Google Reader Feed: My Shared Items
A while back I stumbled on the video below about Thaumoctopus mimicus, or the Mimic Octopus. Discovered in 1998, the Mimic Octopus is unique in that it doesn’t simply manipulate its physical features to blend in to its surroundings in order to escape predators. Instead, the Mimic Octopus manipulates it’s physical appearance in order to [...]
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I recently finished Diego Gambetta’s Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate. For those looking for a more academic take on signaling (particularly from a sociological point of view) it’s a great find. As I previously mentioned, Gambetta uses the extreme case of cooperation amongst criminals to tease out more general dynamics of trust, signaling, and [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: applied signaling, book review, signaling | 1 Comment »
Here are a few quick signaling items for your perusal. I will try to do a similar roundup each Friday if I’ve stumbled on enough items throughout the week. Enjoy! How to Signal That You Are Marrying for Love? It’s tougher than you might think. Some suggest using a pre-nuptial agreement to signal one’s love and affection [...]
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There are many reasons why organizations (government, businesses, etc) grow dysfunctional and stagnant. One major reason lies with the promotion and retention of less capable workers. There have been a number of studies that explored this dynamic (for example, The Peter Principle, which theorizes that people are promoted as long as they are competent, which [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: applied signaling, Business, management, signaling | 1 Comment »
The paper came out a few months ago, but NPR’s recent story reminded me of it. Essentially, a professor and graduate student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business tried to identify the linguistic signaling used by CEO’s and CFO’s during earnings calls that could be used to reliably predict when their companies were cooking the books (PDF [...]
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The idea that certain colors elicit different emotional and behavior responses in humans isn’t all that new, but a new research paper suggests that the effect is stronger than we may have thought. The research team built on the physical signal of the color red, which is displayed on the body of female chimps prior to ovulation: [...]
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Every night, about 15 minutes or so after we’ve put my 3-year old daughter to bed, we inevitably hear a knock at the door. She’s typically knocking because she needs to go the bathroom. She’s also knocking because she wants to scope out what we are doing, find out if she is missing anything. One [...]
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This was just too good to wait until I came back from vacation, combining my love of signaling and unadulterated hatred of all things Jersey Shore (the show, not the location): Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: applied signaling, Brands, market signals, signals | 2 Comments »
Broadway Danny Rose is one of Woody Allen’s lesser known films, but I’d argue one of his best. I was reminded of the movie the other day when I was thinking about various non-verbal displays of strength in nature. In the clip below (first 30 seconds), two men are “tearing money”–literally taking cold hard cash and [...]
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Signaling is the act of conveying meaningful information about oneself to another party. Typically when we talk about signals we refer to intentional behavior on the part of an actor. For example, if the leader of Country A makes a public commitment to defend Country B the leader of Country A is communicating their “type” [...]
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Fiction
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
Non-fiction
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value
The Numbers Game
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception
The Rational Optimist
The Quiet American
How Doctors Think
The Wisdom of Whores
Switch
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
