For much of the past ten years, I’ve been fascinated, both from a personal and professional standpoint, with the subject of behavioral economics.

I hold both an undergraduate and master’s degree[1] in economics, which for much of its history was focused on how humans should behave when acting in their own self-interest, not how they do behave.

And humans do not behave rationally. That’s not to say we’re dumb. Rather, it’s to say we aren’t robots governed by strict mathematical rules and algorithms. We’re wired to be emotional, caring, and unfortunately, easily manipulated by stimuli in our environment.

That’s why I think that it’s never been more important for the typical human to have a basic awareness of just how vulnerable we are to manipulation via our senses. By understanding how easily tricked you are, you can perhaps begin to constructively trick yourself.

Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational (Amazon) is a good place to start. My only criticism of Ariely’s book is that it comes across a bit “patchwork.” The book reads more like a stapled-together set of concise pamphlets on behavioral economics topics.

But within each chapter, there are many good things. So to stay on the patchwork theme, and because I hate writing formal book reviews, here are three things that struck me as particularly important.

1. Delaying gratification

It’s a subject near and dear to my heart:

In order to overcome many types of human fallibility, I believe it’s useful to look for tricks that match immediate, powerful, and positive reinforcements with the not-so-pleasant steps we have to take toward our long-term objectives.

Ariely was a burn victim and shares a number of personal examples of how he pushed through unimaginable pain and discomfort on his path to healing.

2. Anchoring bias

Anchoring bias is perhaps the single most practical topic in the book:

Consider this: if I asked you for the last two digits of your social security number (mine are 79), then asked you whether you would pay this number in dollars (for me this would be $ 79) for a particular bottle of Côtes du Rhône 1998, would the mere suggestion of that number influence how much you would be willing to spend on wine? Sounds preposterous, doesn’t it? Well, wait until you see what happened to a group of MBA students at MIT a few years ago.

3. On keeping doors open and dying donkeys

The inability to close doors (of opportunity) is a major modern challenge, I think. From companies that can’t bring themselves to focus on one or two product lines to individuals that can’t say “no,” everyone should read Chapter 9:

Running from door to door is a strange enough human activity. But even stranger is our compulsion to chase after doors of little worth—opportunities that are nearly dead, or that hold little interest for us.

And even when we work hard to whittle our doors down to two…

A hungry donkey approaches a barn one day looking for hay and discovers two haystacks of identical size at the two opposite sides of the barn. The donkey stands in the middle of the barn between the two haystacks, not knowing which to select. Hours go by, but he still can’t make up his mind. Unable to decide, the donkey eventually dies of starvation. This story is hypothetical, of course, and casts unfair aspersions on the intelligence of donkeys. A better example might be the U.S. Congress.

The upshot:

What [the donkey and Congress] failed to do when focusing on the similarities and minor differences between two things was to take into account the consequences of not deciding.

If you follow me online, you know I'm a big advocate of what I think of as "personal risk management." To me, it means taking as much control (as practical) of your personal information and making value-based decisions that balance data availability and security.

One of the simplest, cheapest, and by far the most preventative methods for avoiding identity theft is a credit freeze. I've talked about it before on this site, and I mentioned it recently on Gabe Weatherhead's Generational podcast.

If your credit file is frozen, your social security number is useless to someone who tries to use it to apply for any product that requires a credit check (loans, auto insurance, credit cards, you name it).

Overly paranoid?

Not really. Take, for example, today's breaking news about an epic hack of the South Carolina Department of Revenue's database:

The extent of the breach was massive: an estimated 3.6 million Social Security numbers and 387,000 credit and debit card numbers were exposed. . . For perspective, there are almost 4.7 million South Carolinians, according to the 2012 U.S. Census, meaning three out of four people's Social Security numbers were compromised.

You should assume that at some point your in lifetime your social security number will be used against you. And until the very broken, antiquated, pro-Wall-Street, anti-consumer credit system in the U.S. is fixed, a credit freeze is your best friend.

If you sign into your Dropbox account online, you'll see a "Sharing" link on the left side of the page. Click it, and you'll see a list of every Dropbox folder that you share with others.

I've been using Dropbox shared folders for a while now, and it finally occurred to me that I should probably review them. Sure enough, I found several that I needed to unshare. So I did.

Projects come and go, computers come and go, and relationships among people and teams change. And you know what? You're under no moral obligation to continue sharing any folder indefinitely.

I say, if the need for a shared folder passes, you should severe the sync. Every shared Dropbox folder is an opportunity for someone to add or delete data from your personal hard drive. The more shared folders you have, the more opportunity for (usually inadvertent) bad things to happen.

One time someone accidentally copied a few hundred megabytes of their personal data into a Dropbox folder I shared with them. All that stuff ended up on my hard drive. Ick.

But this is hard, right? I mean, it probably involves a bunch of fiddly, arcane settings, so I'm going to go back to Twitter now and turn my brain back off, OK? OMG, Honey Boo Boo is @replying!!!

No, stop that. Unsharing is really easy. Just click the "Options" link next to a folder you want to unshare. You'll either see an option to unshare, to leave, or both. I'll explain.

Unshare folder. The unshare option shows up if you're the original owner of the folder and shared it with others. In this situation, you'll also be given the option to let other members of the shared folder keep their own copy of the data. If you choose not to let them keep a copy, the contents of the shared folder will be permanently deleted from their computer.

And yes, I mean permanently. The data won't even be recoverable through Dropbox's standard undelete feature. I'm sure there are situations where this might make sense, but I would generally recommend letting people keep a copy.

Leave folder. You'll see this option if someone shared the folder with you. If you choose to leave, you'll be given the option of leaving the contents of the folder on your computer or removing it right then and there. If you choose to keep the data, the folder simply turns into a normal Dropbox folder. All future changes are synced to your Dropbox account only.

If you created a folder that's been shared with two or more other people, you'll see both options above. As the owner of the folder, you can choose to unshare it, which ceases all sharing for everyone, or you can simply leave the folder yourself but keep sharing intact for the other members.

Folder owners can also assign other members as owners and even kick out individual members. By the way, all of this is explained really clearly and well-illustrated in Dropbox's help system.

Though probably used by a very small minority of the population, most search systems accept operators that provide more control over search output. For example, most web search engines accept operators like

• site:www.practicallyefficient.com
• filetype:pdf
• python -snake

Spotlight in OS X also accepts a staggering array of operators that make it easier to drill through bulging file systems with years of data and multiple file types. Even the search fields in content management systems like Evernote accept advanced search operators.

It’s great that all these search operators exist, but I have a hard time remembering them because each system usually has its own syntax. And even when I do remember the correct syntax, it can be cumbersome to type it out.

After struggling with this problem for way too long, it finally occurred to me that TextExpander’s popup fill-in snippets are an ideal way to build advanced search forms that are customized to each search field.

Now, when I want to search for a piece of text only in a file’s name, I don’t have to remember to type intitle:fragment in Evernote but name:fragment in Spotlight.

Here’s what my Evernote snippet looks like:

By invoking this snippet once or several times in succession, I can do advanced searches far more quickly than relying on memory and fingers alone.

In Spotlight, I’m almost always looking for things by file name. Being able to quickly specify the kind of file makes for really accurate results:

David Sparks and Brett Terpstra have written a great book called 60 Mountain Lion Tips, and I can't recommend it enough. I've already been through the whole book, and my copy is now full of highlights and bookmarks that I can't wait to implement.

"60 tips" is a bit misleading. It's more like 60 topics because virtually every tip topic is accompanied by a concise, but information-rich screencast. Many of the videos are loaded with extra tricks, advice, and demonstrations.

Everyone that reads this book will learn something new about the latest Mac operating system, Mountain Lion. If just one of the tips makes a recurring task easier, then the book, priced only at $7, has already paid you back.

Learn more at 60tips.com, and get your copy at the iBookstore.

If you use Time Machine, USB storage devices, or online options for routinely backing up your data, that’s fantastic. Good for you. You’re probably in a minority.

Unfortunately, your safety net may be little more than a cardboard cutout propped over cold concrete.

Here are a few things that happen in real life with alarming regularity… things you don’t want to happen when you really need to recover data.

Time Machine: “Last backup: delayed”

Maybe you turned it off a few weeks ago to keep it from ruining a Skype call and forgot to turn it back on. Maybe something’s snarled on your network drive. Doesn’t matter now: you’re effed.

How to avoid: Make a habit of looking in your menu bar to make sure Time Machine is running. Even better, go into Time Machine every so often and make sure you see a running daily archive of backups. Practice restoring a file or two to make sure it actually works.

Corrupt USB hard drives

Let’s face it: they’re cheap pieces of (mostly) plastic. They die. Backup programs can be imperfect at copying data. And if data on your Mac hard drive itself gets corrupted—even a little piece of it—that same problem will be cloned your external backup drives, just waiting to make you miserable at a time when your fists are already full of hair.

How to avoid: Run Disk Utility to verify and repair external drives. It usually only takes a few minutes and can save you a ton of frustration.

Overly selective online backups

Maybe you got a little too checkboxy when you were deciding which folders to let slip into the clouds. Or maybe you didn’t fully understand which types of files your online system includes in its backup.

A recent personal revelation: Backblaze, a system I just started using, doesn’t include .dmg files. If you thought the important documents in your secure disk images would be in your Backblaze backup during a data crisis, you’d be wrong.

How to avoid: Go into your online backup, and take some time to inventory key items like secure documents, photo libraries, home movies, or anything else that you really want to be able to recover in the future. Make sure everything you think is offsite is really offsite.

Update: Brandon Pittman on Twitter pointed out to me that the disk image file extension (dmg) is listed in Backblaze's excluded file type list by default. Removing that file extension tells Backblaze to include disk images. All is well again. My message above remains the same, however: know what's really in your backup.

At this point, I can only assume that Feedburner is playing the part of Frank Poole in 2012: A Google Odyssey. The once-gold-standard in RSS feed management is now spinning around haphazardly in space. It’ll live for a little while longer, but the oxygen supply won’t last long. [1]

If you’d like to continue to invite Practically Efficient into your RSS reader, I strongly recommend updating the feed URL:

http://www.practicallyefficient.com/home?format=rss

Or, click here for it. (I’ve also updated the RSS links on the site itself, so you can get it anytime at PracticallyEfficient.com.)

The above URL comes directly from Squarespace 6, and in limited testing, I’ve found that it also updates faster than the Feedburner version I’ve been using.

In theory, my feed will continue to be published to the old Feedburner feed URL as well. So as long as Feedburner keeps breathing, the 5,000 or so of you using it will still see posts appear there, too. But as soon as the lights truly go out at Feedburner, that’s that.

With the exception of live sports, most notably college football, I’m not much of a TV watcher. I just can’t sit still long enough for it. But I do go through bouts of guilty pleasures.

Hi, my name is Eddie. I like Pawn Stars.

To me, it’s a humorous and attention-holding mash-up: Call it the Antiques Roadshow meets grey market economy. I almost always learn something by watching each show, and even though I suspect the negotiations are largely scripted, it’s fun watching the time-tested pawn process assign market values to yesterday’s attic junk.

I’m particularly intrigued by some of the really old books that show up. If you’ve watched the show, you know that the pawn shop owners typically bring in experts to (roughly) appraise items of possible high worth. Rebecca Romney, their local rare books expert, has made several appearances on the show. I’ve seen her identify a first English edition of Walden and even debunk the claim of a Shoeless Joe Jackson signature in a copy of Say it Ain’t So, Joe! [1]

Speaking of Rebecca Romney, she writes a fascinating blog, Aldine, about classic books.

Reality TV isn’t so bad I guess.

I was honored to join my friend, Gabe, on the second episode of his fantastic new podcast, Generational. We talked about data security, personal risk management in the 21st century, and how to make sure your family can access important passwords and documents if something happens to you.

This is like crack for math nerds.

"My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer."

So begins one of the most famous papers in the history of psychology. George A. Miller's seminal 1956 paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information" is widely interpreted to suggest that the typical human can only hold seven objects—give or take two—in working memory at a time.

Practical implementations of the "magical number seven" can be found throughout modern society, the most common example being phone number formats (###-####).

Miller addressed several aspects of human memory in his paper, which, by the way, is very entertaining to read given that it was originally intended to be an oral presentation.

He was particularly interested in experiments that sought to quantify a human's maximum channel capacity using bits, which he defined as follows:

One bit of information is the amount of information that we need to make a decision between two equally likely alternatives. If we must decide whether a man is less than six feet tall or more than six feet tall and if we know that the chances are 50-50, then we need one bit of information.

Sound familiar?

Yes, the use of bits predates our modern networks. But for me, Miller's paper seemed especially prescient, given that I've been thinking a lot about the practical limits of my own channel capacity when it comes to the way I interface with computer encryption systems.

In other words: my ability to recall secure passwords.

Chunking

As is often the case after I read something interesting, I look for more. In this case, I wasn't surprised to find tracks ahead of me in the sand. A few web searches later, I found the work of Nelson Cowan, et al., who argue that Miller wasn't as infatuated with the number seven as many think.

Rather, Miller was quite intrigued with the concept of "chunking," which is the act of putting multiple items together into distinguishable groups as a memory device.

Further whetting my appetite for password applications was this example provided by Cowan, et al.:

Another example that makes the concept clear is memorization of the letter string USAFBICIA. This looks like 9 chunks (single, unrelated letters) but they can be reduced to three acronyms: USA (United States of America), FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), and CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). For someone who knows these acronyms by heart and notices these patterns, there are only 3 chunks to be remembered.

Chunking and passwords

Chunking Theory was actually applied directly to password strategies by Deborah S. Carstens, et al., who were interested in finding secure passwords that employees of security-conscious organizations could remember.

Not surprisingly, they found that "a password comprised of meaningful chunks is easier to recall than a password with random data, even if the password contains additional characters."

Carstens, et al. came up with several password templates that employees could fill in, so to speak, with information meaningful to them. The longest password resulted from a four-chunk formula where study participants had to select "two meaningful dates that weren’t easily accessible to the public using a symbol of choice to be used as day/month/year separators" and then "two sets of initials that contained at least one uppercase and one lowercase letter." That's 2 + 2 = 4 chunks.

An example of a Four-Chunk Password Level Experiment password is “08#11#71Lg12#11#81kd.” The first chunk is “08#11#71” which stands for “August 11, 1971.” The second chunk is “Lg” which stands for “Laura Green.” The third chunk is “12#11#81” which stands for “December 11, 1981.” Lastly, the fourth chunk is “kd” which stands for “Kyle Doyle.”

Just like a computer can parse a string using delimiters, I think the human mind can parse (and consequently recall) longer passwords when those passwords are broken up by a delimiter like the hash symbol in the example above.

The added advantage, in the context of passwords, of using a symbol as a delimiter is that the password appears even more random to people (and machines) with no contextual knowledge of the underlying process used to form the chunks.

But what about password management systems?

I am very much of the mind that a good password management system is critical in modern life. Once I bought 1Password, I gladly gave up trying to remember passwords for the hundreds of credential-requiring sites I visit. Letting a program create and remember long, random passwords for me so that I don't have to just makes sense.

But a password manager can't eliminate the need to remember all passwords. At a minimum, you still need to know the master password to the password manager itself. And arguably, this master password should be the most difficult to hack of all—given that it's the key to all the other keys.

Ignoring all of the other practical benefits of a solid password management application like 1Password, I feel, in a sense, in the same place I started, which is trying to solve the classic password optimization problem:

Maximize the security of my password(s) subject to the limits of my natural channel capacity.

And evolution has given me just a few precious bits to work with.

It's a daunting problem

There is no easy answer to this. I would argue that there isn't a "solution" at all. At least not in the sense that I can ever create a password that is completely invincible to any and all forms of password cracking techniques.

The game of password security is only getting more sophisticated. So much so that I bet few people understand just what we—as limited channel capacity and slow-to-evolve beings—are up against.

I like how AgileBits, the maker of 1Password, characterizes the game:

The strength of a password creation system is not how many letters, digits, and symbols you end up with, but how many ways you could get a different result using the same system.

In other words, a crazy-long 64-character password isn't very secure if it can be "solved for" in a variety of ways. The more paths to a solution, the more likely the solution will be found.

Back to chunking

Clearly we humans don't have the channel capacity to recall a random string of 64-characters, and so the only way we would ever be able to carry around such a string in our minds is by chunking. But if we use well-known chunks, the absolute length of the password becomes less relevant.

In the same AgileBits post I quoted above, the author, Jeff, lists several really good tips for building strong master passwords. For example, using a phrase that doesn't make numerical sense: "I have 35 bats: Larry, Moe & Curly." But:

For those of us of a certain age and steeped in American culture, once we begin a list of names with “Larry…” following it with “Moe and Curly” is very predictable. So even though the Moe & Curly add 11 characters to the password, those 11 characters are so predictable that they add very little actual strength. Even though it is shorter, using I have 35 bats: Larry & Amy is actually stronger than I have 35 bats: Larry, Moe & Curly.

In other words, "Larry, Moe & Curly" isn't really 18 characters. It's just a single chunk—a really well-known one at that. Easily guessed chunks effectively collapse the length of a password for a hacking algorithm.

Where I am today

I can't avoid having to store a handful of passwords in my head. For those, I try to use my own personal and silly brand of Chunking Theory. Chunking is by far the most practical method I've found for creating long, yet memorable-to-me passwords.

Hopefully by using creative chunks and mixing delimiters, I can keep my passwords strong but only a few bits in size so they fit through my naturally narrow channel.

But something tells me that no matter what I do, I will continue to be persecuted. . . by a password.

Because this site is essentially a postmodernist sideshow of my life, things don't always appear here in chronological order. I've made some big changes in my life and career recently that I haven't really discussed at all here. I'm sure I will when I figure out what I want to say about it.

But I did want to mention one very important thing my new schedule has afforded me.

For the last six months or so, I've been spread way too thin across paid and non-paid pursuits. Exercise was just one thing I felt forced to give up to get it all done.

When I'm not regularly exercising, it takes me a lot longer to feel tired at the end of the day. So I stay up later. I feel wired. And I feel like a sloth when I get out of bed in the morning.

Now that I've simplified my life somewhat, I'm running again regularly. And it feels great. I feel naturally tired at the end of the day, and I feel a lot sharper first thing in the morning.

Physical activity and sleep are precious, intertwined things that have become tragically undervalued in our culture of double-digit hour workdays.

There will always be good life reasons that make putting off exercise necessary: special family circumstances, the birth of a child, illness, etc.

But if you're putting off exercise simply because you feel like you can get more done in that 30-45 minutes, that's almost never a good reason. Reminding your body that it wasn't meant to be still all day is one of the single best things you can do to make a better product the rest of the day.

Dr. Drang:

For a while, I was using both TextMate and BBEdit, but today I decided the testing phase is over. I removed TextMate from my Dock and put BBEdit in its place. I’ve changed the default application for files ending in .md, .py, and .txt and will change the default for other plain text extensions as I run into them.

It was with a nearly-tearful eye that I read that paragraph, though I've been expecting to see more and more of this from people whose text editing wisdom I trust—people like Dr. Drang.

For someone like Dr. Drang, switching default text editors is a big deal. A really big deal. And I know the decision wasn't easy.

I'm still using TextMate 1.5. However, I know that one day I'll have to choose between TextMate 2, Sublime Text 2, BBEdit, or whatever else pops up.

But for now, TextMate 1.5 still works fine for me in Mountain Lion, and I figure I've got at least until next summer before OS 10.9 ships. In other words, I've still got at least ten good months left with TextMate 1.5 before an Ocelot potentially eats it.

My primary "production" use of TextMate 1.5 involves its LaTeX bundle and its integration with Skim. I hope my next text editor makes my life as easy as TextMate has, but I'm admittedly nervous.

I love writing on a MacBook keyboard. It’s just the right size, and my fingers know all of my text-relevant shortcuts by heart. It’s a touch typing dream.

However, when I’m sitting at my desk working on math-heavy technical documents, I prefer to use the full Apple keyboard with number pad. The number pad saves me a lot of time when I’m generating lots of mathematical type.

If the full Apple keyboard simply added a number pad to the layout of the MacBook (or wireless) keyboard, all would be well in my world.

The problem

Unfortunately the full keyboard has an extra control key on the right side, and so my right thumb has to hurdle that key to get to the option and command keys for navigation shortcuts that also involve arrow keys.

On a MacBook keyboard, of course, there is no right control key, and so option and command sit snuggly next to the arrow keys. This feels so, so much natural to me when hopping among words and lines.

The solution

KeyRemap4MacBook helped me MacBook-ify my full Apple keyboard. Now, my right control key is an option key, and my right option key is a command key thanks to these two settings:

  <img src="/img/remap1-pe.png" alt=""/>
  


  
  <img src="/img/remap2-pe.png" alt=""/>
  


  
  <img src="/img/key-remap-pe.png" alt=""/>

I decided to leave the default right command key as is. I don’t really mind having two command keys. Plus, it’s nice having a command next to the space bar for my cmd-space LaunchBar shortcut.

Honestly, I’ve never loved the idea of key remapping. It just feels fiddly and wrong to mess with such basic defaults. I think it’s usually far better to adapt your fingers to a keyboard layout. But since I routinely alternate between two layouts and since I lack the ability and interest to build my own perfect keyboard, this was the best solution for me.

KeyRemap4MacBook is a very powerful key remapping tool supported by donations only. If you have similar problems to solve, it’s probably worth checking out.

Practically Efficient lives on Squarespace 6 now. Why did I move? Well, I figured with as much money as Squarespace is spending sponsoring some of my favorite podcasts, the least I could do is move my most valued web possession there.

Kidding aside, I've been trying to move to Squarespace for quite a while. Unfortunately I kept running into import problems with Squarespace 5. Squarespace 6 fixed all that.

I'm really not a part of the de rigueur "It's time to ditch WordPress" movement. For me, the final straw with WordPress happened a few months ago when a cron process went nuts in my installation. My web host nearly killed my site as a result of it.

Squarespace just seems like the best place for my content right now. It's the optimal combination of reliability and flexibility. And it encourages me to publish more than tweak nuts and bolts.