Google Reader Feed: My Shared Items
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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Bob Sutton points to some interesting research on the impact of culture on negotiations: There is a stream of research on negotiation that shows the strategic expression of anger is effective, apparently because it is taken as a sign you are “tough” and thus leads your intimidated opponent to make concessions. A new study by Hajo [...]
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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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After honeymooning without his iPhone, Noah Brier speculates that we’ve reached a point where in order to get anything done we need to ‘engineer difficulty’: as part of having a phone with a keypad (not even keyboard) I went back to T9 (you remember it, predictive type for SMS messages). The struggle to send a simple [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: applied signaling, choice architecture, signals, Thomas Schelling | Leave a Comment »
In the re: March section of this month’s issue of Fast Company you will find a short reaction by me to one of the Heath Brother’s recent columns, “The Telltale Brown M&M“. The Heath’s column presented a great example of how to use signals (intentional or unintentional actions) to uncover potential problems that may be [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: shameless self promotion, signals | Leave a Comment »
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
