I would agree with periodization... From what I have seen the current fitness trends are using this as well. Body builders refer to it as 'cutting' and 'bulking' phases FYI.
1. Who is the party responsible for posting the comments?
Clearly it is the FCC itself (or possibly some coordinated entity) posting this comment. The response is directly in line with the President's agenda. It is doubtful that any real person agrees with the concept of destroying net-neutrality.
2. Why are they posting the same comment over and over?
It seems to be an attempt at influencing behavior by the FCC. They think that people visiting the site to leave a comment will be for net neutrality. If the visitor sees a bunch of comments that are attacking their position their reaction is to counteract the bot by leaving a coherent argument disputing the bot's message. What the FCC doesn't want is people leaving trolling comments like 'My body has been modified to run on internet privacy, why are you doing this to me?'
> I asked him what he was assuming for his supply and demand curves -- continuous, uniformly continuous, differentiable, continuously differentiable, infinitely differentiable, convex, pseudo-convex, quasi-convex, etc.? He said nothing.
> Soon I got a call from my department secretary to call my Ph.D. advisor -- I was out of the econ course!
This is my favorite economist joke: There is a physicist, chemist, and an economist stuck on a desert island together. They find a can of beans, and are discussing how to open the can. The physicist says "Lets climb up the tree and drop a rock on it. The force from the drop will make the can explode and open." Then the chemist says "We should put the can in some saltwater. The metal will corrode, and we can get inside." Finally the economist says, "Let's assume a can opener..."
Yup, on wild assumptions, considering utility functions, the average busy housewife and mother of four children, all under 6, goes to a big grocery store, gets a list of all the items for sale and their prices, notes her utility function as a function of the whole inventory, notes her grocery budget, and solves the likely NP-complete, non-linear, discrete (integer) optimization problem, maybe under uncertainty if she is buying extra bananas on sale and risking that they go bad too soon or buying too little fresh chicken hoping that they may be on sale in two days, etc., all in her head, right away!
Yup, and if buy a lot more transistors, then the price for each will go up? Hmm. Transistors used to be several dollars each, and now can get a billion or so for less than $100.
If buy more disk space, then the price per byte will go up? Gee, it used to be that got 300 MB for $40,000 and now can get 2 TB for about $50.
If buy more in computing, then the price per unit of computing will go up? Hmm, used to be could get a nice DEC dumb terminal for $1400, and now can get one heck of a desktop computer for that.
So, sometimes, if buy a lot more of something and wait a while, then the price per unit can go down, not up. If don't want to wait, then buy in quantity and get a volume discount. Or, instead of buying the teeny, tiny, itty bitty bottles of sweet pickle relish, buy the gallon size at much less cost per ounce. If are buying in really big quantities, say, Hertz buying a fleet of cars, then Ford can put on an extra shift and get the price way down just for Hertz.
Net, that one day in econ class looking at free hand apparently differentiable convex supply curves was a bummer.
What about double majors? Or a BS with a minor? Knowledge in multiple subjects can create a synergistic effect. For example a double major in computer science and biotechnology - or something similar - could be effective. I think that jobs are becoming less specialized, and also workers need to do several things well.
Maybe they couldn't afford a refrigerator in the 1970's. Living within ones means is a value that has not been a large part of the country's identity (US.) We could just be growing more conscious of living with in our means now because of the economic crisis. I don't mean to sound like an expert or anything, I'm just playing devil's advocate
Half the group was asked if they thought a person was above 165cm tall, which he was.
The other group was asked if they thought the same person was below 190cm, which he also was.
Then after, both groups were asked to guess his height. The second group guessed significantly higher than the first. Since both groups were told a number first, their response got anchored/biased towards that value.
If you present people with several options, they'll be biased towards selecting options in the middle of the range. This is particularly relevant to SaaS startups and pricing plans; but in the article the author was using it to steer the decision maker towards the option he had already determined to be optimal.
The optimal cutoff would probably have been $20 million rather than the $10 million that was chosen, but that change would have been too much for a lot of people. If I had only presented options from $1M up to $20M, then the group probably would have chosen $5M no matter how much I argued for $20M. I had to put the $50M number in people's heads so $10M seemed less of a jump.
Ya that's kind of what it seems like you did... throwing a big number out on purpose so that $9M jump would be "rational." The math in my head says you could weight figures on estimated acceptance probability. By throwing out a low probability figure first before a relatively higher probability acceptance figure - versus just presenting them with a reasonably high probability figure - give a better result. It is almost like expected value.
