The Next Bubble: Pirate Equity Markets?

Posted on December 2, 2009 by Bill Petti

“Chirol” of Coming Anarchy (which is a fantastic blog for those interested in global and comparative politics) comments on the recent news that Somali pirates have set up what amounts to a stock exchange to help fund their operations.  Chirol quotes from the original Reuters story: It is a lucrative business that has drawn financiers [...]

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Wired’s Crowdsourced Manhunt

Posted on November 23, 2009 by Bill Petti

The current issue of Wired (not available on-line as of this posting) has a must-read article cover story: Gone.  The premise was to determine how easily someone could disappear and adopt a new identity in the digital age.  While people can easily adopt a new life on-line, it would appear exceedingly difficult to avoid detection [...]

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Nudging Customers and Aligning Interests with Relational Data: A true win-win

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Bill Petti

Last week, the WSJ ran an article on the increasing use of insights from behavioral economics by businesses and organizations.  Organizations are using these insights to ‘nudge‘ customers and clients toward specific behaviors–e.g. using less energy, opting in to the home delivery of prescription drugs, etc. The essence of behavioral economics is that humans fail [...]

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Daily Linkage

Posted on August 8, 2009 by Bill Petti

Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational and a blog of the same name, explores NYC Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to make bus fare free.  Bloomberg’s plan is to eliminate fares on a few of the fares in the hopes of speeding up the famously slow buses.  How would this help?  The plan assumes that there are [...]

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