September82009
"When instant cake mixes were introduced, in the 1950s, housewives were initially resistant: The mixes were too easy, suggesting that their labor was undervalued. When manufacturers changed the recipe to require the addition of an egg, adoption rose dramatically. Ironically, increasing the labor involved – making the task more arduous – led to greater liking.
Research conducted with my colleagues Daniel Mochon, of Yale University, and Dan Ariely, of Duke University, shows that labor enhances affection for its results. When people construct products themselves, from bookshelves to Build-a-Bears, they come to overvalue their (often poorly made) creations. We call this phenomenon the IKEA effect, in honor of the wildly successful Swedish manufacturer whose products typically arrive with some assembly required.
In one of our studies we asked people to fold origami and then to bid on their own creations along with other people’s. They were consistently willing to pay more for their own origami. In fact, they were so enamored of their amateurish creations that they valued them as highly as origami made by experts.
"
Tags: /more
September12009
"If you grew up in or near the city, the whole conceit that anyone would skip school to do anything so cheesy was condescending to the point of being offensive. It’s not a movie about Chicago, it’s a movie about being from the suburbs; likewise, I never saw it as a love letter to Chicago but a love letter to the idea of Chicago. But it’s always bothered me to no end how it gets treated as a ‘Chicago film’ even though it’s really just a ‘35 minutes up I-94’ film. It would’ve been nice for Hughes to credit us Chicagoland delinquents with a little imagination."
— Andrew Reilly on Crosstalk: Ferris Bueller: True to Chicago?
Tags: /more
August142009
Biased Reviews: Teddy Roosevelt Reviews Disney’s Pocahontas »
The good people over at The Talking Mirror bring yet another great article that I got a big kick out of. An excerpt:
“Smith, whose libidinous appetite grumbles audibly for brown-stained flesh, finds Pocahontas and fails to properly smother her with a smallpox blanket, thus sparking their disgraceful tryst. Vulgarly they profess their love through a nauseating musical duet about the colors of the wind. Not only is wind colorless, but savages lack sensory modalities common to most mammals, meaning they’re incapable of fathoming wind both physically and metaphorically. Regardless, the two are wildly taken by their mutual lust.
But so then John Smith is bound and gagged at Hi-Howaya headquarters. He deservedly awaits his execution. Will the savage children eat him alive or will they cook him first? This is the film’s only suspense.”
Oh, but I do love a good small-pox blanket joke….
Tags: /more
August132009
"AND herein lies the genius of J. C. Penney: It has made a point of providing clothing for people of all sizes (a strategy, company officials have said, to snatch business from nearby Macy’s). To this end, it has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on. It’s like a headless wax museum devoted entirely to the cast of “Roseanne."
Tags: /more
July222009
"People bought (and continue to buy) real paper newspapers and magazines because it feels like you’re getting something worth the price. A real physical object. Yes, the true value was, is, and will be the content, but the evidence so far is that media consumers don’t see it that way. When you pay a dollar for a newspaper it feels like you’re paying for the actual stack of paper, and it feels like a fair price. That just isn’t the case with web pages. And pay walls prevent linking, and linking is how you gain traffic. And, even more importantly, they’re competing against online-only news sites that are still going to offer free access to readers."
— Gruber on predictions that news organizations are soon going to begin charging for access to their content. (via)
Tags: /more
July82009
Guest Blogger: Freddy the Raccoon
Guest blogging is all the rage these days, and who am I to go against the trend? For this guest blog post, I’ve brought in a fellow blogger, Freddy the Raccoon. On his blog, the fantastically named, Freddy to Roll, he describes himself this way: “i am mostly your average raccoon. i can go to college. i have a selfphone.” In this first installment, I’ll let Freddy introduce himself:
hi i’m freddy ive been Blogged On for like a year. innernet is not very hard when you get a hang of it. i am a raccoon and go to college. i live with the lemmerds, larva is one of them and her bruther is. i am president of the coonited states! and voded for gobama. i am a cool pool lifecart in the summer which is hard but life i guess. “No Drowning!” sometimes people whoresplay and i say “water stays in pool and you too!” bc what if they got hurt and exploded or i got wet?
i like The Popped’N’Missed bc it has a lot of inchresting things. like with JOB i didnt know that you could ecsplain the most majical things with simple arrhythmatic. i guess it just goes to show faith verses reason like Lock and Jack. the problem with faith is you cant even see it sometimes and what if your wrong? the problem with reason is its hard and kind of dumb, nurds do it a lot. so how do you pick one? maybe you cant even bc of determanism! i just finished watching LOSSED the other day and i feel like i am the one who is lost half the time! but i am figuring out and pretty sure soyer is just jack. that is why they like the same girls.
theres a lot more of me but i could tell you. im not a know-at-all but am smart and brave and funny. if you do a QNA you can find it out ( i will do the A part). you can also see my blog or this picshure of me on indiepenance day. thats about it. sighanara!
Tags: /more
June222009
"I’m always a little reticent to draw lessons from things still unfolding, but it seems pretty clear that … this is it. The big one. This is the first revolution that has been catapulted onto a global stage and transformed by social media. I’ve been thinking a lot about the Chicago demonstrations of 1968 where they chanted “the whole world is watching.” Really, that wasn’t true then. But this time it’s true … and people throughout the world are not only listening but responding. They’re engaging with individual participants, they’re passing on their messages to their friends, and they’re even providing detailed instructions to enable web proxies allowing Internet access that the authorities can’t immediately censor. That kind of participation is reallly extraordinary."
— Clay Shirky, on the role of social media in Iran right now (via)
Tags: /more
