Centives

Michio Kaku, the co-creator of string theory, talked with Jason Hidalgo about the future of science and technology. Some interesting highlights include:

• Our progress in computer technology has been incredible. The computing power of the chip that plays music in greeting cards has more processing capability than all the Allied forces in World War II. Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin and Hitler would’ve given anything to acquire the chip in that card – the same chip we now just throw away.
• By 2020 computer chips will cost about a penny – the same as scrap paper – and computing will have become as ubiquitous as electricity.
• Moore’s law – the observation that processing power roughly doubles every two years – has driven the growth of computing and Silicon Valley and is fast approaching its limits. Soon silicon computer chips will have shrunk to a few atoms, and they won’t be able to shrink further.
• This could lead to Silicon Valley turning into another Detroit.
• DNA, protein, and quantum computing might be the next big thing, but they’re not ready yet.
• The wave of the future is internet-enabled contact lenses. These could identify individuals at a party, translate real time conversations, or even share a user’s point of view with somebody else in real time.

Read more of the expansive interview that covers topics including when humanity can expect to get a Death Star into space, America’s failed attempt to build a Superconducting Super Collider, America’s education system, and more over here.

Source: Engadget

Michael Grabell looked at the army of people that get to work every day at 4am:

• Almost 20% of the job growth in the United States since its recession has been in the temporary worker sector.
• Temp workers show up at temp-agencies at 4am, and wait to find out if they’ll have a job for the day.
• They’re not paid for the hours that they’re just standing around, waiting to see if they are given a job. When those hours are taken into account they’re paid less than minimum wage.
• Demand for them has risen from companies who prefer not to worry about compensation claims, union drives, or even citizen checks.
• There is so much demand that there are ‘temp towns’ – inhabited by a large proportion of temp workers – that have spread across the United States

Read more about the plight of temp workers, what it’s like to work as one, and the role of the government over here.

Source: Time

Lucy Wallis looked at the practice of extreme house sitting:

• With almost a million empty homes across the UK, homeowners need to find a way to ensure their properties aren’t vandalized or burglarized while they’re waiting for the properties to be sold.
• Companies have sprung up that match those who need a place to live, with those who need people to live in their properties.
• In exchange for a small rent (as little as £180 – $274 – a month for a 35 bedroom mansion) an individual agrees to live in the property and protect it.
• There are certain restrictions – the house-sitter can’t host any parties, has to have a stable income, and can’t have a criminal record. They must also stay for at least three months.
• It’s not just homes. Uninhabited hospitals, pubs, schools, police stations, observatories, and even a theme park need a sitter.

Read more about why there’s a surge in interest after Christmas, how you can be a house-sitter in the UK, and other creative ways an individual can find a place to live for low rents over here.

Source: BBC

Bob Shaw took a look at an entrepreneur serving an interesting market:

• Paladin Deception Services offers to tell lies for $54 per deception
• The most popular deception is for Paladin to lie about a job-seeker’s job history, pretending to be a reference that doesn’t exist
• Lying to spouses about where an individual is one night, and helping people take time off from work through sick leave or family bereavement are also popular deceptions
• When making calls the staff use technical know-how to use any area code that the individual would like
• The company keeps on the payroll both males and females who can speak in various accents to help make the deception believable

Read more about how Facebook kicked Paladin off its site, when Paladin works with law enforcement agencies, and more over here.

Source: Twin Cities

Via: Marginal Revolution

Derek Thompson thinks that soon Silicon Valley will go the way of Detroit. A once-famed hub of innovation that loses relevance. What could cause such a calamity: rising sea-levels? Valley competitors? Corporate Corruption? Worse actually. Boredom:

• Silicon Valley is…boring. It’s essentially a suburb.
• The individuals that drive innovation in the Valley tend to be younger and prefer to live in cities where there are things to do.
• Being able to ride to work or shop locally also appeals to the Valley crowd and is also difficult in the Valley environment.
• San Jose, San Francisco, and, further east, New York and Washington, are likely to be the places where the innovators will end up.

Read more here.

Source: The Atlantic

The NBA’s 2013 draft ended this week with several players being offered millions of dollars. Yet 60% of the players in the draft are likely to be bankrupt five years after retirement. Matthew Heimer looked at why:

• Our understanding of NBA careers is distorted by the distinction between the average and the median. If Bill Gates walks into a bar then on average everybody there is a millionaire. Yet the median gives a more accurate overview of the actual salary class of the bar.
• Thus while the average salary of an NBA player may be $5 million, the median is around $2.3 million.
• The average NBA career lasts six years – but the median career lasts just four years.
• In fact a quarter of all NBA players only earn for a year before ‘retiring’.
• Thus the mdian NBA players makes between $500,000 and $1.5 million a year after taxes, for four years. At 26 they’ve retired and have no other real source of income.
• For a player to avoid bankruptcy they need to start careful management of the money now – and realize that they can only really afford an upper middle-class lifestyle. Not a millionaire’s one.

Read more about the fate of NBA players, how ‘survivorship bias’ distorts the numbers, and more over here.

Source: Market Watch

The Economist writes that the general perception that Arabic is a single language is somewhat mistaken:

• Arabic spread across the world 1,400 years ago, and since then it has become increasingly fragmented through regional variations.
• It is now more like Latin in medieval Europe where classical Latin was what people wrote and studied, but those who spoke were really speaking French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
• Similarly a standard form of Arabic is mostly used in political speeches, the news, and in writing – but this is not the version of Arabic that is spoken at home.
• For example an urban Algerian and an urban Jordanian wouldn’t be able to speak to each other if they spoke naturally – but they could communicate by reverting to formal standard Arabic.
• This also means that those looking to learn the language have to learn how to read and write one version of it – and then learn to speak an entirely different version that only a subset of Arabic-speakers will understand

See a demonstration of how different the various strains of Arabic are, why this is a problem of too many navies, and more over here.

Source: The Economist

Helping people in poverty is notoriously hard. It is estimated that in India, for every dollar spent by the government on food or employment aid for the poor, 50 cents are lost to corruption. One solution? Just give poor families $1,000, writes Dana Goldstein;

• GiveDirectly is the brain-child of four Harvard and MIT graduates and does what it says on the tin; Kenyan families are given $1,000 in instalments of $200 . There are no requirements, terms or conditions. The families can do whatever they like with it.
• The charity identifies which families to give money to based on what their houses are made of (mud or concrete?). The typical recipient otherwise lives on 65 cents-per-person-per-day.
• Initial results are encouraging. Recipients have often been spending money on food or home improvements such as a weatherproof tin roof. Others have invested in small businesses, rearing chickens or vending clothes. Early analysis suggests mothers and grandmothers are more likely to invest in children’s well-being than fathers and grandfathers.
• By giving money directly to those in need the bureaucracy of the third sector can be avoided, making gift-giving more efficient. After all, who knows a family’s needs better than the family?
• Non-profit organisation responses have not been overly enthusiastic. “There’s an industry that exists that tries to make decisions for poor people and determine what’s best for them.” explains one NGO employee “If this works, what are we all here for?”
• GiveDirectly is gathering interest. Google donated $2.4 million to expand operations beyond Kenya. Facebook’s co-founder Chris Hughes joined the board of directors in August.

For more about how this approach is different to micro-loans, why village elders are no longer consulted and why this approach might work in Africa though not the USA, click here

Source: The Atlantic

The rightly famous Freakonomics writers had a recent podcast discussing the economic impact that your name has on your life:

• Levitt and Dubner looked at children born into similar situations: age of mother, healthcare plan, parents’ marriage status etc…but who differed by having a distinctly black or traditional white sounding name. The result; there was no correlation. Name has no effect on lifetime economic well-being.
• This contrasts with a study found that sending out a resume with a white sounding name has a 50% higher chance of getting a call-back than sending an identical resume with a black sounding name.
• Perhaps this seeming contradiction can be explained by most people not finding jobs through sending resumes; it’s all about networks. It may be having a black sounding name helps with finding a job in a black community.
• Adverts on Google have an unpleasant trend. Black names typed into a Google search are 25% more likely to come up with the advertisment “(name) arrested” than white names
• But, Google says the way the algorithm works is that ads are weighted in favour of what gets clicked. So what the data actually shows is that “(black name) arrested” is 25% more likely to be clicked than “(white name) arrested”
• When it comes to parents choosing names, there are a couple of interesting trends. One is that almost every name that becomes popular started out as a high-class or high education name. After a couple of decades these names work their way down the income strata, becoming prevalent in lower income families and much less common in high-income families.

Click here for the podcast or here for the transcript. Read or listen on to hear the perspective of fifteen year old E Harper Nora Jeremijenko-Conley, how parents signal intellect through their children’s names and how naming trends vary between liberal and conservative households.

Source: Freakonomics

Lisa Vaas looked at the very creepy market for hacked webcams:

• Hackers have figured out how to remotely activate computer webcams and monitor individuals who are unaware their cameras are compromised.
• A black market exists where access to the webcam of a female’s computer costs $1. Or one could take control of the webcams of 100 males for the same amount.
• Aspiring entrepreneurs can easily make a return on their investment by using the embarrassing photos taken by the webcam to blackmail individuals.
• Last year several MacBooks were compromised – the hacker would convince girls to take the computer into the shower by popping up an error message stating that the device’s internal sensors had to be cleaned by putting it “near hot steam for several minutes”.
• For the most part though losing control of your webcam is rare, is almost always prevented by anti-virus programs, and requires the user to actively be tricked.

Read more about how the hacks work, how to ensure your camera isn’t compromised, and more over here.

Source: Naked Security