Month: November 2009

  • Fixed-Schedule Productivity: Fix the Schedule, Don’t Compromise

    In a guest post for I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Cal Newport of Study Hacks discusses fixed-schedule productivity: a productivity system whereby you set a schedule of work (and play) between certain hours and stick to it ruthlessly. Tim Ferriss aficionados will note that this system relies on a premise that Ferriss heavily depends…

  • Homeowners and Civil Engagement

    According to The Wall Street Journal, the home buyers’ tax credit initiative (U.S.) was “intended to help spur housing sales” by offering financial incentives to first time home-buyers and certain repeat buyers. However the initiative encourages “excess mobility”, suggests Edward Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard, and this is something we should not be…

  • Anti-Patterns

    I’ve written about design patterns a couple of times in the past, but today I discovered anti-patterns: design patterns that “may be commonly used but [are] ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice”. One of the “key elements present to formally distinguish an actual anti-pattern from a simple bad habit, bad practice, or bad idea”: Some repeated…

  • Calorie Counts Don’t Affect Food Decisions

    After New York City passed a law requiring many chain restaurants to post the calorific value of all food they sold on their menus (in the same size and font as the price), researchers started looking at how the posting of calorie counts affect consumer decision making and food consumption. The study’s findings, as summarised…

  • Food Advertising Causes Unconscious Snacking

    Food advertising does much more than influence our brand preferences; it also ‘primes’ automatic eating behaviours, contributing to overall and longer-term weight gain. This is the conclusion of a recent study into whether food advertising (of both the healthy and non-healthy kind) can trigger unconscious snacking by leading our thoughts toward hunger and food. Children…

  • The 50th Law

    Power is greater than happiness, contends Robert Greene in an online discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky about Fear, Power and Mortality (quality summary thereof), as happiness is fleeting and unremitting. Also discussed in this conversation is strategist Robert Greene’s latest book, The 50th Law: 10 Lessons in Fearlessness, which is the result of an unlikely collaboration with hip…

  • Ability to Inhibit Prejudices Diminishes with Age

    As we age we become less able to inhibit prejudiced inferences, relying more on ethnic and sexist stereotypes to interpret situations, research into the science of prejudice suggests. There are a lot of clichés thrown around about the elderly, but one that seems to be true—or at least is backed up by research—is the belief…

  • Simplicity in Japan

    Simplicity, says Kenya Hara, creative director of Muji, is a “central aesthetic principle” in Japan and is what differentiates the visual appeal of the East from that of the West. In an interview for The New York Times looking at the unique design of Japanese bentō, Hara provides a comparison of the East and West’s…

  • 100 Tips for Providing Perfect Restaurant Service

    Bruce Buschel–author, co-creator of a musical, director and producer–is opening a seafood restaurant in New York. In his Small Business column for The New York Times he offers 100 tips to ‘restaurant staffers’ (waiting staff) on how to behave front of house (that’s the first 50 tips; here are the second 50). I (unexpectedly) found myself agreeing with…

  • In Defence of Fixed Service Charges (or: Why Only Tip for Service?)

    Tipping: that most contentious of issues that–depending on your location–can be illegal, required, or the most heinous of etiquette crimes. It’s a complicated business (as the Wikipedia entry indicates by the size of the Tipping by region section), and an odd and occasionally uncomfortable tradition. As a self-proclaimed ‘socially awkward Briton’ David Mitchell laments the…