Economics, Technology and Behavior

Economics: The Freakonomics blog points us to Al Roth of the Harvard Business School.  He talks about the opposite of repugnance.  These are things that we as a society promote, even though there are no good financial or political reasons.  They include: monogamous marriage between a man and a woman, home ownership and donating to charity.

Technology: Lots of talk about this new product that Google introduced (not released) at their IO Conference, called Google Wave.  A good overview article can be found at Techcrunch, but if you have an hour and a half to spare, I heartily recommend you watch the keynote speech where the development team demonstrated the tool.  Wave solves some of the problems that we have today with out communications products, by providing a single repository for waves that can contain multi-media and can be edited by a specified group.  The good news is that Google is planning to release Wave as an open source product, so developers can use common interfaces to build new features, much like the Firefox browser.  This also means that Google will probably not be using this as an advertising vehicle. Lots of whiz bang stuff has been included like real time search, context sensitive spell check, easy two way integration with blogs and real time translation.

Behavior: My most popular column to date is the one I entitled “The Young Entrepreneur“.  Tomatonation wrote a version that was more life centered and less business life centered.  But it belongs on the reading list for any 25 year old.

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