Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational
To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language.
A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived. [...]
The researchers believe a second language provides a useful cognitive distance from automatic processes, promoting analytical thought and reducing unthinking, emotional reaction.
Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational | Wired.com.
Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2012-05-06
- RT @dtnick: Over nine months with Lion and I still think the save/duplicate workflow is broken. #blamelion #
- Spotify has some terrible UI design for a service that I love… Can't even find volume control in their iPad app. #
Descriptive Camera
The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.
By Matt Richardson at NYU ITP. Powered by Mechanical Turk.
Student’s electrodermal activity nearly flatlined during classes
Obviously, this is just one student and doesn’t necessarily generalize, but I love that the electrodermal activity is nearly flatlined during classes. ;-) (Note that the activity is higher during sleep than during class…)
A week of a student's electrodermal activity – Joi Ito's Web.
Multitaskers experience emotional benefits despite decreased productivity
Researchers from Ohio State University [...] discovered that multitasking provided test subjects with an emotional boost even despite the fact that they weren’t actually being more productive. Dr. Zheng Joyce Wang, professor at OSU and lead author of the study, said that multitaskers "are not being more productive — they just feel more emotionally satisfied from their work."
QLOCKTWO W
The beautiful QLOCKTWO is coming to wrists this autumn. If you’ve abandoned wristwatches for your phone, there’s also an app for that.
Self Portrait: Nov ’11 – April ’12
Six months. Plus ça change, …?
Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2012-04-29
- Strange things afoot. Curiosity prevails. Glad for it. #
Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2012-04-22
- Didn't think it was possible, but Skype for Mac is still getting worse… #
- RT @epstein: Walked past pair of Russian tourists (I think) who marveled how cheap every thing in New York City is. #
- RT @claytoncubitt: The concept of "not selling out" is inherently elitist, as it would reduce the ranks of "authentic" artists to only t … #
- RT @sdw: No big deal, just a check Hunter S. Thompson wrote out for two million dollars worth of cocaine. http://t.co/JWbUOsLH #
- I would be kinda terrified if people gave me$3.5m+ after having asked for a mere $100k… http://t.co/E1Qz9uNu #
- Tweets in iambic pentameter: http://t.co/MisPGKOQ #
- RT @rafeco: In the end it seems like all of the problems are UX problems. Except for scaling. #
Marie Connelly in response to John Brownlee’s much-noticed article about the Girls Around Me app:
I don’t believe that having a public persona online needs to be a risky enterprise, and it seems like plenty of people are able to manage that without being attacked, stalked, or otherwise targeted. If we’re saying that’s only true for one half of the population, then I don’t think this is really a conversation about internet privacy as much as it’s a conversation about whether it’s safe to be a woman and live in public.
If the answer to that is “no”, then I think we’ve got bigger problems than ‘Girls Around Me.’
