Letters Remain

Month: November 2008

  • Our Convenient Overconfidence

    Overcoming Bias looks at two research papers on overconfidence, concluding that we “are more overconfident on tasks we don’t actually expect to perform, and when we don’t expect to have to explain our evaluation to others”. On performance: Participants made predictions about performance on tasks that they did or did not expect to complete.  In…

  • The 90-9-1 Principle: Participation Inequality in Social Communities

    Jakob Nielson, the leading usability consultant, discusses the participation inequality of social communities, in which: 90% of users are the “audience”, or lurkers. 9% of users are “editors”; or those who participate. 1% of users are “creators”. More information at 90-9-1: a website dedicated to this ‘principle’ where you can view, among other things, these…

  • Why Local Content Matters

    Google.org on helping technologically developing countries in Africa gain a global voice: allowing them to be producers, not just consumers, of knowledge. Today, Swahili books online for example, number in the hundreds compared to the hundreds of millions of books in English available online. What message does this send to young people about the relative…

  • Raising Money for a StartUp Company

    Jason Nazar, founder of DocStoc, digs up an old document on Raising Money for a StartUp Company Good information within on the ‘funding lifecycle’, bootstrapping, angel investors vs. venture capital, and valuation methods, amongst others. Entrepreneurs face a great deal of challenges in building a successful venture.  They have to identify a good opportunity, in…

  • Five Physics Lessons for Obama

    Foreign Policy presents five physics lessons for Obama, written by Richard Muller, lecturer and author of Physics for Future Presidents (the book, the website, the lecture series and podcast at UC Berkeley). There are lessons on terrorism, energy (oil), nuclear energy, space and global warming. via Kottke

  • Scale of Stressful Life Events and The Misdiagnosis of Sadness

    Mind Hacks points us to a recent article in Psychiatric News arguing that the current definition of ‘major depression’ has led to misdiagnoses of ‘normal sadness’. They argue that the diagnosis contains no qualifications about whether the reaction is appropriate in the context of the person’s life, meaning that people who have suffered unemployment, relationship…

  • The “Broken Windows” Theory of Crime

    The “broken windows” theory of crime, dating back to an article in The Atlantic from 1982 and more recently popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point and Rudy Giuliani (mayor, NYC), suggests that signs of petty crime, like littering and broken windows, trigger further criminal behaviour. Now, recent research is starting to suggest that…

  • Experimenting with Ganzfeld Hallucinations

    After reading a recent issue of Cortex, Mind Hacks goes into some detail discussing the Ganzfeld procedure: The Ganzfeld procedure exposes the participant to ‘unstructured’ sensations usually by placing half ping-pong balls over the eyes so they can only see diffuse white light and by playing white noise through headphones. It is probably best known…

  • Blogs as Wunderkammern

    Wunderkammer, or Cabinets of Curiosities/Wonder, could be classed as collections of objects that fascinate or interest the collector. I suppose you could say that Jay Walker’s personal library is a type of wunderkammer, and quite an impressive one at that. Heather McDougal suggests that blogs are a type of wunderkammer, and I’m inclined to agree.…

  • Sine Wave Speech: How Prior Knowledge Affects Perception

    Sine wave speech Essentially, what initially sounds like random whistling sounds comes together as coherent speech when you know what you’re listening out for. via Mind Hacks