Letters Remain

Category: Uncategorized

  • From Evanomics to Stephanomics: The Blog of the BBC’s Economics Editor

    While Evan Davis was economics editor for the BBC he wrote the excellent Evanomics—a blog in which he attempted to “understand the real world, using the tool kit of economics”. When he temporarily stepped down from this role in March 2008 (for a yearlong sabbatical) Evanomics was sorely missed and his replacement, Stephanie Flanders, didn’t…

  • Spaced Repetition and the SuperMemo Learning Algorithm

    Spaced repetition is a learning technique taking advantage of what is known as the ‘forgetting curve’: a predictable pattern of how we forget information. With this in mind, Piotr WoĆșniak developed SuperMemo—an algorithm specifically designed to predict the future state of a person’s memory to schedule information reviews at the optimal time. Wired profiles WoĆșniak, taking a closer look…

  • Blogging the Origin of Species

    2009 marks not only the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth, but the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, a work that needs no introduction. To honour this occasion, evolutionary biologist John Whitfield (who has surprisingly never read Origin) will be blogging Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of…

  • Better Communication

    Many people equate good communication skills with the ability to speak well and listen well. This assumption misses one essential component: two-way communication skills. Primarily written for mentors, this advice on good two-way communication is particularly useful for all. I especially like the Traffic Light Rule of communication: During the first 30 seconds of an…

  • Daily Routines

    Like many others I’ve recently been captivated by the Daily Routines blog—a look at the everyday customs of a variety of successful people. A common motif is that the majority of these people wake early and look after their bodies (typically through exercise); though I feel these recurring elements are common because of something else:…

  • Setting the Bar for Obama

    To ensure we fairly evalute Obama’s presidency, we must ask ourselves now what our expectations are for his term. It’s not as easy as you think, considering that many of America’s current woes should be improved by even a mediocre president. We’ve heard a lot of hyperbole about how Bush was the “Worst. President. Ever.”…

  • 21 Digital Camera Settings, Techniques and Rules

    A compilation of photography tutorials aimed at beginners from Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography School. Some of these tutorials are fairly basic and may not be of great interest to anyone other than newcomers to digital photography. However, all of these tutorials are well-written and worth having a quick browse over, even if you are a…

  • The Anatomy of a Hit Song

    Two great articles on current research into how artists and songs become hits: Group Think looks at research predicting musical hits using “geo-aware query strings” from file-sharing networks such as Gnutella. The geographic location of an emerging artist is the key to predicting their success [
]. “If an artist has the potential to be successful,…

  • Traffic Psychology

    After visiting Paris and being amazed at how drivers navigate the roads surrounding the Arc de Triomphe without accident, Cognitive Daily‘s Dave Munger reviews Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What it Says About Us and looks at the psychology of traffic and its many counter-intuitive rules-of-thumb. Traffic and highway…

  • Is ‘Number Sense’ (or Dyscalculia) Innate?

    Is our ability to count and estimate quantity an innate skill, or is it learned? To answer this question The Economist looks briefly at the history of counting; people who speak languages that have words only for ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘few’ and ‘many’; and dyscalculia—a condition similar to dyslexia where sufferers lack basic ‘number sense’ or…