Where do you fit into 7 billion?

As you know, the UN population division declared that this week today someone will be (was?) the 7th billion  person on earth*. That's A LOT of people. There are some nice articles about what it means to be so many people on the planet and how we should react towards scarcity of resources. I like this one from the Economist.

So where do we fit in all this? The BBC has put up this webpage that helps you visualize it, with estimations. For example, I was born to be person number 4,720,327,430 on the planet (see chart below). Pretty cool, no?

Clicking next will take you to some cool stats about your country of origin**, then your gender (always kinda cool to see that we live more in expectation than men... even though that may mean that we are left alone sooner), and it wraps up with some (fill in the blank with adj) results. Mines were... well, didn't give me much hope. But probably if you are from other countries it will be, who knows :-). I let you discover it by yourself. I can only say that it took me the equivalent of the birth of 5,059 people to do the test and be writing this blog post. Freaking scary. Hey, Happy Halloween!

* For those who speak Spanish, let's remember that 7 billion is not equal to 7 billones; it is actually "7 thousand millions" or 7 mil millones.

** I found it rad that they included immigration as a stat, especially for a country where it matters so much.

Fibonacci circles in Siberia

The Anthropologist is featuring a reportage of a group of (crazy) people* that decided to create one of the the world's largest works of art: "drawing" a sequence of circles that grow in size according to the golden ratio, in the middle of Siberia (!!!). The results are breathtaking. If you have 5min, just browse through the website to see more pictures.

* The group of people is lead by artist Jim Denevan. He's done some pretty cool stuff. Check out his website.

It is unimaginable (at least for me) to see how people can devote so much time and effort into something that, on a first glance, could seem valueless. My capitalist soul asks itself: "I mean, do you just take some days off to draw circles in the North Pole?" And then my Occupy-Wall-Street self asks "What's wrong with it? Why do we have to attach some kind of utilitarian value to everything we do? The true slavery that Capitalism brought to society is that it got us to think that way." Anyway, let us not get into this philosophical discussions and let us enjoy the art.

Quick note about the website: it turns out that The Anthropologist is from the same people from Anthropologie (the clothes brand), which, in turn, are also the same people from Urban Outfitters. Oh, I just Wiki-ed them, and Free People is also from the same group. No wonder why I have certain attraction for all three stores, and they all seem a bit overpriced to me. Oh well, it's a small (corporate) world after all.

(via swissmiss)

A.A. - cosas importantes (important things)

Mi hija otra vez a medio regaño: "Shhhh" (me hace ella a mi) y yo molesta le digo: "A la mamá no se le calla, cállese usted" a lo que me contesta con sentimiento: "No mamá! De mi boca salen palabras importantes" Y dentro de mi, traduzco: "Tú si cállate porque dices puras pendejadas!!!!!!!" Plop!!!!!

Sólo tengo dos palabras para esta frase: ¡qué miedo! Padre que se defienda desde tan chiquita... al menos sabemos que va a ser más difícil que se la chamaqueen cuando crezca :-).


Here goes the English translation:

My daughter is half rebuking me: "Shhhh". I, upset, tell her "You don't shut up your mother; you shut up" to which she replied, offended: "No, Mom! From my mouth come out important words!! " I could only think to myself:" You shut up because you say only shit !!!!!!!" Plop !!!!!

Two words come to my mind: scary girl. I like how she stands up for herself, though.She will be a tough one to fool around when she grows up :-).

The Haiku

All I want to be

is a person who makes things

and thinks about them.

JOHN MAEDA

Very appropriate for job market season. I would probably add (tacitly, for otherwise it would stop being a haiku) useful things somewhere. I need to feel useful.

What are your plans for this weekend? My dreary Halloween plans include writing statements and cover letters (and, of course, maybe the thesis).  Good thing I don't need a costume for that.

Have a nice weekend!

(via swissmiss)

Where are you going for dinner tonight?

It has happened countless times to everyone with a smartphone. You are out with your friends, suddenly you decide you want to go to eat and, as utility maximizers that we are, we look to make a "good", well-informed decision, i.e., we go to Yelp and see what others have to say about nearby places. As a restaurant owner, the next natural question follows: How much ($) is a Yelp star worth?

Michael Luca, an Assistant Professor at the Harvard Business School, just published a paper that analyzes what the impact of restaurants' Yelp ratings are on their revenue. Here is the abstract or summary of the paper:

"Do online consumer reviews affect restaurant demand?  I investigate this question using a novel dataset combining reviews from the website Yelp.com and restaurant data from the Washington State  Department of Revenue.   Because  Yelp prominently displays a restaurant's rounded average rating,  I can  identify the  causal  impact of Yelp ratings on demand with a  regression discontinuity framework that exploits Yelp‟s rounding thresholds.  I present three findings about the impact of consumer reviews on the restaurant industry:(1) a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a  5-9 percent increase in revenue, (2) this effect is driven by independent restaurants; ratings do not affect restaurants with chain affiliation, and (3) chain restaurants have declined in market share as Yelp penetration has increased. This suggests that  online  consumer reviews substitute for more traditional forms of reputation. I then test whether  consumers use these reviews  in a way that is consistent with standard  learning models.  I present  two additional findings: (4) consumers do not use all available information and are more responsive to quality changes that are more visible and (5) consumers respond more strongly when a rating contains more information.  Consumer response to a restaurant‟s average rating is affected by the number of reviews and whether the reviewers are certified as “elite” by Yelp, but is  unaffected by the size of the reviewers‟ Yelp friends network." 

The idea that I liked the most is that people are going back to traditional ways of reputation/recommendation mechanisms. Chain restaurants used to be a safe bet, but now that you have Yelp to offer you good, local options, it's easier to be willing to try other options. One more benefit of having so much information, so handy. Awesome. Also, pretty cool that somebody could actually quantify the results with a formal model.

If you want to know more, but don't want to read the paper itself, there is an article about it here.


(via Prof. Al Roth's Market Design blog)

PhD (and many other things) in a picture

I am at the impossible part. Hopefully not for too long now  (please!!).

How many books do you read per year?

I admit it. I am a terrible reader. I did a good job probably in the last couple of years, but 2011 has been devastatingly bad. I blame it on my thesis, like everything else bad that happens to me - like not keeping up with my blog, for example.

I am bringing it up today because this week, in my Italian class, they mentioned a couple of books that everybody read. One of them was The Divine Comedy (I can't remember the name of the other book now - but it was written by James Joyce). Even though they are classics and I know of their existence, I never even held those books in my hands.

Terrible, terrible, terrible!! I dearly hope that after I am done with the PhD I will be able to resume with my reading. I just don't understand how I can be so lazy sometimes. Or maybe it's just lack of organization? At the same time there is so much material to read around me: news, blogs, The Economist, New York Mag (new favourite brought home by my roomie, yeay!).

To close the article I am putting a link to Sheridan's article on Mexicans and how much they (do NOT) read. Pretty appropriate. If you can't read Spanish, try Google Translate. Otherwise here are a few (shocking) stats:

• Mexicans read an average of 2.8 books per year and 40% of them have never been in a bookstore (!!!!).
• 18% of the people with a bachelors degree in Mexico has *never* been to a bookstore.
• In 1950 there were 150 bookstores in Mexico City. In 2005 there are twice as many, but the population has six-folded since then.

Really depressing. Back to my thesis now.

Decálogo fotográfico

Mi buen amigo Beco Alcocer publica un decálogo fotográfico hoy en su blog. Conciso, al punto y con excelentes fotografías tomadas por él.

My good friend published the 10 commandments of photography and illustrates them with pictures of his own. Even if you don't understand Spanish much, the pictures are awesome. Go to the link!

Beautiful Imperfection

Did you ever wonder how a woman would look like if she had the proportions of a Barbie doll? I always heard the typical story of how that person would not be able to walk properly because it is just anatomically impossible.

Last week I stumbled upon a the following picture, presumably featured in the Oprah Magazine:

I really like the contrast of this image. I am a very visual learner and it gives me the chill how unrealistic the figure of girl dolls are. Just as in my previous post my cousin can't tell where my niece got those crazy lyrics from, I am convinced that when young girls not only play with these dolls, but are surrounded by an environment that promotes these false image of women, create unnatural ideas of what women should look like without even noticing. This became very apparent the other day that I was window-shopping online. You usually see a garment on a pretty girl and wish you could look as gorgeous as she does... but the other day I saw a model that was a bit chobbier than usual. I swear it was just a bit. I didn't like it. I couldn't even think of buying that piece of clothes (I think it was a sweater). While rationally I know this is totally wrong, I was surprised by how embedded the idea was in my head. After 5min I was happy to see that picture. I hope these become more of a standard and less of an exception. Even if sales drop a bit for that company. Girls should not be used to seeing these unrealistic images of what they should become when they grow up.

A.A. - Lágrimas de sangre

Woah, mi sobrina se la acaba de volar con sus habilidades de canta-autora:

Imaginen las caras de mi marido y mía cuando vamos la familia en el coche y mi chiquita viene atrás inventando canciones y derrepente escuchamos: "Y llorarás l,agrimas de sangreeeeee, de sangreee y triste te matarás solaaaaaaa!!!!!" Plop!!!!!!!!!! (de dónde sacó eso! Dora la exploradora no dice eso!!!!!!)

¡¡La chamaca no tiene ni 3 años!!

The Culinistas shop and cook for you

I bumped into this service provided by The Culinistas this weekend. I find it very interesting. Apparently you do  a kind of checklist of food you would like to eat for a week, they do the groceries, and then come to your house to cook. The food is then labeled and put in your fridge with heating instructions. Sounds great, doesn't it? Here is a video from their website. Sorry, couldn't find the link to embed it here. You will have to go their site to watch it :-P.

They do charge a minimum of $300 a week + groceries. I deem that a bit on the expensive side, but I can't really say whether it is worth it or not. After all, I am a student used to live with 10USD a day for extended periods of time :-).

Point of this post being, I am always surprised by the variety of services that pop up online. Recently, home cooked food seems to be one of them. Happy Sunday!

A.A. - relación a largo plazo

Las contradicciones de la vida: Mamá, me voy a casar con Marthelo, y tu vas a ir a mi boda y después de mi boda va a haber....juegos!!!!!!! (Muy madura para casarse y muy pequeña que quiere juegos!)

No puedo añadir mucho más a eso... Aunque lo que sí me llama la atención es cómo mi sobrina sigue pensando en el dichoso Marcelo. Yo pensaba que iba a ser sólo un capricho, pero ya vamos en los varios meses... qeu en términos de un bebé debe ser como... mucho tiempo. Esto sí que ha sido una relación de largo plazo :-).

Here goes the English translation:

Life's contradictions: "Mom, I will marry Marthelo and you are going to go to my wedding, and then there will be.... a playground!!!"

My cousin well asserted that my niece already feels old enough to marry, but, of course, her idea of a party is to have it at a playground.  What I am really surprised here with is the fact that my niece has been making these comments about Marcelo for a while now... at least several months. If I think how I thought of a month when I was 7 years old, I can't imagine what several months could mean for a toddler. This is truly a long term relationship! :-)

de extinción y política

Guillermo Sheridan publicó una columna muy buena del PVEM en El Universal esta semana. No es noticia que el partido recibe tantísimo dinero sólo en subsidios (3 mil 700 millones de pesos entre el año 2000 y 2011). Pero ahora resulta que, para seguir dando finta de partido ecologista, hizo una generosísima donación de 100 mil pesos a una asociación que se dedica a combatir el riesgo de que el águila real mexicana* pase al catálogo de especies en extinción. Descarados. Y para seguir con su consistencia ideológica, ya declararon su apoyo oficial al candidato del PRI, Enrique Peña Nieto. El autor no lo pudo decir mejor:

No deja de ser original, y podría ser hasta chistoso, de no costarle al erario.

* Me voy enterando buscando una foto del águila mexicana que el árbol nacional es el ahuehuete. ¿Quién lo iba a decir? Y pensar que manejé en la completa ignorancia por la calle patriótica de "Ahuehuetes Norte" todos los días mientras fui a la secundaria y a la prepa.

Momento de confesiones: Soy fan de Sheridan.... Y admito que lo conocí por un link de facebook :-).

A.A. - rimbombante + anecdote (in English ;-) )

Mi sobrina aumenta su vocabulario para describir al mundo :)

El vocabulario rimbombante de mi hija: Las moscas no son "picantosas" (picadoras); Mamá qué "brillosante" (brilloso); No me gusta que la camioneta está "desponchida" (descompuesta)....

I thought of writing an English translation of my niece's quotes (just to be fair), but I am really not sure what the equivalent would be in this case. What is happening is that my niece is trying to use fancier words to describe things, creating new ones on the spot. Such a cutie!


But going back to the translation, I am afraid I am not familiar with the kind of mistakes kids make when they are learning English/growing up to draw analogies here... There is one anecdote, though, a bit related to the misuse of words. This is not about a kid, but an actual office mate who had problems with phrasal verbs a couple of years ago (I mean, who doesn't!). The printer was down (as usual) and when my friend found out, she screamed: "AH! The printer is BROKE again!!"

Just thinking of the scene cracks me up ;-).

And... it's Friday!! Relax and forget about your email for at least an hour. If you can. I know I definitely won't :-).

A Structured Procrastinator

My roommate and I have been discussing a lot lately about techniques that we use to force ourselves to do stuff. You see, as a grad student whose adviser is not pushy at all and living in New York City, it's very hard to get yourself to work on your dissertation. There are no clear deadlines... or there are, but they just seem so far in time. Instead, there are so many things happening around you, it's hard to keep up!

Of course, when you start the fifth year of the program and job deadlines start to pass one after another, panic invades and years of procrastination start paying very high tolls. Not only you realize how behind you are in your work, but also it is hard to get rid of the habit of putting things off.

Today, Vero shared with me an article written in 1996 about Structured Procrastination. It can be more than 15 years old, but I find it as applicable today as it was back then. It basically sustains that procrastinators should have tons of things to do on their lists, to actually become a useful citizen of this world. Here is a paragraph that caught my eye in particular:

Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this approach ignores the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be, by definition, the most important. And the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is the way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.

I can't tell you how many times I followed this flawed assumption. This semester, probably one of the most stressful ones of my whole program I decided to enroll in Italian. It's a 4-day, 1-hour per week course. It forces me to wake up early, I enjoy the class terribly, and it certainly fits the model that John Perry describes in his article.

Please don't stay only with this words and read the article. It's short and compelling.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, as part of my procrastinating activities of tonight, I googled John Perry and he is now an emeritus professor at Stanford. If we assume that he followed this philosophy at least partially for these last 15 years, it has definitely payed off. 

Hongkong Banking Organization

Mi prima me acaba de pasar una puntada genial de mi mamá. Le dice a mi papá:

Raúl, ya te deposité el cheque de HBO.

(Se refería, claro, a un cheuqe de HSBC) Creo que mi mamá no sería muy buena mercadóloga :-))).