Letters Remain

  • The Art of Sand

    I initially passed over this Discover gallery but decided to take a look once @mocost linked to it.

    Who would have thought that sand had such diversity and beauty? Evidently Gary Greenberg did when he compiled these microscopic photographs of sand for his book, A Grain of Sand.

    Composed of the remnants of volcanic explosions, eroded mountains, dead organisms, and even degraded man-made structures, sand can reveal the history—both biological and geologic—of a local environment. And examined closely enough, as the scientist and artist Gary Greenberg has, sand can reveal spectacular colors, shapes, and textures.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Setting Goals: A Good Idea?

    Could setting goals be detrimental to achieving our targets? Yes, say a number of “management scholars” researching the issue, but only because they may lead to “bursts of intense effort in the short term” or be too narrow and poorly defined.

    The comprehensive article looking at their work has some interesting anecdotes and some good advice for those who consistently stumble when it comes to setting and keeping goals.

    What’s often required is a “learning goal” – one where someone pledges to come up with, for example, five approaches to a thorny problem – rather than a performance goal that assumes that the problem will automatically be solved. […]

    Rather than reflexively relying on goals, argues Max Bazerman, a Harvard Business School professor and the fourth coauthor of Goals Gone Wild [pdf], we might also be better off creating workplaces and schools that foster our own inherent interest in the work. “There are lots of organizations where people want to do well, and they don’t need those goals,” he says.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Overestimating the Paradox of Choice

    Are we overestimating the reach of the ‘too-much-choice effect’—the phenomenon first noted by Iyengar and Lepper (2000) [pdf] and popularised by Barry Schwartz as the paradox of choice?

    The theory states that, contrary to traditional economic principles, the more choice consumers have the less satisfied and less likely to decide they are. However, this from the abstract of a recent paper showing that we may be giving this theory too much credence: 

    Core theories in economics, psychology ,and marketing suggest that decision makers benefit from having more choice. In contrast, according to the too-much-choice effect, having too many options to choose from may ultimately decrease the motivation to choose and the satisfaction with the chosen option. To reconcile these two positions, we tested whether there are specific conditions in which the too-much-choice effect is more or less likely to occur. In three studies with a total of 598 participants, we systematically investigated the moderating impact of choice set sizes, option attractiveness, and whether participants had to justify their choices. […] Overall, only choice justification proved to be an effective moderator, calling the extent of the too-much-choice effect into question.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Writing for a Living

    Award-winning author Colm Tóibín claimed earlier this year that he gains no enjoyment from writing.  The Guardian asked a slew of other authors whether or not they enjoyed writing for a living, and the answers were surprisingly mixed. This from the original interview with Colm Tóibín:

    I write with a sort of grim determination to deal with things that are hidden and difficult and this means, I think, that pleasure is out of the question. I would associate this with narcissism anyway and I would disapprove of it.

    And this from Will Self:

    I gain nothing but pleasure from writing fiction; short stories are foreplay, novellas are heavy petting – but novels are the full monte. Frankly, if I didn’t enjoy writing novels I wouldn’t do it – the world hardly needs any more and I can think of numerous more useful things someone with my skills could be engaged in.

    via Kottke

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Zone of Essential Risk

    ‘The zone of essential risk’ is a term coined by Bob Blakely to describe the problem with rare, medium-sized transactions:

    If you conduct infrequent transactions which are also small, you’ll never lose much money and it’s not worth it to try to protect yourself – you’ll sometimes get scammed, but you’ll have no trouble affording the losses.

    If you conduct large transactions, regardless of frequency, each transaction is big enough that it makes sense to insure the transactions or pay an escrow agent. You’ll have occasional experiences of fraud, but you’ll be reimbursed by the insurer or the transactions will be reversed by the escrow agent and you don’t lose anything.

    If you conduct small or medium-sized transactions frequently, you can amortize fraud losses using the gains from your other transactions. This is how casinos work; they sometimes lose a hand, but they make it up in the volume.

    But if you conduct medium-sized transactions rarely, you’re in trouble. The transactions are big enough so that you care about losses, you don’t have enough transaction volume to amortize those losses, and the cost of insurance or escrow is high enough compared to the value of your transactions that it doesn’t make economic sense to protect yourself.

    via Schneier

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Tales of Mere Existence

    My latest obsession, thanks to David, is Tales of Mere Existence: a series of musings on life’s quirks narrated by Levni Yilmaz (of IngredientX) as he doodles on some backlit paper. A couple of favourites:

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Call-To-Action Buttons

    Call-to-action buttons are the buttons that web designers want visitors to click when interacting with their site (Signup, Purchase, Download, etc.).

    Tips on how to design these abound on the Internet, but David Hamill’s overview on how to design good call-to-action buttons and the difference they can make is one of the best I’ve seen recently.

    The note on how subtle changes to Laura Ashley’s ‘shopping basket’ made clickthroughs increase by 11% reminded me of an article (via Kottke) on how Jared Spool changed the text of a submit button for a major ecommerce site, making them an additional $300 million in one year.

    via Good Usability

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Creative Capitalism

    ‘Creative capitalism‘ is a term popularised by Bill Gates at the World Economic Forum in Davos, 2008. Here Gates delivered a speech saying that many of the world’s problems are “too big for philanthropy” and that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

    Creative Capitalism: A Conversation has a transcript of Gates’ speech but it also has much, much more: it is also “a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development” by many of the most popular economics writers around (although the site is now archived as the book has been released).

    Michael Kinsley, columnist at Time and author of the book based on the site, discusses the project in a Microsoft Research program that, unfortunately, looks interesting but I can’t watch due to browser restrictions on my current computer.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Obsession and Writing on the Web

    At SXSW 2009, John Gruber and Merlin Mann held a panel on “building a blog you can be proud of, trying to improve the quality of your work, reaching the people you admire, and maybe even making a buck”.

    The talk, available as a 43f Podcast on Mann’s site, is worth your time whether you ‘blog’ or not. Gruber goes one further and expands on some of the concepts in a short post about obsession and writing on the web:

    My muse for the session was this quote from Walt Disney: “We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.” To me, that’s it. That’s the thing. […]

    No one gets into something like [writing or publishing on the web] without an obsession, but if your obsession is with the money, and your revenue is directly correlated to page views, then rather than write or produce anything with any actual merit or integrity, you’ll dance like a monkey and split your articles across multiple “pages”and spend more time ginning up sensational Digg-bait headlines than writing the articles themselves. It’s thievery — not of money, but of readers’ attention. […]

    The entire quote-unquote “pro blogging” industry […] is predicated on the notion that blogging is a meaningful verb. It is not. The verb is writing. The format and medium are new, but the craft is ancient.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • How Poverty Affects the Brain

    I’ve already noted the correlation between a low IQ and poverty, but now The Economist has a summary of how poverty and stress affects the brain.

    The reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop. […]

    To measure the amount of stress an individual had suffered over the course of his life, […] researchers used an index known as allostatic load. This is a combination of the values of six variables: diastolic and systolic blood pressure; the concentrations of three stress-related hormones; and the body-mass index, a measure of obesity. For all six, a higher value indicates a more stressful life; and for all six, the values were higher, on average, in poor children than in those who were middle class. […]

    The capacity of a 17-year-old’s working memory was also correlated with allostatic load. Those who had spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items in their memory at any time. Those brought up in a middle-class family could manage 9.4, and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle.

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    Lloyd Morgan