The world’s ten creepiest abandoned cities
Apr 29, 2011 thinking design
via gadling.com
Photo Above: Sanzhi
Location: Sanzhi district, New Taipei, Taiwan
Story: This area called Sanzhi was originally a vacation resort catering to U.S. servicemen north of Taipei. The architecture could be called UFO futuro chic, and the abandoned resort community had difficulties from the beginning. During construction, many workers perished in car accidents, and other freak accidents were common. The urban legend online search trail places the death count close to twenty. The deaths were attributed to supernatural causes. Some speculated that the resort was built on a Dutch burial ground while others attributed the misfortunes to a dragon statue destroyed during construction. Either way, the ruins never took their first guest, and the stillborn project was abandoned.
Abandoned since: 1980
From an AOL post by Justin Delaney:
Some cities die. The people leave, the streets go quiet, and the isolation takes on the macabre shape of a forlorn ghost-town – crumbling with haunting neglect and urban decay. From Taiwan to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, these abandoned cities lurk in the shadows of civilization. Their histories are carried in hushed whispers and futures stillborn from the day of their collapse. Some have fallen victim to catastrophe while others simply outlive their function. I think we can all agree on one thing – they are all very creepy.
Click on link above for additional photos and descriptions.
Font size has no effect on learning or memory. Bigger is not better. Use unfamiliar fonts for retention of information
Apr 20, 2011 thinking design
OK…as designers we must admit that we are always pushing our clients to use creative layouts, new fonts and concepts that shift the user’s expectations.
We also battle the common phrase from a client to “Make the fonts bigger!”
Here is a nice article from The New York Times, written by Benedict Carey, that addresses the many biases and assumptions we use during the learning process. My only request is that do not show the “Familiar Fonts” used to clients, as “Comic Sans” (Italicized for Gods sake) was one of the examples of suggested fonts to apply…
Here is the opening paragraphs from the April 18, 2011 article.
“Trick question: Is it easier to remember a new fact if it appears in normal type, like this, or in big, bold letters, like this?
The answer is neither. Font size has no effect on memory, even though most people assume that bigger is better. But font style does.
New research finds that people retain significantly more material — whether science, history or language — when they study it in a font that is not only unfamiliar but also hard to read.
Psychologists have long known that people’s instincts about how well they’ve learned a subject are often way off. The feel of a study session can be a poor reflection of its nutritional value: Concepts that seem perfectly clear become fuzzy at exam time, and those that are hard to grasp somehow click into place when it counts.
In recent years, researchers have begun to clarify why this is so, and in some cases how to correct for it. The findings are especially relevant nowadays, experts say.
“So much of the learning that we do now is unsupervised, on our own,” said Robert A. Bjork, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, “that it’s crucial to be able to monitor that learning accurately; that is, to know how well we know what we know, so that we avoid fooling ourselves.”
For the full read, here is the link:
Is there an iTV coming soon? What are the chances of Apple entering the TV business? – TNW Apple
Apr 19, 2011 thinking design
via thenextweb.com
All I need…another ‘reason’ to buy another Apple product. But, just imagine how “Apple would do it”…boggles the creative mind. Just think of all the cool features that the “iTV” would incorporate…plus the Apple design execution.
From The Next Web:
The net is freshly abuzz with rumors about Apple’s plans to manufacture their own television. Although reignited by the reports of an analyst visiting china this week, this is a long-discussed topic. But what exactly are the chances that Apple will enter the TV business?
Back in 2005, if you told someone that small panel maker Vizio would be the market leader in less than 2 years, they would have given you the crazy eyes. But in 2007, Vizio, with a 76% growth over the year before, had become the number one seller of TV’s. Displacing previous leader Samsung in the process.
Once again, though, Vizio made its move based on price, becoming the low-cost leader. Surely, this is a strategy that Apple would never adopt?
The iPad for instance isn’t the absolute lowest cost tablet on the market, but back in April of 2010 people didn’t realize exactly how well priced it was. A fact that we’re all coming to realize now that manufacturers are trying to equal Apple’s technical feats at a similar price point…
Read full article at the link above.
Google beware: DuckDuckGo partners with Wolfram|Alpha – TNW Industry
Apr 19, 2011 thinking design
via thenextweb.com
From The Next Web (TNW):
For the past two years, Weinberg has been using Wolfram|Alpha‘s API, but today officially marks their partnership, a partnership that should very well make Google shudder.
Why should Google beware? Because Wolfram|Alpha, “the computational knowledge engine,” which launched in May 2009, is considered to be the biggest Internet revolution since the invention of search. In fact, many consider its goal to be the ”Holy Grail of the Internet,” a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Dr. Stephen Wolfram, the engine’s designer is a 51-year old British physicist who completed his PhD in particle physics by the time he was 20 and has recorded nearly every word that’s come out of his mouth in his professional life. According to Wolfram, the engine can compare the height of Mount Everest to the length of the Golden Gate Bridge and answer questions like what the weather was like in London on the day John F Kennedy was assassinated in an instant.
Great overview on the difference between Google and DuckDuckGo:
https://duckduckgo.com/privacy.html
Fun “Goodies” for research:
https://duckduckgo.com/goodies.html
Main site:
Pultizer-prize author Richard Ford on the “Meaning of Work”..is writing “Work”? Is design “Work?
Apr 18, 2011 thinking design
via blogs.wsj.com
Richard Ford, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, is the editor of the coming collection “Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar: Stories of Work” (Harper Perennial). Looks like a wonderful read on the many definitions of “work”. The Wall Street Journal asked him to write an overview on the “Meaning of Work”. Below is an excerpt from the article published on April 18, 2011.
“I’ve always had uneasy loyalties about the relevance of the term “work” to the activities I perform every day, and which occupy the hours when most other people are in fact “working.” I write novels and stories and essays for a living. And while I fairly mindlessly refer to what I do as “work” (“I’m working, I can’t help you shovel the driveway”; “I start work every day at eight and work on ‘til cocktail hour”; “I’ve been working way too hard, I need a trip to Belize”), it’s hard for me to think that work is what I really do.
Work, after all — to me, anyway — signifies something hard. And while writing novels can be (I love this word) challenging (it can also be tedious in the extreme; take forever to finish; demoralize me into granite and make me want to quit and find another line of work), it’s not ever what I’d call hard. A hard job, okay, would have to be strenuous and pressurized (writing’s almost never that way). It would have to be obdurate, never offering me a chance to let up (I can quit writing any time I want to and come back tomorrow, or never). And it would have to be skimpy on personal-spiritual rewards (I’m always trying to do what Chekhov did…change the way some reader sees the world; so big rewards are always out there). In my view, being a first-year law student at Harvard would not be hard; but being a non-partnered associate at Skadden, Arps would be. Learning to play “The Flight of the Bumble Bee” on a Sousaphone would not be hard; but working on the dashboard assembly team for the Ford-150 would most certainly be. You see what I mean. Hard is staring into one of those mind-corroding x-ray machines at LaGuardia. Or taking tolls on the Jersey Turnpike…”
Please read the full story at the above link at The Wall Street Journal.
