Letters Remain

Month: August 2009

  • Moral Psychology and Innate Lying/Honesty

    We have based our society on the assumption that deciding to lie or to tell the truth is within our conscious control. But […] this assumption may be flawed and […] honesty may instead be the result of controlling a desire to lie (a conscious process) or of not feeling the temptation to lie in…

  • Free: Interview with Chris Anderson

    Whether you’ve read it or not, you’re undoubtedly aware that Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, has written a new book: Free. I haven’t read the book but can likely guess the premise—and given that the unabridged audiobook can be downloaded online I’ll no doubt be giving it a…

  • Social Ignorance and Surrogacy

    A vibrant social life and close friendships are an important part of staying healthy, many recent studies have shown, but what is strange about this is why this is the case, considering that we’re surpisingly bad at judging the beliefs, opinions and values of our friends and partners. A growing body of experimental evidence suggests…

  • Sports Drinks and Dehydration

    More for the parents of athletic children, this article from The New York Times‘ Well blog still contains some useful all-round advice on hydration during exercise. In the comments the author also links to this urine colour test for dehydration. When [exercising children] were offered grape-flavored water, they voluntarily drank 44.5 percent more than when…

  • Publishing in Scientific Journals

    Not being a professional or published scientist, the workings of academic journals are foreign to me. As a semi-regular reader of them I really should at least understand the processes involved, and that’s where My Dominant Hemisphere‘s outline of the publihing process and list of 18 interesting journal facts comes in handy. Multiple surveys have…

  • Apple’s Strategy: The Good and Bad

    The four major issues with Apple’s current product line and strategy that are “stifling the industry, consumer choice and pricing”, according to Jason Calacanis: Destroying MP3 player innovation through anti-competitive practices. Monopolistic practices in telecommunications. Draconian App Store policies. Wanting to own almost every extension of the iPhone platform. It’s tough to disagree with these…

  • On-Hold Music and Time Perception

    With the correct choice of music and by giving the perception of progress customers on-hold in a telephone queue underestimate the time they have been kept waiting and will stay on the line longer before hanging up. Newsweek summarises a number of research studies that have looked at the psychology behind telephone queues and on-hold…

  • The Universality of Facial Expressions

    Or not. It’s not just happiness that’s perceived differently across cultures: facial expressions are too. Recent research questioning the assumption that face processing and facial expression recognition is invariant has found that Western Caucasians and East Asians differ in how they process facial expressions. It is a widely held belief that many basic visual processes…

  • Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites

    Privacy could become a competitive feature of social networking sites, suggests Bruce Schneier in an article that looks at the interesting topic of privacy salience: the suggestion that privacy reassurances make people more, not less, concerned. Privacy salience does a lot to explain social networking sites and their attitudes towards privacy. From a business perspective,…

  • Absolute and Relative Poverty

    I’ve already mentioned the World Bank’s startling definition of extreme poverty: $1.25, adjusted for PPP. This is what is known as absolute poverty and it is seldom used by politicians—who prefer to look at poverty in relative terms. Relative poverty is slightly more involved, and the BBC weighs in with the internationally accepted definition of relative…