The cell phone has changed the nature of seduction. One carries in one’s pocket, wherever one goes, the means of doing something other than what one is presently doing, or being with someone other than the person one is with. Take this excerpt from a 31-year-old straight male Diarist living on the Upper West Side:
12:32 p.m. I get three texts. One from each girl. E wants oral sex and tells me she loves me. A wants to go to a concert in Central Park. Y still wants to cook. This simultaneously excites me—three women want me!—and makes me feel odd.
This is a distinct shift in the way we experience the world, introducing the nagging urge to make each thing we do the single most satisfying thing we could possibly be doing at any moment. In the face of this enormous pressure, many of the Diarists stay home and masturbate.
Notice that as earned income rises from about $15,000 to $30,000, income after taxes and transfers is roughly flat. Indeed, it could even fall. The bottom line: If you are poor, the government is inadvertently ensuring that you have little incentive to try to improve your condition. (via Greg Mankiw’s Blog: The Poverty Trap)
But before the debate goes any further, there’s a fundamental question that needs to be investigated. Why do football players wear helmets in the first place? And more important, could the helmets be part of the problem?
“Some people have advocated for years to take the helmet off, take the face mask off. That’ll change the game dramatically,” says Fred Mueller, a University of North Carolina professor who studies head injuries. “Maybe that’s better than brain damage.”
The first hard-shell helmets, which became popular in the 1940s, weren’t designed to prevent concussions but to prevent players in that rough-and-tumble era from suffering catastrophic injuries like fractured skulls.
But while these helmets reduced the chances of death on the field, they also created a sense of invulnerability that encouraged players to collide more forcefully and more often. “Almost every single play, you’re going to get hit in the head,” says Miami Dolphins offensive tackle Jake Long.
While Apple uses about twenty categories to organize the apps in their store, their classification system is mostly topical and therefore not directly aligned with how people are using apps. So it might be interesting instead to look at high-level use cases as a way to understand what people are doing with mobile apps. (via Functioning Form - Use Cases for Mobile Apps)
This ending was not just an easter egg for the obsessive reader who didn’t mind skimming every page looking for telltale words. Instead it’s hard to miss in even a casual riffling. A two-page illustration showing what could only be paradise (or perhaps a theme park) leaps out as the only spread in the book without any text. Flipping to the page before brings you to 101, where you discover that your curiosity has been rewarded. You have found the planet, not by following the constraints of the system, but by going outside of them – a fitting moral to the story and an encouraging reminder that any game should be a starting point for the imagination, not the end. (via Choose Your Own Adventure)
China has seen a tenfold increase in syphilis cases over the past decade, as migrant workers made enough money in the country’s economic boom to hire more prostitutes, a senior Chinese health official was quoted as saying Tuesday.
“The areas with higher syphilis prevalence are usually places where the economy is booming but where there is also greater economic inequality, such as the southeastern coastal areas,” he added.
As a side experiment, my colleagues asked several experts in the company for their expert opinion as to what problems users would run into, and compiled them into a list. (These experts included the software designers, domain experts, and the people who trained users on the software.) Then my colleagues ran their study, observing sixteen people using this software for the first time, and made a list of the problems that users actually ran into. The result?
There was not one common item on the two lists.
In Log in or sign up? Leah Culver recommends a combined log-in/register form. I would totally agree and say this was a great design. If I was not using tumblr.
The tumblr homepage shows a signup form when you are not logged in. But if you are a tumblr user and fill in your name and password, the system logs you in directly. Why would you need two buttons? Tumblr knows you have registered!
Tumblrers you are my webdesign heros.
A road train consists of up to eight vehicles basically playing follow-the-leader, with a professional driver at the head. Using wireless sensors and sat nav systems, cars communicate with the leader to join or leave the pack. Here’s where the incentive comes in: once part of a convoy, the vehicle goes on autopilot and the driver can then do what he or she wants, be it read, watch TV, or surf the web. (via Road Trains: Faux Highway Autopilot Gives Drivers Time to Watch TV « MobileBehavior)
The New York Times provides a batter-by-batter look at Rivera’s pitching since 1995. He’s pitched to 501 batters in the post-season. Only 14 runs have been scored off of him. (via The Pitching Dominance of Mariano Rivera | FlowingData)
