garry’s subposthaven

From the Prophecy Sciences blog:

Not-so-great memory— With so many things competing for our attention throughout the day, it’s a challenge for anyone to keep the important things in our working memory and the unimportant things out. VCs appear to have even more difficulty with this filtering, with our data showing a 10% deficit in working memory compared to everyone else.

Risk Seeking— Not everyone has an appetite for risk, preferring instead to go for small, safe wins. The VCs in our dataset had no trouble going for the big, uncertain gambles, making risky choices 67% more often than others we tested.

Prophecy Sciences is a YC company run by one of the smartest guys I knew at Stanford— he's a PhD/postdoc in Neuroscience and they're building technology for short sit-down cognitive tests that can tell a whole lot about people. It's already in use at hedge funds and professional sports teams to help build teams that work together better. 

Read the full study at Prophecy Sciences

On the Mises Circle blog:

Successful Bridgewater chief Ray Dalio of Bridgewater outlines his philosophy on self interest in his 123 page PDF manifesto "Principles", page 14:

Self-interest and society’s interests are generally symbiotic: more than anything else, it is pursuit of self- interest that motivates people to push themselves to do the difficult things that benefit them and that contribute to society. In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted—NOT how much they desired to make money. Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted and largely unrelated to their desire to make money. There are many people who have made a lot of money who never made making a lot of money their primary goal. Instead, they simply engaged in the work that they were doing, produced what society wanted, and got rich doing it. And there are many people who really wanted to make a lot of money but never produced what the society wanted and they didn’t make a lot of money. In other words, there is an excellent correlation between giving society what it wants and making money, and almost no correlation between the desire to make money and how much money one makes.

In Vanity Fair — A Home at the End of Google Earth: 

Separated from his older brother at a train station, five-year-old Saroo Munshi Khan found himself lost in the slums of Calcutta. Nearly 20 years later, living in Australia, he began a painstaking search for his birth home, using ingenuity, hazy memories, and Google Earth.

ABCNews reported:

The air bag can inflate and surround your head in 0.1 seconds. A small gas inflator fills it with helium. It needs to be powered on, though -- there is a power button and when it's on, LEDs light up to tell you how much electricity you have to work the inflator. There's also a sound to tell you it is powered on in case you cannot see it around your neck. That means you also have to charge the invisible helmet; it uses a microUSB port and the company says a charge lasts about a month during normal use.

And that's not all the tech inside the collar. The helmet has a "black box," similar to ones on airplanes, to record the movements of the cyclist, and recognize the acceleration and angular velocity during an accident. The data is stored in the Hövding so the company can then see what sort of accident it was.

Apparently available for 399 euros only in Europe — not available yet in the United States and it's been years! If it works, I want it now, like today. 

EDIT: Here's the manufacturer's website for those interested in it — http://hovding.com/en/