Letters Remain

Month: February 2010

  • Making Applications Viral, Without Spam

    Virality isn’t an indispensable feature of all successful applications, but for those where it can be hugely beneficial there are four core principles that help the virality of an application, says Daniel Tanner: Invitation should be a core process, that is essential to using the application – this will maximise the chances that your users do invite new users.…

  • Long-Term Thinking and Climate Change

    One of the reasons the general public are slow in acting on climate change in the manner the situation’s importance demands is our reluctance to think too far beyond our immediate time horizon. However this shouldn’t stop us. That is the suggestion of Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, who extols the virtues of long-term thinking more eloquently than…

  • Taxes (Not Subsidies) Control Calorie Intake

    It’s not surprising to discover that in an experiment looking at how taxes and subsidies can be used to influence healthier food purchases it was the taxing of unhealthy food that improved choices, not the subsidisation of healthy options. Strangely, though, it turns out that the health food subsidies actually worsened choices (the study theorises that…

  • Political Rhetoric and Speechwriter ‘Tricks’

    How the art of political rhetoric is regarded differently in Britain and America: In the US, the act of speechwriting has gained an almost mythical status. As keepers of the president’s words, the speechwriters are at the centre of government and are objects of fascination. It is a little different in Westminster. There are no…

  • Accents and Second Language Comprehension

    When teaching a second language, it may be better to speak in the accent of the student’s first language rather than attempting to imitate the accent of the target language, suggests research looking at how accents may hinder or expedite language learning and comprehension. The study that discovered this looked at how much aural information speakers of…

  • The Benefits of Touching

    ‘Touchier’ basketball teams and players (those who bump, hug and high five the most) are more successful than those who limit their non-playing physical contact. Similarly, higher satisfaction has been reported in romantic relationships in which the partners touch more. Just two of the findings from research looking at the importance of touching in relationships.…

  • The Rise of Cooking Shows, the Fall of Cooking (and Happiness)

    I almost ignored this bit-too-long piece on the rise of the TV cooking show and the simultaneous fall of the home cooked meal (via @borrodell). That decline has several causes: women working outside the home; food companies persuading Americans to let them do the cooking; and advances in technology that made it easier for them…

  • Our Fascination with Cookbooks

    Cookbooks are designed to help us attain the “ideal sugar-salt-saturated-fat state” in our cooking while hiding that fact between the sautéing of onions and the reduction of the sauce. That wonderful proposition comes from Adam Gopnik’s look at our long-standing fascination with cookbooks, and how they are used in our homes. The first thing a cadet…

  • The Neuroscience of Comedy

    There is one essential condition required in comedy: “some kind of incongruity between two elements […], resolved in a playful or unexpected way”. That’s according to a fairly comprehensive article summarising the neuroscience research conducted to discover more about the phenomenon of why we find things funny (or not). Of particular interest was how we…

  • Comedic Writing Tips

    There are six essential elements of humour, suggests Dilbert‘s Scott Adams, as he looks briefly at how to write comedy: Pick a Topic: The topic does half of your work. I look for topics that have at least one of the essential elements of humor: Clever, Cute, Bizarre, Cruel, Naughty, Recognizable. Simple Sentences: Be smart,…