Traveler’s Dilemma

Scientific American has a fascinating article by Kaushik Basu, who created a variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma to study decision making. This is the Traveler’s Dilemma:

Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it.

Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numbers, he will assume that the lower one is the actual price and that the person writing the higher number is cheating. In that case, he will pay both of them the lower number along with a bonus and a penalty–the person who wrote the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for honesty and the one who wrote the higher number will get $2 less as a punishment. For instance, if Lucy writes 46 and Pete writes 100, Lucy will get $48 and Pete will get $44.

What numbers will Lucy and Pete write? What number would you write?

Quirkology

The New Scientist website has an article by Richard Wiseman, the author of Quirkology: The curious science of everyday lives. (Alerted by a post on Boing Boing.) The author defines quirkology as “the use of scientific methods to study quirky human behaviour, or quirky methods to probe weightier topics.” In the article, he enumerates his eight favorite studies of the quirky. One is of a British study of speed-dating, in which Wiseman was a co-author, similar to the one noted previously, see Desperado. He observes,

The results showed that the secret of a good chat-up line is to encourage someone to talk about themselves in a quirky, fun way. So the best line from the top-rated man was “If you were on Stars In Their Eyes, which celebrity would you be?” On a similar theme, the top-rated female asked “If you were a pizza topping, what would you be?”. And what shouldn’t you say? One of the least successful lines was “I have a PhD in computing.”

Other studies on the list include one about the comedic properties of the “k” sound, which may offer an explanation for why Pepsi will always be second to Coca Cola:

The hard “k” often forces the face to smile (say “quack”), which may explain why the sound is associated with happiness. Whatever the explanation, if you want to make someone feel happy, offer them a cookie, not a sandwich, and a Coke, not a Pepsi.

Another explores our superstitious fear of contagion.

One of the key categories of superstitious thinking is the “law of contagion”, which says that when an object has been in contact with someone, it somehow acquires their “essence”. Psychologist Paul Rozin and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania have investigated how common such thinking is today.

They asked people to rate how they would feel about wearing a nice, soft, blue jumper that had been freshly laundered – but previously worn by someone else. As they varied the fictitious previous wearers of the jumper, it became clear how strongly people follow the age-old belief in magical contagion.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the volunteers were unhappiest about wearing the jumper if they were told it had previously belonged to a serial killer. On the whole they would rather have worn a sweater that had been dropped in dog faeces and not washed – raising genuine health concerns – than a laundered sweater that had been worn by a mass murderer.

Stop the music

The BBC gave their listeners ten songs from which to choose the “worst pop lyrics” ever sung. There was a “runaway winner”:

It’s official: The most inane pop lyric in music history was penned by popular Nineties artist Des’ree. BBC 6 Music listeners have voted her hit song Life as containing the world’s worst clanger. The offending lines?

I don’t want to see a ghost

It’s the sight that I fear most

I’d rather have a piece of toast

Watch the evening news.

Like any such endeavor, many felt the list omitted other more worthy contenders. One blogger has already come up with his own very opinionated and entertaining list. His candidate for worst pop lyrics:

Yes, “Love Will Find a Way” — “Here is my heart / Waiting for you / Here is my soul / I eat at Chez Nous” Few lines in all of rock & roll communicate more casual contempt for the folks subsidizing the artist’s lifestyle than these. If they could have found a way to rhyme “Fuck it, I can’t think of anything, let’s go home,” they surely would have. Much more entertaining than this stupid, stupid song is this thread discussing all the possible meanings of “I eat at Chez Nous.” (My favorite: “The song appears to be about trying to stay together in the face of some problem. ‘Eating’ at ‘our place’ could mean simply that ‘I’ am not ‘fooling around’…’I’ stay home to eat. The sharing of food is a basic bonding activity and could infer other (more personal) bonding activities are being kept ‘at home’ also.” I love Yes fans!)

Turn off the t.v.

A long term study that followed 700 families for 19 years “found a very clear correlation between higher levels of TV watching by 14-year-olds and subsequent attention and learning problems developed during the remainder of their years.” The study concludes that teenagers “watching three or more hours of television a day leads to poor homework completion, negative attitudes toward school, bad grades, and poor performance in college.”

Why we glean

Erwin Kowalke, a member of the German War Graves Association, has been digging outside of Berlin for over 4o years, excavating more than 20,000 remains of mostly German and Russian soldiers who fell during the last days of WWII. But it is not out of historical curiosity that he brings back the memories of the forgotten.

“In these bones you see what war is like. I know war now. I’ll tell you what it is. War is young men killing other young men they do not know on the orders of old men who know one another too well.”

And so he digs, this compact 65-year-old man with a briefcase holding ledgers of the dead and an amber-tinted photograph of his father, a German soldier killed somewhere in France. What a boy didn’t have he invents; the bones Kowalke collects honor his father and those days in 1944 when the man returned briefly from the front to visit his 3-year-old son. It was the last time they saw each other.

“He was tall,” said Kowalke, “I still remember my small arms around his black boots. He arrived home on June 3 and three days later it was D-day in Normandy and they called him back.”