Author: Lloyd Morgan
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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 somethingās “new” or “breaking” is a concern for newspaper writers seeking scoops. There’s no reason on Earth a…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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(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?…
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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…
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Licensing and Patents for Green Technology and Drugs
The Seed Magazine ‘panel’ (who?) was asked How can intellectual property be adapted to spread green tech? Their short answer starts by looking at drug licensing (the last sentence is quite shocking): By World Trade Organization law, if a patented drug can improve public health in a developing country, itās available for compulsory licensing. That…
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The Denomination Effect: Banknotes vs. Coins
The denomination effect is the phenomenon whereby people spend coins faster than banknotes: it shows that we are more willing (there are fewer psychological barriers) to spend the same sum of money in coins than in ‘bills’. It’s obvious, but I like having these things ‘confirmed’ and having a name to go with them. Another experiment involved [NYU…
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The Case for Redemption
In light of the recall into custody of Jon Venables–one of the ten-year-old boys who horrifically murdered the two-year-old James Bulger in Manchester, 1993–Brian MastersĀ deliberates on the possibility of absolution for a heinous crime committed in one’s childhood. But I do know that [Jon Venables] cannot be the warped and skewed child who shared in…