Author: Lloyd Morgan
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The Infant Brain, Redux
An interesting follow-up if you enjoyed reading about the development of the infant brain last week: Seed Magazine interviews Alison Gopnik, asking about her research and “why everything we think we know about babies is wrong“. Seed: You describe children as being “useless on purpose.” What do you mean by that? AG: It’s related to…
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History of the 160 Character Text Message
I’ve never given much thought to this, and maybe that’s a sign of how well it was designed and implemented: the history and (high-level) technical development of text messaging. Would the 160-character maximum be enough space to prove a useful form of communication? Having zero market research, [the research commitee] based their initial assumptions on…
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Testing Rationality and Bias
How can we test our rationality and various biases? Shouldn’t you get more rationality credit if you spend more time studying common biases, statistical techniques, and the like? Well this would be good evidence of your rationality if you were in fact pretty rational about your rationality, i.e., if you knew that when you read or discussed such…
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Infographic Inspiration
There’s not much I can say about this collection other than giving you its accurate title: 50 great examples of infographics. via @mikaarauz
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Interpreting Hybrid Images
Remember how the Mona Lisa’s famous smile was painted in low spatial frequencies, hence why we interpret the face differently depending on where we look? Now, Mo of Neurophilosophy takes an in-depth look at how our brains interpret hybrid images and complex visual scenes, shedding more light on this effective imaging technique. He also links…
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Procrastination as Newton’s First Law
There’s a lot I identify with in this article of Joel Spolsky’s where he talks of using the Fire and Motion strategy to cope with workplace procrastination. There have been times in my career as a developer when I went for weeks at a time without being able to get anything done. As they say, I’m…
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UK Bank Holidays
Today is the May Day Bank Holiday here in the UK, so I thought I would look at the history of why we have these public holidays. I was sure that the commonly held belief of why ‘bank holidays’ are so called was incorrect, and it appears that Wikipedians confirm this assumption: “Bank holidays are often assumed to…
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How to Win at Monopoly
It appears that a couple of high-profile blogs linked to this a few years back, but it’s new to me: how to win at monopoly. Monopoly is a game of luck, strategy, and people skills. No strategy will guarantee you a win; that’s one of the reasons Monopoly is so interesting. In any given game,…
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Online-Only Newspapers: Counterintuitive Trends
Studying the progress of the Finnish financial daily Taloussanomat as it became Europe’s first online-only newspaper, researchers from City University London discovered a number of seemingly counterintuitive trends from the newspaper’s retiring of its print business. Six and a half months after going online-only Unique Users were 22 percent lower and Page Impressions 11 percent down. […]…
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Development of the Infant Brain
Looking primarily at the research of Alison Gopnik, Jonah Lehrer looks at the development of the infant brain. Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even…