Archive for November, 2016

We sometimes joke that the River Aire has a lot like the Ankh. Occasionally, things get a bit too close to home. For example, the council recently cut down some of the trees along the bank and cleared out some of the crap in the river. Among the tyres and bits of plastic they removed, you will also note they found a Coca-Cola-branded vending machine lying in the river.

TPP have been running recruitment ads in the train station for a long time. I find their tagline, “are you a little bit geeky?” patronising, and I have heard a few too many bad things about working there to be that interested.

But one of the other major healthcare software companies in Leeds, EMIS Health, have started advertising as well. This cheeky shot is presumably aimed at Sky Bet and William Hill, who are also big employers in Leeds.

Earlier this month I took part in the 31st Abbey Dash.

It was the first time I had run the Dash. However, it is not a race I do particularly well. Last year, I set a personal worst over 10k. This year looked like to be a repeat of previous years: old and wet.

Luckily Jane and Rob were already there when I turned up and Chris and Carley turned up later too. Usually, I am stood around by myself for the hour you have to wait, so it was nice to feel like I had some friends for a short while.

Organisation was improved. They only do one water point (Run For All does two) but they did text me my result this year. There was still stuff to fix, though. They let the sub-60 and sub-70 pens go at the same time. I was at the back of the sub-60 pen, so I was running behind a lot of the sub-70 runners. By the finishing straight, I was literally having to push my way through, and it slowed me down a lot.

Despite my previous bad times, I was hopeful. So far in 2016 I had run my first half marthon, set a personal best at Parkrun and run my first sub-60 over 10k when I managed a 59:59 in the Leeds 10k in July. My faith was rewarded: I brought it home in 56:45 setting a new 10k PB.

Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions is a book by academic Dan Ariely. There is so much good stuff in this book. Whether you are looking to understand humans, sell products, design a better society or merely learn some interesting stuff, this book is worth reading.

He begins by telling a story about The Economist. They offer free options: online only, print only, online and print. Print only and online and print are priced the same. Why would they do this? Because people compare things relatively.

If you give people no basis for comparison, they will not know how to judge something. This is why a $1200 bread-maker may not sell at first. People do not know whether they need a bread-maker. But put it next to a $1600 bread-maker and people can see that picking the $1200 over the $1600 is clearly a smart move.

Similarly, you can bias people’s opinions about pricing. People like to buy the thing in the middle. So if you want to sell a certain TV at a certain price, but it between a cheap TV and a really expensive TV. Or, if you are in a restaurant, but one really high priced dish on the menu if you want to sell more of the second highest price dish.

What if you want to break this comparison? Starbucks certainly did when they started charging £10 for a coffee (I do not actually know what Starbucks charge). Why would people pay that when McDonald’s sell coffee for £1.49? Starbucks created an experience. A coffee house with music and chairs and pastries to break the price anchor.

People also love the word free. Amazon were smashing it with their free delivery. Except in France where they were doing terribly. Why? Their discount delivery was one cent. It made almost no difference to the price, but it was not free. People will also queue for free stuff, even though their time is valuable and they could just buy the product instead.

One of the keys here is social norms vs market norms. Professionals will rarely do work for low cost. You cannot get a lawyer to do discount work for the vulnerable. Once you are in the realm of market norms, they want their fee. However, if you ask them to do the work for free, they yes! Why? Because social norms are used instead of market norms.

Trials are a great way to sell stuff. Why? Because once you give someone something, it triggers virtual ownership. Even though they have not bought it yet, their heart tells them they already own it and they go into loss aversion.

Loss aversion may also a reason that we continue to hang on to old friendships, particularly long-distance ones, or ones that have fallen apart, when we should actually be putting that time into building new friendships.

Food glorious, food

How about food? It turns out the same food tastes between when you tell someone what it is in and add exotic ingredients. People’s restaurant behaviour is also interesting. In the West, where individualism is valued, people are less likely to order the dish they want if someone else had ordered it before them.

What that means is that if the waiter is taking your order, and someone orders the dish you wanted, you are more likely to switch your order to a dish you prefer less, because you want to be seen as being individual.

However, when you run the same experiment in East Asia, where fitting in with the group is valued more highly, the opposite is true. People are more likely to switch their order to a dish they prefer less when someone before them orders it.

Dishonesty

Ariely has a long section on dishonesty. Why is it okay to steal a pen from work or a conference for example, but not steal a whole box of pens? There seems to be a sense of what is being a bit cheeky, and what it actually morally wrong.

Cash replacements seem to divorce us from the true value of what we are doing. For example, stealing someone’s Skype credit (this happened to Ariely) seems less wrong than stealing the money directly from him. This is a concern as we increasingly move towards a cashless society.

Summary

I need to read this book at least one more time to get all of the knowledge out of it. It is packed full of stuff that is useful and interesting. Read it. Read it now. Then go buy a bread-maker.

The second half of A Dance with Dragons from George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire has been a long time coming. I use Audible for a lot of my function, including this, and to say Audible had some small technical issues would be an understatement.

Originally they published everything in two halves, hence why all my write-ups of A Song of Ice and Fire have also been in two halves. However, midway through listening to A Dance with Dragons they consolidated the two into one single audiobook.

The problem was that anyone who had bought the first half, could not longer buy the second half. Nor could you buy the new consolidated book because the system thought you already had it. Yet every time you tried to download it, it would give you only the first half again.

It took Audible months to sort this out. I was not tracking exactly how many, but my guess was it was in the three to six-month timescale. They had to roll out a software update to their app to fix it.

Of course, this small delay is but a taster of the delay I can expect to encounter while I wait for Martin to release The Winds of Winter and the book that comes after that.

Was it worth the wait? No, because Martin does what he always does and kills off my favourite characters. But, like a beaten puppy, I cannot stay away and keep reading regardless.

Adulting: How to Become a Grown-Up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps is a book by journalist, Kelly Williams Brown. It is a point-by-point guide to being an adult. Each one gives you advice such as remember to clean your kitchen, be nice to people and stop after the first bottle of wine.

All very actionable stuff.

Like point 6, “stop enjoying things ironically” and just start enjoying them.

Mostly though, it is just a fun book to read. Brown is an amusing writer and while you might not learn much you did not already know (I read it as a 29-year-old, maybe a 21-year-old would learn a lot) you will have a good time reading it.

Sane New World: Taming the Mind is a book by Ruby Wax. Wax is a well-known comedian but what you might not know is that she is also a trained therapist with a masters degree in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy.

This book is all about how to use mindfulness to solve mental health difficulties, narrated through her own struggles with depression. Her own anecdotes really add some sparkle to the book and there is a lot for anyone with depression to identify with in here and think “yes, me too!”. It’s also funny, as you would expect from a big-name comedian.

She also knows her stuff. Her round-up of what parts of the brain do what, and her round-up of the evidence for mindfulness-based therapies have both proved excellent starting points for research.

When to Rob a Bank: A Rogue Economist’s Guide to the World is a book compiled from posts on the Freakonomics blog. Each post is written by either Steven Levitt Stephen Dubner.

They start off by telling an anecdote about how they had been writing the Freakonomics blog and presumed there was no way to monetise it. Then they saw a bottled water factory and realised that sometimes people were actually willing to pay for something that was free if it was put into nice packaging. So they wrapped their blog posts into a book and began selling it.

Some of the posts were interesting, but it literally was just a collection of them, sometimes arranged into a theme. There was no flow, no real overall structure, no main point or take-home message. To me, these are the additions that turn a collection of short anecdotes, good on their own, into an interesting book.

Tasty, tasty baby.

This is the second Mary Berry cookbook I have worked my way through, the other being Absolute Favourites.

I have eight recipes that are “keepers” from this book. That is two more than Absolute Favourites, and only beaten by two of the River Cottage cookbooks. It is useful for basics like roasting potatoes and vegetables, as well as some really nice starters, mains and desserts. I highly recommend this cookbook.