Centives

Chico Harlan looked into the depths of internet history and after clearing the dust away was surprised to find a thriving company:

• Fifteen years ago MapQuest was a verb much like Google. People would say that they are “MapQuesting” the directions to a place.
• Yet today it’s not at all a part of the national conversation – despite having the second highest share of the American mapping market.
• It has considered changing its name to get more attention but decided not to as it has a lot of brand equity. 40 million people use MapQuest every month.
• Unlike the users of Google, Bing, and Apple maps who find it preinstalled on their phones, users of MapQuest are making a conscious decision to find and use MapQuest specifically.
• The company has also tied up with businesses. Papa John’s uses MapQuest to power its pizza delivery system.
• The company is careful with its spending. HERE, a competing mapping service, has 6,000 employees. MapQuest makes do with 100.
• It has also avoided jumping on trends that attract a lot of attention but seemingly serve little purpose such as 3D buildings.
• As a result of this the company is profitable and after updating its website, is aiming for a second wind.

Read more about the company, how it got here, how its parent company’s acquisition by Verizon could change things, and more over here.

Source: The Washington Post

Via: Marginal Revolution

Ella Morton wrote about Presidential Libraries:

• The tradition began when, instead of keeping his White House documents with him when he left office, Franklin D. Roosevelt donated them to the Federal Government.
• To showcase them the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum was built.
• By 1978 handing documents over to the government at the end of one’s tenure in office had become law since documents from previous administrations such as George Washington’s kept getting lost or destroyed.
• Libraries serve the purpose of complying with the law and a museum section builds a story of the President’s legacy.
• Money for the libraries is raised by a foundation while the President is in office. The foundation for George W. Bush raised $500 million.
• Because of this the libraries are biased to portray the President in a positive light – even for infamously notorious one such as Nixon.
• Over time, as the administration’s team begins to age and fade away, it is possible for the library to take a more critical view of the President’s legacy.
• For example Truman’s Presidential library wasn’t able to scrutinize the President’s decision to use the nuclear bomb against Japan until long after he had passed.
• As libraries age, and the President’s they’re focused on begin to fade from public memory, the libraries struggle to draw visitors.
• They can then be repurposed as community areas with events such as speakers.
• Nixon’s library is actually a surprisingly popular place to host weddings.

Find out which Presidential Library is the most popular and which is the least, as well as many more details here.

Source: Atlas Obscura

Despite the spread of user-centric technology over the past two decades, democracy, a system of government that is about empowering the individual, seems to have stagnated writes Thomas Carothers. He put together a group of experts to explain why:

• Technology is good at empowering people at the local level, for example by calling attention to potholes in roads, but it isn’t a useful tool to spread change nationally.
• This may change as technology focuses the minds of those governing high density urban centers. Popular mayors who effectively respond to local feedback may then go onto change things nationally.
• Another reason maybe that technology can be used to sow dissent rather than democratic unity. After all radio – the predecessor to social media – was used to stir passions during the Rwandan genocide.
• Autocrats leading countries have also learnt to use social media and technology to crackdown on dissidents.
• And technology hasn’t really spread as much as people commonly assume. In Turkey, for example, half of all households lack internet access. They get their news from easily censored forms of media.
• Finally technology may have very little to do with spreading self-determination. Democracy requires institutions such as political parties and individual-centric social media does little to build them.

Read more of the arguments, theories, and thoughts, in a fascinating article here.

Source: Foreign Policy

Las Vegas, Nevada, is finally building a stadium that will allow it to have a professional sports team. This heralds a wider era of the gamblification of sports writes Joseph Stromberg:

• Due to previous match fixing scandals betting on sports has been banned in the United States – though loopholes exist.
• However the craze for things like fantasy sports shows that people enjoy predicting the outcomes of sports matches – and would likely wager money on their predictions.
• Fantasy Duel, a site that essentially allows people to bet on individual players made $57 billion in revenues last year.
• Teams will want a piece of the action. They could do so by, for example, offering in-seat betting.
• The stadium in Nevada may well be the first place where experiments such as this are set up.
• As for match-fixing, proponents of legalization argue that it’ll be easier to monitor anomalous betting patterns if gambling is done on official exchanges.

Read more here.

Source: Vox

Tyler Cowen discussed research about traffic management by ants:

• Ants never seem to get stuck in traffic jams, even on trails over 60 feet long.
• Unlike humans, when traffic is heavy, ants speed up instead of slowing down.
• They also widen their trail as more of them arrive on it.
• Since they don’t have great vision ants use their antennae and legs to figure out who’s behind and in front of them.
• This seems to be key to their ability to manage traffic. While human drivers are unable to do this, driverless cars probably will be able to.

You can read more here, and find the full study here.

Source: Marginal Revolution

Roberto A. Ferdman wrote about the effects that weight loss drugs have:

• It is thought that those who take weight loss pills such as appetite suppressants may end up gaining weight because they feel that they no longer have to watch what they eat or how much they exercise.
• New research indicates that merely being exposed to an advert for a weight loss pill drives people to eat worse – even if they didn’t actually take the pill.
• It seems that being told that there is a potential remedy for weight gain out there persuades people that they don’t have to worry too much about gaining weight.
• This effect disappears when pills are advertized as supplements instead of drugs.
• This might be because drugs are seen as something that work without any effort on the user’s part, unlike supplements.

Read more here.

Source: The Washington Post

The Economist wrote about the emerging practice of asking millions of strangers on the internet for help with medical problems:

• There are at least 7,000 “rare” diseases – those that affect fewer than 200,000 people.
• Doctors cannot possibly be aware of, and know how to diagnose all of them.
• Even if they’re farsighted enough to know that they’re unable to diagnose a particular condition, they may not know who to refer a patient to.
• In Europe 40% of those afflicted with rare diseases get an incorrect diagnosis at first.
• Enter the crowdsourcing healthcare site CrowdMed. The site allows users to post a detailed list of their aliments and ask for a diagnosis.
• Patients can offer monetary rewards to garner more attention.
• Those who contribute are medical students, retired doctors, and other laymen who enjoy a challenge.
• Those who provide a correct diagnosis rise in the website’s rankings and gain more prominence.
• One analysis indicates that 80% of the suggestions offered through the site were accurate.
• Surprisingly the most accurate diagnoses don’t always come from those with the best credentials.
• On the other end of the spectrum, AI systems such as IBM’s Watson are also entering into the healthcare diagnosis business by using big data to come up with suggestions.
• It remains to be seen if crowdsourcing or artificial intelligence will provide the most accurate medical evaluations in the future.

Read more in the truly excellent Economist over here.

Source: The Economistc

Europe has a thriving ecosystem of imaginary companies writes Liz Alderman:

• Imaginary companies such as “Animal Kingdom” in France sell animal food.
• They take into account their revenue, costs, and payroll. All these numbers are made up.
• The imaginary company works with other imaginary companies such as banks and suppliers.
• The companies have real offices, and real people working in them but that’s about the extent of it.
• The imaginary money that each company’s employees make can be spent buying the products of other imaginary companies.
• This ecosystem started as a government initiative to train students and the unemployed and get them used to working in an office environment.
• Since the ongoing Euro problems began they’ve taken a crucial role in fighting long-term unemployment by keeping office skills fresh.
• To fully replicate the European business experience, the companies will sometimes hold strikes complete with placards and upset employees.
• The fake companies are successful. Up to 70% of those who go through it in France go on to find a job.

Read more about the World War 2 roots of these companies, how the real workers feel about working in a fake company, and more over here.

Source: The New York Times

Via: Marginal Revolution

Back in 2013 Linda Rodriguez McRobbie took a look at the history of the Ouija board:

• Ouija boards became popular at a time when communicating with spirits was all the rage in the US. It was particularly popular since it was thought to be compatible with Christian beliefs.
• Back then people would communicate with spirits by calling out letters of the alphabet and waiting for a spirit to ‘knock’, thus spelling out words in a time consuming process.
• Entrepreneurs fixed the problem by coming up with the Ouija board, making the process of communicating with spirits much quicker.
• The board got a boost in popularity after the patent office certified it works. They did so because the Ouija board correctly guessed the patent officer’s supposedly unknown name.
• The fact that one of the people who took the board to the officer was a patent attorney, and thus may just have known the officer’s name went unmentioned.
• The board named itself. Its creators asked it what it should be called, and it responded with Ouija – claiming it meant good luck.
• The name is possibly a misreading of the name of a woman’s rights activist, Ouida, whose picture may have been in the room at the time the board was named.
• Mediums hated the board – by bypassing them, the board was stealing their business.
• Up until 1973 the board was a bit of a joke, a game which sometimes had higher sales than Monopoly. Then The Exorcist, a movie where a child is possessed after playing with the board, became popular. Suddenly the board began to terrify people.
• It has since receded as an object of terror in the popular imagination. Several Ouija board apps are available.
• Experts believe that Ouija boards work as a result of the ideometer effect, where involuntary muscle movements are amplified. Because the movements are involuntary they are assumed by people to be caused by an external force.
• There is some psychological evidence to indicate that the board can be used to access people’s subconscious memory.

Read more about the history of the board, how the board “asked” its so-called creator to build a factory that later killed him, the role it played in the White House, how psychologists are trying to use it, and much more in a fascinating article over here.

Source: The Smithsonian