A study comparing the effects of various leisure activities on the recognition and identification of faces has concluded that eyewitnesses should not be permitted to do cryptic crossword puzzles prior to an identity parade.
The study, conducted by Cardiff University’s Michael Lewis, compared logic puzzles (sudoku), crossword puzzles (both cryptic and standard) and mystery novels (Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code) and found that performing cryptic crosswords reduced the reliability of recognising and identifying faces.
“The identification of an offender by a witness to a crime often forms an important element of a prosecution’s case. While considerable importance is placed by jurors on the identification of the offender by a witness (such as a suspect being picked out from an identity parade), research tells us that these identifications can often be wrong and sometimes lead to wrongful convictions.”
“It would be undesirable,” he writes, “to have witnesses doing something before an identity parade that would make them worse at picking out the offender … Consider what witnesses may do before an identity parade. It is possible that they might be doing something to pass the time (eg read or do a puzzle). It is possible that some of these potential activities may lead to a detriment in face processing.”
via @noahWG
Stating that “one of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate”, Alain de Botton‘s short essay for City Journal looks at our “obsession” with current events and how this distracts us from… everything.
The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture—and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. We leave a movie theater vowing to reconsider our lives in the light of a film’s values. Yet by the following evening, our experience is well on the way to dissolution. […]
The need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of fasting.
via Intelligent Life
As part of their series on ‘media diets’, The Atlantic Wire is asking a number of media luminaries how they manage the deluge of information we all encounter online.
Some names you’ll recognise include David Brooks, Ezra Klein, Tyler Cowen and the following from Clay Shirky discussing his distaste for ‘breaking news’:
In general, there’s no real breaking news that matters to me. I don’t have any alerts or notifications on any piece of software I use. My phone is on silent ring, nothing alerts me when I get a Tweet and my e-mail doesn’t tell me when messages arrive.
I also don’t read any of the big tech aggregators. Knowing that, for instance, Google just bought Blogger, isn’t that useful for me to hear today rather than tomorrow. Some of Michael Arrington’s stuff I think is an example of the worst kind of breaking news. The kind of Apple Insider stuff where they publish something every day to satisfy the news cycle. It’s gossip coverage like following movie stars and it distracts me from thinking longer form thoughts. […]
What are my guilty pleasures? Given the fact that media’s my job—I don’t feel much guilt. There’s no equivalent of eating Häagen-Dazs out of the box. […] That’s the thing about this job. If you think about it, I suppose the guilty pleasure is gardening or cooking. It’s about getting away from media consumption and making linguine instead.
Of all of the articles in the series, Shirky’s is the ‘diet’ my own is closest to.
via @cojadate
It’s been a while since I’ve read a technical(ish) article that is as accessible and fun as Mark Pilgrim’s guide to using new HTML5 markup in web forms.
I’m not sure if it’s the doing of ‘Professor Markup’ or this slightly nerdy quip, but I fell in love with Pilgrim’s style:
Asking for a number is trickier than asking for an email address or web address. First of all, numbers are more complicated than you might think. Quick: pick a number. -1? No, I meant a number between 1 and 10. 7½? No no, not a fraction, silly. π? Now you’re just being irrational.
Mark Pilgrim–developer advocate for Google, “specialising in open source and open standards”–has recently released a book on the subject, HTML5: Up & Running. I hope it’s as entertaining as this.
via @rands, who is asking the same question as me: “How the hell does Pilgrim make web forms entertaining?”
In 1996, while he was still the CEO of NeXT, Steve Jobs was interviewed by Wired writer Gary Wolf. The result was a sometimes quaint, occasionally prophetic and often pessimistic exchange.
In this far-reaching (and somewhat lengthy) discussion with Steve Jobs, the two discuss the forthcoming ubiquity of “the web dial tone”, how technology doesn’t change the world and this on the true meaning of design and creativity:
Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. The design of the Mac wasn’t what it looked like, although that was part of it. Primarily, it was how it worked. To design something really well, you have to get it. You have to really grok what it’s all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don’t take the time to do that.
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.
via @tcarmody