Monthly Archives: July 2010

Behavioral Economists

Economics,

Behavioral economics is an interesting branch of economics that combines economics and psychology. It studies personal decision making in the context of economics. Perhaps the best way to view the field is as the field that studies why people do not follow the “economic rules of life,” which I’ve generalized in my previous entry. Why do people make economic decisions that do not appear to be rational? Why do they not respond to certain incentives? Does realization of opportunity cost make a huge difference in decision making?

Individuals in many humanities and social sciences fields tend to strongly dislike this field (including several of my history professors). In my experience, their main question tends to be: “How accurately can one use science to examine human decision making?” Can we really decipher human decision making on the basis of a scientific model? Those in the humanities are more inclined, I think, to view the human mind on a, well, humanist level. Specifically, I think they view the human mind as being filled with a lot of human values and concerns that science cannot necessarily detect and quantify scientifically.

How abstract is the human mind? To what level can we use the scientific method to predict human choices? Are we really as “human” as we perceive ourselves to be?

Just some thoughts as I am forced by Maruel to think about how economics can be used to bring about some sort of institutional reform to Hawaii’s public sector and education systems.

Configured my mcom.com e-mail with SeaMonkey Mail

Tech, , ,

Over a year and a half ago, I found out from a disgruntled jwz that I could register my very own mcom e-mail address! I was in need of a new e-mail address to use for professional corespondance, since my graduation from UH was within sight and I did not think I could use my hawaii.edu address forever. My other e-mail addresses were not exactly “professional.”

So, I registered an address.

(If you are not familiar with MCOM, let me give you a brief history. MCOM is short for “Mosaic Communications,” which was the first name of the company that would later become Netscape Communications, maker of the Netscape brower. The brand’s been dead essentially since the company was renamed in 1994; however, jwz, a former Mosaic/Netscape employee (and current owner of the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco) had tried to buy the domain from the now-current owner of the Mosaic Communications website (mcom.com), AOL. AOL had declined to sell the web address to him but did allow him to upload the original MCOM website from 1994 at the location, as well as his collection of old MCOM software)

Aside from jwz’s uploads, AOL has recently used the domain as part of its Tunome service, which allowed users to create custom e-mail addresses. Tunome is now defunct and it is no longer possible to make new mcom.com addresses (so the address I have now is something special!).

Anyway…

After I created my mcom address, I did not use the address as often as I wanted it too. The main reason for this was I did not know how to configure it via IMAP with a mail client (a client is a third party application that used to manage e-mail, such as Thunderbird or Outlook…I personally use SeaMonkey). MCOM uses the AOL webmail interface by default, but uses a different server address for IMAP and STMP settings. It was because of these different settings that I couldn’t figure out how to configure my e-mail with SeaMonkey.

I finally figured out how to do that today after work, thanks to some Google searching. So for the time being I expect to use this as my primary e-mail address. Thank you AOL for giving me the chance to be ridiculously nostalgic every time I check my e-mail!

(BTW the image at the top of this blog entry is the original Mosaic Communications logo, which I always found a bit trippy! In the throbber version of the image in the Mosaic browser, the colorful squares around the “M” in the logo would spin. Awesome.)