Every year during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP), Professor Patrick Winston gives a wonderfully reflexive and recursive talk about giving talks titled How to Speak. This lecture provides some useful speaking heuristics, especially if you’re in the business of helping people learn. This year the talk will be given Friday, Feburary 1 at 11am in [...]
The Echonest, a startup out of the Media Lab located in Somerville, MA, just launched an Audio Analysis API which processes MP3s and returns an XML document with a number of features including tempo, loudness, time signature, fades, timbre and a whole lot more. These can be used in a number of different cool demos [...]
This map on religion and regionalism is fascinating, and reminds me a lot of the pop/soda/coke regional map.
B.J. Fogg, esteemed Stanford professor of persuasive computing, taught a class last semester about creating engaging Facebook applications. The students were, suffice to say, quite successful.
Mr. Fogg will be discussing the class today an open PARC forum titled, Facebook applications, mass persuasion, & world peace. The talk is 4-5pm at the George E. Pake Auditorium. [...]
Metafilter has released the metadata for all of their sites, including comments, favorites and contacts. I think it’s excellent that they are taking the time to do this, and hopefully a few academics will recognize the value of such a compact, influential community that has amazing historical data. (via waxy)
WhileThe Hudsucker Proxy is not one of the Coen brothers’ most lauded films, but I have always though of it as an amazing movie about the unlikely sources of innovation. It wasn’t until I read about Richard Knerr’s death that I realized the affiliation the movie has with Knerr’s real life, namely the invention of [...]
When going to dinner on a Saturday in New York, one only has a few options: eat early, eat late, or eat at home. Last night we were confronted by Williamsburg Saturday-night economics, four restaurants in a row with over an hour wait, and I was reminded of a story that I read ages ago [...]
I was surprised the other day when I stumbled onto Barack Obama’s Facebook page and discovered that he actually filled out his music tastes:
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder,
Johann Sebastian Bach (cello suites), and The Fugees
I think that given the task of coming up with a more inclusive list, I don’t think I [...]
I was fascinated by a piece on yesterday’s Morning Edition about sleep, In today’s world, the well-rested lose respect. A myth has been created by America’s most successful politicians, businesspeople and other luminaries that their success is in some way tied to a physical condition, short sleeping, that allows them to have more productive hours [...]
Whenever I am selected as part of a survey panel, online or otherwise, I nearly always take the opportunity. I am “one of those people” who creates self-selection bias. I am a perennial student of surveys, and always interested in what researchers and marketers are trying to understand. I received an invitation this morning by [...]