interesting things
Another bottle brawl has broken out — this time between nightlife operators and building owners.
After the Chris Brown
-Drake bottle-throwing melee at SoHo hot spot W.i.P., bottle sales at clubs are getting hammered by rising lawsuits and insurance costs as building owners try to distance themselves from the…
via NY Post: Business http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/realestate/commercial/the_party_over_ry8RfVBr6XyPzUl76mevAN?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=Commercial
The vultures are still feeding on the carcass of the financial collapse, but there’s not much meat left on the bone.
Distressed hedge funds have been top performers since the crash of 2008, delivering their biggest gains in 2009. That’s when top players gained between 30 percent and…
via NY Post: Business http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/vulture_funds_seeking_fresh_meat_XKNHmTPL7NMKuCNY171yrJ?utm_medium=rss&utm_content=%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20Business
Sunday’s rebroadcast of 60 MINUTES, following NFL Football, delivered 12.4 million viewers, more than all 12 of last week’s primetime premieres, according to Nielsen live plus same day ratings for the week ending Sept. 16.
Graphed (click to enlarge):
Amber Williams applauds the work of Emil Johannson, the proprietor of lotrproject.com, perhaps the most neurotically wonderful resource for Tolkien fans imaginable:
Johansson is on a quest to track every character from Tolkien’s
fictional world. He started by creating a massive family tree, and from
there he crafted an interactive map of Middle-earth and a timeline of
events in Tolkien’s stories. He has even performed statistical analyses
on the characters’ race, lifespan, and gender. Johansson points out that
the lopsided gender split (81 percent male, 19 percent female) reflects
the world Tolkien included in his tales of the ultimate war, but
probably not Middle-earth in its entirety.
via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/09/life-expectancy-on-middle-earth.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+andrewsullivan%2FrApM+%28The+Daily+Dish%29
A recent spate of fake online reviews is just the beginning of a trend, according to Gartner research.
The book publishing world was roiled by the recent disclosure that self-published author John Locke bought Amazon reviews and author Stephen Leather used “sock puppet†accounts to build online buzz  for his books, as GigaOM’s Laura Owen reported earlier. This kerfuffle comes after months of reports about too-good-or-bad-to-be-true restaurant and other reviews on Yelp and other online review sites.
Well, get ready, because it’s just the beginning, according to Gartner, which expects that 10 to 15 percent of all online reviews will be paid for by companies within two years. As companies seek to cash in on consumer time spent on online review sites, Facebook and Twitter, it’s not surprising that companies would try to steer consumer perception of their products.
According to a statement by Gartner senior research analyst Jenny Sussin:
With over half of the Internet’s population on social networks, organizations are scrambling for new ways to build bigger follower bases, generate more hits on videos, garner more positive reviews than their competitors and solicit ‘likes’ on their Facebook pages … Many marketers have turned to paying for positive reviews with cash, coupons and promotions including additional hits on YouTube videos in order to pique site visitors’ interests in the hope of increasing sales, customer loyalty and customer advocacy through social media ‘word of mouth’ campaigns.
Three years ago, the FTC found that companies paying for rave reviews without disclosing that the reviewer was compensated constitutes deceptive advertising and can be prosecuted. Gartner thinks that means companies will take a proactive role policing reviews that defame their products and services and pressure online sites to remove them. That will give rise to “reputation defense†companies specializing in such practices.
The perils of “churnalism” and the new Middle East.
via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/opinion/18iht-edcohen-never-wrong-for-long.html
An unlucky new study courtesy of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research has found that, on the whole, people who believe in luck — black cats sauntering across their paths, breaking mirrors, walking under ladders, or not simply waiting for all those pennies you dropped in your kitchen to eventually turn heads up — are more likely to live unhealthy lifestyles, since they believe life is just a crazy, random amusement ride with a whole section missing near the end and over which they have absolutely no control. Believing in luck, so this research suggests, is antithetical to bootstraps and rugged self-reliance.
According to Deborah Cobb-Clark, director of the Melbourne Institute, a link exists between people who let themselves buy snake oil to ward off all that black cat crossing guard luck and poor health. In other words, she explains, people are fat because they believe in luck rather than willpower, grit, and whatever other virtue people who spend four hours a day heaving kettlebells overhead and grunting like oxen:
The main policy response to the obesity epidemic has been the provision of better information, but information alone is insufficient to change people’s eating habits. Understanding the psychological underpinning of a person’s eating patterns and exercise habits is central to understanding obesity.
All those overweight people who think they just got stuck with a bad roll of the loaded gene dice are clearly kidding themselves. They just need better access to information, like pamphlets and Nordic personal trainers because thin people, well, just look at them! Clearly they have everything figured out because they’re sinewy enough to slip through wormholes and collect all the secrets of space and time.
Meanwhile, in the gender-specific portion of the study, researchers found that men wanted more often to see real, physical results from exercise, whereas women were content just to know that they were probably going to outlive most men anyway, but with exercise they would live to like a hundred and fifty.
Believers in luck = unhealthier lifestyle [UPI]
Image via CHRISTOPHE ROLLAND/Shutterstock.
Kate Middleton got the giggles today when she was greeted by a party of bare-chested women on the tiny village of Marau in the Solomon Islands.
via The Daily Beast – Latest Articles http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/17/kate-greeted-by-topless-women-solomon-islands-traditional-dress.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+%28The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles%29
WASHINGTON (AP) — A female giant panda at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo is a mother for the second time, giving birth to a cub….
via AP Top Headlines At 10:10 a.m. EDT http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_NATIONAL_ZOO_PANDA?SITE=FLROC&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
The Socialist International’s latest congress in Cape Town turned into a good old tussle between North and South.
via NYT > Most Recent Headlines http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/workers-of-the-world-re-unite/