Lone Gunman

Tak­ing a leaf out of the adver­tis­ers’ book may be the key to suc­ceed­ing in the fight against global warm­ing and eco­log­i­cal apa­thy. At least, that’s the view Robert But­ler takes after look­ing at the suc­cesses of a novel adver­tis­ing cam­paign used to cut the inci­dence of lit­ter­ing in Texas:

The ads avoided the neg­a­tives of guilt and shame in favour of the pos­i­tives of pride and group iden­tity. Within a year, road­side lit­ter had dropped by 29%; within five years, by 72%. The cam­paign had tar­geted a spe­cific group with a mes­sage from “people-like-them” that they were will­ing to hear. Com­pare this with the prim admon­i­tory vague­ness of “Keep Britain Tidy”.

This brings to mind a quote from an arti­cle (dis­cussed pre­vi­ously) com­ment­ing on how gov­ern­ments are tak­ing advan­tage of the public’s cog­ni­tive biases for polit­i­cal and envi­ron­men­tal gain.

Like mil­lions of oth­ers, Heath had found that sim­ply being told she ought to save energy had lit­tle effect on her habits – and she actively resents the idea of being pun­ished for dis­obey­ing gov­ern­ment dik­tats on envi­ron­men­tal­ism. Drive a big car? You’re bad – pay a penalty.

Like David, I’ve often been curi­ous about the minu­tiae of hedge fund oper­a­tions: I’ve long known the vague gen­er­al­i­ties, but never the specifics. For those in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion, the Lon­don Review offers a thor­ough intro­duc­tion to hedge funds. This was the basic strat­egy of the first hedge fund, as run by A.W. Jones—sociologist and finan­cial journalist:

By adding mod­est bor­row­ing to, let’s say, $100,000 of investors’ money, Jones might buy $110,000 worth of the shares in com­pa­nies he liked, while simul­ta­ne­ously short sell­ing $40,000 of shares he thought might do badly. He was thus par­tially insu­lated (‘hedged’) against over­all mar­ket move­ments. If the over­all mar­ket fell, the shares he had bought (his ‘long posi­tions’, in mar­ket ter­mi­nol­ogy) would lose money, but his short posi­tions would gain because buy­ing back bor­rowed shares would now be cheaper.

Of course, you can’t have talk of hedge funds with­out men­tion­ing what may very well be one of the great­est finan­cial ‘hacks’ of all time: when Porsche/VW played the hedge funds to become the largest com­pany in the world by mar­ket cap­i­tal­i­sa­tion—even if it was just for a brief moment.

While Evan Davis was eco­nom­ics edi­tor for the BBC he wrote the excel­lent Eva­nomics—a blog in which he attempted to “under­stand the real world, using the tool kit of economics”.

When he tem­porar­ily stepped down from this role in March 2008 (for a year­long sab­bat­i­cal) Eva­nomics was sorely missed and his replace­ment, Stephanie Flan­ders, didn’t res­ur­rect the blog in a new form. Until now.

As Evan sug­gested in his final post, the blog is called ‘Stepha­nomics’ and is being billed as a “dis­cus­sion of the UK econ­omy, how it relates to the rest of the world, and how it affects us all”.

Required read­ing for all those inter­ested in eco­nom­ics in the UK.

Get­ting Real is the undis­puted bible of agile soft­ware development—a man­i­festo that can change your view in a sin­gle read­ing. How­ever when it comes to typog­ra­phy and design, the clos­est I have ever come to such a doc­u­ment was Mark Boulton’s Bet­ter Typog­ra­phy pre­sen­ta­tion. Now there’s a contender:

The Vignelli Canon (pdf)

I can’t do this tome jus­tice. Split into two parts—The Intan­gi­bles (seman­tics, syn­tac­tics, etc.) and The Tan­gi­bles (paper sizes, grids, type sizes, etc.)—Massimo Vignelli’s book cov­ers every­thing you could want to know about typog­ra­phy in graphic design.

One def­i­nitely not to miss.

How Do You Design? (pdf)

Hugh Dubberly’s book looks at “over one-hundred descrip­tions of design and devel­op­ment processes, from archi­tec­ture, indus­trial design, mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing, qual­ity man­age­ment, and soft­ware development”.

By read­ing this you can’t fail to learn some­thing about design.

Spaced rep­e­ti­tion is a learn­ing tech­nique tak­ing advan­tage of what is known as the ‘for­get­ting curve’: a pre­dictable pat­tern of how we for­get infor­ma­tion. With this in mind, Piotr Woź­niak devel­oped Super­Memo—an algo­rithm specif­i­cally designed to pre­dict the future state of a person’s mem­ory to sched­ule infor­ma­tion reviews at the opti­mal time.

Wired pro­files Woź­niak, tak­ing a closer look at the psy­chol­ogy and appli­ca­tions of this learn­ing tech­nique.