- The Paradox of Choice features Barry Schwartz in a provocative TED Talk with a different view on social psychology - too much consumer choice makes us unhappy. Not just when you’re buying salad dressing; Schwartz looks at some wider sociological impacts of increased choice.
the paradox of choice. great video by ted schwartz
via freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/
But why should we be the sole beneficiaries of such blegs? Surely our readers, in addition to providing a great reservoir of diverse knowledge, also have bleg requests of their own.
Freakonomics blog nutzen, um meine digg arbeit und quotevault zu vermarkten
he Exploit: A Theory of Networks, Galloway and Thacker. This is currently one of my favorite books on network culture. Complex, yet concise Thacker and Galloway take their questioning further than most, past the simple rhetoric of “networks yeah!” that inform many works.
The fact is that climate change, if it were caused by gay sex, or caused by the practice of eating puppies, millions of Americans would right now be massing on the street insisting that the administration do something about it.
Dan Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness) on the task of social psychology to explain why people don't get as actively outraged over acid rain as other issues.
I'd wager that the main problem here is that there's no easy target to blaim. We ourselves are to blaim in terms of climate change. We can't protest against our own actions. People need easy targets to protest against.
via www.nytimes.com/
His statistical approach has led to what he says is a radically new interpretation of 20th-century art, one he is certain art historians will hate. It is based in part on how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks.
“Quantification has been almost totally absent from art history,” he said. “Art historians hate markets.”
I like this idea.
The New York Times has been on a Twitter tear lately. They've got a good collection of accounts that make for some nice variety. Some of the accounts are written straight-up by writers, editors, and bloggers at the Times and others deliver just the Section Headlines.
NY Times twitters too.
if you can't help me why are you on google when I type in help with the internet? If you don't want to help people when they need it maybe you shouldn't be on google!"
from emails send to slashdot
via www.youtube.com/
A quick and plain English intro the micro-blogging service Twitter.
Great introduction to Twitter
The good news for most people is that we're taking measures to reduce junk in the system—and it's working.
Twitter implementiert Methoden um Spam zu reduzieren, Junk auszufiltern.
Follow spam is the act of following mass numbers of people, not because you're actually interested in their tweets, but simply to gain attention, get views of your profile (and possibly clicks on URLs therein), or (ideally) to get followed back.
Wie funktioniert 'Follow Spam' bei Twitter.
Managers elsewhere boast about how little time they waste in meetings; Apple is big on them and proud of it. “The historical way of developing products just doesn’t work when you’re as ambitious as we are,” says Ive, an affable, bearlike Brit. “When the challenges are that complex, you have to develop a product in a more collaborative, integrated way.”
This comparison rings a bell in my head
Legend has it that, on his deathbed, Orson Welles exhorted his loved ones to make sure that Ted Turner — who, at the time, was determined to colorize every black-and-white movie in his library — kept his “goddamn crayons” off of “Citizen Kane.”
But who will stop George Lucas from destroying the legacy of George Lucas?
Star Wars - The Clone Wars. Regarding George Lucas destroying the history of Star Wars, ever more with every sequel.
via www.plosone.org/
imilar brain regions are involved when we imagine, observe and execute an action. Is the same true for emotions? Here, the same subjects were scanned while they (a) experience, (b) view someone else experiencing and (c) imagine experiencing gustatory emotions (through script-driven imagery). Capitalizing on the fact that disgust is repeatedly inducible within the scanner environment, we scanned the same participants while they (a) view actors taste the content of a cup and look disgusted (b) tasted unpleasant bitter liquids to induce disgust, and (c) read and imagine scenarios involving disgust and their neutral counterparts
Bücher und Filme haben ähnliche Wirkungen: But now a new neuroscience study reveals that books control people's minds and emotions in exactly the same way television do
Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo, the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual discipline to go from concept to product.
Concept products are like essays, musings in 3D. They are incomplete promises.
via technology.timesonline.co.uk/
A techno-utopian by nature, MIT is his natural home. And it was at MIT in 1968 that he met Seymour Papert. Papert had worked with the great educational theorist Jean Piaget. From Piaget’s work, Papert had developed the learning theory of constructionism. Put simply, this means that children learn most effectively when they are doing things rather than just sitting and listening. Negroponte became an enthusiastic constructionist. It synched with his world-transforming view of technology. Computers were to be the perfect constructionist tool, allowing children to discover and make things on their own. If Negroponte is the father of the XO, Papert is its grandfather.
Lerntheorie, aktivität
If you look at the history of software development, all the interesting things that have been built have been built by two people. It is the nature of software technology.
Google's Eric Schmidt on Software Development.
Real artists ship, dabblers create concept products
Pretenders don’t quite understand that design is born of constraints. Real-life constraints, be they tangible or cognitive: Battery-life impacts every other aspect of the iPhone design — hardware and software alike. Screen resolution affects font, icon and UI design. The thickness of a fingertip limits direct, gestural manipulation of on-screen objects. Lack of a physical keyboard and WIMP controls create an unfamiliar mental map of the device. The iPhone design is a bet that solutions to constraints like these can be seamlessly molded into a unified product that will sell. Not a concept. Not a vision. A product that sells.
why hasn’t Apple, the most innovative and visionary company in computing, produced a single concept product or vision in over a decade? Because, to paraphrase Jobs, real artists ship.
None
via technology.timesonline.co.uk/
But the non-profit decision was important because it provided clarity of purpose – first, a head of state will talk to you because it’s about children and learning and not profit and, secondly, the best people will work for you for zero salary.
Negroponte on why being a non-profit was the right decision.