Letters Remain

  • Marriage, Children, and Surnames

    In most countries around the world it is convention that the wife take the husband’s surname at marriage. It is equally conventional for a child to then also take this same name. Evolutionary psychology is the reason behind this phenomenon, as discussed briefly in the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters.

    One of the author’s reflects further on this idea in a number of posts looking at why wives and children take their husband/father’s last name.

    Nature may or may not help the father convince himself of his paternity by making the baby (kind of) resemble the father rather than the mother. However, […] people (especially maternal kin) appear to help, by telling the father that the baby resembles him, regardless of whether it does or not. […] After all, the maternal kin, unlike the paternal kin, have no interest in finding out the truth. They know that the baby is genetically related to the mother for sure – there is no such thing as maternity uncertainty – and all they want is to make sure that the father is convinced of his paternity enough to invest in the offspring, regardless of whether or not he is the actual genetic father.

    The convention of giving the child the father’s last name is another means for the mother and her kin to convince the father of his paternity.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Life Advice

    Not from a life coach, personal development guru, or some other self-professed expert on life, but from those whose advice I think it’s actually worth paying attention to: those older than you.

    First is Life Advice From Old People (via Kottke)–a video blog containing nothing but interviews with a wide range of ‘old’ people, including Farmer Tom, Jon Voight and Errol Morris.

    Some more colourful advice comes from The Musty Man (via Ben Casnocha) who, on his 30th birthday, decided to offer some no-nonsense advice to those living in their 20’s. The best of the Musty Man’s advice I’ve read is on relationships, although it’s all great.

    As is the standard at MeFi, the advice offered to this recent graduate is more functional and eminently useful. This is one piece of advice I subscribe to wholeheartedly:

    Make your bed every day — as soon as you get up. Something about that one small thing sets the tone for the rest of the day; are you going to be lazy, or are you going to get something done?

    More concisely, this list of 30 pieces of advice for young men from an old man is fairly good, especially the last item:

    97% of all advice is worthless. Take what you can use, and trash the rest.

    As for advice from meta-careerists; Ben Casnocha’s thoughts mirror mine perfectly:

    The best advice on networking will come from someone who is not a professional networker. The best advice on entrepreneurship will come someone whose entrepreneurship is not selling books and workshops about entrepreneurship. Writers who write about anything other than writing for a living usually have the best advice on writing.

    Like many others in my situation (someone attempting to figure out the direction they want their life to go in) I love hearing advice from a diverse range of people. If you have some, or even just a choice quote, please offer it up in the comments. I would appreciate it more than you can imagine.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Macbeth Effect and Moral Colours

    The Macbeth effect is the tendency for people who have acted or thought in an immoral or unethical manner to want to clean themselves physically as a kind of surrogate for actual moral cleansing.

    Researchers looking at this effect wondered about other interesting characteristics of moral psychology which led them to devising a test for implicit links between different colours and morality. For example, the colour black is commonly connected with evil and white with good, and the researchers wondered whether this would present itself. It did:

    Psychologists have long known that if people are presented with, say, the word “blue” printed in a blue font, they will be able to state the colour of the font much faster than if the word “red” is printed in the same blue font.

    The study conducted by Mr Sherman and Dr Clore presented words of moral goodness, like “virtuous” and “honesty”, and of badness, like “cheat” and “sin”, in either black or white fonts on a computer screen. As they report in Psychological Science, the two researchers found that when “good” words were presented in black it took the participants about 510 milliseconds to state the colour of the word. When these same words were presented in white it took roughly 480 milliseconds—a significant difference. A similar effect was seen with “bad” words. Responding to white ones took around 525 milliseconds, whereas black ones needed only about 500. These results are remarkably similar to those found when words are printed in colours that clash with their meaning.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Entrepreneurial Reads and Annual Reads

    I’m a real sucker for book lists.

    Entrepreneurial Reads is a wiki list of suggested reading for entrepreneurs. The list contains books written specifically for entrepreneurs (e.g. The E-Myth Revisited) in addition to much fiction containing entrepreneurial lessons (e.g. The Fountainhead).

    That link came via What Books Are Worth Reading Once Per Year?–a post by Alex Mann compiling the answers he received when he asked that very question. Answers included:

    • Success Principles by Jack Canfield
    • The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom
    • The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle
    • Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
    • This Is Water by David Foster Wallace (the book of Wallace’s 2005 Commencement Speech at Kenyon College)
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Kodak and Brand Naming

    While reading about the history of the Eastman Kodak Company (more commonly known just as Kodak) I came across this titbit about the Kodak name which seemed like sound advice for naming a product or brand:

    The letter “K” had been a favorite of Eastman’s, he is quoted as saying, “it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter”. He and his mother devised the name Kodak with an anagram set. He said that there were three principal concepts he used in creating the name: it should be short, one cannot mispronounce it, and it could not resemble anything or be associated with anything but Kodak.

    To reiterate:

    • Short.
    • Cannot be mispronounced.
    • Could not resemble anything or be associated with anything but your brand.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Computing and the Climate

    In what appears to be a bit of an advertisement for climateprediction.net–a distributed computing project to test the accuracy of various computer models of climate change–The Economist looks at the impact of computing on the environment; specifically carbon dioxide emissions.

    According to a report published by the Climate Group, a think-tank based in London, computers, printers, mobile phones and the widgets that accompany them account for the emission of 830m tonnes of carbon dioxide around the world in 2007. That is about 2% of the estimated total of emissions from human activity. And that is the same as the aviation industry’s contribution. According to the report, about a quarter of the emissions in question are generated by the manufacture of computers and so forth. The rest come from their use.

    via More Intelligent Life

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Information Gaps and Knowledge Rewards

    Starting with two great examples of marketing through curiosity (the Hot Wheels mystery car and California Pizza Kitchen’s Don’t Open It thank you card), Stephen Anderson looks at how you can use ‘information gaps’ to drive curiosity and then interaction with your customers.

    Information can be presented in a manner that is straightforward or curious. If we opt for the latter, we are guaranteed not only attention, but likely higher engagement as well—curiosity demands we know more! What was known information (a simple coupon or another toy car option) that might have been ignored has been converted into something unknown, something mysterious, something that demands resolution.

    The article goes on to discuss George Loewenstein and his information-gap theory before offering some advice on inciting curiosity in your product:

    If you want to make someone curious, make them aware of something they don’t know. Find that information you can use to tease people. Chances are, you’re either withholding all the specific information or giving it all away. To get attention and engage the senses, look for ways to turn these direct messages into a quest to be completed.

    It’s no surprise that curiosity can be a powerful tool, as some recent research is suggesting that information is as much a reward as thirst, neurologically speaking.

    Dopamine neurons are thought to be involved in learning about rewards – by adjusting the connections between other neurons, they “teach” the brain to seek basic rewards like food and water. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka think that these neurons also teach the brain to seek out information so that their activity becomes a sort of “common currency” that governs both basic needs and a quest for knowledge.

    via @bfchirpy

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Text as UI (On Twitter)

    Putting me in mind of Dustin Curtis’ multivariate ‘split’ testing to increase click-through rates to his Twitter profile (previously), Jakob Nielsen discusses his iterative design process for a Twitter message advertising his latest usability conference.

    The message went from,

    Announcing LAS VEGAS and BERLIN as the venues for our biggest usability conference of the year http://bit.ly/UsabilityWeek

    to,

    LAS VEGAS (October) and BERLIN (November): venues for our biggest usability conference ever http://bit.ly/UsabilityWeek

    I am by no means a high-output Twitter user and I dislike ‘How to Twitter’ articles with a passion. Nielsen’s latest I quite like because he notes that, in the case of Twitter and other micro-blogging services, text is a form of UI in itself.

    It’s a common mistake to think that only full-fledged graphical user interfaces count as interaction design and deserve usability attention. As our earlier research has shown, URLs and email both contribute strongly to the Internet user experience and thus require close attention to usability to enhance the profitability of a company’s Internet efforts.

    The shorter it is, the more important it is to design text for usability.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • All About Placebo

    Wired has published what must be one of the most comprehensive articles looking at the phenomenon of the placebo effect.

    From its humble beginnings in WWII with anesthetist Henry Beecher to the placebo’s transition from being treated as a purely psychological trait to a physiological one; there’s some great material here.

    Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

    It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

    The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the [pharmaceutical] industry into crisis. The stakes could hardly be higher. In today’s economy, the fate of a long-established company can hang on the outcome of a handful of tests.

    Related: Placebo in History.

    via @jonahlehrer

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • A Guide to Speed Reading

    The PX Project is a single 3-hour “cognitive experiment” designed to increase your reading speed. Average increases using the technique are apparently in the region of 386%. The technique seems to involve three steps:

    • Minimize the number and duration of fixations per line.
    • Eliminate regression and back-skipping.
    • Use conditioning drills to increase horizontal peripheral vision span and the number of words registered per fixation.

    Derren Brown has embedded a short video discussing the technique (3m 38s) on his site.

    When thinking of speed reading my first reaction is not dissimilar to Felix Salmon’s:

    When you read fast and don’t subvocalize, do you start to miss the art of constructing or even just appreciating beautiful sentences? Would a speed reader, for instance, ever be able to write a book like [Nicholson Baker’s] U&I?

    But this quote from the article made me realise that even if you can speed read, you don’t have to speed read:

    Final recommendations: If used for study, it is recommended that you not read 3 assignments in the time it would take you to read one, but rather, read the same assignment 3 times for exposure and recall improvement, depending on relevancy to testing.

    I would go one further and say; If the book is to be read for pleasure, don’t speed read. For all other instances, the above applies.

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    Lloyd Morgan