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Nathaniel Thurston's Recent Activity

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Your Brain Owners' Manual
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the difference between creativity and innovation

Don’t trust facebook apps

This is scary.  Facebook apps get access to all sorts of information about you, and the prospect that they’ll then turn around and use it for targeted spam is just… a very good reason to not to trust the apps in the first place.

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com
Online Age Quiz Is a Window for Drug Makers

Pharmaceutical companies pay RealAge to compile test results of RealAge members and send them marketing messages by e-mail. The drug companies can even use RealAge answers to find people who show symptoms of a disease — and begin sending them messages about it even before the people have received a diagnosis from their doctors.

While few people would fill out a detailed questionnaire about their health and hand it over to a drug company looking for suggestions for new medications, that is essentially what RealAge is doing.

Read more at www.nytimes.com
 

an interesting take on the new economy

No Commentary

Amplify’d from changethis.com
Trust Economies: Investigation into the New ROI of the Web
in the Trust Economy, communities are king, and ROI stands for Return on Influence.”Read more at changethis.com
 

Social networks in poor countries don’t pay

No Commentary

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com
In Developing Countries, Web Grows Without Profit

Call it the International Paradox.

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

Read more at www.nytimes.com
 

Oracle is under pressure due to lack of community credibility

No Commentary

Amplify’d from www.entirelyopensource.com

The Oracle open source credibility gap

Paula says open source executives are suspicious, and the unscientific poll I did here confirms it.

Oracle has an open source crediblity gap.

Fact is that many in the open source movement distrust Oracle’s motives in buying Sun and taking over such blue-chip open source names as Java, mySQL, Open Solaris and OpenOffice.org.

The fear that Oracle will seek to destroy these projects is real. And as with the swine flu, fear has consequences.

Just as Mexico is being pummeled because people fear a bug that has (as of yet) killed no one in this country, so Oracle is hurt by its open source credibility gap.

Read more at www.entirelyopensource.com
 

on the importance of eye candy

No Commentary

Amplify’d from www.alistapart.com

We’ve all seen arguments in the design community that dismiss the role of beauty in visual interfaces, insisting that good designers base their choices strictly on matters of branding or basic design principles. Lost in these discussions is an understanding of the powerful role aesthetics play in shaping how we come to know, feel, and respond.

Why aesthetics?

Aesthetics and cognition

Aesthetics and affect

You remind me of…

Can you trust me on this?

Put it all together and…

Attractive things work better

Stitching it all together

So, is “pretty design” important?

Reference

Read more at www.alistapart.com
 

predictions about the future of the social web

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Amplify’d from www.web-strategist.com
The Five Eras of the Social Web:

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

Timing Of The Five Overlapping Eras
See more at www.web-strategist.com
 

growing abuse of trust on social networks

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Amplify’d from www.itworld.com

Why you can’t trust ‘friends’ on Facebook

With e-mail and IM spam and Internet scams, the whole social-engineering game is to get you to trust a stranger. But social networks are different. The goal there is to get you to believe the fraudster is a friend whom you already trust.

Step 4: Now, you’re in business. You can ask things of these people that only friends dare ask.

“I’m in Nigeria on vacation, got robbed and need $500 to get home!”

Read more at www.itworld.com
 

the social effects of selectively enhanced intelligence

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Amplify’d from www.overcomingbias.com

Future Incompetence

What, then, would be the effect of selective enhancement of intellectual capacity - that is, enhancement of some, but not all - for the social and political world that we “normals” would inhabit?  Would it erode the foundations of egalitarianism, undermining the claims of many who now hold title ans citizens to that equal status?  Would those made or engineered to be born smart be within their rights to deprive the rest of our rights, presumably with a humanitarian intent?  In a word: yes. … 

This is a great test case for paternalists; if you feel that your superior minds justify ruling the lives of others, would do you accept having your life ruled by future folk with greatly enhanced minds?

Read more at www.overcomingbias.com
 

Practical turing tests

The longer the test goes on, the more difficult it is to pretend to be what (or who) you’re not.  The answer to the CAPTCHA mess is to extend the tests outside of the domain of a single website, and to make mistakes correctable.

Amplify’d from www.slate.com

I’m Human, Computer, I Swear!It’s time to move beyond those squiggly letter tests that Web sites use to weed out spam.

Read more at www.slate.com
 

people can read while simultaneously categorizing words

No Commentary

Amplify’d from www.spring.org.uk

Classic attentional training study hints at our considerable potential to multitask.

Before the training Diane and John’s normal reading and comprehension rates were measured, so it could be compared with post-training. Then Spelke and colleagues set about their three-phase training regime.

Phase 1: Simultaneous reading and writing.

Phase 2: Detecting structured sub-lists

Phase 3: Reading while categorising words

After the 16 weeks of the study it seemed that both Diane and John could categorise lists of words and write down the name of the category at the same time as reading, and understanding, a sophisticated and completely unrelated short story.

Read more at www.spring.org.uk
 
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