Credit: Nancy Kelly Allen & Lisa Fields (hat tip: Cliff Pickover)
Lots of big box retailers like Walmart and Home Depot are ramping up their use of self-scanners in order to reduce their labor costs. That is, instead of waiting in a long line to have a cashier ring up your purchases, you can save time by going up to a self scanner and ringing up your purchases yourself. But according to two respected researchers at the University of Leicester (Adrian Beck and Matt Hopkins), self-scanners increase the level of shoplifting by reducing the perception of risk (i.e. the risk of getting caught shoplifting). Professors Beck and Hopkins conducted an extensive consumer survey to measure the incidence of “shrinkage” (i.e. theft) in retailers who employ self-scanners. Surveys, however, are notoriously unreliable, as they are based on self-reports, making it impossible to verify their accuracy. Indeed, our first reaction to their study was: Who would ever admit to stealing? The answer, it turns out, is more people than you might imagine. One-fifth of shoppers in their survey admitted to stealing from self-checkouts, with the majority of those claiming they did so regularly. In other words, self-service checkout technology creates a trade off between convenience and speed on the one hand and higher rates of shrinkage on the other. (You can find a link to the study here. Also, check out this thread on reddit on “Walmart self checkout.”)
Credit: Market Realist
Australian artist Clemens Habicht has created the beautiful “color puzzle” pictured below, a puzzle containing exactly 1,000 colors cut into a one-thousand piece CMYK color gamut. You can order one here (via Colossal).
Hat tip: Cliff Pickover
What’s up with Wells Fargo’s CEO? According to the N.Y. Times, “Wells Fargo was flowing with regrets …, taking out ads in nearly a dozen newspapers saying the bank took ‘full responsibility’ for creating sham bank accounts without its customers’ permission. * * * But with its banking regulators, Wells Fargo was not as contrite. The bank agreed to pay $185 million in fines and hire an independent consultant to review its sales practices, but it was able to settle the investigation into the questionable accounts without officially admitting to any of the suspected misconduct.” It gets worse. Adam Davidson wrote up this analysis of the Wells Fargo scandal in The New Yorker. Here is his conclusion: “There is no evidence that John G. Stumpf, the C.E.O. of Wells Fargo, was involved in the scheme to defraud the bank’s customers. [But] If bank regulation were doing its job—if he’d feared a job-threatening fine—he would have had the incentive to find out about it and stop it. What price has Stumpf paid for failing to monitor his bank? Remember: early signs of this scandal were covered in 2011, and then widely revealed in 2013. That year, Stumpf won the Euromoney Banker of the Year award. Last year, Stumpf was named Morningstar’s C.E.O. of the Year, and made nearly twenty million dollars. This year, he was reappointed to the prestigious Federal Advisory Council, a group of twelve bankers who are trusted to give guidance to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The Federal Reserve, of course, is the nation’s leading bank regulator.”
Too Big To Jail
The bookshelf pictured below was designed by Andrei Saltykov, a Russian-born architect who lives in London. You can read more about his beautiful creation here. Hat tip: wildeastmofo, via reddit. (By the way, we wonder what a bookshelf of a political map of Europe would look like?)
Photo Credit: Will Pryce
Credit: rasmusab, via GitHub. (Hat tip: Cliff Pickover.)
Check out this fascinating review of the book Parliament. (The review is by Margaret Rhodes; the book, by David Mulder van der Vegt and Max Cohen de Lara.) In summary, Mssrs. Mulder van der Vegt and Cohen de Lara studied the spatial layouts of the national legislatures of all 193 member states of the United Nations, and based on their researches, they conclude that all 193 legislative halls fall into one of five layouts (four of which are pictured below): “semicircle,” “horseshoe,” “opposing benches,” “circle,” and “classroom.” What type of layout does your country’s legislature or parliament fall into?
That is the name of a cool new App created by Natalie Hampton, a teenager from Sherman Oaks, California. Her App helps school kids navigate what one blogger (Maddy Myers) calls “the politics of the lunch table.” According to Ms Myers, “kids who use the App can designate themselves as ‘ambassadors’ and then post ‘open lunch’ events at specific tables, where anyone can come and sit down. Kids can also request to join tables through the App rather than getting shunned, ignored, or mocked once they reach the table in person.” Kudos to Ms Hampton! (Hat tip: Tyler Cowen, rock star of the Internet.)
Hopefully It’s Interesting.
In Conversation with Legal and Moral Philosophers
PhD, Jagiellonian University
Books, papers, and other jurisprudential things
Ramblings of a retiree in France
BY GRACE THROUGH FAITH
Natalia's space
hoping we know we're living the dream
Lover of math. Bad at drawing.
We hike, bike, and discover Central Florida and beyond
Making it big in business after age 40
Reasoning about reasoning, mathematically.
I don't mean to sound critical, but I am; so that's how it comes across
remember the good old days...
"Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences." - Sylvia Plath
a personal view of the theory of computation
Submitted For Your Perusal is a weblog wherein Matt Thomas shares and writes about things he thinks are interesting.
Logic at Columbia University
Just like the Thesis Whisperer - but with more money
the sky is no longer the limit
Technology, Culture, and Ethics
Just like the horse whisperer - but with more pages
Poetry, Other Words, and Cats
prior probability 