How to Change the World



"How Women Work"

Check out this great article called "How Women Work." It's like a combination of Women for Dummies, Everything You Wanted to Know About Women But Was Afraid to ask, and Women: The Missing Manual.

My favorite factoid: men have 6.5 times more gray matter than women. Women have 10 times more white matter. Gray matter is for processing centers. White matter is for creating connections between processes so that people can see and process patterns.

Imagine a Bigger Market and You'll See a Bigger Market

Scientists in two studies at the University of Virginia discovered that softball players and golfers who had good days perceived balls and golf holes as larger than the players who had bad days. The question is, Did this difference in perception cause the player to have better days or did the day's performance cause the players to perceive the ball and holes as bigger?

The Magic of Marketing

A research team from Durham University and the University of British Columbia is investigating magic tricks to further understand how people's minds work. The key magician's techniques that the team investigated were misdirection and illusion.

For example, in the misdirection trick, a researcher dropped a lighter and cigarette while misdirecting the subjects to the opposite hand. Most of the observers did not notice the researcher dropping the two objects even though it happened in plain sight.

Kronomy Again: Apple Timeline

Take a look at what Jeffrey Gordon did with Kronomy after he read my posting about the company.

Alltop Badge Contest Winners

Voters have selected the five winnners of the Alltop badge contest. Each winner will receive a iPod Touch. The winners are:

  1. Jesse Pons
  2. Glenn Sakamoto
  3. Kristen Chase
  4. Ben Goheen
  5. Cayley Vos

You can see the winning entries here. My thanks to everyone who entered and who voted.

How to Change Someone's Mind

There's nothing I like to study more than techniques of persuasion, and I want to persuade you to check out a website called ChangingMinds.org. You can think of it as Robert Cialdini, my hero when it comes to persuasion, on steroids.

The Wall Street Journal Lesson

A sign of PR cluelessness is writing to a reporter after an article appears because you think that it should have mentioned your product or company. There are two problems with this theory: first, the reporter isn't going to revise the original piece; and second, she's not going to write another article covering the same topic in the near future.

Friendfeed Starter Pack: Frienderati.alltop

I recently signed up for Friendfeed, and I had a hard time figuring out who to follow. Christine Lu told me that this is a common problem, and we came up with idea of aggregating the top Friendfeeds to help people get started. Check it out: Frienderati.alltop.com. You can use this as a starting point to figure out who to follow on Frienderati or to quickly scan what the Frienderati are discussing.