February 2009
129 posts
The Perception of Stress →
The problem is that stress is perceived to be everywhere and we use the term to interpret everything we feel. It suggests that we have all got this terrible disease but the reality is that we need to be courageous and learn to cope by facing challenges.
So view being stressed as being resilient. Resilient people see pressure as a challenge, trust that they have control and don’t see...
Unintended Consequences →
Unintended consequences are something of an art form in interface design. Small things can affect behavior, not just in your user, but across an entire community. Everything from button placement, to type size, to what features are exposed where, creates an environment that either encourages or discourages certain types of behavior.
Everything is a trade-off. Everything has a consequence.
Recession Indicator →
The latest recession indicator: more people are searching Google for “coupons” than for “Britney Spears.” And it’s not that Britney is getting less popular.
January 2009
142 posts
The Cinematic Orchestra - To Build a Home
The Economics of Giving It Away →
In other cases, the same digital economics have spurred entirely new business models, such as “Freemium,” a free version supported by a paid premium version. This model uses free as a form of marketing to put the product in the hands of the maximum number of people, converting just a small fraction to paying customers. It’s an inversion of the old free sample promotion: Rather...
Printing the New York Times →
Not that it’s anything we think the New York Times Company should do, but we thought it was worth pointing out that it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead.
Are we trying to say the the New York Times should force all its print subscribers onto the Kindle...
Who We Choose →
The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us is known in social science as “homophily”, and it shapes our views, and our lives, in ways we’re barely aware of. It explains why, if you know the political positions of a person’s friends, you can predict their own with near certainty. It’s also why, say, creationists...
Barack Obama's Daily Routine →
He reads several papers, eats breakfast with his family and helps pack his daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, off to school before making the 30-second commute downstairs — a definite perk for a man trying to balance work and family life. He eats dinner with his family, then often returns to work; aides have seen him in the Oval Office as late as 10 p.m., reading briefing papers for the next...
Huffduffer →
A place to collect your favorite audio clips, like a Tumblr for podcast episodes. I love exploring the New and Popular sections.
Via Waxy Links, who describes it as “Give Me Something to Read for audio”.
Pedestrian - Go
Endowment for Newspapers →
[T]here is an option that might not only save newspapers but also make them stronger: Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities. Endowments would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down.
An interesting idea, but I wonder if anyone would be willing to put up the required chunk of money.
Act Like a Beetle →
Darwinian ideology offers this final recessionary tip: “It is not the strongest species that survive, or the most intelligent, but the ones who are most responsive to change.” This precludes Darwinian business people from selecting as role models any animals pictured in the motivational posters sold by office suppliers. These include eagles and bears, which are respectively noble and smart, and...
Interactive Games in Museums →
McGonigal says games make people happy — and she takes happiness very seriously. She’s come up with four elements she believes we all need to be happy: satisfying work, the experience of being good at something, time spent with people we like, and the chance to be a part of something bigger. Games, she says, do all of these things.
She says the shared experience of sharing a fictional...
A Little Dirt is Good For You →
“Children should be allowed to go barefoot in the dirt, play in the dirt, and not have to wash their hands when they come in to eat,” he said. He and Dr. Elliott pointed out that children who grow up on farms and are frequently exposed to worms and other organisms from farm animals are much less likely to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases.
Given what we know about how immune systems...
Games Still Doing Okay →
In this era of uncertainty and powerlessness, games give us some semblance of control - however illusionary. While the rest of your life might be going down the proverbial pan, you can still complete World at War, you can still play a delightful through-ball to Robinho in the 89th minute of the Manchester derby via PES. For a few brief seconds, life isn’t only okay, it’s okay because...
Snow On Mars →
High in the sky above Mars, it is snowing right now. Very gently snowing. The snow does not settle on the rubble-strewn land below - not these days, anyway - but instead vaporises into the thin atmosphere long before it reaches the ground.
Whoa.
Beautiful Accidents →
Beautiful accidents. Unintentional intentions. We can’t plan these mistakes, but wish we could. What seems like disaster, turns into the spark that ignites what we perceive later as “rightly so”.
And it happens all the time when I’m designing. Oops, I dumped a white paint can where color used to be. Wait. That’s nice. It’s become a part of my process. A part I can’t anticipate, or account for,...
What I Learned →
In my more reductive moments, I sometimes think there are only two lessons in life: First you learn how to live and then you learn how to die.
Preserving Digital Archives →
The BBC’s Doomsday Project of 1986, intended to record the state of the nation for posterity, was recorded on two 12inch videodisks. By 2000 it was obsolete, and was rescued only thanks to a specialist team working with a sole surviving laser disk player.
It’s sobering to realize that in just 14 years, a storage format can be so obsolete that there is only one device left that is...
Where Is Your Attention? →
I just read this quote by Blaise Pascal:
“It is not in space that I must seek my human dignity, but in the ordering of my thought. It will do me no good to own land. Through space the universe grasps me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I grasp it.”
What a stunning reminder. I spend so much time and effort to organise the externals of my life. […] But I spend...
How To Escape Your Rat Race →
It amazes me how often people use that phrase: “Find the right life.” Would you walk into your kitchen hoping to find the right fried egg, the right cup of coffee, the right toast? Such things don’t simply appear before you; they arrive because you rummage around, figure out what’s available, and make what you want. (If you’re rich, you can hire a chef and place your...
Don't Be (Quite As) Evil →
Too often, cynicism yields to blanket indictments of “corporate America,” which leaves businesses with few incentives to try harder. What really prevents big companies from investing more is the nagging fear that you, the consumer, won’t notice. Or what’s worse, that even if you do, you’ll never reward them for it.
What Women Want →
Studies have found that a big reason professional women drop out of the workforce is not that they don’t want to work, but rather that there is insufficient flexibility in their jobs—partly because their male colleagues and bosses have such “supportive” wives that they don’t need flexibility.
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”
– Jorge Luis Borges (via Zen Habits)
Why People Procrastinate →
People act in a timely way when given concrete tasks but dawdle when they view them in abstract terms.
As the team report in Psychological Science, in all three studies, those who were presented with concrete tasks and information responded more promptly than did those who were asked to think in an abstract way. Moreover, almost all the students who had been prompted to think in concrete terms...
The Secrecy - In Deep
