Month: July 2009
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Goal Setting and Affluence
You’ve heard of the Yale Goal-Setting Study, right? The one that goes like this: In 1953 a team of researchers interviewed Yale’s graduating seniors, asking them whether they had written down the specific goals that they wanted to achieve in life. Twenty years later the researchers tracked down the same cohort and found that the…
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TED Speaking Guide
Now that TEDGlobal 2009 has drawn to a close and the videos are slowly making their way online, the latest Nature has an editorial on the TED phenomenon, suggesting that “those wishing to reveal scientific ideas should learn from the engaging style of TED conference talks”. TED succeeds in part because participants are encouraged to talk…
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Reporting and the Internet
It seems you can’t spend five minutes on the Internet without coming across an opinion piece on the end of traditional media or an article riffing on the age of the blog. I’ve so far refrained from noting (m)any of these articles, mainly because the argument is becoming stale and the articles are so widespread.…
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The Tao of War Photography
Laying dormant at the bottom of my bookmarks was this article Jason pointed out over four months ago: photographer Bruce Haley‘s Tao of War Photography. 1. To begin with, practice this sentence: “If I get out of here alive, I’ll never do this again.” You’ll say this to yourself every single time an already dangerous…
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I, Toaster and The Economies of Production
Doing away with the division of labour and most other economies of production, Thomas Thwaites’ Toaster Project is an experiment to “build a toaster, from scratch—beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only £3.99”. Many have mentioned this already (Jason Kottke, Tyler Cowen on Margin Revolution, Radley…
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Exporting Poor Work Environments
After a long time of successfully managing to avoid the blog, I eventually clicked this past week when I was sent Fake Steve Jobs’ reaction to the news that an employee of Foxconn, one of Apple’s Chinese ‘manufacturing partners’, committed suicide shortly after reporting a missing iPhone v4 prototype. We can’t make these products in…
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The Ideal Creative Workspace
Jonah Lehrer suggests that the ideal creative workplace is “a room with blue walls that feels very far away and is filled with references to foreign countries”. Why would these three conditions be conducive to creativity? Colours can influence how we think (in one experiment, red backgrounds were found to make participants more accurate, while…
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The Principles of Edward Tufte
The problem: “presenting large amounts of information in a way that is compact, accurate, adequate for the purpose, and easy to understand”. The solution: Edward Tufte (actually, the solution is “to develop a consistent approach to the display of graphics which enhances its dissemination, accuracy, and ease of comprehension”… but that’s not as catchy). Yes,…
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Making Graphs That Work
Seth Godin offers some advice on creating quality, legible, graphs. Short and sweet. Don’t let popular spreadsheets be in charge of the way you look. Tell a story. The only 4 stories permissible: Things are going great, look! Things are a disaster, help! Nothing much is happening. We need to work together to figure out…