September 2009
“But “Apple’s evil” promoters still insist that Apple sever its integrated model; license its OS; tear down the App Store; let anyone load any app on the iPhone; turn a blind eye to competitors leveraging its iTunes platform without compensation; give up the subsidies from AT&T and jump into bed with CDMA that will be sunset in a year or two; and allow any number of slow, ugly and battery-consuming competing runtimes proliferate on the iPhone. Because not doing so would be…evil.”
—Before Apple introduced the iPhone… « counternotions
“Today at their headquarters in Palo Alto, Facebook’s design team walked through their philosophy and approach to designing for a quarter billion users. In particular, they emphasized the importance of writing code, sharing designs early and often, being involved with a project from start to finish, and not falling in love with your work. Making sure designers are technical enough to write code came up a lot.”
—Functioning Form - Design at Facebook
August 2009
Stark realisation: I no longer depend on Google to find stuff
This is the fundamental problem with Google search: there is no trust. Once upon a time we could trust that the best products would be at the top of Google’s search results for any given term. This is no longer true. In fact we should be especially skeptical of those who come up first in Google results - as they are more than likely to be the ones whose products suck and are gaming the system.
“Dallas’s police department changed the way it lines up its suspects for identification. Instead of the common “six pack” method where the victim looks at six photos at once, detectives (blind to who the suspect is) started showing the photos one at a time, reports the Associated Press. This small change, according to the AP, can lower misidentification rates by 39 percent.”
—To Catch a Criminal, It’s All About Presentation - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
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“It sounds funny,” said Old Lions Chairman Franz-Josef Goebel, “but (the fake bus stop) helps. Our members are 84 years-old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works at all, but the long-term memory is still active. They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home.” The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.
Nursing home staff members then approach them and invite them inside for coffee.
” —How does a German senior center stop alzheimer’s patients from wandering off? « Nudge blog
“The researchers found that customers with a higher BMI were more likely to use larger plates and to face the ever-tempting buffet. They were also less likely to use chopsticks (as opposed to a fork) or have a napkin on their lap. Wansink and Payne concluded that, “small changes in one’s environment may lessen one’s tendency to overeat.”
—Nudges by Chopstick - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com
Play
“The Longest Poem in the World” is composed by aggregating real-time public twitter updates and selecting those that rhyme. It is constantly growing at ~4000 verses / day.”
—The Longest Poem in the World
