Pirates: Rational Profit Maximizing Entrepreneurs of the Sea

January 24, 2012 9 Comments

Pirates are awesome.  Economics: also awesome.  The combination?

Check out this report: The Economics of Piracy.  It uses data from 1500 Somalian pirates to look at the future of international piracy.  An excerpt:

Pirates would appear to be the very essence of rational profit maximizing entrepreneurs described in neo-classical economics. Expected profits determine decisions based on the information available. The supply of pirates, therefore, is closely related to the expected benefits of being a pirate and the associated risk adjusted costs.

Yep. You read that right. Pirates are economics bad-asses.

The paper, which looks primarily at Somalian pirates, explores piracy in several arenas, and concludes that incidents of piracy will substantially expand in the coming years, primarily due to the rising income disparity betwen pirates and non-pirates.

How big a problem is piracy? In 2010, the cost of piracy to the international community was between $4.9 and $8.3 billion.  Off the coast of Somalia, the total income to pirates, from piracy, was between $75 and $238 million in 2010.

Thinking about hitting the high seas as a Somalian pirate? You can expect to earn between $168,630 and $394,200 over a five year career. If you choose the next best legal alternative, you’ll probably make $14,500 – over your entire working life.  At those prices, piracy doesn’t look so bad.

To combat piracy, the paper recommends the formation of a Global Contract Group, as well as new developments to asymmetric law and law enforcement.

Check it out.  Worth a read.

Filed under Opinion, review Tagged with , , , , ,

Why You Should Name Your Child “Peter”

April 27, 2011 1 Comment

One of my favorite parts about the tech revolution is the sheer amount of data that we, as end users, generate.  I’m thrilled when companies or organizations use data, voluntarily offered by their users, to write impromptu market research reports.  It’s even more exciting when market research isn’t their core competency.

One of the best examples of this is OKCupid‘s OKTrends, which reports on “Dating research from OKCupid.”

Insights, LinkedIn‘s equivalent market research arm, published a report on their blog that analyzes names.  The report analyzes names of professionals using LinkedIn. Specifically, the report looks at what names are overrepresented in different professional areas, such as among sales reps, CEOs, engineers, or athletes.

The top CEO names, for men:

  1. Peter
  2. Bob
  3. Jack
  4. Bruce
  5. Fred

And for women:

  1. Deborah
  2. Sally
  3. Debra
  4. Cynthia
  5. Carolyn

LinkedIn identifies two trends. Among males, CEO names tend to be either short or shortened versions of popular first names.  This could be because nicknames are often used to denote friendliness or openness.  Conversely, female CEOs use their full name to project a more professional image.

Here’s the infographic.

Read LinkedIn’s full report.

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Iterative Innovation or: The Marshmallow Theory

December 20, 2010 1 Comment

We’re afraid of failure.  This makes sense – failure is a frightening concept.  Nobody likes putting themselves out there and being disappointed with the outcome.

However, we, as a society, are too afraid of failure.

Sometimes, we are so afraid of failure that we procrastinate.  Often, we call this “research,” “planning,” or “preparation.” None of those words, unfortunately, is “implementation.”

Because we’re afraid of our initiative failing, we push off executing our plans for far too long.

Failure is useful; it points out areas of improvement.  One of the best arguments I’ve seen in favor of failure is in Tom Wujec’s TED talk: “Build a Tower, Build a Team.”

In the talk, Wujec describes a team building exercise, during which teams attempt to build the tallest tower using only dry spaghetti, a yard of tape, and one marshmallow, which has to be on top of the structure.  In this exercise, business executives do terribly – they spend a lot of time figuring out who the team lead’s going to be and planning their strategy.  Fortunately, architects and engineers do quite well – they understand how to build stable structures.

Surprisingly, kindergarteners end up building some of the tallest structures.

“What kindergarteners do differently, is that they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keeping the marshmallow on top, so they have multiple times to fix ill built prototypes along the way. So designers recognize this type of collaboration as the essence of the iterative process. And with each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn’t work.”

Wujec is pointing out the necessity of beginning with the end in mind.  In this case, that’s the marshmallow.  However, there’s another factor at play here: kindergarteners aren’t afraid of failure.

Kindergarteners start building immediately, and when their structure collapses, they build another one.  And another one.  And another one.  And each time, they’re improving their structure, because now they’ve experimented with what doesn’t work.

Now, I’m not advocating striving to fail.  As Warren Buffet said, “You want to learn from experience, but you want to learn from other people’s experience when you can.”

However, stop procrastinating.  Planning only goes so far.  Research, like everything else, has diminishing marginal returns.  Put your plan into action.

Failure is not the only way to learn.  Nor is it the end of your project.  But it’s definitely a pretty good place to start.

Filed under Opinion, TED, video Tagged with , , , ,

Seen at HP: Roseville

October 18, 2010 1 Comment

So, this definitely happened at my HP campus.

I took a picture of these office shenanigans and submitted it to the Cheezburger Network, the home of the infamous LOLCats blog.  It’s posted under “How About The Reward Of Keeping All Your Teeth?” at FailBlog – M Thru F.

 

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Singularity Summit Summary

August 19, 2010 Leave a comment

As I’m sure you’ve gathered based on the copious amounts of tweets and blog posts that have clogged your proverbial tubes, this past weekend was Singularity Summit.   I told you we’d discuss the future of humanity, waxing poetic on everything from mechanical brains, to life-and-death, to human and artificial intelligence.  And discuss we did.

The weekend was incredibly well-organized in terms of content.  Appropriately, we started out with an overview of the Scientific Method, which was essentially a survey of the history of science.  The first day delved into the intersection of humans and computers, focusing specifically on artificial intelligence.  The program contained a number of talks about adding technology to the human brain.  We heard from the world’s First Cyborg and learned how to become Superhuman with haptic interfaces. We heard from the infamous Ray Kurzweil.  The day finished off with a tantalizing preview of the topics to be discussed on Day Two, with discussions on the real power of cells and the emulation of biological systems.

Day Two took a definitively more biological approach to the future of humanity.  We looked at the idea of aging as an illness and talked more broadly about the future of the environment.  We heard from our first female speakers, who discussed limb regeneration and DNA.  More discussion of artificial intelligence ensued, this time from the perspective of Evolutionary Psychology.

The final talk was given by James Randi, well-known skeptic of pseudoscience and the paranormal.  He asked if there really was any such thing as a “Scientific Consensus.”  In providing a more general discussion, as did the first talk on the Scientific Method, this capstone talk perfectly wrapped up a weekend of intelligent, and sometimes conflicting, speculation.

In comparison to the World Futures 2010 conference, this was a much smaller event.  That’s probably due to the specificity of the topic.  “The future of humans and technology” is much a broader topic than “The Future.”

The demographic at Singularity Summit was much younger.  It was also much more male.  That being said, the networking at Singularity Summit was far superior, although that perhaps was due to hooking into the conference’s Twitter stream.

The best parts of conferences like these are the networking opportunities, the new ideas, and the book suggestions.  It’s rare in day-to-day life to feel overwhelmed with new, exciting information.  After a weekend filled with eye-opening theories, I now have a very deep book list that I can’t wait to get started on, new people in interesting fields to get to know, and many, many fresh ideas to research.

Overall, not a bad way to spend a weekend.

Filed under conference, Opinion, review, Singularity Summit Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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