How we Decide

From "How we Decide" - Jonah Lehrer

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• Loss Aversion : In human decision making, losses loom larger than gains. The pain of a loss was approximately twice as potent as the pleasure generated by a gain.


• Loss aversion is part of a larger psychological phenomenon known as negativity bias, which means that for the human mind, bad is stronger than good. This is why in marital interactions, it generally takes at least five kind comments to compensate for one critical comment. The only way to avoid loss aversion is to know about it.


• How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. An individual can try to figure out why he's feeling the what he's feeling.
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• Could eat one marshmallow right away or if the child was willing to wait a few minutes, could eat two. Practically all decided to wait. The marshmallow was a test of self-control. The emotional brain is always tempted by rewarding stimuli. The ability to wait was because patient children were better at using reason to control their impulses. They covered their eyes, managed to shift attention somewhere else, looked for something else to play with and not fixate on the sweet treat. This skill also allowed these kids to spend more time on their homework.
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• People with frontal-lobe ;lesions can never solve puzzles. When problem-solving, the first brain areas activated were those involved in executive control, such as the prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex. The brain was banishing irrelevant thoughts so that the task-dependent cells could properly focus. Insight required a clean slate. Most of the possibilities your brain comes up with aren't going to be useful, but then when the right answer suddenly appeared, there was an immediate realization that the puzzle had been solved. This act of recognition is performed by the prefrontal cortex.


• If the mind were infinitely powerful, information would be an unqualified good. The biological reality of the brain however is that it is severely bounded. the conscious brain can only handle about seven pieces of data at any one moment.


• Too much data can intimidate the prefrontal cortex, that's when bad decisions are made.


• Experiment with some people given a 7-digit number and others given a 3-digit number, they were offered a choice between a chocolate cake slice or a fruit bowl. The 7-digit people normally chose the cake.


• Distracting the brain with a challenging memory task made a person much more likely to give in to temptation and choose cake. the subjects' self-control was overwhelmed by the extra 5 digits.


• The effort required to memorize seven digits drew cognitive resources away from that part of the brain that normally controls emotional urges.


• A mind trying to remember lots of information is less able to exert control over its impulses.


• A slight drop is blood sugar levels can also inhibit self-control, since the frontal lobes require lots of energy in order to function.


• Students were made to watch a mentally taxing movie while ignoring the rolling text at the bottom of the screen and then some were then offered lemonade with sugar, others were given lemonade with Splenda. After giving time for the glucose to enter the brain (abt 15 mins), the students were asked to pick apartments. The students without the sugar relied on intuition and instinct rather than reason since their rational brains were just too exhausted to think.


• This research can also help explain why we are cranky when we're hungry and tired: The brain is less able to suppress the negative emotions sparked by small annoyances.


• A bad mood is really just a rundown prefrontal cortex.


• The brain relies on mental accounting since it has such limited processing abilities. These thinking problems come from the fact that we have slow, erratic CPU and the fact that we're busy. Since the prefrontal cortex can only handle seven things at the same time, its constantly trying to chunk stuff together to make the complexity of life more manageable. Instead of thinking about each M&M, we think in scoops.


• The fragility of the prefrontal cortex means that we all have to be extremely vigilant about not paying attention to unnecessary information.


• We live in a culture that's awash in information. The human brain was not designed to deal with such a surfeit of data. Being exposed to extra news was distracting.
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• On complicated decisions, its probably a mistake to reflect on all the options, as this inundates the prefrontal cortex with too much data.
• Use your conscious mind to acquire all the information you need for making a decision. But don't try to analyze the information with your conscious mind. Instead, go on holiday while your unconscious mind digests it. Whatever your intuition then tells you is almost certainly going to be the best choice.
• Anyone who is making difficult decisions can benefit from a more emotional thought process.As long as someone has sufficient experience in that domain-he's taken the time to train his dopamine neurons- then he shouldn't spend too much time consciously contemplating the alternatives.
• It is the easy problems that are best suited to the conscious brain. These simple decisions won't overwhelm the prefrontal cortex.
• Complex problems, on the other hand, require the processing of the emotional brain, the supercomputer of the mind. This doesn't mean you can just blink and know what to do- even the unconscious takes a little time to process the information-but it does suggest that there's a better way to make difficult decisions.

Strawberry jam: 

Consumers first picked their favorite Jam based on taste. Matched Consumer Reports reviews. 

Then I asked to explain why they prefer a particular Jam, which forced them to analyze their first impressions. All this extra analysis warped their jam judgment. 

Thinking Too much about the strawberry jam causes us to focus on all sorts of variables that actually don't matter. Instead of just listening to instinctive preferences - Best jam is associated with the most positive feelings- our rational brain search for reasons to prefer one jam over another. 

Repeated that. And with posters. 

5 posters- if subjects were divided into two groups. First was the non thinking group - instructed to Simply rate each poster on a scale from 1 to 10. The second group were given question that ask them why they liked or disliked each of the five posters. 

The members of the non-thinking group were much more satisfied with their choice of posters. SelfAnalysis resulted in less self-awareness. 

Fragility of the prefrontal cortex means that we all have to be extremely Vigilant about not paying attention to unnecessary information. When the prefrontal cortex is overwhelmed a person can no longer make sense of the situation. correlation is confused with causation. 

People in good mood are significantly better at solving hard problems that require insight then people who are cranky and depressed. The prefrontal cortex isn't preoccupied with managing emotional life, which means they're free to solve the problem at hand. 

Reason and feeling are both essential tools., each is best suited for specific tasks. Simple problems require reason on the other hand for important decisions about complex items use your emotions. It might sound ridiculous, make scientific sense: think Less about those items that you care a lot about. Don't be afraid to let your emotions choose. 

How can anyone identify the simple problems that are best suited for reason? Can the decision be accurately summarized in numerical terms? 

2 Simple tricks to help ensure that you never let certainty interfere with your judgment: First always entertain competing hypotheses. When you force yourself to interpret the facts through a different but uncomfortable lens you often discover your beliefs rest on a rather shaky Foundation. Be your own devil advocate. 

Second, continually remind yourself of what you don't know. Unknown unknowns. 

Classic again. JH

This thing has gone round and round even in the SMS, before SEOS.
All the ideas have come again and again.
I think the only way it's going to get fixed is to stay out of the way and let a few people that are majorly impacted to go ahead and just do it. Then the rest of us will follow.
Otherwise it will just never happen.
BGP will go with the flow, absorb any changes that may happen.

iWise bookmarks from iphone

• "A mind always employed is always happy. This is the true secret, the grand recipe, for felicity." Thomas Jefferson
• "When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred." Thomas Jefferson
• "Our greatest happiness does not depend on the condition of life in which chance has placed us, but is always the result of a good conscience, good health, occupation, and freedom in all just pursuits." Thomas Jefferson
• "I confess I have the same fears for our South American brethren; the qualifications for self-government in society are not innate. They are the result of habit and long training, and for these they will require time and probably much suffering." Thomas Jefferson
• ""Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing." Thomas Jefferson
• "Happiness is not being pained in body or troubled in mind." Thomas Jefferson
• "Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today." Thomas Jefferson
• "Honesty is the first chapter in the book of wisdom." Thomas Jefferson
• "I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it." Thomas Jefferson
• "There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents." Thomas Jefferson
• "Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it." Abraham Lincoln
• "Faithfulness and sincerity are the highest things." Confucius
• "The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration." Confucius
• "To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it." Confucius
• "Follow your instincts. That's where true wisdom manifests itself." Oprah Winfrey
• "That guy just cut right in front of me. But I'm not going to let it bother me. No. I'm on my way to work and I decided it doesn't matter who wants to cut in front of my lane today. I'm not going to let it bother me one bit. Once I get to work, find myself a parking space, if somebody wants to jump ahead of me and take it, I'm going to let them." Oprah Winfrey
• "Well done is better than well said." Benjamin Franklin
• "Our critics are our friends; they show us our faults." Benjamin Franklin
• "Rather go to bed with out dinner than to rise in debt." Benjamin Franklin
• "A penny saved is a penny earned." Benjamin Franklin
• "Necessity never made a good bargain." Benjamin Franklin
• "Take time for all things; great haste makes great waste." Benjamin Franklin
• "Whatever is begun in anger, ends in shame." Benjamin Franklin
• "Sloth makes all things difficult, but industry, all things easy. He that rises late must trot all day, and shall scarce overtake his business at night, while laziness travels so slowly that poverty soon overtakes him." Benjamin Franklin
• "Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason." Benjamin Franklin
• "Would you live with ease, do what you ought, and not what you please." Benjamin Franklin
• "I find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success." Thomas A Edison
• "Insults are the arguments employed by those who are in the wrong." Jean Jacques Rousseau
• "The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good." Samuel Johnson
• "The only tyrant I accept in this world is the still voice within." Mahatma Gandhi
• "It is the quality of our work which will please God and not the quantity." Mahatma Gandhi
• ""Quarrel not at all. No man resolved to make the most of himself can spare time for personal contention. Still less can he afford to take all the consequences, including the vitiating of his temper and loss of self control. Yield larger things to which you can show no more than equal right; and yield lesser ones, though clearly your own. Better give your path to a dog than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite." Abraham Lincoln
• "We should be too big to take offense and too noble to give it." Abraham Lincoln
• "Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap. Let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges. Let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in the courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation." Abraham Lincoln
• "Lets have faith that right makes might and in that faith let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it." Abraham Lincoln
• "Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker the lawyer has superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough." Abraham Lincoln

Priceless!

Topic Comment: (Topic level)
Comment: I've seen this review go back and forth for weeks for silly editorial comments about spacing, bla bla. This is not progress that shareholders pay you for.
Enough already with the editorials.
Please stick to actual bugs you find or shut up.


Sorry about the language. Here it is again in better language:
Readability is good, but maintainability is paramount. Haggling over small syntactic issues is unreasonable.

Did it make the slightest difference that she published the Philosophical Review? She put the thought out of her mind, it was simply wrong as undermining doubts so often are.

Mahatma Gandhi.

• Freedom is not worth having if it doesn't include the freedom to err.
• Full effort is full victory.
• Providence has its appointed hour for everything. We cannot command results, we can only strive.

Walter schloss principles

Warren Buffett on Schloss:
He knows how to identify securities that sell at considerably less than their value to a private owner: And that's all he does. He owns many more stocks than I do and is far less interested in the underlying nature of the business; I don't seem to have very much influence on Walter. That is one of his strengths; no one has much influence on him.

Here are 16 golden rules for investing from Walter Schloss. Thanks to Todd Sullivan for the finding:

2. Try to establish the value of the company.
3. Use book value as a starting point to try and establish the value of the enterprise. Be sure that debt does not equal 100% of the equity.
4. Have patience. Stocks don’t go up immediately.
5. Don’t buy on tips or for a quick move. Let the professionals do that, if they can. Don’t sell on bad news.
6. Don’t be afraid to be a loner but be sure that you are correct in your judgment. You can’t be 100% certain but try to look for the weaknesses in your thinking. Buy on a scale down and sell on a scale up.
9. Don’t be in too much of a hurry to sell. If the stock reaches a price that you think is fair, then you can sell. Before selling reevaluate the company again and see where the stock sells in relation to its book value. Be aware of the level of the stock market. Are yields low and P-E ratios high. Are people very optimistic etc?
10. When buying a stock, I find it helpful to buy near the low of the past few years. A stock may go as high as 125 and then decline to 60 and you think it attractive. 3 years before the stock sold at 20 which shows that there is some vulnerability in it.
11. Try to buy assets at a discount than to buy earnings. Earning can change dramatically in a short time. Usually assets change slowly. One has to know much more about a company if one buys earnings.
12. Listen to suggestions from people you respect. This doesn’t mean you have to accept them.
15. Prefer stock over bonds. Bonds will limit your gains and inflation will reduce your purchasing power.
16. Be careful of leverage. It can go against you.
Don't lose money !

If you are doing your best, you will not have time to worry about failure.
- Robert Hillyer

Will any man despise me? Let him see to it. But I will see to it that I may not be found doing or saying anything that deserves to be despised.
-Marcus Aurelius

I who have never wilfully pained another, have no business to pain myself.

Is one doing me wrong? Let himself look to that; his humors and actions are his own. As for me, Iam only acting as my own nature wills me to act.

• Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it. -Mahatma Gandhi
• I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice. -Abraham Lincoln
• It is not wealth one asks for, but just enough to preserve one's dignity, to work unhampered, to be generous, frank and independent. -Somerset Maugham

Link to : Muriel Barbery: An Elegant Quill

Had a great time at the jazz festival and drinks last evening.
Here's a very nice review of "Elegance of The Hedgehog"

As the two characters' lives overlap, Paloma comes to discover Renée's secret gifts, and to appreciate her self-effacing elder as having "the elegance of a hedgehog: a real fortress, bristling with quills on the outside . . . deceptively sluggish, ferociously independent, yet terribly elegant."

From "Elegance of the Hedgehog"

• Thus the television in the front room, guardian of my clandestine activities, could bleat away and I was no longer forced to listen inane nonsense fit for the brain of a clam
• With the exception of love, friendship and the beauty of Art, I don't see much else that can nurture human life.
• I have read so many books.... and yet , like most autodidacts, Iam never quite sure of what I've gained from them. There are days when I feel I have been able to grasp all there to know in one single gaze, as if invisible branches suddenly spring out of nowhere, waving together all the disparate strands of my reading - and then suddenly the meaning escapes, the essence evaporates, they seem to flee further with each subsequent reading.
• Nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where its words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is the mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce , conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.
• Because in town it is the dogs who have their masters on a leash. though no one seems to have caught on to thew fact.If you have voluntarily saddled yourself with a dog that you'll have to walk twice a day, come rain wind or snow, that is as good as as having a leash around your own neck.
• From the very start Colombe and I have been at war because as far as Colombe is concerned, life is a permanent battle where you can win only by destroying the other guy. She cannot feel safe if she hasn;t crushed her adversaries and reduced their territory to the meanest share. For some obscure reason Colombe, who most of the time is totally insensitive to what's going on with other people, has figured out that what I dread more than anything else in life is noise. That silence helps you to go inward, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence: this is something she is not capable of understanding, because her inner space is as chaotic and noisy as the street outside. But in any case she figured it out so all day long she makes noise. Since she can't invade anything else, she invades my personal auditory space, and ruins my life from morning to night.
• and then, for the price of sixty-three euros, I had some fillets of mullet in curry and then for thirty-four euros, the least evil thing I could find on the menu: a bitter chocolate fondant. Let me tell you: at that price, I would have preferred a year';s subscription to McDonald's. At least its in bad taste without being pretentious.
• Teas and mangas: something elegant and enchanting, instead of adult power struggles and their sad aggressiveness.
• But never again will I see those I love, and if that is what dying is all about, then it really is the tragedy they say it is.
• I understood I was suffering because I couldn't make anyone else around me feel better. I understood that I have a grudge against Papa, Maman and above all Colombe because I'm incapable of being useful to them.
• I was having breakfast and looking at the bouquet on the kitchen counter.I don't believe I was thinking of anything.I was alone, and calm, and empty. So I was able to take it in. There was a little sound, a sort of quivering in the air that went "shhh" very very very quietly: a tiny rosebud on a little broken stem that dropped onto he counter. The moment it touched the surface it went "puff", a "puff" of the ultrasonic variety, for the ears of mice alone, or for human ears when everything is very very very silent. .. and I have been lucky because this morning all the conditions were ripe: an empty mind, a calm house, lovely roses, a rosebud dropping. Because beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. Its the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment when you can see both their beauty and their death.
• What is the purpose of intelligence if not to serve others? And I'm not referring to the false servitude that high-ranking state - employed flunkeys exhibit so proudly, as if it were a badge of virtue: The facade of humility they wear is nothing more than vanity or disdain.
• Instead privilege brings with it true obligations. If you belong to the closed inner sanctum of the elite, you must serve in equal proportion to the glory and ease of material existence you derive from belonging to that inner sanctum.
• I have always been fascinated by the abnegation with which we human beings are capable of devoting a great deal of energy to the quest for nothing and to the rehashing of useless and absurd ideas. I spoke with a young doctoral candidate in Greek patristics and wondered how so much youth could be squandered in the service of nothingness. When you consider that a primate's major preoccupations are sex, territory and hierarchy, spending one's time reflecting on the meaning of prayer for Augustine of Hippo seems a relatively futile exercise.
• Literature for instance serves a pragmatic purpose. Like any for of Art, literature's mission is to make the fulfillment of our essential duties more bearable.
• Truth loves nothing better than simplicity of Truth: that is the lesson Colombe Josse ought to have learned from her medieval readings, but all she seems to have gleaned from her studies is how to make a conceptual fuss in the service of nothing. The fact that the middle classes are working themselves to the bone, using their sweat and taxes to finance such pointless and pretentious research leaves me speechless. Every gray morning, day and after gloomy day, secretaries, craftsmen employees , petty civil servants , taxi drivers and concierges shoulder their burden so that the flower of French youth, duly housed and subsidized, can squander the fruit of all that dreariness upon the altar of ridiculous endeavours.

Every instinct..

By Nathalie Thomas

BILLIONAIRE US investor Warren Buffett has said he intends to bide his time before taking up his option to buy a further $5 billion worth of Goldman Sachs shares, despite calculations that he stands to make a significant profit from the transaction. Buffett secured warrants to buy more Goldman stock last September when his investment vehicle Berkshire Hathaway snapped up $5bn worth of preferred shares in the banking giant.

Although the move helped to inject some confidence in the sector at a time, analysts later questioned its wisdom after Goldman's shares fell below $48 in November.

But last week the stock hit $165.45, prompting speculation that Buffett would exercise his right to increase his stake. Under the terms of the deal, he has until 1 October 2013 to buy a further $5bn of common shares at $115 each but he told a US television channel that he intends to delay even though the warrants are currently valued in excess of $2bn.

"Every instinct in my body tells me that we will want to hold those warrants until they're very close to their expiration date," he told Fox Business Network.

Points from Klarman's "The Value Of Not Being Sure"

• Financial markets are manic and best thought of as an erratic counterparty rather than as an arbiter of the accuracy of one's investment judgements.
• Historically, little volume transacts at the bottom or on the way back up and competition from other buyers will be much greater when the markets settle down and the economy begins to recover. Moreover the price recovery from a bottom can be very swift. Therefore, an investor should put money to work amidst the throes of a bear market, appreciating that things will likely get worse before they get better.
• Process, Not Outcome :The only things one can really control are investment philosophy, investment process and the nature of clients. Controlling your process is absolutely crucial to long-term success in any market environment/.
• James Montier, recently pointed out that when athletes were asked what went through their minds just before competing, the consistent response was a focus on process, not outcome.
• Success virtually requires that a process be in place that enables intellectual honesty, rigor, creativity and integrity.

Buffett: The Master of Simplicity

From http://www.gurufocus.com/news.php?id=5816

Buffett’s answers were like always, straight to the point, simple and stunningly brilliant.

In business schools, students are taught complicated is smart and simple is not. Students adept at solving equations with Greek letters are more highly sought after. As Buffet says:“If calculus or algebra were required to be a great investor, I’d have to go back to delivering newspapers.”
Buffett is successful by being simple.

Munger reportedly wears mostly Brooks Brothers clothing, a line known for its proper and classic look, for a fair price. Likewise, up until recently, Buffett wore whatever he could find. He still buys his Zegna suits off the rack. They'd be less successful if :

1) They both sat at computers all day, they would stop thinking nearly as much as they do now. A computer would give them a temptation to listen to others and they would lose logic and rational thought.

2) They lived in New York and worked on Wall Street. The “buzz” would likely interfere with their thoughts. Both men have said again and again that isolated rational thought is the key to successful investing.

3) They spent time shopping for the newest fashionable clothing, they would lose focus on what they are doing. When asked in a recent CNBC interview what one word would describe his success, Buffett answered, “focus”. Spending time on frivolous accessories would make his extreme focus much harder.

The annual meeting made me wonder: why does our society appear to be increasingly embracing the complex way of life, when “the simple life” clearly can lead to happiness?

"If you can keep your head when all around you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, then the world is yours and all that's in it." -- Rudyard Kipling

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise - Franklin

• Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes. -Mahatma Gandhi
• A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone. -Henry David Thoreau
• Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. -Eleanor Roosevelt
• Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.
  -Socrates from Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers
• To understand the heart and mind of a person, look not at what he has already achieved, but at what he aspires to do. -Kahlil Gibran

In my financial counseling practice, I use the rule of thumb that a reasonable amount to spend on clothing without overspending is 4% to 6% of your take-home pay per month. Just take the number that your paychecks actually add up to in a month, and multiply that by .06 Just remember that this amount is for the entire family, not just one person unless you are single and no one else is depending upon your income.


To start with I don't think $500 is enough for what you listed but, at the same time, I think you're spending too much at once. I believe that clothes shopping should be a regular experience and not a once a year experience.

I would plan to make one purchase at a time. Once or twice a month, depending on what you can afford and your pay schedule, you should go clothes shopping. Each time you shop you should buy one outfit.

Then, I would go for the jeans and the black sweater. Jeans can cost between $25 for basic Levis to $200 for designer jeans. Try to stick to the $60 range. Take your time and search for jeans that really fit you. It's not as easy as it sounds. For the sweater I would buy cashmere. No other sweaters wear better and look great for a longer time than cashmere. If you're thrifty you can find one for under $100 but it will take some shopping. Winter is the time to buy cashmere so don't wait too long because spring clothes will be coming soon. I make a point of buying at least one, if not two, cashmere sweaters each Christmas season.

I always maintain 5 pairs of jeans and just buy a new pair when one of the 5 becomes unwearable for some reason. I always have no more than 5 pair and no less than 5 pair.

Spring - This is a big time to shop. Spring is when fashion colors change again and it's time to buy dress pants with matching or complimentary blouses. It's also time to buy a new purse in a lighter color that compliments your spring clothes.

Summer - It's time to buy play clothes for outdoor activities and be sure to buy a light summer dress. They are a must for light wearability and going out.

every woman needs 10 basic wardrobe pieces as the basis for style. They are:
1. A good fitting pair of jeans
2. A white shirt
3. A blazer
4. A trench coat
5. Dress pants
6. A skirt
7. A basic black cocktail dress
8. A sweatsuit alternative - clothes to be active in that don't look sloppy.
9. A cashmere sweater
10. A dress (I can't remember how he described this dress but it's not too formal, maybe a business dress)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/05/frankoconnoraward

The judges for the Frank O'Connor award have dispensed with the ritual of issuing a shortlist, announcing today that Jhumpa Lahiri has won the world's richest honour for a short story collection. The jurors decided that Unaccustomed Earth was so plainly the best book that they would jump straight from longlist to winner, and have awarded Lahiri the €35,000 (£27,000) prize.

In what will be a shock to writers and publishers, Lahiri's collection of eight stories examining different aspects of the Bengali migrant experience has seen off authors including Booker winners Anne Enright and Roddy Doyle. But the book is already a publishing sensation: published this spring, it went straight into the New York Times's fiction charts at number one. It is an unprecedented feat for a short story writer which the paper compared to "a comet landing", so rarely does a serious writer make this kind of commercial impact. Indeed, unusual success has been the hallmark of her career since she published her first book of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, in 1999, winning the Pulitzer prize and selling 600,000 copies - another very rare feat.

The judges - Granta fiction editor Rosalind Porter, Cork City chief librarian Liam Ronayne and Irish Times Literary correspondent Eileen Battersby - were immediately and unanimously convinced the book should win.

"With a unanimous winner at this early stage we decided it would be a sham to compose a shortlist and put five other writers through unnecessary stress and suspense," explained the award's director, Pat Cotter. "Not only were the jury unanimous in their choice of Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth as the winner, they were unanimous in their belief that so outstanding was Lahiri's achievement in this book that no other title was a serious contender."

Lahiri will now travel to Cork to be presented with the award at the end of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story festival on September 21 - the day when the prize was originally scheduled to be revealed.

Buffett quotes from 1974

"you never have to swing. You stand at the plate,
the pitcher throws you GM at 47 ! X at 39 ! and nobody calls
a strike on you. There's no penalty except opportunity lost.
All day you wait for the pitch you like; then when the
Fielders are asleep, you step up and hit it."