Centives

Cigarettes. Is there anything they can’t do? Venessa Wong pointed out that they were arguably the most stable international currency:

• Luxury cigarettes that cost almost $900 have become a common way to bribe officials in China.
• In American jails cigarettes were the most widely used currency until they were banned.
• In Romania in the 1980s Kent cigarettes would be enough to bribe a doctor to see to your sick child. The cigarettes were so widely circulated as currency that they would often go stale.
• After World War Two wiped out the value of the German currency, Germans would use cigarettes to barter for goods.

You can read more about how cigarettes are viewed today over here.

Source: Business Week

Chris Miller discussed the history of military uniforms. Highlights include:

• Brightly coloured uniforms used to be the norm in an era before electronic communications. Military commanders needed to be able to look across the field to see how their troops were doing, and the best way to do that was for them to be dressed in a distinctive colour that made them stand out.
• These uniforms were hot and heavy and many units were lost to exhaustion and heat stroke. Camouflage was considered cowardly.
• At the turn of the 20^th century function began to be more important than form. By the time of World War One only France had brightly coloured uniforms.
• Trench warfare and fighter planes suddenly made the ability to blend into the terrain very desirable.
• Old habits died hard though. One World War Two general required units under his command to wear ties into combat.
• While camouflage will remain important for downed pilots and snipers, these days true camouflage is more about blending in with the people and adopting some of their customs and practices.

Read more about the various designs of the American uniform and some of the standards that soldiers today are expected to live up to in a fascinating and engaging article over here.

Source: The Atlantic

The Eurozone crisis has made many desperate to find funds to pay their bills. One avenue that people have turned to is insurance fraud writes Joseba Elola. Some of the more notable cases from Spain include:

• One woman claimed to have been bitten by a dog, creating a phobia of dogs which prevented her from going to work. The insurance company produced a video of her happily leaving the house to go to her job…at a canine hair salon.
• Immigrants are burning down their properties to collect the insurance money and fund their migration to another country with better prospects.
• One man was convinced by his family to take out a €600,000 insurance policy on his arm, and then to cut it off, ostensibly by accident. He was caught because the cut was too clean and he had tried to take off the wedding ring from the severed arm.
• Certain types of fraud are on the decline. People are not calling in sick as frequently because they don’t want to risk their job.

It’s an upsetting article that shows the desperation that is beginning to set in. You can find it here.

Source: El Pais

Via: Marginal Revolution

When you sit down for a meal at a restaurant, the waiter might know more about you than you think writes Susanne Craig:

• In an effort to provide personalized service, more and more restaurants are creating a database of information about your preferences.
• These include:
  • Where you like to sit
  • Special dates (anniversaries, birthdays etc.)
  • Hard or soft butter
  • Pepsi or Coke
  • Sparkling or Still water
• This information isn’t always used to help the customer. If you were a camper the last time and stayed at your table for a long time after you finished your meal, your waiter might seat you in an uncomfortable area to encourage you to leave.
• Restaurants have to be careful with the information. It’s no good to know the name of the wife of the guest. He might, after all, be dining with his mistress.
• But computers aren’t everything. To provide top service a human touch is required. One manager reads and watches the news to know if potential guests might have had a bad announcement or quarter. He knows then how to approach the customer.

To read more about the different codes used to describe you and why you had better hope you’re a PX and not a HWC click here.

Source: The New York Times

Via: Marginal Revolution

Song artists better not want to be billionaires too $#!%ing bad. Matthew Panzarino found out how much an artist makes when we buy one of their songs through iTunes or other services. His findings include:

• Streaming a song through iTunes makes an artist less than one third of a cent ($0.00330). This means that the song requires at least three plays just to make a penny.
• Spotify pays more by almost paying a cent for each play ($0.009669).
• But to list their songs artists need to pay an annual fee of $50. This means they need over 15,000 plays of their songs on iTunes just to break even (the number for Spotify is the somewhat better 5,171.)

Read more about how best to help your favourite artist and the fate of local artists over here.

Source: The Next Web

David H. Freedman looked at some of the ways that computers could transform democracy. They include:

• In the future candidates could answer a series of multiple choice questions about their positions, backed with videos of them explaining their opinion. Voters could then see a graph that shows how the candidate’s positions compare to their own.
• Online voting, because of its convenience, might also increase participation in elections – especially for the smaller races that don’t attract many voters but have a large impact on their lives.
• An attempt to form an online party that would put up a candidate to fight in the 2012 Presidential election failed. But that doesn’t mean the idea is doomed. Both the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street Movement got their boost through the internet.

You can read more about the role that Facebook would play in this future over here.

Source: Discover Magazine

Apple’s victory over Samsung in an intellectual property lawsuit has made international headlines. Yet Clyde Prestowitz believes that Samsung will have the last laugh after all:

• America is no longer the biggest smart phone market in the world, China is.
• An American court found that a foreign company had infringed on American patents. Courts in other parts of the world take a differing view. Even if Samsung lost the case in the United States it may well win them in the rest of the world.
• Samsung has almost double Apple’s global market share. All of this make the American verdict somewhat inconsequential.
• Apple is also dependent on Samsung for components necessary to make products such as the iPhone. More than 30% of Apple’s value products is said to come from Samsung. The company might now choose to supply the latest innovations to other companies before Apple.

Read the full argument here.

Source: Foreign Policy

Richard Pérez-Peña reported on a fascinating new phenomenon: the rise of Muslims attending Catholic Colleges:

• Some of the Muslim students say they enrolled because they felt more comfortable in an environment that encourages piety and faith, even if it is not their own – as opposed to secular institutions that might ignore or suppress it.
• Others go there because of a more conservative lifestyle that might include single-sex dorms.
• The colleges, for their part, make an effort to accommodate the students’ needs. These include specially designed prayer rooms and supplying halal meat for special events.

Read more including some of the challenges that the students face over here.

Source: The New York Times

Via: Marginal Revolution

Robert Provine looked at the role of laughter in our society. Highlights include:

• Women are attracted to men who will make them laugh, and men are attracted to women who laugh around them. This might explain why female comedians are rare, and why they generally aren’t considered sexually appealing.
• Women laugh 127% as much as men in a given audience.
• Some of these gender differences appear as early as age six.
• The average speaker laughs 46% more than the audience – the opposite of what happens in standup comedy routines.
• Perhaps this is why laughter begets laughter. In India one man has built an entire movement around people spontaneously laughing in groups.
• Most conversational laughter is not a response to a joke. It’s normally the charisma of the speaker that drives laughter.
• Laughter has a dark side. It is generally present during horrible events such as murder, rape and pillage.

The full article is much longer and it goes into much more detail about many aspects of laughter, including laughter epidemics. You can find it here.

Source: The Guardian