The spacing effect posits that the best time to study something is at the moment you are about to forget it – an insight that was useless in the real world, until Piotr Wozniak introduced SuperMemo.
Death of the Guidebook: Lost in a Cutthroat World
Chris Taylor calls “desk updates” the travel guidebook industry’s “dirty secret.” “In times past, the only way to research a guidebook was to actually go there — the alternative, plagiarising another guidebook, was, and still is, difficult to cover up. Today, you can sit at home and Google the town you might otherwise be exploring on foot, and hopefully some random blogger has done the legwork for you.” But the dirty part is not the fact that they stayed at home, it is the misrepresentation of the source of their expertise and the betrayal of their readers’ trust. They should learn from the best bloggers: write everywhere (including from home), borrow from everyone, give credit where it’s due, and add value to the conversation from your own genuine experiences.
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Noble Eagles, Nasty Pigeons, Biased Humans
Natalie Angier explains biobigotry: “If you have two important birds from the same region of Latin America, said Mr. Fraser [psychological conservationalist], one a hyacinth macaw that looks like flying jewelry and can vocalize like a human, the other a storm petrel that is brown, squawky and cakes the coastline with guano, guess which face ends up on the next fund-raising calendar.”
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Decision Making: Is It All ‘Me, Me, Me’?
Classical game theory predicts that people inevitably act in their self-interest, leading to “Nash equilibrium.” Team reasoning theory suggests individual self-interest is not always foremost in the way people act as they will act in the best interest of their “team.” A recent study suggests that the latter is a better predictor of decision-making.
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Weekend Food Blogging: Oatcakes
Weekend food blogging is about two skills I want to improve simultaneously: cooking and web design layouts. These oatcakes have been a Sunday brunch staple for years.
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Online Libraries Are Not Libraries At All
David Weinberger on why online libraries are not libraries at all: “So, even if the distributed online library we’re building at first seems sort of like a library, it will quickly invent itself into something new, something unpredictable and quite possibly, something that will change us deeply.”
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Social Media Will Change Your Business
Catch up or catch you later. Social media will change your business: “But here’s betting that we [professional publishers] also forge ahead in the open world. The measure of success in that world is not a finished product. The winners will be those who host the very best conversations.”
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The Art of Doing Something Well
Technology can make us forget the full meaning of craftsmanship, to lose sight of its human dimension. But even in our post-industrial society, western economies continually create niche markets for fine craftsmanship like wine-making, artisanal coffee, linux software, handmade furniture.
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Can Social Bookmarking Improve Web Search?
Lots of interesting conclusions in this study about social bookmarking’s role in web search: Tags are present in the pagetext of 50% of the pages they annotate and in the titles of 16% of the pages they annotate. Tags are in context and many tagged pages would be discovered by a search engine (p.8).
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Why can’t we stick to our goals like “I will lose weight” or “I plan to finish this article before the deadline. “Nice thoughts, but not formulated in terms that your ancestral, reflexive brain might understand,” says psychologist Gary Marcus. The work around? “Translate those abstract goals into a form your ancestral systems – which traffic largely in dumb reflexes – can understand: if-then. If you find yourself in a particular situation, then take a specific action.”