Category: technology
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Innovation and the ‘Creation’ of Time
I make no secret of being a huge fan of Matt Ridley’s body of work, and his latest addition to this, The Rational Optimist, seems like a welcome addition. A wonderful summary of the book’s main theme–that innovation and the spreading of theories and ideas is the key to a prosperous future and we should…
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Text-Only Ads are the Most Effective
Advertisers are “often wrong about what attracts our attention” is the conclusion of a usability study looking at how users interact with online advertising. The study, published in the report Eyetracking Web Usability by the Nielsen Norman Group (a usability consultancy firm from Jakob Nielsen and Kara Pernice), suggests that text-only advertising is the most…
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In Praise of Self-Tracking: The Data-Driven Life
It is a natural desire to strive for self-improvement and seek knowledge about oneself, but until recently it has been difficult or impossible to do so objectively and quantitatively. Now, through self-tracking systems and applications that are becoming prevalent in many of our lives thanks to a number of technological advances and sociological changes, we can,…
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Paper Maps vs. GPS vs. Personal Directions
Noting that “a device can be precise without being accurate” and contemplating the possible effects the simultaneous rise in digital maps and a decline in the use of paper maps could have, John McKinney looks at some studies comparing the efficacy of different navigational aids: Studies by the British Cartographic Society show that high-tech maps…
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The Landscapes of Gadgets
Stating that modern gizmos (in this example, the iPhone) are no longer just dependent on highly integrated and developed systems for their production, but now also depend upon “a vast array of infrastructures, data ecologies, and device networks” for their operation, Rob Holmes’ “mind-boggling update to I, Pencil“* looks at the landscapes of extraction, assembly…
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The Economically-(Im)Perfect World of Online Games
Kristian Segerstrale–owner of online games company Playfish (acquired by Electronic Arts for $400m in November 2009)–discusses why online game environments are exciting places for economics research (and specifically: “how social factors influence economic decision making”): When economists try to model behavior in the real world, they’re always dealing with imperfect information. “The data is always…
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Information Foraging and The Fold
Even though users are now accustomed to scrolling down web pages, we know that the fold still exists and is important–and how we can design to take advantage of it. In light of this, Jakob Nielsen has conducted research to see what prompts users use to decide whether to scroll or not (the answer: the information…
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Summarising Joel on Software
Now that Joel Spolsky has ‘retired’ from blogging at Joel on Software (in the format the site has been known for, at least), Jan Willem Boer is reading the entire back-catalogue of entries and condensing the knowledge within each essay into a single sentence (or two). The result is a stunning list of tips on…
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Technological Affluence and Happiness (Everything Except TV is Good)
In a study probing the association between ‘technological affluence’ and general well-being it was found that computers, mobile phones and music players increased self-reported levels of happiness, while television ownership decreased it. That is: the ownership of most modern technological goods makes us happy, except for televisions, which make us sad. Using self-reported life satisfaction…