Letters Remain

Month: November 2009

  • Time Needed to Form a Habit

    How long does it take to form a habit? By studying 96 people as they each attempt to start a new habit, the answer comes out as between 18 to 254 days, with a mean of 66. Some good news and caveats: Missing a single day did not reduce the chance of forming a habit. A…

  • The New Rules of The Fold

    In 1996, while discussing the importance of the inverted pyramid style of writing, usability expert Jakob Nielsen wrote that “users don’t scroll”. From there the idea of The Fold as an integral part of web design came into being. But, as Nielsen himself has said, the Internet has evolved and “as users got more experience…

  • Identification through Anonymous Social Networking Data

    Anonymity is “not sufficient for privacy when dealing with social networks” is the conclusion from a study that has successfully managed to de-anonymise large amounts of sanitised data from Twitter and Flickr. The main lesson of this paper is that anonymity is not sufficient for privacy when dealing with social networks. […] Our experiments underestimate…

  • The Exponential Growth of Death

    I was recently reading about supercentenarians–people that have lived to the age of 110 or above–and read the following statistic: [Reaching] the age of 110 years [is] something achieved by only one in a thousand centenarians (based on European data). Furthermore, only 1 in 50 supercentenarians lives to be 115 (1 in 50,000 centenarians). Fascinated…