Lone Gunman

Alibi clubs are loose col­lec­tions of peo­ple will­ing to help each other out with ali­bis for every occa­sion: skip­ping work for the day, trav­el­ling to another coun­try with your mis­tress, or get­ting out of a blind date. Your imagination—and morality—is your only barrier.

There is noth­ing new about mak­ing excuses or telling fibs. But the lure of alibi net­works, their mem­bers say, lies partly with the anonymity of the Inter­net, which lets peo­ple find col­lab­o­ra­tors who dis­ap­pear as quickly as they appeared. Engag­ing a free­lance deceiver is also less risky than drag­ging a friend into a ruse. Cellphone-based alibi clubs, which have sprung up in the United States, Europe and Asia, allow peo­ple to send out mass text mes­sages to thou­sands of poten­tial col­lab­o­ra­tors ask­ing for help. When a will­ing helper responds, the sender and the helper devise a lie, and the helper then calls the vic­tim with the excuse — not unlike hav­ing a friend forge a doctor’s note for a teacher in the pre-digital age.

via Schneier

William Zinsser—author of 17 books—talks in length on the tri­als and tribu­la­tions of writ­ing ‘On Writ­ing Well’.

My ini­tial fear of immod­esty was mis­guided. The best teach­ers of a craft, I saw, are their own best text­book. Stu­dents who take their classes really want to know how they do what they do—how they grew into their knowl­edge and learned from their wrong turns. There­after, in every edi­tion, I wrote more reveal­ingly, trust­ing my read­ers to trust me if I veered down some unlikely trail of anec­dote to illus­trate a point.

It now occurs to me that I didn’t really find my style until I wrote On Writ­ing Well, at the late age of 52. Until then my style more prob­a­bly reflected who I wanted to be per­ceived as—the urbane colum­nist and humorist and critic. Only when I started writ­ing as a teacher and had no agenda except to be help­ful did my style become inte­grated with my per­son­al­ity and my character.

via Arts and Let­ters Daily

Matt Ridley—author of The Red Queen, among others—discusses the causes of poverty and pros­per­ity, offer­ing new (to me) insights on inno­va­tion, tech­nol­ogy and markets.

It’s very clear from his­tory that mar­kets bring forth inno­va­tion. If you’ve got free and fair exchange with decent prop­erty rights and a suf­fi­ciently dense pop­u­la­tion, then you get innovation. […]

The only insti­tu­tion that really counts is trust, if you like. And something’s got to allow that to build. […]

But human beings are spec­tac­u­larly good at destroy­ing trust-generating insti­tu­tions. They do this through three crea­tures: chiefs, thieves, and priests.

via Arts and Let­ters Daily

With news that Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity is to demand A* grades at A-Level as a pre­req­ui­site for entry (a grade that cur­rently doesn’t exist), there is much in the news about ‘grade inflation’.

How­ever “grade infla­tion” is actu­ally the answer; the prob­lem is “grade dis­tor­tion”:

True grade infla­tion would mean each grade was equally deval­ued, with A grades super­seded by AA, AAA and AAAA as new labels for superla­tive per­for­mance became nec­es­sary. One hun­dred per cent would become 110 per cent.

Yet exam­in­ers are reluc­tant to award 110 per cent and there are no AAAA grades. What we see is not infla­tion but a clas­sic price dis­tor­tion. Even­tu­ally all stu­dents will get A grades and they will be mean­ing­less. A* grades are a small, belated step in the right direction.

Grade dis­tor­tion is a seri­ous affair. Stu­dents and their teach­ers are forced to switch to grey mar­ket trans­ac­tions denom­i­nated in alter­na­tive cur­ren­cies: the let­ter of rec­om­men­da­tion, for exam­ple. Like most alter­na­tive cur­ren­cies, these are a hassle.

Grade dis­tor­tions, like price dis­tor­tions, destroy infor­ma­tion and oblige peo­ple to look in strange places for some sig­nal amid the noise. Stu­dents are judged not on their strongest sub­jects – A grade, of course – but on whether they also picked up A grades in their weak­est. When excel­lence can­not be dis­played, plau­dits go instead to those who deliver pat answers with­out stumbling.

Cook­ing is “the evo­lu­tion­ary change that under­pins all oth­ers” and is what makes us human, accord­ing to Richard Wrang­ham, Har­vard Uni­ver­sity. The the­ory: the process of cook­ing makes our food more digestible, free­ing up a huge amount of calo­ries that are then expended on other, more impor­tant, activities.

And with Homo sapi­ens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opin­ion is that its food is so often cooked.

Cook­ing is a human uni­ver­sal. No soci­ety is with­out it. No one other than a few fad­dists tries to sur­vive on raw food alone. And the con­sump­tion of a cooked meal in the evening, usu­ally in the com­pany of fam­ily and friends, is nor­mal in every known soci­ety. More­over, with­out cook­ing, the human brain (which con­sumes 20–25% of the body’s energy) could not keep run­ning. Dr Wrang­ham thus believes that cook­ing and human­ity are coeval.

via Link Banana