In the summer of 2007, excitement regarding the criticality of map data (specifically turn-by-turn navigation data) reached a fever pitch. On July 23, 2007, TomTom, the leading portable GPS device maker, agreed to buy Tele Atlas for US$2.7 billion. Shortly thereafter, on October 1, Nokia agreed to buy NavTeq for a cool US$8.1 billion. Meanwhile Google was still evolving its strategy and no longer wanted to be limited by the terms of its two contracts. As such, they informed Tele Atlas and NavTeq that they wanted to modify their license terms to allow more liberty with respect to syndication and proliferation. NavTeq balked, and in September of 2008 Google quietly dropped NavTeq, moving to just one partner for its core mapping data. Tele Atlas eventually agreed to the term modifications, but perhaps they should have sensed something bigger at play.

Read the whole article.

Hyman designed a pair of studies where he had subjects walk across a certain path without distraction, while listening to an iPod, while talking on a cell phone, and while walking and talking with another person. He found in the first study that people talking on a cell phone walked more slowly, and had to make more course corrections than the other groups.

…

What this all might mean is that there is something about talking on a cell phone that is particularly demanding of our attention – more so than listening to music or talking with someone who is physically present. These results also support the hypothesis that talking with a passenger is not as dangerous because the extra pair of eyes increases the chance that someone will notice a sudden obstacle or unexpected traffic pattern.

Read the whole article on the Neurologica blog. See also: Cognitive biases.

You can’t burn 6 minutes of your time any better than watching this video.

Anyway, the one down there was a McDonald’s. It did awesome lunch business and was extremely well-run. One of those McD’s where even if the drive thru line went all the way to the road (which it always was at lunch), you still knew you’d be through in 10 minutes and your order would be right.

Of course, this kind of success attracted competition, and a Wendy’s was built very close-by. It was to open on a Tuesday.

So what did McDonald’s do on Wendy’s big grand opening day?

Maps of bounded rationality: a perspective on intuitive judgement and choice
Nobel prize lecture by Daniel Kahneman

Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks
A paper by Eliezer Yudkowski (part of Global Catastrophic Risks book).

Why Didn’t I Think of That?
A book by Charles McCoy.

Image cropped from “Light Bulbs”

“[The image] depicts 320,000 light bulbs, equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage (inefficient wiring, computers in sleep mode, etc.)”

I am really impressed by the perfection of all this. The flight’s captain, by the way, has an interesting background.

Image cropped from grego!’s photo at Flickr

Photos → the first published photo @ Twitter, by grego! @ Flickr, and at TimesOnline.

Update: Videos of the splashdow is now available (in the second clip action starts at 1:58)

In 1996 Ethiopian Airlines flight 961 was hijacked and crashed into the sea as a result of running out of fuel. Upon impact, the plane broke into millions of pieces and only 52 out of 175 onboard survived. Below is the footage of the impact.

In 1963 a small passenger jet, Tu-124, landed in the Neva river in Saint-Petersbourgh, USSR, with no causalities. The story behind it is so bizarre I would not believe it had not it happened in Russia. Note how close a bridge is to the crash site.

Via HN.

Some editions: Xmas, Customer service, China fact of the day, Boxing day and many more.

The authors (Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok) are great blog writers — if you’re trying to make your blog interesting, you better learn from them. “Markets in Everything” series is just one way of keeping readers come back.

New business models and strategies for monetization are proposed for online content and social networks. Also, there is a brief explanation of the startup market (meaning the acquisitions of startups). I guess this would be insightful for anyone who is about to launch a startup or have built a social application that he has trouble monetizing.

Here is the paper in PDF, it is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.

I’m writing this to provide a live example. A recently purchased Macbook Pro had a defect in either its logic board or left I/O board, which translated into the impossibility to use it. Shit happens, of course, but guess the time it takes to repair it in Apple warranty service in Russia, where I live. It’s undetermined. At least 2 months. At this point you would be probably thinking about violation of consumer rights law. According to the Russian law, warranty service can not take more than 20 days, and starting from the 10th day, the service provider must give me a substitute laptop for the period until they finish the repair.

So what?

They refuse to comply, saying basically “We know that we are breaking the law, but obliging to it would require us to hold an inventory of parts here in Moscow rather than order a new part every time some malfunctioning device is brought for repair (it’s the customs that takes 2+ months), which is too expensive for us. You can, of course, sue us, but that would not bring you your device any faster.”

You probably would think of law enforcement problems, but there are none in this case. I can go sue them, but the purpose of getting my Macbook faster is not going to be achieved. You would think that it’s some underdeveloped service provider in some underdeveloped country, but it’s an Apple Authorized Service Center and Apple Authorized Premium Reseller. Apple is aware of the problem, but is unwilling to solve it. I spoke to both Apple Russia and Apple USA but was forwarded to people whose job was to apologize, rather than solve the problem.

You would not expect it from Apple in the USA or Europe, would you? Even the nicest guys are driven by incentives.

They don’t deny the existence of problems, they believe these should be silenced.

The problem is, a problem that is not talked about is not a problem, in a sense that no one is going to solve it. It sounds evident, but to a lot of people, it’s not. In Russia at least it’s a big problem — no one speaks about problems. Some don’t dare, others believe problems should not be spoken about. There is no pressure on the political “elite” to solve the problems, so they don’t bother.

I wonder if this problem silencing phenomenon is cross-cultural, or specific to certain cultures. And if this correlates with economic growth rates and freedom indices.

Machine-in-itself. Via Machine Thinking. leavemealonebox.com.