Reputation
jjacquet | March 5, 2010In addition to their notorious beauty, there could be another reason to mail-order a Russian bride. In a study that compared donations to a public goods game by Russian and Italian men and women, Russian females were constantly and, more interesting, increasingly cooperative.
The experiment involved 12 Russians and 12 Italians, made up equally of both genders, who played a public goods game on a computer. Each player started every new round with 10 'currency units' -- which the experimenters would then translate into extra credit in their course. Players have choice of donating none, a…
jdupuis | March 4, 2010I'm away for a couple of days, so I thought I'd fill in a bit with an oldy-buy-goody from February 4, 2009. It ended up being the first of three parts, with the other two being here and here. As usual, the first part got the most readers and comments, with the two after that being decidedly less popular. Go figure.
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I was just going to call this post "On Blogging" but I decided I like Robert Scoble's rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don't, but I think it's an…
jjacquet | December 15, 2009Will Big Business Save the Earth? This was the title of the New York Times Op-Ed last week by Jared Diamond (UCLA professor and author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse). I thought we could go through his piece -- piece by piece.
1) He begins:
There is a widespread view, particularly among environmentalists and liberals, that big businesses are environmentally destructive, greedy, evil and driven by short-term profits. I know -- because I used to share that view. But today I have more nuanced feelings.
More nuanced feelings? The New York TImes must not edit for arrogance. Many big…
jjacquet | December 10, 2009Today President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." Obama might, in fact, be cooperating too much with the status quo left by his predecessors. Earlier this year, some of Obama's most devoted supporters were most upset by the Administration's stance to uphold the same secrecy and immunity claims made during the Bush Administration and his reversal of his pledge to release photographs of detainee abuse in U.S. prisons abroad. And then, of course, there is the the irony that his Peace…
edyong | December 1, 2009Oscar Wilde once said, "One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything, except a good reputation." All well and witty, but for those of us who aren't Victorian cads, reputation matters. It's the bedrock that our social lives are built upon and people go to great lengths to build and maintain a solid one. A new study shows that our ability to do this involves the right half of our brain, and particularly an area called the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC).
Disrupting the neurons in this area hampers a person's ability to build a reputation while playing psychological…
jjacquet | November 22, 2009This week, an article I authored along with eight colleagues titled Conserving wild ï¬sh in a sea of market-based efforts appeared in Oryx: The International Journal of Conservation. Its publication led to some interesting media, including Larry Pynn's article on how domestic farm animals are devouring the world's fish stocks in the Vancouver Sun and Colleen Kimmett's blogpost for the Tyee on how sustainable shopping won't save the oceans. I also really liked Deborah Jones's coverage of our article for the AFP (and distributed broadly by media such as Yahoo! News) in her piece explaining…
sb admin | October 28, 2009
Oliver Morton wrote a delightful book all about photosynthesis called Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet, which I reviewed earlier this year for Search Magazine (R.I.P.) under the title "A Song for the Heartless". One of my favorite passages in the book beautifully explains the difference between art and science:
Discoveries feel determined. They are there to be made, and if one person doesn't, another will. This doesn't lessen the achievement; indeed it can give it spice. The thought that 'this is the way the world is--and I am the first to see it as such' is an intoxicating…
jjacquet | September 14, 2009
A lot of people who don't want to feel guilty about eating seafood will look for the MSC logo. The MSC (or Marine Stewardship Council) supposedly certifies sustainable fisheries. They aim to reward good fisheries management by providing access to niche markets (the same markets concerned with their bread slicers) and the lure of higher profits (although this hasn't seemed to happen so far). Four recent events reveal the fishiness of MSC-certification -- a process many fisheries scientists supported at its inception but now doubt.
1) Certified wasted fish
Daniel Pauly and I have an article…