I bet it wasn’t this:

(via WFMU)

Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.

Surprisingly — stunningly, in fact — research shows that the majority of people select the first option; they would rather make twice as much as others even if that meant earning half as much as they could otherwise have. How irrational is that?

Surprising, and not. But are people really that status-conscious? I mean, I know they are. But, really?

(LA Times: “Why people believe weird things about money,” by Michael Shermer [13 Jan 2008]; via Lifehacker)

Interesting enough for the subject matter — the mysterious skyjacker who disappeared from a plane¹ with some gracious amount of money, never to be found again (the skyjacker that is; some of the money was found, maybe) — this article from the AP is probably best for the very last sentence:

“Maybe a hydrologist can use the latest technology to trace the $5,800 in ransom money found in 1980 to where Cooper landed upstream,” Carr said. “Or maybe someone just remembers that odd uncle.”

The FBI’s presenting, as they say, “for the first time” to the public, new & exciting information.

In case you do remember that odd uncle.

¹ Which is to say, jumped.

I AM
81%
JAZZTake the Transformers Quiz

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I am: Kurt Vonnegut For years, this unique creator of absurd and haunting tales denied that he had anything to do with science fiction. Which science fiction writer are you?

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What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North   You may think you speak “Standard English straight out of the dictionary” but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like “Are you from Wisconsin?” or “Are you from Chicago?” Chances are you call carbonated drinks “pop.”
Philadelphia
The Northeast
The Midland
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Also, I do not refer to carbonated beverages as “pop”; naturally, all of the other information is 100% accurate.

You want ice?  You need black cherries. (via LifeHacker)

Loneliness is bad for your health.

Bikes “aren’t transportation.”

How we think we understand things we don’t, really.  (Namely, tipping.)  Interesting shufflings in the comments area, as well as some worthwhile links.
(Crooked Timber: “Tipping points,” by Henry [16 May 2007])

I don’t know exactly how it works, nor do I want to:

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(Emphasis added.)

Or maybe it wasn’t crazy at all. In fact, does anyone say that anymore? They ought to. Because, if it does, it is. From a press release on the FBI’s web site:

The sales pitch was seductive: the young visionary behind Brown Investment Services in Virginia guaranteed investors he would double their money in 30 business days by tapping into the complex world of foreign currency trading.

Just for future generations, let’s translate:

“guaranteed” = “ha ha ha (etc.)”

“complex world of foreign currency trading” = “fraud”

In case you were wondering.

It is possible something is the matter here. Just as there were deep flaws in the work ecosystems of the caring professions, noticed by researchers in the seventies, it’s possible there’s something wrong with our professional environments—and perhaps, more broadly speaking, our culture of work. Isn’t this worthy of examination? Work, after all, is a form of religion in a secular world. Burning out in it amounts to a crisis of faith.

I came across this article in New York Magazine eight months ago or so, and despite being intrigued by the topic, put off reading it until now. Why? Because it looked fairly long, and I didn’t feel like I had time to read it, then. Of course, the author writes about how we’re always hurried, and waiting. That’s a secondary point, however, and first and foremost the article is interesting for its direct perspectives on burnout, burnout apparently being a relatively recent and little-researched concept.

But today, says Maslach, corporate settings are cautiously, slowly, cracking their doors, letting people like her in, because they recognize that something’s gone awry. “Like in Silicon Valley,” she says. “It used to be the case that people would say, ‘You’re burned out? You don’t like the job? So quit. I don’t run a country club,’ ” says Maslach. “But what was happening was the best and the brightest wanted to opt out. They started saying, ‘I can’t do this; this is not a life.’ They’d go to the Midwest and start a pet-food store.” Maslach adds that when she did interviews at nasa, she noticed similar problems there. “So suddenly, these places were saying, ‘Whoa, what do we need to do to get these people?’ Getting the most out of people didn’t actually mean getting the best. That’s when there was a new wave of interest in burnout.”

Admittedly, I don’t quite understand the “I don’t run a country club” bit, but I like the rest. There are interesting anecdotes, and also facts and figures (which you can take with however much salt you like):

• According to a survey in the Netherlands, 10% of the workforce is burnt out at any given time;
• Younger workers are more likely to burn out than older workers;
• Single are more likely to burn out than married;
• and people in strongly individualistic societies are more likely to burn out than… well, those in less individualistic societies (though I’m not sure how exactly that distinction is made for the purposes of the fact).

If you don’t have enough time to read the article in its entirety, this last bit’s a good one to go out on:

As Schaufeli, the Dutch researcher, notes, one of the strongest predictors of burnout isn’t just work overload but “work-home interference”—a sociologist’s way of saying we’re receiving phone calls from Tokyo during dinner and replying to clients on our BlackBerrys while making our children brush their teeth.

Indeed, that’s her colleagues’ most startling finding of all. Most Americans believe they work more today than they did 35 years ago. Yet according to the American Time Use Survey, an ambitious project that for 41 years has been asking thousands of participants to keep detailed time diaries, Americans now have five more hours of leisure per week (38) than they did in 1965. Certainly, there are academics who reject these numbers—in The Overworked American, published in 1992, the economist Juliet Schor calculated we were working nearly an extra month per year, setting off a rather sharp debate about her methodology—but even those who agree our leisure time is increasing will readily concede that Americans experience their leisure quite differently and therefore may feel as if they’re working more. For one thing, it’s non-contiguous leisure time, time meted out in discrete increments. Human beings have always resisted the fracturing of time. Gleick points out that Plautus cursed the sundial. Now, he says, we gain 90- second reprieves with our microwave ovens. But do we do anything meaningful in those 90 seconds? Or do they vanish in the same particle puff?

(NYMag: “Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” by Jennifer Senior)

Or not so much youth as longevity. Winning the Nobel prize apparently adds years to your life, maybe:

“Status seems to work a kind of health-giving magic. Once we do the statistical corrections, walking across that platform in Stockholm apparently adds about 2 years to a scientist’s life-span. How status does this, we just don’t know.”

There’s not enough info listed in the article to really dig your teeth into, but the first and likely most obvious question I have is, hello Mr. Correlation v. Mr. Causation? Say what you want about “deserving work,” but what if Nobel prize winners are simply more driven than their nominated, non-winning peers? Ignoring the notion of a status effect, it would make sense that people who are more driven would have more cause to live, and be more likely to keep going when others would give up an wither away.

Just wondering.

(EurekAlert: “New research says winning a Nobel Prize adds nearly two years to your lifespan.” [Jan 16, 2007])

First by knowing the word, and second by actually being able to do it.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

Think what you will; it’s hard to dislike an article that includes a chart with the title “Slugs and snails v sugar and spice”. Really. The article in the Economist looks at studies examining the differences between boys and girls, men and women, monkeys and monkeyettes. Some interesting, marginally inconclusive findings, all encompassed (mostly) by the subtitle: “Men and women think differently. But not that differently.”

(Economist: “The mismeasure of women.” [Aug 3, 2006].)