Date posted: April 11, 2008

Song Charts, Cognitive Dissonance And More

Just in case you haven't caught up with the Song Chart phenomenon, the Flickr set is now growing rapidly. The idea is to create a chart, graph or flow diagram in PowerPoint to represent a popular song. I love the idea. I'll replace the illustrations which I downloaded from Flickr with some self-created graphs if I can find the time to create some.

A video of a plane landing at Hong Kong's legendary Kai Tak airport. Unfortunately I only visited Hong Kong for the first time after it had closed. Here's another video, in the rain, and at night. To fully appreciate it you have to watch the plane landing from the ground. Watching these videos makes me want to go to Hong Kong again and to fly, of course.

An article in The New York Times discusses a working paper by economist M. Keith Chen in which he challenges some long-standing results in experimental psychology. Chen applied what is known as the Monty Hall problem to an experimental procedure in psychology and the result is both instructive and counter-intuitive, as Daniel Gilbert a psychologist at Harvard University is quoted as saying. It's a fascinating article and I still have to let it sink in to see if it also applies to other experiments.

But why do many people actually find the solution to the Monty Hall problem counter-intuitive? Craig Fox, professor of management and psychology at U.C.L.A. and Jonathan Levav, professor of marketing at Columbia University, have a theory.

A British advertising campaign promoting road safety recycles a video first used in experimental psychology to study inattentional blindness: Daniel J. Simons and Christopher F. Chabris (1999), Gorillas in our midst: sustained inattentional blindness for dynamic events. Perception vol. 28, pp. 1059-1074.

Scientists at Tel Aviv University have developed an algorithm to evaluate the attractiveness of women. Amit Kagian and his colleagues combined a database of human scores of facial attractiveness for a collection of female facial images with a set of features extracted from the images. They then used a standard supervised learning algorithm to connect both datasets and produce ratings of facial attractiveness. The paper was published in the April 2008 issue of Vision Research, vol. 48 pp. 235–243.

Not surprisingly research by evolutionary psychologist David Buss of the University of Texas at Austin suggests that when looking for a partner attractive women want it all: good genes, economic investment, parenting proclivities and emotional commitment.

A new book by Alexandra Harney, The China Price, asks why products made in China are cheap and explores their true cost. The Financial Times has a review. When I was in Vietnam last year I noticed that many factories have a big sign at the gate saying ISO 9001. Of course my observations have no scientific value, but it appears that some Vietnamese companies realize that they can compete with China by adhering to European and American standards. Managers also read the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal so they are aware of the growing concerns in the countries to which they export about the environment, safety and labour conditions.