Letters Remain

Month: March 2010

  • A Summary of Happiness Research

    David Brooks brings ‘happiness research’ back to the wider public’s attention with a succinct summary of research into what does and does not make us happy: Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow? […] If you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, you are…

  • Marriage as Scope Creep

    Even though married life was progressing well and all involved were happy, Elizabeth Weil decided to actively apply herself to “the project of being a spouse” and to document the process. Weil’s article is slow to start but becomes an absorbing inquiry in to what it means to be married. I’ve never really believed that…

  • Choosing a Marriage Partner

    When you’re looking, here are a few tips on choosing a marriage partner to increase your happiness and marriage longevity, from a summary of the research by Eric Barker: There is mutual idealisation: “Spouses who idealized one another were more in love with each other as newlyweds. Longitudinal analyses suggested that spouses were less likely…

  • Behavioural Game Design and the Manipulation of Fun

    Over the last twenty or thirty years gaming has changed almost beyond recognition. With the simultaneous growth in behavioural psychology the two fields have collided, as summarised by Microsoft games researcher John Hopson in his look at behavioural game design. Cracked summarises the article well (if not a tad sensationalised) as Five ways video games…

  • Blogs as Books and the ‘New’ Bias

    We are prejudiced against material that doesn’t identify itself as ‘New’ and this is a problem not just with the majority of online information consumers but also the websites that pander to this ‘old media’ bias. Whether something’s “new” or “breaking” is a concern for newspaper writers seeking scoops. There’s no reason on Earth a…

  • The Influence of Sold-Out Products

    Sold-out products create “information cascades” where we infer that the next-best item must also be of a similar high quality and value for money: sold-out items ‘validate’ similar products, persuading us to purchase more readily. “Sold-out products create a sense of immediacy for customers; they feel that if one product is gone, the next item…

  • Creativity Stages and ‘Flow’

    After intently studying people at work in a diverse range of fields, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlined what he determined to be the five stages of the creative process in his book Creativity: Preparation: Becoming immersed, consciously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity. Incubation: A period whereby ideas…

  • Development Strategy: Better Than Yesterday

    Excerpting from his book The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler reveals his philosophy on growth (in many contexts): small, incremental changes to reach long-term, seemingly unassailable goals. The idea is encapsulated in the question, Was today better than yesterday? Most important challenges in life manifest themselves as large, insurmountable amorphous blobs of potential failure. This is…

  • (Another) Interview With a Somali Pirate

    The second I’ve posted. I haven’t read the story this interview was conducted for (an article on the economics of Somali piracy) but this full, ‘uncut’ interview between Scott Carney from Wired and a Somali pirate offers a glimpse at their strategy and reasoning. How do you pirates decide on what ransom to ask for?…

  • Health and Alcohol Intake (Men, Women, Wine)

    A longitudinal study of almost 20,000 U.S. women is showing signs that moderate alcohol consumption (“one or two alcohol beverages a day”) can lower the risk for obesity and inhibit weight gain: Over the course of the study, 41 percent of the women became overweight or obese. Although alcohol is packed with calories (about 150…