Letters Remain

Month: January 2010

  • Buying Linen: Thread Count Marketing

    Remember that numerical specifications drastically influence our choices: even if they’re meaningless and contradict our personal experience? The same goes for thread count, it seems: Textiles expert Mark Scheuer calls it a “marketing ploy” and tells you to forget about it when purchasing, while Linenplace says it is a metric we should consider–just not the most…

  • The Relationship Between Boasting and Arrogance

    In certain situations boasting about one’s achievements is a necessary evil (I’m British, OK?). It’s a delicate thing to do correctly and there are strategies to successfully avoid the situation completely[1]. When you must brag, however, research has shown in what circumstances a person’s boasting comes across as self-absorbed arrogance and when it comes across as…

  • Reasons for Compassion and Charity

    Tackling the idea that human empathy is self-serving, Dacher Keltner, for UC Berkeley’s Greater Good magazine, reviews a number of studies looking at why we are compassionate. In other research by Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns, participants were given the chance to help someone else while their brain activity was recorded. Helping others…

  • Charitable Donations: The Problem of Restricted Funds

    By donating funds to disaster-specific charitable organisations and campaigns we restrict the use of our funds to the relief of that problem only. This can cause long-lasting issues for charities and worldwide disaster recovery efforts in the future. To ensure the charitable help best, the charitable should ensure they give unrestricted funds that are not…

  • Resources for Community Building

    Richard Millington—online community builder for the UNHCR and one of Seth Godin’s 2008 interns—has compiled over 100 of his best posts from the previous two years. There’s a wealth of valuable information at FeverBee and this list is a great introduction to the topic of community building. A few of the twelve categories Millington has used in…

  • E-Prime and the Retiring of ‘To Be’

    A form of constrained writing, E-Prime strives to completely restrict the use of the verb to be as a way to prevent implications of certainty and objectivity. As part of the This Column Will Change Your Life series, Oliver Burkeman discusses the merits of E-Prime and unambiguous language. To think about and function in the world, [Alfred…

  • Words and Phrases Lost in Translation

    Coming from the author’s confusion in relating to her German-speaking Balkan partner, the question is asked: can phrases and words that we give great weight to in our native tongue truly be translated across cultural and language barriers. Could it really mean the same thing for him to say “I love you” in English if he…

  • The Transformative Power of a Narrative

    Can a narrative attached to an everyday object increase its objective value? That was the question posed by Rob Walker (author of The New York Times‘ Consumed column) and Joshua Glenn (author of Taking Things Seriously) when they started the Significant Objects Project—an experiment designed to test whether a series of stories created about an object…

  • Credit Card Customer Profiling and the Luhn Algorithm

    From a Q&A with a VISA fraud prevention agent on reddit: Some years ago, someone wrote a paper claiming he could get the age, gender and race only from the credit card purchase history. It worked very well. Today, with your full purchase information, we can even “guess” your income range, number of dependants and…

  • The Irrational Use of Credit Cards

    Our irrationality toward money and inability to fully visualise the impact of distant events is how credit card companies thrive and many bank balances suffer. That’s the conclusion one draws after reading this article from Time that looks at a number of studies showing that we fail miserably in making logical decisions about money when…