Centives

Indian butlers are the latest trend in imports to the United States writes Jesse McKinley:

• The Pierre hotel on New York’s Fifth Avenue has launched a royal attaché service for guests at the hotel’s 11 Grand Suites.
  • These suites can cost up to $20,000 a night.
• The royal attachés are butlers trained in India where such luxurious treatment is standard fare at high-class hotels.
• The butlers are proficient in various subjects including in-room dining, international customs, fixing shoelaces, drawing baths, cleaning carpets, fixing remotes, and “power dressing”.
• They also have keen observation skills so that they can anticipate “unspoken wishes”.
• The three that have come to the States were selected from a pool of thousands of other candidates. They underwent six months of additional training to prepare for the American market.

Read more about the butlers, the services they offer, why it’s not possible to have a request that is too bizarre, and what they would wish for if somebody was waiting on them, over here.

Source: The New York Times

Via: Marginal Revolution

Joshua Keating did what all of us have feared will happen at some point in our lives. He went through our search histories. Or, to be more precise, the search history of everybody on the planet. Here is what he found:

• Across the world people appear to have a fascination with celebrities – especially dead ones. Whitney Houston was the number one search term.
• Egypt had some of the most serious search terms. There were no pop culture references in the top ten and terms such as “Tahir Square” and “Mubarak trial” were high on the list.
• Burma, a country going through a democratic transition, was among the most searched terms in Saudi Arabia – perhaps an indicator of future political winds in the oil producing country.
• “Pulmonary carcinoid” was high on Japan’s list. Probably due to fears stemming from the Fukushima disaster.
• Russians were mostly interested in figuring out how to watch movies for free on the internet.
• India’s top two most searched terms were university entrance exams. Despite – or perhaps because of – this the number three most searched term was an Indian-American porn star who played the lead role in a mainstream Bollywood film this year.

See the full report of the most searched terms both across the world, and within various countries over here.

Source: Foreign Policy

Sword fighting is a staple of video games these days. Yet according to Rick Lane the games are doing it wrong:

• Video games mostly operate in a binary world. You press a button and it leads to a specific action. Sword fighting is more fluid than that and that complexity can’t be captured by buttons.
• In games you can normally either parry or attack. But in real battles it’s possible to both parry and attack in the same stroke.
• Motion control offers more hope. But they face the problem of not providing feedback. In real life if you swing your blade across and it gets blocked, your stroke is obstructed. With a motion controller there’s nothing to stop your arm from following through with the motion.
• Even if we could solve controls, the secrets of medieval sword fighting are also hard to recover. They are written in ancient languages with nuanced meanings that are difficult for modern scholars to decipher. We just don’t know how to sword fight in the right way anymore.
• What we do know about sword fighting though can take years to master. And video games have to be accessible enough so that anybody can pick up the technique.
• Despite all the issues, fighting dragons or gargoyles isn’t realistic either. Gamers can take solace in the fact that nobody has developed a real world technique to fight fire breathing creatures. There’s no reason to think that our games do it any better or worse than how it should be done.

Read more about sword fighting in video games over here.

Source: IGN

Matthew Yglesias writes that we should really appreciate T-Mobile’s latest scheme to double the price you pay for a smartphone:

• Subsidized smartphone contracts are a scam. Verizon will, for example, purchase an iPhone for $649, sell it to you for $199, and then make it up by overcharging you for service every month.
• You would actually save money if instead you paid full price for the phone and paid a fair monthly fee for your contract.
• This is likely why the makers of phones themselves – such as Google and Apple – are consistently ranked as the most admired companies, while America’s telecom operators, AT&T and Verizon are the most reviled.
• T-Mobile has decided to get rid of the subsidized carrier model. It remains to be seen if Americans will choose to take this better deal.

Read more about why Americans are stuck with this inefficient system, and what can be done to fix it over here.

Source: Slate

As bonus season comes around, Kevin Roose wrote an article that is likely to be rather unpopular as America continues to limp on after its financial crisis:

• While Wall Street bankers are paid too much, if they’re going to be paid a high amount then bonuses are the best way to do it.
• It’s good for banks because they can adjust the compensation given to employees based on performance in that year. In a bad year they can quickly cut costs without having to fire employees.
• As much as bankers might be hated at the moment they play an important role in the economy, and it’s bad for everybody if they are fired. It is estimated that for each financial service job lost in New York City, two non-financial jobs are lost as well.
• Bonuses might also be better for the economy. By getting a one-time lump sum payment bankers might be more likely to spend it all – putting it back into the economy – rather than if they had received it in standardized amounts over the year.

Read more about bonuses and some implausible alternatives over here.

Source: New York Magazine