Centives

America’s FBI has a drug problem reports James Comey:

• The FBI is increasingly having to deal with cyber criminals. To do so the FBI is onboarding 2,000 new individuals, many of who will target cyber-crime.
• However the FBI is struggling to find recruits because it requires that candidates not have smoked marijuana three years prior to joining.
• Since many of the brightest computer students are fans of pot it’s difficult to find qualified applicants who meet the requirements.
• The FBI is considering changing its policies to allow for new joiners who “want to smoke weed on the way to the interview”.

Read more over here.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

The X-Men, Spiderman, Iron Man, and the Avengers are all Marvel characters. Yet you’ll never see Wolverine make a cameo in an Avengers film because Marvel sold off the movie rights for the X-Men characters to Sony, another studio. Even though this means we won’t see some awesome cross-overs Joshua Yehl argues that this is a good thing for comic book fans:

• Only so many comic book movies can be made every year by a single studio.
• Marvel’s most popular characters before superhero movies became a craze were the X-Men and Spiderman.
• If they had held the rights to those characters then they probably would’ve exclusively made movies focused on them.
• They sold the rights before they realized they would get into the superhero movie making business. Once they did they had to scratch around for lesser known characters with potential such as Iron Man.
• And if it weren’t for Iron Man we probably wouldn’t have gotten the rest of the Avengers heroes. Characters such as Thor and Black Widow were unknowns before Marvel began to experiment with movies around them.
• Therefore we have the fragmented ownership of the characters to thank for both the quality and quantity of movies like The Avengers

Read more of his argument over here.

Source: IGN

Nintendo’s Wii U console continues to disappoint as Microsoft’s Xbox One and Sony’s PlayStation 4 eclipse it in sales, while on the portable gaming device front Nintendo is losing out to mobile games. The gentlemen and ladies over at ArsTecnica outlined how they would save the beleaguered company:

• Over the course of four years Activision released 21 Guitar-Hero like games. Nintendo meanwhile only releases sequels to its popular games ones every few years. More frequent releases will mean more sales.
• Nintendo could also mint some nice cash by creating versions of its popular series such as Mario and Zelda for mobile phone app stores.
• Doing so would give it the opportunity to cross-license. Imagine the popularity of an Angry Birds: Pokémon edition.
• Nintendo should either stop making hardware or…make better hardware. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are similar platforms which allow developers to cross-develop games for both consoles. The Wii U on the other hand is far less powerful meaning that if studios want games to work on it a substantial amount of effort needs to be done.

Read more about the various things that have gone wrong with Nintendo and how things can improve over here.

Source: ArsTechnica

The war on drugs is widely thought to unfairly target black people. There may be a silver lining though writes Tim Fernholz:

• Mandatory employee drug testing has become increasingly frequent.
• Yet unlike other anti-drug programs this seems to help black people.
• According to one study states in which such testing is common, black employment increases by up to 30%, and wages for black people by up to 13%.
• Researchers speculate that it is because employers overestimate the amount of drugs taken by black people. Mandatory drug testing shatters those perceptions with hard fact.
• Perhaps this is why black people have increasingly approved of drug testing, while older and more educated workers dislike it.

Read more about the study, its results, and the White House position that the author of the study will take up over here.

Source: Quartz

Nutella turns 50 this year. Dany Mitzman delved into the history of the most glorious of chocolate hazelnut spreads:

• 365 million kilos of Nutella are consumed every year – that’s about the weight of the Empire State Building.
• It was created in a region of Italy famed for its chocolate and hazelnuts. Others had put the two together before, but it usually contained a lot of chocolate which was too expensive for the common person at the time.
• The first version of the hazelnut heavy Nutella was sold as a loaf wrapped in aluminum foil. Consumers would shave off slices of it with a knife.
• The first spreadable version was launched a few years later and this helped make it popular since customers could more easily make a small amount go a long way. It was no longer just for special occasions.
• Nutella was first called “Giandujot” the name was changed to Nutella – “-ella” is an affectionate suffix attached to other popular Italian foods such as mozzarella or caramella.
• The company behind Nutella today buys 25% of the world’s hazelnuts – more than any other single buyer.
• It is seen as a pop-lux product. It’s luxurious but not too expensive for commoners. This is epitomized by the glass jar which indicates class, and a plastic cap that conveys common familiarity.
• Its success is also down to marketing. It advertises its hazelnut and milk ingredients while avoiding mentioning that over 50% of it is sugar.

Read more about Nutella, its founder, the progeny who still runs the company, and more over here.

Source: BBC

Despite experts estimating that the moon is one of the least densely populated areas in our solar system, marketers are looking to expand their mindshare of advertizements on the moon writes Rich McCormick:

• The first planned private mission to the moon is scheduled for October, 2015.
• The payload will include a 1 kg can filled with a powdered Japanese sports drink.
• The company will pay over half a million dollars for this delivery.
• Irony abounds: the company that will deliver the payload usually uses its technology to clean up space trash.
• The drink can only be opened through a ‘dream ring’ which will be distributed to children.
• The makers of the drink say that they hope this will encourage children to become astronauts, go to the moon, open the can, and take a drink.
• This won’t be the first drink on or close to the moon. American astronauts are often equipped with the powdered orange drink, Tang.

Read more about the plan over here.

Source: The Verge

On any given book on Africa chances are that the cover features a red sunset or an acacia tree or both. Michael Silverberg took a look at why:

• Cover designers aren’t necessarily worldly in their outlook and may not know a lot about African countries.
• In such circumstances it is safer to fall back upon existing clichés.
• When there are exceptions to this cover design it is usually because the author is female or Muslim – and then clichés for female or Muslim authored books are used on the cover instead.
• Someday there’ll be a bestselling book on Africa that won’t resort to this trope for its cover. This bestseller’s cover will then become the new cliché.

Read more over here.

Source: Quartz

Western countries tend to be more individualistic while eastern countries are usually thought to be more community oriented. Conventional wisdom suggests that this is all about wealth: richer societies tend to be more individualistic and in recent history the west has been wealthier than the east. As those in eastern countries accumulate wealth they too will become more individualistic. Lily Kuo outlined a study which shows that this line of thinking may be incorrect:

• The authors of a study postulated that societies that grow rice slowly become more interdependent over generations while those that grow wheat are more individualistic.
• This is because growing rice requires more cooperation. Rice is a labour intensive crop and usually requires twice as much manpower – sometimes an entire village to grow – as wheat.
• Rice farmers need complicated irrigation system and one’s use of the water directly affects the usage of other farmers, requiring cooperation.
• Meanwhile rain which usually drives wheat growth will fall no matter what other wheat farmers do.
• Regions in northern China are more likely to grow wheat, while those in the south grow rice. Researchers found evidence that those in the northern regions are more individualistic than those in the south.
• They also found that rice regions had lower rates of divorce.
• This finding could help explain why countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong remain less individualistic than their western counterparts despite comparable levels of wealth.

Read more about the study, its methodology, and its findings over here.

Source: Quartz

Goldman Sachs has launched a new financial product aimed at helping communities writes Esmé E. Deprez:

• Goldman Sachs has given the government of Massachusetts a $9 million loan to reduce crime.
• If a targeted group of people spend less time in jail than expected, then the government of Massachusetts will have to spend less money jailing people and Goldman Sachs could stand to make up to $22 million.
• If crime isn’t reduced then the financial services company will lose almost everything it lent.
• Such financial products are expanding under “double bottom-line” initiatives that aim to align a company’s profits with its values.
• There are about $80 million of these social justice bonds in America today. They are expected to grow to $500 million by next year.

Read about what critics have to say of such bonds, social workers who are charged with ensuring that people stay out of jail, and more over here.

Source: Bloomberg

For this Mother’s day Kevin Voigt took a look at the tradeoffs that mothers make:

• It takes about $241,000 to raise a child. And that doesn’t even include the cost of college.
• But that is just the tip of the iceberg. According to one estimate a mother produces $119,000 worth of unpaid output a year.
• If this were included in GDP calculations it could boost many country’s GDPs by up to 50%.
• The longer women wait to have children the more their lifetime wages increase – even if they return to work after.
• And for highly skilled women being a mother can mean a loss of $230,000 in lifetime earnings.
• Father’s, on the other hand, see no financial penalty from parenthood.

Read more about the financial decisions that mothers have to make, details about the studies referenced, and more over here.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor