onfocus

"The culture of individualism is so strong that we sometimes forget how powerfully and silently social networks and those around us influence our health..." [via cshirky]

"Researchers are increasingly coming to understand that people are also 'programmed' to care about others." [via cshirky]

"Perhaps they know better than we do how deeply the American people long to be done with the problem of democracy...Sarah Palin represents what many people want: a retreat from reason; a regression to childhood." [via MeFi]

Netflix has an API now. It includes their movie catalog, reviews, and manipulating queues (oauth for that). [via waxy]

A talk David Simon gave at the Berkeley Townsend Center. [via sippey]

Search the Google of 2001 when my blog was the 3rd result for "Paul". I guess Pagerank and I have drifted apart over these last seven years.

[via kottke]

Texas highway department: "roads simply don't pay for themselves." [via migurski]

Fantastic post about subterranean tunnels and the Federal Writers' Project that exposes some darker parts of the American West psyche.

"Start expressing fuel efficiency as gallons per mile (gpm) for some standard (meaningful) distance. We prefer gallons per 10,000 miles because it makes clear that seemingly small mpg improvements are valuable."

This Yahoo! Stencil Kit looks like a good way to mock up iPhone apps in Illustrator. [via CreativeTechs Tips]

"Buying a new home, rearranging your room, or moving into a new office? You can save time and have more fun if you lay out your ideas ahead of time." Looks like nifty web app.

tl;dr

A web comic about branding. [via Brand New]

The Web's favorite tinsmith resigns his post with the Yahoo Web Trust for a more pastoral way. [via waxy]

[via sterling]

Gary McGraw: "People keep asking me to join the LinkedIn network," he said, "but I'm already part of a network, it's called the Internet." Jon's right, we can think bigger than our current data islands. [via o'reilly radar]

Tired: focus groups. Wired: immersion research. Ugh, when will people stop agreeing to be guinea pigs for marketers? If a marketer asks to live with you, say no. [via SOTD]

New blog by Dan Lockton about the intersection of psychology and business. [via Mind Hacks]

Great article on the current state of password "recovery", and how you can choose passwords that are somewhat more secure. Schneier's PasswordSafe is an essential program for me.

Why people hate domain registrars: "Domain name servers were not responsible for lost domain names if holders did not re-register in time, Xinhua quoted a center insider as saying, since the loss was an 'act of God.'"

Fantastic article about aggregating current emotion research. "Most neuroscientists now recognise six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise." (subscription req'd unfortunately)

this articles dissects the art of comedy and distills it down to a few "joke templates". [via Mind Hacks]

"a musical realization of the motion graphics of john whitney as described in his book 'digital harmony'." By Jim Bumgardner. Play with the hand crank!

Flickr Hacks co-author Jim Bumgardner recently spoke at Yahoo about the visual and audio hacks he plays around with. I hope Yahoo releases audio of his talk.

[via Bruce Schneier]

some of the presentations from the IDEA conference are available now

I already ordered the book. (It arrived today, yay!) But I'd be ordering on Nov. 1st with others if I hadn't. [via Brian Sawyer]

John Battelle has a great idea about storing data in info-privacy friendly countries. But I'd go a step further and say that big data stores should also store data in an encrypted format, so only someone with a key can make the data useful.

put in some text, and see if this script can guess the author's gender based on word usage. (I was looking for a Perl module that does this, but no luck.)

Jerry Michalski on outsiders [via msippey]

an ex World of Warcraft top player explains why he quit: "Then it hit me like a ton of bricks: I was providing them with an escape from their problems and nurturing the very thing that was holding them back." [via waxy]