Some hands I drew for work. Work in progress.
How police drills for tiger escape. A photo from In Focus’ “The Unreal World”.
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View of midtown Manhattan in 1939 by LIFE.
Joshua Bell, a world renowned violinist, plays at a Metro station in Washington D.C. as a part of The Washington Post’s experiment to see if people can recognize beauty. The result?
In the three-quarters of an hour that Joshua Bell played, seven people stopped what they were doing to hang around and take in the performance, at least for a minute. Twenty-seven gave money, most of them on the run — for a total of $32 and change. That leaves the 1,070 people who hurried by, oblivious, many only three feet away, few even turning to look.
Does this experiment show that we are incapable of appreciating, let alone recognize, beauty when it’s not in a concert hall or set in a golden frame? The first person to stop by Bell, John David Mortensen, says of his performance:
Mortensen doesn’t know about major or minor keys: “Whatever it was,” he says, “it made me feel at peace.”
So maybe we can appreciate beauty, even though we can’t always articulate why we find it beautiful. There is one demographic that always noticed the beauty of Bell’s music though (and this demographic is particularly bad at “articulating”):
Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch.
All is not lost.
The Frequent Fliers Who Flew Too Much -
A surprisingly funny article on people who bought unlimited first-class tickets from American Airlines.
There are frequent fliers, and then there are people like Steven Rothstein and Jacques Vroom.
Both men bought tickets that gave them unlimited first-class travel for life on American Airlines. It was almost like owning a fleet of private jets.
Passes in hand, Rothstein and Vroom flew for business. They flew for pleasure. They flew just because they liked being on planes. They bypassed long lines, booked backup itineraries in case the weather turned, and never worried about cancellation fees. Flight crews memorized their names and favorite meals.
Who said the best things in life aren’t free? An ability fly to anywhere in the world any time on first class is almost magical. Imagine flying to Europe or a Caribbean island for a weekend on a whim: Make a quick call, get to airport, walk pass the lines, get first class treatment and arrive at any destination you ever wanted.
When I tell people I’m from Korea, which happens quite often in college, a common response I hear is, “your English is really good.” To be frank, my English is not perfect but it’s still pretty damn good, and that’s because I’ve been practicing English really hard for the last 10 years. I used English exclusively in school, read books in English, watched movies in English and listened to music in English so much so that I now think in English instead of Korean. It is and has been my most comfortable language for a while. I don’t know exactly when that happened, but English, my third language after Korean and Japanese, has become my primary language.
So, a recent study called The Foreign-Language Effect by Boaz Keysar, Sayuri L. Hayakawa and Sun Gyu An really caught my attention. The experimenters show that students overcome their cognitive biases, namely framing, when questions are presented in a foreign language. In other words, thinking in a foreign language makes your decisions more rational.
Before I delve into the actual research, let me give you some background on the issue of cognitive bias. This field of psychology has been pioneered by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky who showed that there exist two components of thinking: System 1 where your fast “gut” feeling happens and System 2 where a more deliberate, slower thinking happens. We, humans, tend to be lazy so we utilize System 1 most of the time, which inclines us to make cognitive mistakes as System 1 is fast but often shallow and stereotypic.
Take this classic example by Kahneman and Tversky:
Recently, a dangerous new disease has been going around. Without medicine, 600,000 people will die from it. In order to save these people, two types of medicine are being made.
If you choose Medicine A, 200,000 people will be saved.
If you choose Medicine B, there is a 33.3% chance that 600,000 people will be saved and a 66.6% chance that no one will be saved.
Which medicine do you choose?
Most people choose Medicine A over Medicine B even though both medicines have the same expected value. We would rather take the sure thing than to gamble with people’s lives. However, when the question is presented differently like this:
Recently, a dangerous new disease has been going around. Without medicine, 600,000 people will die from it. In order to save these people, two types of medicine are being made.
If you choose Medicine A, 400,000 people will die.
If you choose Medicine B, there is a 33.3% chance that no one will die and a 66.6% chance that 600,000 people will die.
Which medicine do you choose?
In this case, most people choose Medicine B over Medicine A even though only the phrasing—or framing—of the question has been changed. This is System 1 at work: A cursory glance at the question would incline you to choose Medicine B in the second question. The prospect of 400,000 people dying as framed by the question is less desirable than it was in the first question where taking Medicine A will save 200,000 people. Common sense would dictate that the decision to gamble—or take risk—shouldn’t change regardless of the description but that’s not the case because of System 1. In other words, your decisions—or risk preference—should stay consistent since the only difference between the two questions is the way in which they are phrased, but System 1’s “gut” response to “400,000 people dying” swayed you the other way in the second question.
So back to the research by Keysar, et al. In their first experiment, they took the same questions and asked them to three different groups of people: (a) One hundred twenty-one students in Chicago and Raleigh who spoke English natively and Japanese as a foreign language, (b) 144 students in Daejeon, Korea who spoke Korean natively and spoke English as a foreign language and (c) 143 students in Paris who spoke English natively and French as a foreign language. People in each group was randomly assigned to the first question (gain-frame) or the second question (loss-frame). This was the result, showing the percentage of participants who chose the Medicine A, the sure option:
When students read the question in their foreign language, there were about equal percentage of students who chose the sure option in the first or second question. On the other hand, when they read it in their native language, there exists a huge disparity between those who chose sure option for the first question and those who chose sure option for the second question.
Therefore, the result indicates that the asymmetry of risk preference disappears when the question is presented in students’ foreign language. Moreover, this foreign-language effect happens regardless of students’ particular native or foreign language. Just thinking in a foreign language is enough to keep your risk preference consistent and symmetrical.
In the second part of the experiment conducted by Keyser, et al., they explored another cognitive bias studied by Kahneman and Tversky called loss aversion. For example, people tend to avoid bets such as an equal chance to win $12 or lose $10 despite their positive expected value because of their emotional response to the prospect of loss. It is rational to accept such bets since you’re more likely to win money in the long run but the thought of losing money in the short run drives people away from such an opportunity. Previous study by Hanrinck, et al. provide evidence to support this cognitive bias, showing that people display loss aversion when the bets are high but they are not loss averse when the bets are low.
In their experiment, Keyser, et al. presented 18 equal-odd, positive expected value bets to 146 native Korean speakers. Half of the bets had high stakes (e.g., lose 119,000 won or 170,000 won) and half had low stakes (e.g., lose 200 won or 500 won; 1000 won is worth about a dollar). Bets had differing loss-to-gain ratio, ranging from 1/10 to 9/10. The graph below shows the percentage of bets accepted by the students:
Loss aversion is greater in large bets when the they were presented in Korean, the participants’ native language, but the aversion is significantly less and almost the same between large and small bets when bets were in English. Also, participants were more likely to accept bets when loss-to-gain ratio was smaller, as seen below:
Keyser, et al. replicates a similar experiment with students at the University of Chicago and the result was similar (the only difference was that students kept their money from the bets at the end of the experiment). Students who took the bets in their foreign language (Spanish) accepted them more often than students who took them in their native language (English).
The three experiments all point to the same conclusion: People are less likely to suffer from cognitive biases when they make decisions in their foreign language. The framing effect is greatly diminished or even eliminated when using a foreign language. The result is somewhat surprising considering that using a foreign language requires more effort and thus, we would be more likely to take mental shortcuts resulting in cognitive bias. However, the opposite was true. As the study hypothesizes, “a foreign language provides a distancing mechanism that moves people from the immediate intuitive system to a more deliberate mode of thinking. A foreign language may provide greater distance because it is less grounded in the emotion system than a native tongue is (e.g., Pavlenko, 2005).” By separating decision making from emotions that is an integral part of System 1, using a foreign language reduces cognitive bias from framing.
This might explain why watching ads from another country is such a jarring experience. Ads often employ techniques to take advantages of your cognitive biases and therefore, when you see ads at a foreign country, you find them to be quite unconvincing, if not outright bad. On a more general level, however, the study might give a clue as to why foreigners like international students understand things differently than do domestic students. What we often associate with language barrier may not always be so negative after all.
Now that I think about it, this might be why my teachers in high school said I was too literal. Despite English’s being my most comfortable language, my native tongue, Korean, may still influence the way I understand and think. The reason why I studied English was to assimilate into the American culture, to be a native at a foreign country I’ve never lived in and to relinquish my Korean identity so that I can thrive in America. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe there is a benefit to being an outsider. Maybe it’s time to embrace who I am and return to where I began.
This guy nails how Apple gets things right.
It’s neat, but will never happen. The prototype misses the subtle intersection of all the constraints necessary for good design on the iPad. At a high level, here are a few that you want to optimize for:
- Efficiency: how fast can the user perform the task at hand?
- Intuitivity: how likely is it the user will understand how to use it without direct instruction? (based upon trial and error, previous experience, etc.)
- Consistency: how much is it like other patterns in the same UI/environment?
- Metaphor: how much does it ‘feel’ like other real-world objects and leverages how the user understands them already?
These are of course a sample of high level overlapping themes. This particular prototype is obviously optimizing for efficiency. It does so very well, but at a very, very deep cost to the others. It is an undiscoverable interface. It utterly destroys the direct manipulation illusion of the iPad. It causes the virtual keys to no longer be metaphorical buttons since you can drag across them for an effect. It is inconsistent with other use of gestures, particularly since you are controlling a cursor remotely much like you would with a mouse (likely a fire-able proposition at Apple!)
The thing that makes Apple’s work so amazing is the balance they manage to strike between these things and so consistently get it right. For a power user, give me vim, Maya, Photoshop, and other tools that optimize for efficiency (much like this prototype does.) But when designing things that are meant to be universally available, a more subdued and balanced approach across these types of constraints is necessary.
One of the photos from NYC municipal archives. I love the style of the signs.
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A small preview of what I’m going to be working on this summer.
The Atlantic takes on Kanye West:
What’s most interesting about these moments, which are repeated verbatim on every stop of the tour, is that Kanye never goes off script. He is famous for emotional outbursts and rambling excursions, he hates scripts—but he likes being a pop-culture genius even more. That’s what’s at stake, and he is disciplined enough to do what needs to be done.
[…]
In Los Angeles, Kanye departs from the script for a full minute and a half, which is by far his longest nonmusical departure on the entire tour. “I was thinking about suicide three years ago,” he tells the crowd in the Staples Center. Two months from now, the Grammy Awards will be held here. He will win four, a respectable enough achievement, which will be entirely overshadowed by Whitney Houston’s death and by Adele’s sweep of the awards. Neither Kanye nor Jay-Z will attend the ceremony.
It is part of Kanye West’s job to tell people the truth about himself, just like it is part of his job to make great songs. “And now having the most Grammy nominations. I told you the truth,” he announces to the audience at the Staples Center. “People always tell you, ‘Be humble. Be humble.’ When was the last time someone told you to be amazing? Be great! Be great! Be awesome! Be awesome!”
And this is why I like Kanye West more than Jay-Z.
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Angry Birds, Farmville and Other Hyperaddictive ‘Stupid Games’ -
Coolest interactive graphic ever.
The Book of The Future by Grant Snider