Lebron James made of Skittles - by Andrei Bilan
“We have no money, so we have to think.”
“A while back, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, his wife, Cherie, was caught on mic saying something out of line about Gordon Brown, who at the time was Chancellor of the Exchequer, the man in control of the nation’s money. Importantly for this story, the Prime Minister lives at Number 10 Downing Street and the Chancellor resides at Number 11. They’re neighbours. At any rate, Cherie’s comments caused a kerfuffle in the press and it was clear that Tony Blair was going to have to say something, to address the issue somehow. The occasion he chose was the speech scheduled at his final Labour Party conference in September 2006. The line he used to refer to Cherie’s remarks, and to defuse the situation humorously, was ‘Well, at least I don’t have to worry about my wife running off with the bloke next door’. It really did the trick. Everyone laughed, and it genuinely put the whole thing behind them. But here’s the thing: Philip Collins, the speechwriter who wrote that joke, explained later that the sole reason it stayed in the script was because he’d only thought of it about fifteen minutes before Blair left for the auditorium. As he put it, no good joke ever survives a committee of six people, because there’s always somebody who thinks it’s not funny, or that it’s too risky, or otherwise invents some reason – which might even be valid – why it shouldn’t be told.” — Ahmed, Ajaz; Olander, Stefan (2012-05-03). Velocity (Kindle Locations 1958-1970). Random House UK. Kindle Edition.
“Brands are about smart and artful storytelling. Great agencies help clients to amplify a brand’s authentic voice. Today, the canvas used to connect with audiences has more variations and marketers have more tools available. Communication should have more respect for what the audience gets out of it – how it will inspire, satisfy, motivate and reward them. Rather than bombarding people with messages they scan past or ignore because it’s not relevant. Shaping an attitude and moving people towards action has always had more to do with emotion than function. In the case of deodorant, the product may have the functional benefit of providing 50 per cent more staying power, but it’s the implicit, emotional benefit of not having odour or damp patches on a shirt that makes us feel more confident and better about ourselves.” — Ahmed, Ajaz; Olander, Stefan (2012-05-03). Velocity (Kindle Locations 973-979). Random House UK. Kindle Edition.
Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a very simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities. I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message “Stop counting – There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was over two inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it. Just for fun, I placed a second large message half way through the newspaper. This one announced: “Stop counting, tell the experimenter you have seen this and win $250.” Again, the unlucky people missed the opportunity because they were still too busy looking for photographs.
73 percent of black children are born outside marriage, compared with 53 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of whites. And educational differences are growing. About 92 percent of college-educated women are married when they give birth, compared with 62 percent of women with some post-secondary schooling and 43 percent of women with a high school diploma or less, according to Child Trends.
Marzoli & Tommasi (2009) had a female confederate visit a disco and approach 176 random people asking for a smoke. Clubbers were about twice as likely to hand one over if the request was directed at the right ear, whether or not the clubber was male or female.
These findings confirm previous studies which have found a right-ear preference for attending to and processing verbal stimuli. It is thought that this is because language is preferentially processed by the left side of the brain, which receives its input from the right ear.
To see whether swearing can help change attitudes, Scherer and Sagarin (2006) divided 88 participants into three groups to watch one of three slightly different speeches.
The only difference between the speeches was that one contained a mild swear word at the start:
“…lowering of tuition is not only a great idea, but damn it, also the most reasonable one for all parties involved.”
The second speech contained the ‘damn it’ at the end and the third had neither.
When participants’ attitudes were measured, they were most influenced by the speeches with the mild obscenity included, either at the beginning or the end. It also emerged that the word ‘damn’ increased the audience’s perception of the speaker’s intensity, which was what lead to the increased levels of persuasion. On the other hand, swearing did not affect how the audience perceived the speaker’s credibility.
“But with the approach of modern times, when the stupid craze for signature came in, the Unknown Man ceased his activity, and was content to rest. An immense throng of vain fellows, of men who had a name or sought to make a name, began to paint, invent, carve, write. They had less genius than the Unknown Man, and they had also less modesty: they proclaimed to all the winds that they, and none but they, had done these things. They worked not only for their own joy or for others’ benefit, but that the world might know that they, and none but they, had done the work.” — Giovanni Papini - The Unknown Man [24 Cervelli]
“For better and worse, telling stories is how we make sense of the world, and it’s hard to tell a story without focal actors around which to center the action. But as we witness a succession of popular movements, from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, we can at least pause to appreciate the real story, which is the remarkable phenomenon of a great many ordinary individuals coming together to change the world.” — Duncan Watts
Researchers examined the impact of team members who were deadbeats (“withholders of effort”), downers (who “express pessimism, anxiety, insecurity and irritation”) and jerks (who violate “interpersonal norms of respect”). They found that having just one slacker or jerk in a group can bring down performance by 30% to 40%.
Source: How a Few Bad Apples Ruin Everything
I’m not concerned that women don’t engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I’m worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks.
Source: A rant about women
In a Princeton study, 18-40 year old test subjects were allowed to read short descriptions of aliens either in a “disfluent font” like Comic Sans or Bodoni or a “fluent font” like Arial. After a 15 minute delay, participants were able to recall 14% more information if it was presented in the disfluent font.
The Internet, like all intellectual technologies has a trade off. As we train our brains to use it, as we adapt to the environment of the internet, which is an environment of kind of constant immersion and information and constant distractions, interruptions, juggling lots of messages, lots of bits of information. As we adapt to that information environment, so to speak, we gain certain skills, but we lose other ones. And if you look at the scientific evidence, it’s pretty clear particularly from studies of like video games, that use of online media enhances our – some of our visual cognitive ability. So our ability to spot patterns in arrays of visual information to keep track of lots of things going on at once on a screen but along with that, what we lose is the ability to pay deep attention to one thing for a sustained period of time, to filter out distractions. - Nicholas Carr
Why is it so uncomfortable to stand really close to a stranger?