Google Reader Feed: My Shared Items
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: Brands, signals, market signals | 1 Comment »
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 [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: costly signals, signals | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: negotiations, signals | Leave a Comment »
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: 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 »
Correlation doesn’t always equal causation, but often correlation can serve as a signal. The collection and analysis of data in some areas of the world is messy and slow. Often times this means the data can only tells us what happened in the past. What we would ideally like is a snapshot of events and [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: data mining, data-driven world, Economics, signals, statistics | Leave a Comment »
A few issues ago Wired had an interesting article on the use of a sophisticated algorithm that can create hi-res images out of lo-res originals: Vasanawala needed a phenomenally hi-res scan, but if he was going to get it, his young patient would have to remain perfectly still. If Bryce took a single breath, the [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: signals, technology | 1 Comment »
While there are all sorts of actions people can take to signal that they are trustworthy, sometimes simply making a promise can get the job done. When two parties will be dealing with each other for an indeterminate amount of time it is advantageous to both if they are viewed as trustworthy. Lying would mean [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: reputation, signals, trust | 1 Comment »
Non-fiction
How Doctors Think
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
The Wisdom of Whores
Switch
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
The Lords of Strategy
