Letters Remain

  • The Scientific Journalism Formula

    In a near-perfect parody of science reporting in the popular press, Martin Robbins, The Lay Scientist, created “a news website article about a scientific paper“.

    In the standfirst I will make a fairly obvious pun about the subject matter before posing an inane question I have no intention of really answering: is this an important scientific finding? […]

    This is a sub-heading that gives the impression I am about to add useful context. […]

    To pad out this section I will include a variety of inane facts about the subject of the research that I gathered by Googling the topic and reading the Wikipedia article that appeared as the first link.

    I will preface them with “it is believed” or “scientists think” to avoid giving the impression of passing any sort of personal judgement on even the most inane facts.

    You get the idea, I’m sure, but it’s well worth looking at the full piece as the spoof also acts as a guide to why we should avoid clichéd, formulaic writing: it quickly gets boring and predictable.

    In a follow-up to his parody, Robbins looks at why this tired formula has come into play and what can be done about it.

    via Kottke

    Also: Are stories with loaded-question headlines popular?

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Science Journalism’s Manifesto for the Simple Scribe

    “To make somebody read it”. That is the only reason for writing, according to the renowned Guardian editor Tim Radford, author of the “manifesto for the simple scribe”.

    This manifesto, previously distributed to editors at Elsevier and Nature, consists of twenty-five writing tips that collectively tell a science writer all they need to know to write consistently good copy.

    Many, if not all, of Radford’s tips are relevant to writing styles other than science journalism. Some favourite quotes:

    You are not writing to impress the scientist you have just interviewed, nor the professor who got you through your degree, nor the editor who foolishly turned you down, or the rather dishy person you just met at a party and told you were a writer. Or even your mother. You are writing to impress someone hanging from a strap in the tube between Parson’s Green and Putney, who will stop reading in a fifth of a second, given a chance.

    No one will ever complain because you have made something too easy to understand.

    If in doubt, assume the reader knows nothing. However, never make the mistake of assuming that the reader is stupid. The classic error in journalism is to overestimate what the reader knows and underestimate the reader’s intelligence.

    Remember that people will always respond to something close to them. Concerned citizens of south London should care more about economic reform in Surinam than about Millwall’s fate on Saturday, but mostly they don’t. Accept it.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Rhetorical Devices to Incite Timely Applause

    Any delay between the end of a speech and the audience’s applause can send strong negative signals to those watching and listening. In order to prevent this awkwardness, there are rhetorical tricks we can implement that trigger applause or laughter at appropriate moments.

    Speechwriter and political speech advisor Max Atkinson, in a critique of UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s speaking style, offers some rhetorical devices for preventing delayed applause.

    The point about delayed applause is that, when the script and delivery are working well together, it should happen within a split second of the speaker finishing a sentence.

    That’s why contrasts and three-part lists are so effective, because they project a clear completion point where everyone knows in advance where the finish line is and that it’s now their turn to respond […]

    Better still is to get the audience to start applauding early, because it gives the impression that they’re so enthusiastic and eager to show their agreement that they can’t wait – and the speaker ends up having to compete to make himself heard above the rising tide of popular acclaim.

    One way to do that is to use a three part list, in which the third item is longer than the first two.

    via @TimHarford

    Back in 2004, a Max Atkinson-inspired BBC article offers some more persuasive devices.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Non-Design Skills Needed by Designers

    Like in many other specialised fields, to become a great designer one must master or be acquainted with many non-design skills.

    User interface designer Aza Raskin — ex-Creative Lead at Firefox and son of Jef — offers up this list of what he believes to be most important to do and master in order to become a designer:

    1. The Hardest Part of Software is Culture. Get a Book on Negotiation. If you cannot communicate, you will fail. If you cannot convince, you will fail. If you cannot listen, you will fail. […] To design is to inspire participation. Unless we can let our ideas become other people’s ideas—get others to want to champion design as their own—we will not be successful. […] The hardest part of your job isn’t being creative or brilliant; it’s communicating and culture.
    2. Know Cognitive Psychology. You are designing for people; you need to be well versed in the abilities and frailties of the human mind. […] Interface design is as much a science as it is an art. Know the science, else you are walking blindly through a minefield of harmful design.
    3. Learn to Program, Even if Poorly. Thucydides wrote, “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.” The optimal society is one that mixes scholar-warriors and warrior-scholars. The same is true for companies that schism their designers and engineers.
    4. Create, Create, Create. You’ll need thousands of hours of practice to rise to the top of your game. […] If you don’t have dozens of little projects you’ve created, learned from, and even discarded, you are doing it wrong.
    5. Study Graphic Design. Looks affect usability. Looks are just one aspect of designing for emotional beings—you need to think about the whole sensory experience of an object, from sound to touch—but looks are often the most immediately apparent.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Login Is Not a Verb

    We do not signup, login or checkout when we buy products online. We do not startup, shutdown or backup our computers. The reason: these words, primarily used in computing contexts, are not verbs.

    These are just some of the “bad bad verbs” featured on a site dedicated to “informing people about words that are not verbs, even though people misuse them that way”. From what I can gather, this all started with loginisnotaverb.com:

    Despite what many people — mostly in the computer field — think, “login” is not a verb. It’s simply not. Whether or not “login” is a word at all may spark a debate in some circles, but assuming it is then it may act as many parts of speech, but not as a verb.

    And so it goes with all of these non-verbs:

    • backup
    • carryout
    • checkout
    • cutover
    • cutoff
    • failover
    • login
    • logoff
    • logon
    • logout
    • lockdown
    • pickup
    • setup
    • shutdown
    • shutoff
    • signin
    • signoff
    • signout
    • signup
    • startup

    Of course, there’s the MeFi and HN threads to accompany your reading.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Art in 140 Characters

    Is it possible to encode and compress an image to such a degree that the raw data can fit in a single Twitter message (140 characters) that, when decoded again, is still recognisable? The answer to the questions is a resounding Yes, as confirmed by a coding challenge inspired by Mario Klingemann’s attempt to compress and encode the Mona Lisa down to 140 characters.

    Klingemann’s attempt, dubbed the MonaTweeta II, is definitely an image recognisable as the Mona Lisa, but it must be said that some of the entries to the main coding challenge are truly breathtaking.

    The winning tweet (with a character to spare):

    咏璘驞凄脒鵚据蛥鸂拗朐朖辿韩瀦魷歪痫栘璯緍脲蕜抱揎頻蓼債鑡嗞靊寞柮嚛嚵籥聚隤慛絖銓馿渫櫰矍昀鰛掾撄粂敽牙稉擎蔍螎葙峬覧絀蹔抆惫冧笻哜搀澐芯譶辍澮垝黟偞媄童竽梀韠镰猳閺狌而羶喙伆杇婣唆鐤諽鷍鴞駫搶毤埙誖萜愿旖鞰萗勹鈱哳垬濅鬒秀瞛洆认気狋異闥籴珵仾氙熜謋繴茴晋髭杍嚖熥勳縿餅珝爸擸萿

    via @spolsky

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Avoid Boring Writing: Tips (to Avoid) from Scientific Articles

    Most scientific papers consist of “predictable, stilted structure and language”, leading to consistently boring journal articles. Kaj Sand-Jensen, writing in the ecology journal Oikos, decided to investigate this problem and concluded his research by providing a set of recommendations for how to write consistently boring scientific articles (pdf):

    • Avoid focus
    • Avoid originality and personality
    • Write l o n g contributions
    • Remove most implications and every speculation
    • Leave out illustrations, particularly good ones
    • Omit necessary steps of reasoning
    • Use many abbreviations and technical terms
    • Suppress humor and flowery language
    • Degrade species and biology to statistical elements
    • Quote numerous papers for self-evident statements

    Even though this was originally published in an ecology journal, you can’t fail to see how these recommendations apply to almost every other piece of written work.

    via @Falijn

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Narratives for Selling Premium Goods: The Grey Goose Story

    People want to pay more in order to own luxury goods, but you need to give them a reason to do so. That excuse? A compelling story.

    One man that subscribed to this idea was Sydney Frank, as is evident from the strategy he developed for Grey Goose: the ‘superpremium’ vodka that Barcardi bought for $2 billion in cash in what became the largest ever single brand sale.

    In a 2005 New York article published shortly before his death, you can read all about Sydney Frank’s marketing/branding strategy and the compeling story of Grey Goose vodka. This excerpt follows Frank’s decision to have Grey Goose distilled in France:

    But why France? Doesn’t vodka come from Russia, or perhaps, in a pinch, Scandinavia? “People are always looking for something new,” says Frank. It’s all about brand differentiation. If you’re going to charge twice as much for a vodka, you need to give people a reason.

    “Nietzsche explains that human beings are looking for the ‘why’ in their lives, […] we refer to this ‘why’ as ‘the Great Story.’ The Great Story must be enticing, memorable, easily repeatable, and about what you want your brand to be about.”

    For Grey Goose, the brand was about unrivaled quality. Grey Goose’s Great Story hinged on the following key points: It comes from France, where all the best luxury products come from. It’s not another rough-hewn Russian vodka—it’s a masterpiece crafted by French vodka artisans.

    It uses water from pristine French springs, filtered through Champagne limestone.

    It’s got a distinctive, carefully designed bottle, with smoked glass and a silhouette of flying geese. It looks fantastic up behind the bar, the way it catches the light […] It sure looks expensive.

    It was shipped in wood crates, like a fine wine, not in cardboard boxes like Joe Schmo’s vodka. This catches the bartender’s eye and reinforces the aura of quality. Never forget the influence of the bartender. […]

    And now the most important piece of the story—the twist that brings it all together: Grey Goose costs way more than other vodkas. Waaaaaaay more. So it must be the best.

    This description of Grey Goose’s Great Story perfectly captures the essence of the article.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Virtues of Rationality

    The name Eliezer Yudkowsky immediately conjours in my mind the word rationality (thanks to his addictive piece of fan fiction, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality). On a recent visit to his site, this connection has now be strengthened after I saw his excellent essay on the twelve virtues of rationality:

    1. Curiosity: A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth.
    2. Relinquishment: Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs.
    3. Lightness: Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can.
    4. Evenness: You are not a hypothesis, you are the judge. Therefore do not seek to argue for one side or another.
    5. Argument: In argument strive for exact honesty, for the sake of others and also yourself […]Do not think that fairness to all sides means balancing yourself evenly between positions; truth is not handed out in equal portions before the start of a debate.
    6. Empiricism: Always know which difference of experience you argue about.
    7. Simplicity: When you profess a huge belief with many details, each additional detail is another chance for the belief to be wrong.
    8. Humility: To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors.
    9. Perfectionism: The more errors you correct in yourself, the more you notice.
    10. Precision: More can be said about a single apple than about all the apples in the world. The narrowest statements slice deepest.
    11. Scholarship: Each field that you consume makes you larger.
    12. The Void

    I believe that the ninth virtue, perfectionism, is the most elegant and I implore you to read the full essay if only to read that description in full (and, I guess, to discover what The Void is). However the eleventh virtue of rationality, scholarship, almost perfectly describes why I write here and may go some way to explaining my diverse reading habits:

    Study many sciences and absorb their power as your own. Each field that you consume makes you larger. If you swallow enough sciences the gaps between them will diminish and your knowledge will become a unified whole. If you are gluttonous you will become vaster than mountains. It is especially important to eat math and science which impinges upon rationality: Evolutionary psychology, heuristics and biases, social psychology, probability theory, decision theory. But these cannot be the only fields you study. The Art must have a purpose other than itself, or it collapses into infinite recursion.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • PlentyofFish and Unusability

    In an early 2009 profile of Markus Frind–the founder and CEO of the online dating website PlentyofFish—Inc. briefly touched on the topic of the site’s famously bad user interface, with Frind explaining why he believes that, sometimes, user experience should take a back seat as a better experience isn’t always linked to greater profits.

    Plenty of Fish is a designer’s nightmare; at once minimalist and inelegant, it looks like something your nephew could have made in an afternoon. There’s the color scheme that seems cribbed from a high school yearbook and the curious fondness for bold text and CAPITAL LETTERS. When searching for a prospective mate, one is inundated with pictures that are not cropped or properly resized. Instead, headshots are either comically squished or creepily elongated, a carnivalesque effect that makes it difficult to quickly size up potential mates.

    Frind is aware of his site’s flaws but isn’t eager to fix them. “There’s no point in making trivial adjustments,” he says. Frind’s approach — and the reason he spends so little time actually working — is to do no harm. This has two virtues: First, you can’t waste money if you are not doing anything. And second, on a site this big and this complex, it is impossible to predict how even the smallest changes might affect the bottom line. Fixing the wonky images, for instance, might actually hurt Plenty of Fish. Right now, users are compelled to click on people’s profiles in order to get to the next screen and view proper headshots. That causes people to view more profiles and allows Frind, who gets paid by the page view, to serve more ads.

    This wonky rationalisation reminds me of Andrew Chen’s insightful reponse to the Quora question, How did MySpace, with a smart team of people, do such a bad UI/UX job with the new design?

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    Lloyd Morgan