Insightology

Let's say you are a cell phone manufacturer and you have to make a decision about a new phone. Your clever engineers have developed several new features that could make your phone much more distinctive in the market. What do you do? Do you put as many features as you can into one phone, or do you introduce several phones, each with a different set of features? Researchers at the University of Maryland asked this question and conducted a series of experiments to answer it.  Surprisingly, their conclusion is that having a larger number of specialized products would be better in the long run.    

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Yoram Bauman is a micro-economist who calls himself the world's first and only stand-up economist*.  This is his take on an economics text book.

 

The Ten Principles of Economics

 

Other, more colorful, routines can be found on You Tube by simply searching for Yoram Bauman.  

 

*This claim is disputed by several others, as posted on his website.

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In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan

To be clear, Michael Pollan is not a food scientist, nutritionist, physician or a government employee. He is a journalist with a long interest in food and its impact on society. Consequently this book does not contain a specific diet nor does it focus on combating a particular condition such as weight loss. What it is, oddly enough, is what it says it is - a defense of food. It might seem strange that someone would need to write a book to defend something as fundamental and essential to life as food, but Pollan shows that this book is necessary because the very definition of "food" is under question. He wrote this book as a follow-up to his best seller The Omnivore's Dilemma, which explored the origins of four different meals and in the process explained where our food comes from and how that affects us. In this easy read he focuses on what we should eat, laying out an "eating algorithm" that is based on a very simple rule that is printed right on the book's cover: eat food, not too much, mostly plants. All the guidance you need to eat well and live long.

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Do names have an impact on performance? How about initials? Would major league baseball players with the initial K strikeout more than others? Would people with intials C or D perform worse in class? Are people with white or black sounding names likely to be more or less successful in life? Interesting research has been done in both the areas of initials and names and the results are seemingly contradictory.

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Asteroids are space objects and sometimes they hit earth. Depending on their size they can cause great damage. Small asteroids can burn up when they enter the atmosphere. Larger ones can hit earth and cause damage directly and indirectly. The most popular reason for the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago is asteroid strikes and the resulting global climactic changes. Okay, nothing new so far. Everyone can agree that asteroid strikes can have no to devastating impact. The next question is how likely are such impacts? To understand how frequently asteroids have struck earth in the past the traditional research method is to look for craters. Using this method scientists have estimated that large strikes happen about once in a million years or so. Then geophysicist Dallas Abbott began wondering if that kind of calculation made sense. Since about seventy percent of the earth is covered with water, wouldn't it make sense that most asteroid strikes are likely to have been in water than land. If so isn't it likely we have been underestimating the number of asteroid strikes on earth?

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Why Not? How to Use Everyday Ingenuity to Solve Problems Big and Small by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres

As readers of their Forbes column know, Nalebuff and Ayres have a long history of suggesting quirky and unconventional ideas. In this book they show us how, with easy writing and plenty of examples. How do you ensure you don't forget your keys? Did you know a variation of the solution makes European hotels more energy efficient? Can you buy insurance to protect against a drop in your home value? How nice would it be if you didn't have to pay your mortgage for a month - especially when the shopping season depletes your wallet. How can you get your health insurance company to treat your life as if it were worth a million dollars? Sometimes the answers are real world solutions, sometimes they are simply interesting ideas. This is a book about problem solving - or as the authors put it, problem solving with a purpose. They want you to not only think in new ways, but also come up with solutions that could help society or seed new businesses. Their approach to problem solving is based on two perspectives: looking for problems in search of solutions, and solutions in search of problems. 

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In a series of classic studies done in the 1960's, the Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget showed how children can misperceive volume. When colored liquid was poured from a taller cylinder to a shorter wider cylinder, they thought the volume of liquid had decreased. These primary school children were using only the height of the container when making volume judgments and were hence making mistakes. Ah, you say, they are children and are naive enough not to understand that more than height goes into determining the volume of liquid in a container. Full grown adults would never make that mistake. Why, if such height based illusions existed, wouldn't restaurants routinely use tall thin glasses to pour your drinks, rather than short wide glasses? Well.         

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Does movie violence increase crime? Does Fox News have an impact on voting? Do people pay not to go the gym? Are companies correct in expecting that investors pay less attention to information released on Friday? These and other interesting questions are asked and answered by Stefano DellaVigna,  an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley. To study movie violence, he and his colleagues looked at actual crime statistics surrounding movie releases, rather than run lab experiments.

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The Reluctant Mr. Darwin - An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution by David Quammen

On the evening of July 1, 1858, six scientific papers were read to the Linnean Society in London. One of them was an idea independently discovered by two authors, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Neither author was there; the young man, Wallace, was in New Guinea collecting insects, while the older man, Darwin, was moaning the death of his young son at home. The idea, natural selection, had nearly zero impact and in the annual address given the following year, the president of the society said the past year hadn't seen "any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize" science. That was the official birth, 150 years ago, of the single biggest idea in the biological sciences.

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First let's discuss leverage and then get to (the Philadelphia Phillies outfielder) Burrell. Leverage can briefly be described as the ability to exert influence. When a person has the ability to influence another or a situation, then that person is said to have leverage. It is a term often used in financial dealings. Have you seen it applied in sports such as baseball? Here's the set-up. In baseball are all runs equal? In other words, do runs scored in the early innings have the same importance as the runs scored in later innings? Sabermetricians will argue that they are not, simply because runs scored later have lower probabilities of being overtaken.  (Click here for an introduction to sabermetrics).

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