Lone Gunman

Putting me in mind of Dustin Cur­tis’ mul­ti­vari­ate ‘split’ test­ing to increase click-through rates to his Twit­ter pro­file (pre­vi­ously), Jakob Nielsen dis­cusses his iter­a­tive design process for a Twit­ter mes­sage adver­tis­ing his lat­est usabil­ity conference.

The mes­sage went from,

Announc­ing LAS VEGAS and BERLIN as the venues for our biggest usabil­ity con­fer­ence of the year http://bit.ly/UsabilityWeek

to,

LAS VEGAS (Octo­ber) and BERLIN (Novem­ber): venues for our biggest usabil­ity con­fer­ence ever http://bit.ly/UsabilityWeek

I am by no means a high-output Twit­ter user and I dis­like ‘How to Twit­ter’ arti­cles with a pas­sion. Nielsen’s lat­est I quite like because he notes that, in the case of Twit­ter and other micro-blogging ser­vices, text is a form of UI in itself.

It’s a com­mon mis­take to think that only full-fledged graph­i­cal user inter­faces count as inter­ac­tion design and deserve usabil­ity atten­tion. As our ear­lier research has shown, URLs and email both con­tribute strongly to the Inter­net user expe­ri­ence and thus require close atten­tion to usabil­ity to enhance the prof­itabil­ity of a company’s Inter­net efforts.

The shorter it is, the more impor­tant it is to design text for usability.

Wired has pub­lished what must be one of the most com­pre­hen­sive arti­cles look­ing at the phe­nom­e­non of the placebo effect.

From its hum­ble begin­nings in WWII with anes­thetist Henry Beecher to the placebo’s tran­si­tion from being treated as a purely psy­cho­log­i­cal trait to a phys­i­o­log­i­cal one; there’s some great mate­r­ial here.

Two com­pre­hen­sive analy­ses of anti­de­pres­sant tri­als have uncov­ered a dra­matic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One esti­mated that the so-called effect size (a mea­sure of sta­tis­ti­cal sig­nif­i­cance) in placebo groups had nearly dou­bled over that time.

It’s not that the old meds are get­ting weaker, drug devel­op­ers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is some­how get­ting stronger.

The fact that an increas­ing num­ber of med­ica­tions are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the [phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal] indus­try into cri­sis. The stakes could hardly be higher. In today’s econ­omy, the fate of a long-established com­pany can hang on the out­come of a hand­ful of tests.

Related: Placebo in His­tory.

via @jonahlehrer

The PX Project is a sin­gle 3-hour “cog­ni­tive exper­i­ment” designed to increase your read­ing speed. Aver­age increases using the tech­nique are appar­ently in the region of 386%. The tech­nique seems to involve three steps:

• Min­i­mize the num­ber and dura­tion of fix­a­tions per line.
• Elim­i­nate regres­sion and back-skipping.
• Use con­di­tion­ing drills to increase hor­i­zon­tal periph­eral vision span and the num­ber of words reg­is­tered per fixation.

Der­ren Brown has embed­ded a short video dis­cussing the tech­nique (3m 38s) on his site.

When think­ing of speed read­ing my first reac­tion is not dis­sim­i­lar to Felix Salmon’s:

When you read fast and don’t sub­vo­cal­ize, do you start to miss the art of con­struct­ing or even just appre­ci­at­ing beau­ti­ful sen­tences? Would a speed reader, for instance, ever be able to write a book like [Nichol­son Baker’s] U&I?

But this quote from the arti­cle made me realise that even if you can speed read, you don’t have to speed read:

Final rec­om­men­da­tions: If used for study, it is rec­om­mended that you not read 3 assign­ments in the time it would take you to read one, but rather, read the same assign­ment 3 times for expo­sure and recall improve­ment, depend­ing on rel­e­vancy to testing.

I would go one fur­ther and say; If the book is to be read for plea­sure, don’t speed read. For all other instances, the above applies.

Jonah Lehrer, a neu­ro­sci­en­tist and writer I’ve men­tioned many times, has a won­der­ful arti­cle in Psy­chol­ogy Today that looks at the field of neu­roaes­thet­ics and how the brain inter­prets art.

All the adjec­tives we use to describe art-vague words like “beauty” and “elegance”-should, in the­ory, have neural cor­re­lates. Accord­ing to these sci­en­tists, there is noth­ing inher­ently mys­te­ri­ous about art. Its visual tricks can be decoded. Neu­roaes­theti­cians hope to reveal “the uni­ver­sal laws” of paint­ing and sculp­ture, to find the under­ly­ing prin­ci­ples shared by every great work of visual art.

In the arti­cle Lehrer pro­poses The 10 Great Prin­ci­ples of Great Art and in the accom­pa­ny­ing inter­view he chal­lenges the sup­po­si­tion that neu­roaes­thet­ics will “unweave the rain­bow” of great art.

Related: Dr Shock takes a brief look at the rela­tion­ship between archi­tec­ture and neu­ro­science.

via Mind Hacks

I’m not a big fol­lower of ath­let­ics, but two news items have some­how made their way to my men­tal inbox from the IAAF World Ath­let­ics Cham­pi­onships in Berlin: how ridicu­lously fast Usain Bolt is, and the con­tro­versy sur­round­ing Caster Semenya.

On the lat­ter, Caster is cur­rently under­go­ing gen­der ver­i­fi­ca­tion tests and in the process has gar­nered a lot of press attention—attention that appears to come from peo­ple who are vastly une­d­u­cated on the issues being debated. The Nation looks at these issues and describes how sex­u­al­ity is more ambigu­ous than you might think.

Let’s leave aside that being male is not the be-all, end-all of ath­letic suc­cess. A country’s wealth, coach­ing facil­i­ties, nutri­tion and oppor­tu­nity deter­mine the cre­ation of a world-class ath­lete far more than a Y chro­mo­some or a penis ever could.

[…] Gender–that is, how we com­port and con­ceive of ourselves–is a remark­ably fluid social con­struc­tion. Even our phys­i­cal sex is far more ambigu­ous and fluid than is often imag­ined or taught. Med­ical sci­ence has long acknowl­edged the exis­tence of mil­lions of peo­ple whose bod­ies com­bine anatom­i­cal fea­tures that are con­ven­tion­ally asso­ci­ated with either men or women and/or have chro­mo­so­mal vari­a­tions from the XX or XY of women or men. Many of these “inter­sex” indi­vid­u­als, esti­mated at one birth in every 1,666 in the United States alone, are legally oper­ated on by sur­geons who force tra­di­tional norms of gen­i­talia on new­born infants.

There are a num­ber of good arti­cles writ­ten on this, one of which is this excerpt from Robert Peel’s Eve’s Rib (that dis­cusses the case of María José Martínez Patiño), and the Wikipedia arti­cles I’ve linked to above.