Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • Record Label Demands on Music Streaming Services

    New and potentially disruptive music streaming services are having a hard time breaking into the market, with many analysts blaming their business models and others blaming the contractual demands from labels for the troubles encountered. There are also complaints about the royalties paid to artists and poor revenues of existing services. Michael Robertson–founder of MP3Tunes and…

  • How Trends Actually Spread; or, Six Degrees but No Connectors

    The small sample size of Stanley Milgram’s small world experiment means that the theory of ‘six degrees of separation’ and the conclusion drawn from it–primarily, the Influential’s theory popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point–could be deeply flawed. That was the starting point for Duncan Watts‘ research that led him to say “the Tipping Point is…

  • Retreating to Study Technology’s Cognitive Impact

    Five neuroscientists travelled into deepest Glen Canyon, Utah, to contemplate how technology has changes their behaviour. Some were sceptics and some were believers, and by taking this forced break from their computers and gadgets (there was no mobile phone reception or power) they were determined to find out whether or not modern technology inhibits their…

  • Successful Science Article Pitches

    Article and book pitches — both successful and unsuccessful — can give you a small insight into an editor’s selection process and the sales-side of a writer’s mind, as well as help you learn to write more effectively. As such I’ve started to collect sites featuring proposals and pitches. A recent addition to this list…

  • Realism and Abstraction in User Interface Design

    User interface designers (and particularly icon designers) could learn a lot from comics and the theory behind them. Taking his cue from Scott McCloud’s excellent Understanding Comics, Lukas Mathis looks at how for optimum recognition and in order to aid understanding, user interface elements must find the sweet spot between universality and realism. Like when…

  • On Titles, or: Titles: Is There an Optimal Solution?

    As a co-editor of the open-access journal Theoretical Economics, Jeff Ely has seen his fair share of academic papers and their associated titles. Inevitably Ely has constructed a theory on how to title a paper (or anything else, for that matter) for maximum exposure, impact and intrigue. In his hilarious tongue-in-cheek article detailing this theory,…

  • Inventive Ways to Control Trolls

    To keep the peace on the ever-expanding Stack Exchange Network of online communities, owners Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood introduced the timed suspension of disruptive users’ accounts. Over time the transparency of the timed suspension process proved to be occasionally inefficient when discussions arose regarding the merits of certain suspensions. This led the administrators of…

  • The Demand for Product Obsolescence

    Years ago (and still, for certain products) consumers decried the idea of planned product obsolescence in industrial design: the intentional engineering of products to have a limited useful life, such as with products produced with sealed-in batteries or fridges that will only function for seven years. In recent years, however, the need for planned obsolescence…

  • Persuasive Infomercial Sales Techniques

    I don’t take infomercials very seriously, mainly due to how hilarious and absurd they are. However I’ve now been won over and can see their potential for certain product–market combinations. How did this miraculous change come about? Through a surprisingly enjoyable interview between Andrew Warner and the master of the infomercial, Tim Hawthorne. From his…

  • Infants Quickly Learn to Ignore Unreliable and Silly People

    Children learn a lot from imitating the actions of adults, with recent research suggesting that infants as young as 14 months are selective imitators — taking cues from our behaviour in order to decide which of us adults to learn from and which to ignore. In a study where researchers expressed delight before either presenting an…