Letters Remain

Month: June 2009

  • Child Well Being in Biological and High-Conflict Familes

    With the timing and sequence of ‘young adult transitions’ bearing importance for successes in later life, this news about these transitions and their occurrence in ‘high-conflict’ families shows that staying together for the sake of the kids doesn’t necessarily help: Compared with children in low-conflict families, children from high-conflict families are more likely to drop…

  • Education and Surveillance

    After a school here in the UK installed a CCTV system in a classroom used for the teaching of an A-level politics class the students revolted; walking out only to return once they were reassured that the monitoring system was inactive and to be used solely as a teaching aid. The students’ plight was eventually…

  • The Economist Daily Chart

    The Daily Chart from The Economist is one of those links where it’s been around so long and is so great that you feel everyone must know about it already. Visualising data from a diverse range of topics, The Daily Charts are almost always impeccably executed and surprising. The RSS feed for the feature is…

  • Crowdsourcing and Creative Deflation

    Monday Note uses the case study of LG eliciting designs for future mobile phones to show how crowdsourcing is changing how design is done… and how it’s starting to change advertising, too. Altogether, LG is going to spend $75,000, to be distributed among 43 awards. […] Let’s face it: for a company such as LG, seventy-five grand for…

  • GOOD’s Infographic Collection

    GOOD Magazine (“for people who give a damn”) have put their ‘Transparencies’ infographics on Flickr. I spent some time going through the set attempting to find a few favourites to share with you specifically. I failed—they’re all great. via Kottke

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach Video Lectures

    Last year I pointed to MIT’s programme dedicated to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach—the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on cognition that defies categorisation. Just to update you on GEB news; MIT have now produced a series of video lectures dedicated to the book. (6 lectures, each approx. 1 hour in length.) (I have a sort of love-hate…

  • The Science of Persuasion

    Persuasion is not an art; it’s a science. That’s according to Yes!—the book by social psychologists Robert Cialdini, Noah Goldstein and Steve Martin that proposes to offer 50 ‘scientifically proven ways to be persuasive’.  For his review of the book, Alex Moskalyuk lists these 50 ways to be persuasive, as gleamed from dozens of psychology studies.…

  • The Problems with Saving

    In 2007 the average American saved 0.6% of their income. By February of this year that had risen to more than 4%, but in the 1980s it was 10%. With this in mind, Tim Harford asks why are we such awful savers, and what can we do to improve the situation? Behavioral economists […] have…

  • Advice for Design and Life, from Milton Glaser

    Milton Glaser, the designer best known for creating the ‘I ♥ NY’ logo, offers ten pieces of advice from a life in design: You can only work for people that you like: “all the work I had done that was meaningful and significant came out of an affectionate relationship with a client”. If you have…

  • The Introverted Traveller

    Starting with the declaration that “We introverts have a different style of travel, and I’m tired of hiding it”, Sophia Dembling looks at the differences in how introverts and extroverts travel, and what this means. I’m always happy enough when interesting people stumble into my path. It’s a lagniappe, and I’m capable of connecting with…