Month: April 2009
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Crowd Behaviour
By studying the footage from an unidentified UK city’s CCTV cameras, psychologist Mark Levine is finding that a number of theories about crowd psychology previously taken as gospel may be incorrect, including the bystander effect (sometimes referred to as the Kitty Genovese effect) and the idea that crowds are inclined to be unruly and violent.…
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Children Exposed to ‘Dirt’, Healthier
From the ‘Science proves mum right’ and ‘Obvious, but still needs to be stated’ file comes the news that children who are exposed to bacteria, viruses, worms, and dirt have healthier immune systems. Public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they “also eliminated exposure…
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Open Source Software as Self Service
“Open source software development is the ultimate self-service industry”, says Jeff Atwood in an article looking at possible reasons for the OpenOffice.org project’s dwindling development community. However, it’s Atwood’s thoughts on self service supermarket checkouts that I found most interesting: What fascinates me about self-service checkout devices is that the store is making you do work they…
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Suicide: The One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem
A strangely inspiring article comes out of this philosophical look at suicide—that problem with which our species has been ‘gifted’. It feels like a call-to-action for your life. We must recognize that there are multiple forms of suicide. You can release your claim to life by means of a rope, a gun, a tall building,…
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What Design Is
Design is 70% dealing with people, 3% the idea, 2% selling the idea, 2% the brief, 2% being pig headed, 1% printing, 3% eye for detail, .6% invoices, 2% coffee, .7% tracking, .1% warm glow, .6% panic, 1% 4am, .6% staring, .2% checking, 1% letting go, .8% keeping hold, .7% estimates, .3% checking, .4% proofs,…
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Writing for the Web
Former LA Times writer Cathy Curtis believes that writing for the web has improved her skills as a copywriter. She shares some of what she has learnt and some advice about web copywriting in an eminently readable article for AIGA, the American Institute for Graphic Art. [In my journalism days] I wasn’t terribly concerned with the…
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Unintuitive Interfaces
Expanding on Jared Spool’s thoughts on learning cycles and so-called ‘intuitive’ interfaces, Vicky Teinaki discusses the ‘knowledge matrix’ and makes this interesting point that I feel almost embarrassed to have not thought about previously: Digital devices can never be inherently ‘intuitive’, as the fact that they deal in abstraction automatically means that actions must be arbitrary.…
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How Reviews Influence Sales (Positive and Negative)
Unsurprisingly, this brief analysis of how reviews influence sales on Amazon equates quite well with my purchasing behaviour; I wouldn’t feel comfortable buying a product with 100% positive reviews unless I knew personally that it was awesome. And a product with less than 15 reviews or so? Forget about it. [A] handful of bad reviews, it…
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How To Destroy a Marriage
In response to Dr Rob Dobrenski’s article on why marriages fail (linked previously), The Last Psychiatrist looks at various “post-marriage accelerators of divorce”—things you can do today to destroy your marriage (limited time offer): Be contemptuous Bring your work home (emotionally) Rush through your ‘family life’ in order to spend time with yourself Be painfully honest with friends/colleagues…
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The Truth About Markets
My current read, The Truth About Markets/Culture and Prosperity (UK/US title respectively), is a thoroughly enjoyable—if occasionally dense and dry—introduction to economic theories and applications. Published in 2003, it’s aged fairly well. I felt the need to share this two-paragraph excerpt from a section discussing “large models purportedly descriptive of entire economic systems” (pp. 193-194): The…