times a minute soon after the photo was posted on Twitter.
• Advertizers have increasingly tried to integrate their products into shows since consumers are more likely to skip over ads.

Read more about Samsung’s previous spending on the Oscars, the hitch that Samsung had to deal with, and the proportion of the mentions of Samsung on social media that were positive over here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal