2010/08/20

Nearly 1 million children in the United States are potentially misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder simply because they are the youngest -- and most immature -- in their kindergarten class, according to new research by a Michigan State University economist....

2010/08/14

It’s late at night during these last few days before Christmas. You’re bathed in the ghostly glow of your laptop computer at your kitchen table. As you shop on the Internet, you think you’re safely beyond retailers’ manipulative grasp. Thing is, you’re not. As much as brick-and-mortar shoppers can be influenced by a store’s layout and the product placement within, so can online shoppers with the design of a retailer’s Web site....

2010/08/14

2010/08/07

Odds are you've run across one of these characters in your career. They're glib, charming, manipulative, deceitful, ruthless -- and very, very destructive. And there may be lots of them in America's corner offices.

2010/07/28

Have you ever walked into an airport, seen that there is nobody in line at the check-in counter, but still made a bee-line for the self-service kiosk? Better yet, have you ever waited in line for an ATM machine even though there is nobody in line for the teller inside the bank?...

2010/07/27

SuperMemo is a program that keeps track of discrete bits of information you've learned and want to retain. For example, say you're studying Spanish. Your chance of recalling a given word when you need it declines over time according to a predictable pattern. SuperMemo tracks this so-called forgetting curve and reminds you to rehearse your knowledge when your chance of recalling it has dropped to, say, 90 percent. When you first learn a new vocabulary word, your chance of recalling it will drop quickly. But after SuperMemo reminds you of the word, the rate of forgetting levels out. The program tracks this new decline and waits longer to quiz you the next time....

2010/07/14

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it? Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger....

2010/05/02

A perverse incentive is an incentive that has an unintended and undesirable effect, that is against the interest of the incentive makers. Perverse incentives by definition produce negative unintended consequences.

2010/01/31

What do monkeys have to do with war, oppression, crime, racism and even e-mail spam? You'll see that all of the random ass-headed cruelty of the world will suddenly make perfect sense once we go Inside the Monkeysphere.

2009/12/29

Essay by Bruce Schneier that illustrates his view on airport security. Given that he has several books on security, his opinion carries some weight. In the article, Bruce discusses the rarity of terrorism, the pitfalls of security theater, and the actual difficulty surrounding improving security....

2009/12/15

When we examine the iPhone users’ arguments defending the iPhone, it reminds us of the famous Stockholm Syndrome - a term that was invented by psychologists after a hostage drama in Stockholm. Here hostages reacted to the psychological pressure they were experiencing, by defending the people that had held them hostage for 6 days....

2009/12/13

As technology allows people to do more tasks at the same time, the myth that humans can multitask has never been stronger. But researchers say it's still a myth — and they have the data to prove it.

2009/10/24

It probably says something about certain segments of the population that many people, when exposed to an exaggeration or fabrication about certain real-life occurrences or facts, will perceive the fictional account as being more true than any factual account of the same. In effect, some perceive the TV/Hollywood version of something real as being more true than the real thing. This may cause viewers to cry foul when things on a show work out in a way that actually is realistic, or complain of the "fake Scottish accent" of the real Scottish actor. Part of the problem is fiction being held to higher standards of realism than reality itself is....

2009/10/14

The Office is not simple gags attempting to alleviate the despair of low-level grunts. It’s a complete management theory falsifying 83.8% of business books.

2009/09/27

Long before humans started playing games, natural selection discovered the fundamentals of game theory and shaped animal societies according to its rules. Within species, individuals adopt alternative competing strategies with frequencies that reflect the success of each strategy. Evolutionary Stable Strategies occur when alternative competing strategies are at equilibrium. Competition within species has generated many Evolutionary Stable Strategies with colourful titles like: Bourgeois, Scrounger, Sneaky, Satellite, Transvestite, and Sex-change. However, co-operation within and between species has generated only one Evolutionary Stable Strategy., TIT FOR TAT. The importance of TIT FOR TAT to the evolution of co-operative behaviour was discovered in a very unusual way, through a worldwide computer competition to find the winning strategy for the well known paradox 'The Prisoner's Dilemma'. In 1981 TIT FOR TAT won that competition, and ever since then it has grown in stature to where it...

2009/05/20

This ex post facto study looked for gender differences in multitasking. The participants were fifty-eight students from a small university in the Midwest. The participants were given an assignment of performing specified multiple tasks simultaneously. Afterwards, the participants were asked to fill out a brief survey that included questions about how they felt about the study and other questions to control for confounding variables. While there was no significant difference found in regards to the relationship between gender and productivity when multitasking, a significant difference was found between the genders in the area of accuracy when multitasking....

2009/05/18

50 scientifically proven ways constitute 50 chapters of the book, longest of which take 7 pages. The authors take the position that persuasion is a science, not art, hence with the right approach anybody can become the master in the skill of persuasion. So, what are the 50 ways?...

2009/05/13

Wie zijn toch die suff... euh mensen, die zich geld uit de zak laten kloppen door mooie verhalen op internet? De hoger opgeleiden, luidt het verrassende antwoord van het in internetfraude gespecialiseerde onderzoeksbureau Ultrascan.

2009/05/06

Have you ever heard of a German military leader who celebrated, even rewarded laziness? What a preposterous question, you must be thinking. Given the overwhelming industriousness of the entire Germanic population since the beginning of time, it seems impossible there could be such a leader. Yet, there was. He is an anomaly, to be sure, but he definitely existed. And he was important. He was General Helmuth von Moltke who served as chief of the German General Staff from 1858 to 1888. Under his leadership the German military became the model for all modern armies....

2009/04/21

Need to sell more of a product or service? Here’s a counterintuitive idea: offer your customers a similar, but inferior, at about the same price. While it’s unlikely that they will actually buy the less attractive item, you may see a jump in sales of what you are trying to sell. That’s decoy marketing....

2009/03/25

All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you.

2009/03/10

Decades of psycho-social research on team work suggests that effective teams have both strong task-based behaviour as well as good social cohesion.

2009/03/10

My problem is that I have been persecuted by an integer. For seven years this number has followed me around, has intruded in my most private data, and has assaulted me from the pages of our most public journals. This number assumes a variety of disguises, being sometimes a little larger and sometimes a little smaller than usual, but never changing so much as to be unrecognizable. The persistence with which this number plagues me is far more than a random accident. There is, to quote a famous senator, a design behind it, some pattern governing its appearances. Either there really is something unusual about the number or else I am suffering from delusions of persecution....

2009/03/10

Psychology is the study of the human mind and mental processes in relation to human behaviors - human nature. Due to its subject matter, psychology is not considered a 'hard' science, even though psychologists do experiment and publish their findings in respected journals. Some of the experiments psychologists have conducted over the years reveal things about the way we humans think and behave that we might not want to embrace, but which can at least help keep us humble. That's something....

2009/03/10

One of the best-documented characteristics of working memory is its limited capacity. The short-term storage process of working memory can hold only about seven items at a time. To deal with more information than that, the information must be organized into larger chunks. For example, words can be combined into sentences or stories; then more than seven words can be held in working memory. Psychologist George Miller pointed out the seven item limitation of working memory in a classic 1956 article, "The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information." Chunking points to the importance of organization in overcoming the limits of memory. If short term, working memory is limited to about 7 chunks, the only way to improve its capacity is to organize larger chunks. This turns out to be a common theme in memory research. Memory is improved by organizing little pieces into larger wholes....

2009/03/08

Quiz over de psychologie van geld en consumentenbestedingen

2009/03/04

This paper is intended to serve as a resource for counsellors and prevention workers in the field of problem gambling. It is also intended for people in the general public who wish to understand slot machines.

2009/02/11

A flashy handbag or Armani suit can signal a person's wealth, but so can their body language, according to a new study. People of higher socioeconomic status are more rude when conversing with others. Psychologists Michael Kraus and Dacher Keltner of the University of California, Berkeley, videotaped pairs of undergraduate students who were strangers to one another, during one-on-one interviews. In total, 100 undergraduate students participated....

2009/02/01

The adult human brain is surprisingly malleable: it can rewire itself and even grow new cells. Here are some habits that can fine-tune your mind

2009/01/22

Getting people to say “yes” is the goal for any sales message. It’s what psychologists call “compliance.”

2009/01/18

It is famously difficult to teach people to program, and CS lore says that there are simply people who get it and people who don't. Saeed Dehnadi and Richard Bornat, two computer instructors at Middlesex University in the UK, put that idea to the test, and ended up not with two kinds of people, but three....

2009/01/15

One of the big trends in workplaces around the world is the use of personality tests and profiles. All sorts of tests are used but the question is does this stuff actually work? Does it give real insights into our personalities?

2009/01/05

The most important function for a manager is X = -Y, where X is employee brain use and Y is degree of management. To use the horse whisperer's advice, The more you use your reins, the less they'll use their brains."

2008/11/21

A fun way to demonstrate your graph design prowess or help your colleagues see the differences between good and bad design.

2008/10/10

The photograph on the right was doctored by the “beautification engine” of a new computer program that uses a mathematical formula to alter the original form into a theoretically more attractive version, while maintaining what programmers call an “unmistakable similarity” to the original....

2008/09/28

Essay by Richard Feynman

2008/09/28

Even if you're a hyper-organized, task-oriented worker with an expansive mind and endless ambition, you won't get a lot done if your mind and body are demanding you curl up and doze off. Luckily, you can overcome a late night of net surfing, a rough morning, or just the post-lunch stupor without becoming an over-wired mess. We've put together 10 of the best ways to jumpstart your brain and get back into a productive groove, and all of them are tricks you can put to work this Monday....

2008/09/18

I’ve been observing an unusual programmer friend of mine for some time now. (Yeah…a “friend”, that’s it….) He has such a strange combination of potential and incompetence that its hard to tell if he is just lazy or if he has a “light” form of autism or some other disorder. I try to avoid “easy” pop-psychology terms when discussing him, but try to be as specific as possible when listing his qualities....

2010/09/09

Strong currents, extreme depths, and the distance from land and medical facilities have always made diving the Andrea Doria a hazardous endeavor. It is even more so today. The Doria is not the dive that it used to be. The hull is collapsing badly, and the top of the wreck is now below 190 ft. Many of the places that divers used to visit have deteriorated beyond recognition. Gimbel's hole, once the famous entry to the inside of the wreck, is now no more than a closed-off depression. Every year, as the hull sinks further into itself, the dive becomes deeper, more dangerous, and more pointless. Once the "Mount Everest of Shipwreck Diving", the heyday of the Andrea Doria is over. I have never been there, and have no desire to go, but I know a lot of people who have, including some of the most experienced....

2010/09/09

SMS Emden was a light cruiser of the Imperial German Navy in World War I. The Emden raided Allied shipping in the Indian Ocean early in the war, sinking or capturing thirty Allied merchant vessels and warships before being run aground by her captain to prevent her from sinking, after engaging more powerful HMAS Sydney at the Battle of Cocos....

2010/09/09

Year-long free trial of TIBCO Silver Spotfire