Friday, May 27, 2005 11:37 AM | rahel luethy | 5 comment(s)
via cafe au lait, i've read this article which disusses that the gender gap at work isn't due to women's insecurities about their abilities but due to different appetites for competition. here's a short summary of the experiment underlying the claim:
women and men were paid to add up five numbers in their heads. in a first round, they worked individually, getting 50 cents for each correct sum. in a second round, they competed in groups of four, with only the winner getting $2.
on average, women made as much as men (with either system).
for the third round, they were free in their choice of system: either take the piece rate or compete in a tournament. the result was that even the best women declined to compete, while almost all men chose the tournament (even the ones who had done worst in previous rounds).
seeing this as a "byproduct of evolution and testosterone" is a rather redunctionist view. however, it actually matches my personal work experience and my own behavior rather well...
Thursday, May 05, 2005 9:10 AM | rahel luethy | 3 comment(s)
i'm always a bit slow at hopping on the meme wagon. back in december, ben told me about flickr, a new photosharing website (actually, ben was also the one who told me about google back in 1999, so maybe it's just him being fast) .
i forgot about flickr for a while, until it was in the news in march, when the company was aquired by yahoo!. beyond all it's photo-sharing-album-slideshow-email-friends-post-to-blog features, there are two things i like about flickr:
- it is not owned by google
- it offers an extremly cool tagging mechanism
the idea behind tagging is that anyone can add keywords (metadata) to any public photo maintained in flickr (all your photos are publicly visible unless you explicitly prevent it). this "practice of collaborative categorization using freely chosen keywords" has a name: it's called
folksonomy.
let's assume you upload your favorite fcb-shot to flickr and tag it with "fcb". soon, katrin comes along and tags your photo with "julio". dario also recognizes julio hernan rossi, but tags the photo with "neighbor" (which is correct in his case). so for all the sceptics, let's assume that jonas comes along, still can't tell julio and jimmy apart and tags the shot with "jimmygoal". your photo can thus be found whenever users search for any of the keywords. it's the frequency-dependent nature of folksonomy which makes it work so smoothly: the fact that most people add correct tags (like you or katrin), with "correct" meaning "what the majority of searchers mean". and maybe (just maybe...) there will be this one user searching for a shot of julio, also mixing up julio and jimmy, searching for "jimmygoal" and not even noticing that he's only successful because of the jonases in the world...
i sometimes try to profit from frequency-dependency in another context: whenever i'm not sure about the use of a word in english (and
leo can't help out), i simply type the snippet into google and count the number of hits. for example, i wasn't sure whether you say "hopping
on the meme wagon" or "hopping
onto the meme wagon":
- "hopping on": 131'000 hits
- "hopping onto": 11'400 hits
sometimes, you might be better off restricting your search with "site:*.com" because you don't want to dilute it due to lithuanian dislexics.
Tuesday, May 03, 2005 7:51 PM | rahel luethy | 3 comment(s)
just a quick note on a phat wikipedia feature i've discovered a minute ago:
if you enter your birthday into the wiki URL like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_26
you get a nice overview of births, deaths, and historical events that happened on the same day (note for geeks: no leading zeros for single digit days).
now i know the following important facts:
- nothing historically relevant happened on august 26, 1975
- every august 26, there are 127 days left until new year's eve (which would actually be enough time to plan ahead and not be surprised about not having any cool plans for the oh-so-important night, which is in fact the dullest of all nights because it officially climaxes at midnight already)
- i might in fact be a reincarnation of haile selassie, emperor of ethiopia, who passed away just when i was born. haile selassie is not to be confused with haile gebreselassie, who is regarded as the greatest distance runner of all times
- macauly culkin, the no-longer-american-child-actor aka kevin was born on the same day
considering the quality of these facts, you should probably refrain from repeating this research for your own birthday. now that i know that some of you have spent hours reading joel's blog, i don't even want to think about how much this crap will cost your employers...
