Author: Lloyd Morgan
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Environmental Assumptions
Big business is environmentally destructive: a widespread and almost unquestioned assumption. A false assumption, according to Jared Diamond, noting that profits often arise from green initiatives and environmental concern is of inherent importance to many large corporations. The story is told through the lens of Wal-Mart’s transport and packaging initiatives, Coca-Cola’s concern “with problems of…
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Marketing and Spreading Online
Bud Caddell, strategist at Undercurrent, talks with the author of Chief Culture Officer, Grant McCracken, on Bud’s experience of marketing online and how it really should be done–by the small and large companies. This on making something ‘spreadable’: Trying to design a program that reaches mass first, isn’t going to spread at all. It’s not remarkable, there’s…
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Advice from Economists
Jim Rogers—co-founder of the Quantum Fund (with George Soros), economic commentator, guest professor of finance at Columbia University and author of A Gift to My Children—provided a short interview with the FT discussing his thoughts on making that first million, on travelling, and some general advice to the next generation. What is the secret of your success? As…
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Terrorism and Our Responses
Shortly after the Northwest Airlines Flight 253 incident, Bruce Schneier provided links to a number of articles that published interviews, quotes or essays from him. As expected, Schneier calmly reiterates his old advice that is as valid now as it was pre-9/11. The one not to miss: Is aviation security mostly for show? The best defenses against…
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Web Design Research Results
Some of the more enlightening/worthwhile results from a number of studies on design and usability conducted by Smashing Magazine, found via their otherwise-ordinary 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines article: General design decisions taken by the top 50 blogs (part two): 92% use a fixed width layout with 56% varying the width between 951 and 1000px. For body…
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Simple Rules for Better Typography
Some simple rules to follow for improved typography (web or print), from Fred Design: Don’t use too many typefaces (not more than 3). Pay close attention to the hierarchy. No more than 4 font sizes, preferably 3. 8-10pt for body copy (definitely not above 12pt). Use simple, legible typefaces. Keep leading in mind (a little…
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On Hiring Talent (Not Just Programmers)
You could hire through open source like GitHub (“we hire ‘The Girl or Guy Who Wrote X,’ where X is an awesome project we all use or admire”) or use a check-list to recognise competency (passion, self-teaching, a love of learning, intelligence, hidden experience and knowledge of a variety of technologies) and no doubt find…
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Psychological Pricing and Other Shopping Persuasion Techniques
The endowment effect, sex in advertising and pricing anchors: all bits of ‘shopping psychology’ we’ve heard before. Ryan Sager looks at these shopping persuasion techniques we should be aware of, adding a few small pieces of information that may be novel: Endowment effect: We place a higher value on items we own, and just by…
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Ways of Reading, Writing, Learning
A Working Library’s Ways of Reading could be called the nine rules of reading, writing, and learning. My favourite three: Always read with a pen in hand. The pen should be used both to mark the text you want to remember and to write from where the text leaves you. Think of the text as the…
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The Statistics of A/B Testing
Whether or not you believe this to be (as Joel Spolsky does) the “best post […] about A/B testing, ever”, it definitely is one of the easiest to understand and one of the few posts on split testing that is statistically sound (i.e. useful). Is [a given A/B test] conclusive? Has [variant] A won? Or…