Letters Remain

Category: interesting

  • To Breastfeed or Not

    In governmental and popular literature breastfeeding is praised as being the optimum solution to infant feeding. The Wikipedia article, for instance, is extensive and well-cited suggesting the following benefits to infants: superior nutrition, greater immune health, higher intelligenceā€¦Ā the list goes on. For the mother, many long- and short-term health benefits are also cited. In what…

  • I, Toaster and The Economies of Production

    Doing away with the division of labour and most other economies of production, Thomas Thwaites’ Toaster Project is an experiment to “build a toaster, from scratchā€”beginning by mining the raw materials and ending with a product that Argos sells for only Ā£3.99”. Many have mentioned this already (Jason Kottke, Tyler Cowen on Margin Revolution, Radley…

  • The Ideal Creative Workspace

    Jonah Lehrer suggests that the ideal creative workplace is “a room with blue walls that feels very far away and is filled with references to foreign countries”. Why would these three conditions be conducive to creativity? Colours can influence how we think (in one experiment, red backgrounds were found to make participants more accurate, while…

  • When Money Buys Happiness (or Not)

    After discussingĀ consumer signalling and Geoffrey Miller’s Spent in hisĀ Findings column (mentioned previously), readers of John Tierney’s Lab were asked, List the ten most expensive things (products, services or experiences) that you have ever paid for (including houses, cars, university degrees, marriage ceremonies, divorce settlements and taxes). Then, list the ten items that you have ever…

  • Aspen Ideas Festival

    The Aspen Ideas Festival–a joint production of the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic–is an annual gathering of “some of the most inspired and provocative thinkers, writers, artists, business people, teachers, and other leaders drawn from myriad fields and from across the country and around the world” who meet to discuss “some of the significant ideas…

  • Tests On Language and Click-Through Rates

    By varying the language used in a sentence at the end of his articles, Dustin Curtis increased click-through rates to his Twitter profile by 173%. Dustin describes his multivariate (‘split’) testing of different call to action sentences, revealing the most persuasive, in a visually excellent article. This puts me in mind of how both Tim…

  • Harnessing Collective Intelligence Online

    The ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ theory, as popularised by James Surowiecki’s 2004 book of the same name, is an importantā€”if misunderstoodā€”theory that has influenced a lot of recent online ventures that rely on social networks and collaboration to work intelligently. For those who want to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds for their own ventures,…

  • The Declining and Thriving News Magazines

    While Time and Newsweek saw double digit falls in revenue last year, The Economist saw similar sized gainsā€”despite increasing subscription rates (previously). The Atlantic discusses this phenomenon, looking in detail at why The Economist is thriving in a market seemingly in decline. The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact…

  • The Most Important Century

    The next 50 years will bring technological, social and geopolitical change greater than we can imagine, says Astronomer RoyalĀ Martin Rees, but the emerging problems of population growth and climate change make this century arguably the most important in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, even from the perspective of an astronomer. It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that…

  • The Realistic Threat of Terrorism

    To think rationally about risk is to think probabilistically / statistically about the dangers we face. Noting that “the most dangerous person you’re ever likely to encounter ā€“ by several orders of magnitude ā€“ is the one you see in the mirror every morning”, John Goekler offers some perspective on what risks we really should…