Author: Lloyd Morgan
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Apple, Disney and Pixar: It’s the Products
Written in early 2006 shortly after Disney’s acquisition of Pixar in a $7.4 billion all-stock deal, BusinessWeek looks at the relationship between the Disney and Apple CEOs and where their relationship may lead. Prescient in that it accurately predicted the Apple TV and the iPhone, the article also briefly looks at Jobs and his product-first…
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Barriers, Not Calories, Influence Eating Habits
Informing consumers of the calorific value of their food options doesn’t change their ordering/eating habits (previously), but removing barriers and making the healthier options easy to order does. That’s the conclusion from Kevin Volpp’s lecture, ‘Using Behavioral Economics to Improve Health Behaviors’. Recent studies […] have indicated that providing nutritional information at restaurants and recommending…
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The Psychology of Restaurant Menus
Type, colour, currency symbols and vivid adjectives: all items to pay attention to when designing menus–but not for aesthetic reasons. Subtle changes to menus can influence our restaurant decision-making, as is made obvious by Sarah Kershaw’s excellent article on the psychology of restaurant menus. (If you’ve read the articles in my previous post on this topic there…
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The Optimal Level of Trust
How much we trust people influences much more than just our interpersonal relationships and can even cost us a considerable amount of financial harm. The study concluding this (pdf) suggests that too much or too little trust has a financial cost equivalent to that of not attending university and shows that if we trust too much we assume too…
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Entrepreneurial Success Not Correlated to University Prestige
An analysis of the educational backgrounds of tech company founders has shown that an elite education does not provide as much of an advantage as many expect. In fact the results seem to show that where one studies has no correlation to entrepreneurial success, as long as one actually does study. The 628 U.S.-born tech…
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Business Schools Failing American Manufacturing
America’s deterioration as a leader in the engineering and manufacturing fields can be attributed largely to the failings of the elite business schools, suggests Noam Scheiber, Rhodes Scholar and senior editor at The New Republic. Business school graduates are now educated toward high paid financial services jobs, leading gradually to an “era of management by…
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Language Map of Europe
As Neatorama says of this language map of Europe: Languages correspond only imprecisely with political borders, which are designated by the superimposed red lines. The English version of this map was created by Postmann Michael in 2007 […] and there are continuing doubts regarding the accuracy of some of the language borders. I am reminded…
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Flags as Language Symbols in Web Design: Wrong
With Brazil (Portuguese), Finland (Swedish) and my home-country (the United Kingdom) as perfect examples, Jukka Korpela tells us why the use of flags to represent language options on the web is “plain wrong”. In a perfect world, there would be no need for explicit links to versions of a document in different languages. Even in this imperfect…
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The Humble, Essential and Safe Elevator
Stuck in an express elevator around the 13th floor of the McGraw-Hill office in New York for 41 hours, Nicholas White’s story should be somewhat fear-provoking. Intersperse with information on the importance of elevators in modern cities, a profile of elevator consultant James Fortune and a discussion on the psychology of elevators, the article somehow…
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We Project Our Beliefs Onto God
Those with a belief in God subconsciously bestow him with their own opinions in order to “validate and justify” them. This is a theory that has recently been strengthened by two surprisingly simple yet effective experiments conducted to find what the theist think about the beliefs of God, other people and themselves when it comes to…