Saturday, June 30, 2012

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Just finished Dan Areily's book "The (Honest Truth About Dishonesty)"

Take home points:

 Simple Model of Rational Crime (dishonesty based on rational analysis of cost/benefit of cheating, benefit of the crime, probability of getting caught, expected punishment) is completely bogus.  Study was set up (solving math problems for $$), subjects did not cheat more when the payout (for cheating) was higher.  It was actually less.   Probability of getting caught?  Study showed roughly the same amount of cheating as when there was NO chance of getting caught.

The more distanced from actual money (tokens vs. actual $), people were more likely to cheat.  People are more likely to steal $1 of pens (office supplies) than an actual $1 bill.  Stealing $1 and then using it to buy a pen is somehow worse than stealing a $1 pen.  Getting people to recite an honor code (thou shalt not steal) makes them less likely to steal.  So does signing *before* they fill out a form (like a tax form).  Filling out after does not have this effect.

The more distanced you are from the act, the more likely you are to cheat.  Golfers cheating by moving the ball are less likely to consider it cheating if they move the ball with their club or feet than by their hands.  This also ties into cheating by stealing $$$ vs. stealing supplies.

Resisting temptation somehow wears down our moral resistance, and after enough resistance we are apt to give up (run out of steam) and give in.

Wearing (known) fake products (sunglasses, bags) makes us more likely to cheat on various tests.

Cheating across cultures and nationalities, pretty much the same.

Being supervised decreases dishonesty.  Even a picture of somebody watching you decreased the likelihood that somebody would cheat on putting the correct change in a box to pay for a snack.

Essay mills - people paying for essay papers?  As of 2010 - a survey of the quality of these papers shows them to be so poor it's immediately apparent to professors that they are complete junk.

People are more likely to cheat in an altruistic situation where they are helping somebody else.

Forces that shape dishonesty:

  • Ability to rationalize the situation
  • Conflicts of interest
  • Being creative
  • One immoral act spawning another
  • Being tired
  • Altruistic benefit
  • Watching others cheating
Forces that have no effect

  • Amount of money to gain
  • Probability of being caught


Forces that decrease dishonesty


  • Pledging honesty
  • Signing something
  • Reminding of the moral code
  • Being supervised

  

All in all, a good read, good studies back up the conclusions.  The book starts out strong, but by the later chapters seems to run out of steam and becomes more anecdotal.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

Coach!

Oh man, I was saddened to learn that the McGurk effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect) had nothing to do with Coach McGuirk.  Too bad.

QuackTime Player

Grrrrrr.  Why is it that the QuickTime player can only play MPEG-2 at OSX Lion levels.  It can play MPEG-4 just fine.  What is it about MPEG-2 that they couldn't handle?  VLC has been doing it for years.


This is the sort of crap that drives me bonkers with Apple stuff.  If you stay within the ecosystem, everything is fine, but once you stray out, you realize the ecosystem is actually quiet small and limited.


http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3775?viewlocale=en_US


Below are the video and audio file formats and codecs that QuickTime Player can playback in Mac OS X v10.6.x or OS X Lion:

Video

  • QuickTime Movie (.mov)
  • MPEG-4 (.mp4, .m4v)
  • MPEG-2 (OS X Lion only)
  • MPEG-1
  • 3GPP
  • 3GPP2
  • AVI
  • DV
  • MPEG-2 (OS X Lion only)
  • MPEG-4 (Part 2)
  • H.264
  • H.263
  • H.261
  • Apple ProRes
  • Apple Pixlet
  • Animation
  • Cinepak
  • Component Video
  • DV
  • DVC Pro 50
  • Graphics
  • Motion JPEG (Mac OS X v10.6.x only)
  • Photo JPEG
  • Sorenson Video 2
  • Sorenson Video 3

Friday, June 22, 2012

zipl.us and twitterfeed

Good post at http://iag.me/socialmedia/tools/how-to-update-twitter-and-facebook-with-your-google-posts/ about how to get google+ posts to announce to twitter.  I'd been using plusfeed but that had dropped off the radar a while ago.

Taking out the trash

So I have one of these little Creative Vado digital cameras.  I've been using it for a couple of years now, and I've noticed that recently the recording time seems to be getting less and less.  It's flash based memory so I figured it was something to do with the memory being reused and unusable after time.  I figured it was time to buy a newer one, something that had a bit more record time.

On a whim I decided to poke around the filesystem using the shell to see where the space was being used.  Surprise - the Mac had created a .Trashes folder and was happily squirreling away all the deleted videos.  DOH!  About 7.6G of space.  Double DOH!  Frustrating because this trash doesn't show up in the finder when I just browse the device.  Would be nice if I had the option in the finder to disable keeping trash on certain devices.

I manually did a rm -rf on .Trashes and my record time went from 9 minutes (!) to 2 hours and 11 minutes.  Schweet!

Saturday, June 9, 2012

Need For Speed

Copying a 5GB file around my net.

802.11g - 6 hours
100M ethernet - 11 minutes
GigE ethernet - 2 minutes

Time for a wireless upgrade!