Letters Remain

  • Children Exposed to ‘Dirt’, Healthier

    From the ‘Science proves mum right’ and ‘Obvious, but still needs to be stated’ file comes the news that children who are exposed to bacteria, viruses, worms, and dirt have healthier immune systems.

    Public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they “also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us.”

    “Children raised in an ultraclean environment, […] are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.”

    Of course there are caveats, or at least common sense rules (although even the researchers in this field are debating exactly how far to take this):

    “I certainly recommend washing your hands after using the bathroom, before eating, after changing a diaper, before and after handling food,” and whenever they’re visibly soiled, [one researcher] wrote.

    Dr. Weinstock goes even further. “Children should be allowed to go barefoot in the dirt, play in the dirt, and not have to wash their hands when they come in to eat.”

    via Kottke

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Open Source Software as Self Service

    “Open source software development is the ultimate self-service industry”, says Jeff Atwood in an article looking at possible reasons for the OpenOffice.org project’s dwindling development community. However, it’s Atwood’s thoughts on self service supermarket checkouts that I found most interesting:

    What fascinates me about self-service checkout devices is that the store is making you do work they would normally pay their employees to do. Think about this for a minute. You’re playing the role of the paying customer and the cashier employee. Under the watchful eyes of security cameras and at least one human monitor, naturally, but still. We continue to check ourselves out. Not only willingly, but enthusiastically. For that one brief moment, we’re working for the supermarket at the lowest possible pay scale: none.

    That’s the paradox of self-checkout. But to me it’s no riddle at all: nobody else in that store cares about getting Jeff Atwood checked out nearly as much as Jeff Atwood does.

    On the topic of open source development communities, I also found this quote to be quite poignant:

    If you’re having difficulty getting software developers to participate in your open source project, I’d say the community isn’t failing your project. Your project is failing the community.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Suicide: The One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem

    A strangely inspiring article comes out of this philosophical look at suicide—that problem with which our species has been ‘gifted’. It feels like a call-to-action for your life.

    We must recognize that there are multiple forms of suicide. You can release your claim to life by means of a rope, a gun, a tall building, or a bottle of pills. But you can also do it by more mundane means: by letting your life get stuck in a loop of repeated, shallow days, like a skipping record stuck on a boring track. In letting your future days become mere faded copies of your past days, you may not physiologically die, but you certainly cease to live. Some methods of suicide are just slower and less deliberate than others, but in that way perhaps they smack even more of cowardice.

    I also congratulate the author on writing a piece on suicide without resorting to tired Schopenhauer quotes; something I surely wouldn’t be able to do!

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • What Design Is

    Design is 70% dealing with people, 3% the idea, 2% selling the idea, 2% the brief, 2% being pig headed, 1% printing, 3% eye for detail, .6% invoices, 2% coffee, .7% tracking, .1% warm glow, .6% panic, 1% 4am, .6% staring, .2% checking, 1% letting go, .8% keeping hold, .7% estimates, .3% checking, .4% proofs, .1% colour, .9% understanding, .4% marketing, 1% checking, .8% beach ball, .5% mice, .3% keynotes, .4% persuasion, .2% bragging, .5% smiling, 2% knowing when to stop.

    Quote from designer Tina Roth Eisenberg (of swissmiss) who is in turn quoting Duane King (who himself is not taking credit for the list). Nevertheless, I like it.

    via @zambonini

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Writing for the Web

    Former LA Times writer Cathy Curtis believes that writing for the web has improved her skills as a copywriter. She shares some of what she has learnt and some advice about web copywriting in an eminently readable article for AIGA, the American Institute for Graphic Art.

    [In my journalism days] I wasn’t terribly concerned with the mechanics of keeping readers interested throughout the story.

    The novelty of the web, on the other hand, made me question every move. During my first few years, I treasured the free online advice offered by Jakob Nielsen and other pioneering web specialists. I became fascinated by theories about how users absorb information online. Everyone seemed to agree that the web user was, above all, impatient.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Unintuitive Interfaces

    Expanding on Jared Spool’s thoughts on learning cycles and so-called ‘intuitive’ interfaces, Vicky Teinaki discusses the ‘knowledge matrix’ and makes this interesting point that I feel almost embarrassed to have not thought about previously:

    Digital devices can never be inherently ‘intuitive’, as the fact that they deal in abstraction automatically means that actions must be arbitrary. (An aside: for those who argue that much of gestural and time based interactions are intuitive, remember that this assumes a Western way of looking at space and time. Anthropologists would tell you that there are other ways.) In other words, interfaces aren’t ‘intuitive’, they’re ‘intuited’: before that, there’s nothing ‘intuitive’ about them at all.

    If you’re wondering what Vicky means by this, this excerpt from Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness may enlighten you:

    When we draw a time line, those of us who speak English put the past on the left, those of us who speak Arabic put the past on the right, and those of us who speak Mandarin put the past on the bottom.

    It goes without saying that how we believe people read our sites is based on cultural assumptions.

    via Devan Goldstein

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • How Reviews Influence Sales (Positive and Negative)

    Unsurprisingly, this brief analysis of how reviews influence sales on Amazon equates quite well with my purchasing behaviour; I wouldn’t feel comfortable buying a product with 100% positive reviews unless I knew personally that it was awesome. And a product with less than 15 reviews or so? Forget about it.

    [A] handful of bad reviews, it seems, are worth having. “No one trusts all positive reviews,” [John McAteer, Google’s retail industry director,] says. So a small proportion of negative comments—”just enough to acknowledge that the product couldn’t be perfect”—can actually make an item more attractive to prospective buyers.

    The sheer volume of reviews makes far more difference, according to Google’s analysis of clicks and sales referrals. “Single digits didn’t seem to move the needle at all,” says Mr McAteer. “It wasn’t enough to get people comfortable with making that purchase decision.” But after about 20 reviews of a product are posted, “We start to see more reviews—it starts to accelerate.”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • How To Destroy a Marriage

    In response to Dr Rob Dobrenski’s article on why marriages fail (linked previously), The Last Psychiatrist looks at various “post-marriage accelerators of divorce”—things you can do today to destroy your marriage (limited time offer):

    • Be contemptuous
    • Bring your work home (emotionally)
    • Rush through your ‘family life’ in order to spend time with yourself
    • Be painfully honest with friends/colleagues about your relationship
    • Communicate through your kids
    • Refill hedonistic supplies (“look elsewhere for affirmation of identity”)

    TLP compiled this list because he felt that Dr Dobrenski’s article focused more on “reasons [that] are generally of the type ‘unrealistic expectations’ or at least ‘the wrong impression.’   In other words, the marriages failed not because of what went on in the marriage, but because people were oriented wrong before they even got married.”

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Truth About Markets

    My current read, The Truth About Markets/Culture and Prosperity (UK/US title respectively), is a thoroughly enjoyable—if occasionally dense and dry—introduction to economic theories and applications. Published in 2003, it’s aged fairly well.

    I felt the need to share this two-paragraph excerpt from a section discussing “large models purportedly descriptive of entire economic systems” (pp. 193-194):

    The error of principle—the reason these models will never be useful—is best exposed by Jorge Luis Borges’ story of mapmakers who competed to build the best possible map. They eventually understood that the most accurate map simply replicated the world. The search for realism destroyed the purpose of the map. A map is valuable precisely because it simplifies and omits. Economic models are maps for the market economy. A map can be false but never true. Our criterion for selecting among maps that are not false is usefulness, and a map can be too detailed or not detailed enough. We seek the simplest map adapted to our purpose, and it is a different map if we are walking or driving: not better or worse, but more fitted for its use. The London Underground map is a brilliant design for its purpose but useless to pedestrians. The ‘little stories’, or economic models, of this book are to be judged in the same way.

    I once debated the relationship between the social sciences with some anthropologists. We adjourned to the pub, and someone bought a round of drinks: the discussion naturally turned to the reasons why. For the economists, the explanation was obvious: the practice of buying rounds minimized transaction costs, reducing the number of exchanges between the patrons and the bar staff. The anthropologists saw it as an example of ritual gift exchange and described the many tribes that had developed similar customs. I proposed a test between the competing hypotheses: did you feel cheated or victorious if you bought more rounds than had been bought for you? Unfortunately, the economists and the anthropologists gave different answers to that question.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Economics Lectures

    I was introduced to Stephen Kinsella—Junior Lecturer in Economics at Kemmy Business School, University of Limerick—through his beautiful looking economics presentations available on SlideShare. Of course, the problem with (the majority of) beautiful presentations is that they lack context and thus, without a voiceover, end up being a confusing set of beautiful pictures with scant text.

    Not to worry; Kinsella’s economics lectures are also available on Vimeo.

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    Lloyd Morgan