December 2009
67 posts
Marginal Revolution: Today's music model: meet the... →
Someone teleported through time from the early 1950s to 2009 would find a music business curiously similar to the landscape of 60 years ago. Few specialty record outlets. Department stores dominating…
Refusing to Use the Internet - WSJ.com →
But moving the focus of one’s social life online may also make it less diverse, as people tend to seek out shared interests, friends and experiences online. Also unclear is whether online contact…
Free yourself from oppression by technology -... →
I study the psychology of technology, and it seems to me that we are sleepwalking into a world where technology is severely affecting our well-being. Technology can be hugely useful in the fast lane…
Culture & Society Articles | GIS Mapping Shows... →
The Cedar Grove Institute has been using maps to exhibit patterns of municipal discrimination against low-income and minority communities for almost a decade. The patterns, rooted in the days when…
How You Lowered Your Information Standards - Tom... →
As information grows in quantity, consumers of it are willing to accept lower quality. I call this willingness satisficing — being satisfied with sacrificing quality.
Restaurants Use Menu Psychology to Entice Diners -... →
So can price formats that end in the numeral 9, as in $9.99, which tend to signify value but not quality, menu consultants and researchers say.
“If admen had souls, many would probably trade them for an opportunity every...”
– Man, people really hate us. Never forget that.
Source: NYT
Fight infection by disturbing how bacteria... →
Researchers from the University of Groningen have clarified the structure of an enzyme that disturbs the communication processes between bacteria. By doing so they have laid the foundations for a new…
Autumn of the Republic? | Miller-McCune Online... →
The illiterate, semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present.
News Analysis - In Senate Health Vote, a New... →
The votes also marked something else: the culmination of more than a generation of partisan polarization of the American political system, and a precipitous decline in collegiality and collaboration…
Reconsidering the Revival of Cassette Tape Culture... →
It would be difficult for me to contest the aesthetic value of a vinyl record over a compact disc, but in any case the motivation seems transparent enough: the novel qualities of one physical product…
Readers by Author « Lauren Leto →
Stereotyping People by Their Favorite Author
Essay - Steal These Books - NYTimes.com →
Fiction is the most commonly poached genre at St. Mark’s Bookshop in the East Village of Manhattan; the titles that continually disappear are moved to the X-Case, safely ensconced behind the counter….
Urbanist's Economic Prescription Might Make Good... →
“Jacobs pointed out that to boost an area’s economy, the normal plan is to bring in a branch of some big business. But then you have an industry without roots. They’re not using local accountants and…
Find & Analyze Data →
ICPSR offers more than 500,000 digital files containing social science research data. Disciplines represented include political science, sociology, demography, economics, history, gerontology,…
"Curious?" by Todd Kashdan | Miller-McCune Online... →
“Our curiosity and threat detection systems evolved together, and they function to ensure optimal decisions are made in an unpredictable, uncertain world,” he writes. “We are all motivated by the…
Handwriting Is History | Miller-McCune Online... →
But handwriting is bound up with a host of associations and connotations that propel it beyond simply a fine-motor skill. We connect it to personal identity (handwriting signals something unique…
New Ratings System for Radio Gives Guilty... →
Now, with a year of data from the early converts, researchers are finding intriguing patterns. Men had been thought to make up 34.7 percent of the soft-rock audience, according to Arbitron Radio…
Do Artists Live By a Different Moral Code? Maybe.... →
Great artists touch us in deep places, expressing feelings that in some cases we didn’t even realize we had. This creates a sort of fusion with their fans, an intense sense of identification that…
What is the Color of Sin? | Miller-McCune Online... →
To understand why abstract concepts like these might be associated with colors at all requires an understanding of how the mind processes abstract concepts. Almost 30 years ago, George Lakoff and…
San Francisco News - The Worst-Run Big City in the... →
San Francisco can’t point to progress on many of the social issues it spends liberally to tackle — and no one is made to answer when the city comes up short.
Guide to World Domination — AIM Coho, Salmon &... →
TheGreatHatsby is a bot that scoops LiveJournal account screen names, and randomly matches the users up. The insidious thing is that it’s done in such a way that each participant believes the other…
WE ARE 1976 - Design Shop • Gallery • Workshop •... →
There’s a design revolution going on in Dallas, and it’s all happening right here in our shop.
Come and see for yourself and take home a wonderful gift for someone or a fun little goody
for yourself….
Selling Wants to buy Haves →
Each painting shows one thing we want, and sells for the price of the real item. So you can buy A Slice of Pepperoni for $3.00 or Dinner at Nobu for $152.00. When the painting sells we use the money…
WoW, The Virtual And The Real - Ta-Nehisi Coates →
This time I was crying over someone I had met in a game. Was I crazy? The temptation is to say yes. But it’s worth remembering that, in the long sweep of history, we aren’t that far removed from the…
Tea party protesters' last-ditch effort to derail... →
Meanwhile, tea partiers are discovering their ability to drive policy. They have no qualms about taking credit for derailing health care reform. Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity,…
Why kids self-destruct with cell phones and... →
The bar for becoming a cyber-bully, or even a cyber-bully’s accomplice, is much lower than the bar for becoming an actual bully. To torment a girl with a nude photo via sexting, you don’t have to…
Don't Make My Mom Your Marketing Director - Small... →
The problem here is neurological science. Isn’t it common knowledge that consumers are motivated more by emotion than reason? Isn’t that why brands exist? And, if we can agree that brands work on an…
Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail →
One, I avoid searching for things that are likely to score high in Google keyword searches. Appliances are an example, but there are many more, most of which I use mechanisms other than broad search….
Understanding Obamacare—By Luke Mitchell (Harper's... →
The health-care industry has captured the regulatory process, and it has used that capture to eliminate any real competition, whether from the government, in the form of a single-payer system, or…
Why do rappers hold their guns sideways? - By... →
To look Hollywood, of course. Journalists and gun experts point to the 1993 Hughes brothers film Menace II Society, which depicts the side grip in its opening scene, as the movie that popularized the…
The Moguls’ New Clothes - The Atlantic (October... →
Executives, investors, analysts, and the press seem to agree that the primary imperatives are to accelerate growth, diversify internationally, invest in content, and exploit digital convergence….
Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN... →
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the…
The downside of beauty : Gene Expression →
The key prediction of this theoretical cost: that antagonistic male persistence is directed toward, and harms, intrinsically higher-fitness females more than it does intrinsically lower-fitness…
Why We Travel : The Frontal Cortex →
The larger lesson, though, is that our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends alot of time and energy choosing…
Pregnant women develop emotion-reading superpowers... →
RAGING hormones during pregnancy prompt mood swings, but may also lead to a heightened ability to recognise threatening or aggressive facesMovie Camera. This may have evolved because it makes future…
January 2010: Kurt Andersen on the Large Hadron... →
The L.H.C. is not merely the world’s largest particle accelerator but the largest machine ever built. At the center of just one of the four main experimental stations installed around its…
Amazon.com: Identity Economics: How Our Identities... →
The Medium Is No Longer The Message, . . . You Are →
Agencies will need to learn how to produce low bandwidth advertising content that can be shared and distributed in lots of different ways by lots of different social groups, all the while preserving…
The Technium: Penny Thoughts on the Technium →
We turned ourselves into part of the technium because we cannot live as a species. We cannot live without technology. We’ve invented ourselves. And it’s our greatest invention so far.
The Ninth Annual Year in Ideas - Magazine -... →
Once again, The Times Magazine looks back on the past year from our favored perch: ideas. Like a magpie building its nest, we have hunted eclectically, though not without discrimination, for…
Interview | Danah Boyd: 'People looked at me like... →
“As adults, by and large, we think of the home as a very private space – it’s private because we have control over it. The thing is, for young people it’s not a private space – they have no control….
Facebook (and systems biologists) take note:... →
They applied their mathematical and computational framework to five different networks, ranging from a group of dolphins to a network of neurons, and found one method indeed could reliably analyze…
alex dragulescu :: Data Portraits: Lexigraphs I →
Lexigraphs I is the first visualization from the Data Portraits series. Micro-blog authors use mobile text messaging or web interfaces to post short answers to the question What are you doing?,…