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Month

May 2010

“The average payroll rank for NBA playoff teams was 11.4 in 09-10.
The average payroll rank for MLB playoff teams was 8.4 in 2009.
The average payroll rank for NFL playoff teams was 15.8 in 2009.”
—RealGM: From The Rafters - Spending Leads To Winning
May 27, 2010
The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains → wired.com

chrisbowler:

Author Nicholas Carr in an article in Wired.

On the Net, we face many information faucets, all going full blast. Our little thimble overflows as we rush from tap to tap. We transfer only a small jumble of drops from different faucets, not a continuous, coherent stream.

A fascinating — and frightening — reinforcement of what we are all coming to know. The article focuses on web pages littered with links, images, and video, but I would assume that computers with a multitude of applications has a similar affect on our work.

And so we ask the Internet to keep interrupting us in ever more varied ways. We willingly accept the loss of concentration and focus, the fragmentation of our attention, and the thinning of our thoughts in return for the wealth of compelling, or at least diverting, information we receive. We rarely stop to think that it might actually make more sense just to tune it all out.

Man, that really hits home.

May 27, 201053 notes
“Preferred music was found to significantly increase tolerance and perceived control over the painful stimulus and to decrease anxiety compared with both the visual distraction and silence conditions. Pain intensity rating was decreased by music listening when compared with silence. During the music condition, frequent listening to the chosen piece in everyday life was found to negatively correlate with anxiety level, and extent of knowledge of the lyrics further positively correlated with tolerance of the stimulus and perceived control.” —Can good music increase pain tolerance and decrease anxiety? - Barking up the wrong tree
May 25, 20102 notes
May 24, 201023 notes
“For more than 90 percent of sibling pairs who had played in the major leagues throughout baseball’s long recorded history, including Joe and Dom DiMaggio and Cal and Billy Ripken, the younger brother (regardless of overall talent) tried to steal more often than his older brother.” —A Pattern of Sibling Risk-Taking in the Major Leagues - NYTimes.com
May 24, 20101 note
We need two systems and two experiences. → thefuturewell.com

My main message was that healthcare was never designed. It simply happened. And now we’re left with messy processes because the infrastructure wasn’t built to function as a whole. These messy processes lead to terrible experiences for both patients and doctors.

May 24, 2010
“It’s easy to think that the grass is always greener away from AT&T, but keep in mind that these are cellular carriers: massive oligopolists that don’t give a shit about us. Their phones are ARPU vending machines, first and foremost, not communication tools. Cellular carriers are only a small step above cable and phone companies in the contempt and disregard they show for their customers.” —Marco.org - A Verizon reality check
May 24, 20101 note
“After 12 months, participants receiving calls from a live person were exercising, as a mean, about 178 minutes a week, above government recommendations for 150 minutes a week. That represented a 78% jump from about 100 minutes a week at the start of the study. Exercise levels for the group receiving computerized calls doubled to 157 minutes a week. A control group of participants, who received no phone calls, exercised 118 minutes a week, up 28% from the study’s start. “When you knew you were going to have to report back on what you had done, it motivated you,” says Ms. Lowe.” —Nudge blog · Excuse me, how much did you exercise this week?
May 21, 2010
“We theorized that when reasonably salient, a high versus low ceiling can prime the concepts of freedom versus confinement, respectively. These concepts, in turn, can prompt consumers’ use of predominately relational versus item-specific processing.” —Does the ceiling height of a room dramatically affect how you think and feel? - Barking up the wrong tree
May 21, 20103 notes
“The best ideas come out of the corner of our eye, the edge of our consciousness, in a flash. They are the result of misdirection and random collisions, not a grinding corporate onslaught.” —Seth’s Blog: Where do you find good ideas?
May 21, 20109 notes
“The function of the wakaresase-ya is the direct opposite of a dating agency: with great ingenuity, and the right fee, they will prise apart human relationships. Do you have a troublesome ex-boyfriend who won’t leave you alone? A beloved son who is getting engaged to an unsuitable girl? A dead-loss employee who refuses to take the hint and retire? All of these difficult situations can be resolved by the splitter-uppers.” —Sex, lies and splitting up - Times Online
May 21, 2010
May 21, 2010829 notes
May 19, 20106 notes
“The more I think about stuff like this and User Experience, the less satisfied I am as a consumer; and the more annoying I am to my wife.” —Rands In Repose: The Shop I Want
May 19, 20101 note
May 12, 20101 note
May 7, 2010118 notes
“The members of my family immediately gravitated to the new shiny thing — no prompting, no encouragement, no migration, etc. They are drawn to it like a moth to flame.” —What iPads Did To My Family - Chuck’s Blog
May 7, 20102 notes
“It’s like we’ve rebooted the computer industry into the Cloud, and everything has to be refactored for the new platform. It’s currently at the stage where basic blocks are being built, such as the command line (Twitter + software agents) and file system (Dropbox). What’s the GUI of the cloud going to look like? Will it even be graphical?” —John Kestner. MIT object design punk. | With yesterday’s announcement of iPad and Android…
May 6, 20103 notes
“Each successful interaction, no matter how minor, invests the user in the application experience.” —Max Lord, Lessons from Google Mobile (via davidkaneda)
May 4, 201018 notes
May 4, 20101 note
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