I write to you from the middle of the Baltic Sea.  While I can access the internet, I am unable to add the pictures and make a full blog post so you’ll find out about my adventures so far in Stockholm and Helsinki when I return to land sometime tomorrow.

Here’s a quick preview what you’ll learn in my upcoming posts:

• What I learned about the Swedish navy, and why it made me nervous to get on this boat
• What my cousin Sarah says Swedes think of Norweigans
• Why Finns have rows of hitching posts set up by the sea
• How to keep my grandmother happy for an afternoon in Helsinki
• Another reason why Swedes decided to stop fighting wars and start selling weapons
• The degree to which my uncle overestimated the amount Swedes party on boats during random Monday nights

Now I’m off to aimlessly wander around the boat.  Based on my observations from yesterday, here are some possible activities for tonight:

• Buy things in prices that would be outrageous in Dollars, but are actually in Euros
• Insert Euros into the TakeYourMoney Machine - either Video Poker or Slots style
• Convert Euros into 5.6% alcohol Finnish beer and watch cover bands/bollywood dancing (last night’s activity)
• Watch The Little Mermaid in German with Russian subtitles (I think).
• Try to find the movie theater and watch Indiana Jones (hopefully in English)

Categories: Travel
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At Kulturefest in Stockholm, Nana met a friendly robot who danced with her and posed for a picture.  This is in stark contrast to robots in France.

We also stopped by some of the little .  In Chicago, I spend nearly every weekend at one of the many street festivals.  I eased my way into Swedish life by doing the same.  The music on the stages were varied - this group played vocal-driven folk rock.  Stopping here also gave Nana and Papa a chance to sit down.

All kinds of companies set up booths at Kulturefest.  Green friendly Swedes won’t pimp their rides, but they will pimp their wheelchairs.  The only things missing were the elephant ears, funnel cakes, and beer stands.

While we were eating Lebanese food, CaribbeanFest partied through the streets.  In authentic Caribbean style, some of the countries’ floats were late, so every 15 minutes a different group danced by.  They also may have gotten lost, as I think we saw the same guys come by a few times.

Some other observations so far:

• Women here come in two varieties, Heidi Klum and frumpy
• Many things Sweden is known for - pancakes, vikings, lingonberries - don’t actually exist here.  Hot Dog stands are everywhere, but they’re called körbs (sausages).
• Teenagers own the streets - but that may be because I accidentally wandered into TeenFest ‘08.
• Street festivals here have lots less drinking in the streets
• At night, parks in Stockholm were filled with normal people, rather than drug dealers

Categories: Travel
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American Express recently sent me an e-mail with this offer:

From June 2-12, 2008, there will be one U.S. destination on sale each weekday, with some packages retailing below $3,500. Once on sale, the price of each package drops every 20 minutes. So when the price seems right, you better grab yours before it’s gone. Visit the website now to check out in-depth trip details and photos, and to sign up to receive an e-mail reminder for when the trips you want go on sale.

It looks like they’re selling the vacation packages using an Open Descending Bid Auction, also known as a Dutch Auction.  If we think back to our Auction Theory, this should give us the same result as a Sealed-Bid First Price auction, but American Express has an excellent opportunity to test whether or not that holds in a real world environment.  From a behavioral perspective, in the real world and not a laboratory, will bidders react the same way in both situations?  My hunch is no, but I don’t have data to back it up - could my readers who still have unfettered access to academic journals find some?

Dutch Auctions are currently used by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Dutch Flower Merchants, and a variant was used for Google’s original IPO.

Categories: Behavioral Economics, Business and Economics, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Matching Mechanisms, Travel
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Matthew Polly in Slate is logging his trip to Thailand:

Khao San Road is where WTO protesters go to vacation. It is a collection of cheap hostels, Internet cafes, semi-legit massage parlors, disreputable travel agents, nightclubs, and endless stalls manned by Thai merchants willing to cater to the desires of the First World’s spiritually confused, culturally eclectic youths. And what do they want? Primarily, tattoos, henna, and dreadlocks. As I walked past a Thai grandmother braiding Bob Marley hair into a twentysomething Japanese head while a Thai man was needling Superman’s symbol onto his shoulder, I thought: If this is where peace, love, and understanding lead, then let’s give war a chance.

My journal entries from Thailand are lost with an old website, but I never really updated them so you’re not missing much. He’s a better writer, but I think I had cooler adventures than most Western travelers to Thailand (for starters, I wasn’t a backpacking hippie). Members can see pictures of my trip in the gallery.

Categories: Travel
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It seems like I’m out of town every week lately. For those who want to meet up, here’s my travel schedule for April:

I’m in Detroit right now through Wednesday night.

From April 12-15 I’ll be in Washington, D.C. crashing an IEEE Medical Imaging conference

At the end of the month, I’ll be in Omaha, traveling for work.

Hangouts during any of these trips are welcome, especially in Omaha. Get in touch through email or the blog.

Categories: Travel
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Even after JetBlue screwed up big time, people are still going back:

Because JetBlue worked hard to acknowledge the importance of customer satisfaction early, the carrier has, in effect, built in a forgiveness contingency in it’s implied agreements with its customers.

Categories: Business and Economics, Incentive Centered Design, Marketing, Strategy, Travel
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Is the Central Time Zone now the coolest one on the planet? My move to Chicago, completed today, would seem to indicate so. Some advantages of Central time:

1. The Daily Show is now on at 10:00, rather than 11, allowing for earlier bedtimes or trips to the bar.
2. I live in it.
3. It looks like I’m going to bed later to people in Eastern time.
4. Less Jet Lag when traveling to Vegas, not that sleep schedules really matter in vegas anyways.

Those interested in Chicago-style hangouts should get in touch, david@dworin.net, especially people I’ve lost touch with who stumble onto this blog.

Categories: Ephemera, Travel, Winter of Dave
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Blogging will be light for the next few weeks as I move to Chicago (this weekend) and then take a week and a half in Florida.  I should still be checking e-mail for those who want to reach me.  Chicago-ites (?) interested in meeting up once i move should feel free to contact me, I’m always interested in a new audience.

Categories: Ephemera, Travel
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My photos from Boston are online, but don’t have any meta-data yet. I’m going to leave them open to everyone for the next week, then probably make them members only.

Pictures from my other random adventures are online in the gallery too, though almost nothing for the past year has any meta-data.

Categories: Photos, Travel, Winter of Dave
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Just got back from Boston tonight. A quick recap of the weekend’s adventures and my impressions of the city:

• For a city its size, Boston is very flat. Yes, there are tall office towers downtown, but there isn’t the high-rise condo development you see in other large cities. Most of the city is three story apartments.
• It was very difficult for me to tell what areas were independent of the city of Boston and what areas were districts of the city. My impression was that the city of Boston itself is very small, but that it somehow encompasses many outlying cities. I could probably figure out the real answer with more research.
• Buildings are very old. The city is filled with “ambient history” - streetcars are still a normal means of transportation, even expensive buildings look built forever ago, and everything downtown is across from a colonial church or a founding father’s grave.
• Looking at the way the roads and trains were built, you can tell the city grew much larger than anyone ever anticipated. Transportation infrastructure has to be built underground, streets are layered from boulevards to carriageways with train tracks in the middle.
• I got to drive through the Big Dig, the largest civil engineering project in the world and the last project funded by the Eisenhower interstate highway act!
• The culture of Boston, at least for 20somethings, is defined in large part by the number of top-tier universities in the city. According to OldRoommateJeff, this meant I couldn’t pick up a girl by telling her I was a nuclear physicist, because odds were she would know one. Jeff was wrong.
• I was only there for a few days, so I can’t really judge, but it doesn’t seem like Boston is a major restaurant city, especially relative to its size and affluence.
• After a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, I am convinced that every art museum in the country has a “Watson and the Shark.” I have so far seen it in Boston, at the National Gallery in DC, and at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Is there an art expert out there who can explain this to me? Did the same artist paint the same scene many times? Are curators all lying to me?
• The MFA also had two Thomas Cole paintings, my favorite artist, an extensive and well arranged East-Asian and Indian collection, and more renaissance works than I actually care for. It deserved more than the few hours I gave it.
• Coors Light girls are lying dirty whores who promise you T-Shirts and then don’t deliver. Jack Daniel’s girls not only deliver on the T-Shirt, but they are friendly and down to earth. I’m glad I didn’t actually buy a Coors Light.

Photos will be up later tonight, for members to peruse. ThailandMarc got a hold of the camera and went on a photo-spree, so the Friday Night was well documented.

Categories: Travel, Winter of Dave
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I’ll be traveling to Chicago this weekend to look at apartments and hang out with friends.  If you’ll be around, let me know and we can meet up.

Categories: Travel, Winter of Dave
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A study conducted last year for the Partnership for New York City, a business group, cited 2000 census data that showed about 35 percent of government workers in Manhattan drive to work, compared with 14 percent for those who work in finance. Kathryn S. Wylde, the president of the group, said that many city workers drive because they can park at no charge using parking placards obtained through their agencies.

From the NYTimes, via the Freakonomics Blog. Talk about an Incentive Centered Design problem. Unlike Detroiters, however, at least New Yorkers have public transportation as a viable option.

Categories: Community, Incentive Centered Design, Metrics, Travel
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This is a little late in posting, but in December, I went to Nebraska and Minnesota, which means that I’ve now been to over half the states in the union. See the map below for details:

(visited state map courtesy of this tool)  I have a CorelDRAW script that I will post one day that also generates visited state maps.

Categories: America, Ephemera, Travel
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