Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed

Chefs@Google: Anthony Bourdain
The Big Freeze
The Penalty Shot Problem
Positive words carry less information than negative words

Chefs@Google: Anthony Bourdain

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 10:46 PM PDT

Chefs@Google: Anthony Bourdain – YouTube.

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The Big Freeze

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 10:18 PM PDT

Americans are frozen in place, with mobility at its lowest levels since the 1940s. A new NYT piece looks into the issue, and is worth reading in its entirety, and it include this graphic.

Mobility

The Penalty Shot Problem

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 09:54 PM PDT

While it doesn’t apply to the NHL, still interesting:

The Penalty Shot/Optional Minor Choice in Ice Hockey

Under the rules of NCAA Hockey and USA hockey, when a penalty shot is awarded, the nonoffending team has the choice of taking the penalty shot or having a minor penalty assessed to the offending team. Since the chance of scoring on a penalty shot normally exceeds the chance of scoring during the minor penalty, most teams will accept the penalty shot. We show, however, that there are times when selecting the minor penalty in lieu of the penalty shot is optimal. We show that when the nonoffending team is ahead near the end of the game, the optimal choice is the minor penalty.

via “The Penalty Shot/Optional Minor Choice in Ice Hockey” by Steven E. Rigdon.

Positive words carry less information than negative words

Posted: 27 Oct 2011 09:37 PM PDT

Intriguing new paper showing the higher signal in negative words.

Positive words carry less information than negative words

We show that the frequency of word use is not only determined by the word length [1] and the average information content [2], but also by its emotional content.We have analysed three established lexica of affective word usage in English, German, and Spanish, to verify that these lexica have a neutral, unbiased, emotional content. Taking into account the frequency of word usage, we find that words with a positive emotional content are more frequently used. This lends support to Pollyanna hypothesis [3] that there should be a positive bias in human expression. We also find that negative words contain more information than positive words, as the informativeness of a word increases uniformly with its valence decrease. Our findings support earlier conjectures about (i) the relation between word frequency and information content, and (ii) the impact of positive emotions on communication and social links.

via [1110.4123] Positive words carry less information than negative words.