Month: September 2011

by Patrick Appel

In an infographic.

by Zack Beauchamp

Charles Homans recounts their history:

Ever since the first warrior picked up a wooden stick in imitation of a sword, the line between war and entertainment has been decidedly blurry. Military training in ancient Greece and chivalric Europe gave rise to the Olympics and medieval jousting tournaments; paintball guns and video games have become tools for honing the skills of today's soldiers. The realm of strategy, however, is where games have exerted the most remarkable impact on the conduct of war, serving as a tool for, as one U.S. Army general put it, "writing history in advance."

by Zoë Pollock

Marc Lynch updates his thesis about Jay-Z and international relations. By collaborating with Kanye on the new album Watch The Throne, Lynch finds Jay-Z moving to secure his hegemony with "more robust partnerships and a fully-realized new alliance system":

Jay-Z and Kanye … solidified their place on the throne not by crushing their rivals but by inspiring them to be their best as part of a team, through creative use of the internet for public diplomacy, and by working within rather than trying to dictate new norms. They recognized that "no one man should have all that power." Jay-Z was willing to "lead from behind" and share the spotlight in order to build a broad and effective coalition.

Ackerman connects it the Arab Spring. So what country gets to be Lil Wayne?

by Zack Beauchamp

Lucy Moore reports on a new model for meeting people on the internet:

Grouper is a self-described social club that involves signing up through facebook. Grouper techs match your facebook profile (interests, likes) to another Grouper applicant of the opposite sex; once matched, you receive a confirmation email and find two friends to join you on your Grouper meetup. The outcome? Three boys and three girls meet at a trendy location chosen by Grouper founders Jerry Guo, former "Good Life" columnist, and Michael Waxman, designer of the news reader Paper buff. For 20$ a person, you and your friends have a table at an assigned venue, and the Grouper match and their friends meet you under one reservation name (first drink included!) For us, it was Lucy–no other information about either party was disclosed prior. Comparing Grouper to sites like OkCupid, this is a big difference. There is absolutely no stalking or ruminating on who you will meet up with! The experience is based solely on the actual meetup and nothing else.

Lucy had previously penned a fantastic dispatch on New York's OK Cupid scene. She's a great friend and an awesome sex writer, so you should go check it out.

by Zoë Pollock

Ian Bogost has some tough words for academics:

The humanities needs more courage and more contact with the world. It needs to extend the practice of humanism into that world, rather than to invite the world in for tea and talk of novels, only to pat itself on the collective back for having injected some small measure of abstract critical thinking into the otherwise empty puppets of industry.

by Zoë Pollock

In his Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote:

A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.

Martin Ravallion applies the concept to aid today:

This passage has often been used to justify the view that poverty is not absolute but relative—that certain socially-specific expenditures are essential for social inclusion, on top of basic needs for nutrition and physical survival. The way this idea is implemented in practice is to set a “relative poverty line” that is a constant proportion of average income for the country and date in question. That is how poverty is measured in most of Western Europe. By contrast, poverty measures in developing countries have almost invariably used absolute lines, which aim to have a fixed real value over time.

(Photo: Somalis displaced from their home villages by famine and drought receive food at a feeding center on August 16, 2011 in Mogadishu, Somalia. By John Moore/Getty Images)

by Zoë Pollock

LynNell Hancock profiles Finland's uber-generous system:

Finland provides three years of maternity leave and subsidized day care to parents, and preschool for all 5-year-olds, where the emphasis is on play and socializing. In addition, the state subsidizes parents, paying them around 150 euros per month for every child until he or she turns 17. Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschool, where children begin some academics. Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.

Hancock preempts some rebuttals:

Some of the more vocal conservative reformers in America have grown weary of the “We-Love-Finland crowd” or so-called Finnish Envy. They argue that the United States has little to learn from a country of only 5.4 million people—4 percent of them foreign born. Yet the Finns seem to be onto something. Neighboring Norway, a country of similar size, embraces education policies similar to those in the United States. It employs standardized exams and teachers without master’s degrees. And like America, Norway’s [Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA)] scores have been stalled in the middle ranges for the better part of a decade.

by Zoë Pollock

Jaron Lanier tackles the question:

I'm astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online. There are just a lot of people who feel that being able to get their video or their tweet seen by somebody once in a while gets them enough ego gratification that it's okay with them to still be living with their parents in their 30s.

Evgeny Morozov and Paul Ford touched on similar ideas earlier this summer. Matt Zoller-Seitz focuses on Lanier's idea of the "local-global flip":

This term refers to what happens when a company — Wal-Mart, Google and Apple are his three main examples — conquer certain sectors of the economy quickly and completely, and their dominance over that sector is so complete that it creates a stranglehold over that part of the market, effectively destroys the so-called "Mom-and-Pop" vendors that used to coexist with it… [T]he way that the successful company's system is set up — with a "My way or the highway" mentality — can turn vendors and business partners into indentured servants who are terrified to innovate, or even quit their association with the big company, for fear of being financially obliterated.

(Hat tip: The Browser. Image by Won Park)

by Zoë Pollock

A couple of Dan Ariely's students tested the moral code of their fellow classmates by sending a link to test answers before an exam. Afterwards, Ariely asked them to cop (anonymously) to their own cheating and estimate how many others in the class cheated. He found they overestimated how much their classmates cheated:

Although it might sound like good news that fewer students cheat than they suspect, in fact such an overestimation of the tendency to cheat can become a very damaging social norm: when students think that their peers are cheating, they feel both that it is socially OK to cheat and feel pressured to cheat. A few students have even complained to me that they were penalised because they decided not to cheat. If cheating is perceived to be rampant, what are the chances that 2012's students will not adopt even more lenient moral standards and end up living up to their perceived cheating among their peers?