Very well done

The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia:
[Via New Your Times Special Edition]

The End of the Experts by Thomas Friedman

This was so well done that it could easily fool someone for the first few minutes. I was sent, unaware, to one of the interior pages by Friedman. Reading it, since it sure looked real, I slowly got more and more of that ‘Wha?’ feeling. The Onion is so obviously over the top but this was twisted just enough askew without being immediately outrageous.

I then started seeing little things that really gave it away. Someone went to a lot of work for the spoof. Then setting up the website, WITH comments for people to add. And even better ads. The writing also carries the nice NYT prose, allowing both sides to have their say without showing any apparent bias.

Coming in at the front page makes it very obvious it is a spoof paper. But some of those inner pages are deadly!

UPDATE: Just to make sure everyone understands. The group responsible for this also distributed 1.2 million paper copies of their Special Edition in and around New York yesterday, with some being distributed in Chicago, Washington and LA.. This was a very expensive and sophisticated prank. It also appears that several reporters at the NYT actually participated. And, it being the INformation Age, you can download a PDF of the actual fake.

Technorati Tags: Entertainment, General, Web 2.0

Not acting their age

by whiteafrican
Risky decision-making essential to entrepreneurialism:
[Via EurekAlert! - Policy and Ethics]

(University of Cambridge) Whether someone will become the next Richard Branson, Steve Jobs or Henry Ford may be down to whether they make risky decisions, scientists at the University of Cambridge have concluded.
[More

This is part of a series of articles in Nature about innovation. Of interest here is the attempt to understand how some people make really good decisions under periods of stress with limited information. The commentary in Nature (may need a subscription) indicates that the entrepreneurs (mean age 51) took risks similar to young adults while other types of managers acted more their age.

The ability of the different types of managers to make cold decisions was the same. Differences were only seen when hot decisions had to be made. The ability to be mentally flexible while making decisions under stress could have real survival characteristics. Whether the jungle is in Africa or on Wall Street.

I did like this sentence from the article since it helps explain why this sort of behavior we see today could be unique:

One of the beneficial effects of entrepreneurial clusters in regions such as Silicon Fen may be that the increased networking and contact amongst the entrepreneurs works to create a culture that normalizes a more risk-tolerant type of decision-making.

Because we now huddle these types of people together, their ‘odd’ behavior becomes normal. The human social networks help amplify this sort of decision-making. Perhaps it can be leveraged to help us do more than just make money for startup companies and venture capitalists.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Web 2.0