Why beautiful people are more intelligent
This paper breaks down the theorem “beautiful people are more intelligent” into 4 assumptions. These assumptions are short and sweet and evidence is provided in the actual paper.
- Men who are more intelligent are more likely to attain higher status
- Higher status men are more likely to mate with more beautiful women
- Intelligence is heritable
- Beauty is heritable
Hence, it logically follows that beautiful people are more intelligent.
QED.
Note that while the correlation between beauty and intelligence is statistically significant (p < .05), the strength of the relationship is fairly weak (d = .07), compared to for example, beauty and popularity (d = .65).
Kanazawa, S. & Kovar, J. L. (2002). Why beautiful people are more intelligent. Intelligence, 32(3), 227-243. [PDF]
67 comments September 4, 2006
How Spammers Steal Your Email Address
Ever wonder who’s scraping your email from a website for spamming?
Project Honey Pot is a project that aims to analyze email harvesters by setting up honeypots on hundreds of thousands of websites. They have some interesting findings about the geographical source of harvesting and processing, sending patterns of different types of spammers, and email list management behaviors.
Email harvesters can be categorized into two types, termed “hucksters” and “fraudsters”.
Hucksters have a longer delay between the time they harvest the email address to the time a spam is sent there. They have more sophisticated harvesting algorithms, generally send a large volume of spam, and their emails typically sell a product.
Fraudsters almost immediately send a spam email once they harvest the email address. They send a small number of messages to each email address, and their emails typically involve some sort of fraud (phishing, “advanced fee” fraud, etc.).
My thoughts are that Hucksters are a more organized group of spammers that as a group create email lists, send bulk email, and sell products for profit. Meanwhlie, the fraudsters are simply individual spammers looking to make a quick buck.
The geographical origin of harvesters and spammers breaks down as follows,
Harvesters
|
Spammers
|
Note that there seems to be some sort of apparent “outsourcing”, since Romania is the #2 country for harvesting but doesn’t appear in the top 10 for spamming.
So what are the most effective ways to munge (obscure your email address from harvesters) your email on a website?
- Putting the email address in an image
- Using Javascript to render the address (harvesters are unlikely to execute Javascript)
For the latest Project Honey Pot statistics, click here.
Prince, M. B., Holloway, L., Langheinrich, E., Dahl, B. M., & Keller, A. M. (2005). Understanding How Spammers Steal Your E-Mail Address: An Analysis of the First Six Months of Data from Project Honey Pot. Proceedings from CEAS ’05: Conference on Email and Anti-Spam. [PDF]
5 comments September 2, 2006
What is the sound of thousands of people chatting on the Internet?
First, I’d like to mention that this post is totally biased because I LOVED this project.
The Listening Post was an art exhibit I saw at the San Jose ZeroOne Art and Technology Festival.
Text is taken from online chat rooms, bulletin boards, and public forums, then selected lines centered around a theme are read aloud while the text is simultaneously displayed on a wall of digital tiles in real time.
Having a text-to-speech engine read the text makes it feel very impersonal, and the background music is quite serene. The whole piece made me feel quite cold and lonely.
It’s really more of something to see than describe, so here are some videos: [Video 1], [Video 2].
My favorite line: “I AM A PROFESSIONAL KILLER DEAR”
The only thing that would make this better is to alternate several different voices in the TTS engine, or at least have a female voice as well.
Hansen, M. & Rubin, B. (2002). Listening Post: Giving voice to online communication. Proceedings from ICAD ‘02: International Conference on Auditory Display (Accepted but not published). [PDF]
Add comment September 1, 2006
Does the Internet improve social relationships and psychological well-being?
Well-known studies have showed that TV directly causes social disengagement and bad moods.
However, Internet is used for many social purposes — email, newsgroups, chat rooms, etc.
In 1998, Kraut et al. showed a correlation between Internet use and declines in social relationships and isolation,
Greater use of the Internet was also associated with small, but statistically significant declines in social involvement as measured by communication with the family and the size of people’s local social networks, and with increases in loneliness, a psychological state associated with social involvement.
This paper was titled the “Internet Paradox” because the Internet is heavily used for communication, yet it makes people lonelier. Strong relationships developed online are rare; most people use the internet to keep up with offline relationships.
More recently, Kraut et a. did another study on the original test group, and found that the negative effects of using the Internet had dissipated.
A second study was then done on new purchasers of computer and televisions, and it also showed that the internet had a positive effect on social and psychological well-being. Unsurprisingly, this was more pronounced for extroverts and more socially connected people.
So what accounts for the difference between the 1998 and the 2002 study?
One could argue that the Internet has changed. Online dating, discussion boards, social networking, instant messaging. It’s just a different Internet.
The other argument one can make is that the users have changed — when the first study was done, only about the third of the population had access to the Internet. Now, everyone’s online.
Interestingly, the new study showed that heavy Internet usage was associated with declines in local knowledge and interest in living in the local area. This is likely “the grass is greener on the other side” syndrome, and the paper remarks,
Unlike regional newspapers, for example, the Internet makes news about distant cities as accessible as news about one’s hometown.
Kraut, R., Kiesler, S., Boneva, B., Cummings, J., Helgeson, V., & Crawford, A. (2002). Internet paradox revisited. Journal of Social Issues, 58(1), 49-74. [PDF]
Kraut, R., Patterson, M., Lundmark, V., Kiesler, S., Mukopadhyay, T., & Scherlis, W. (1998). Internet Paradox: A Social Technology That Reduces Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being? American Psychologist, 53(9), 1017-1031.
Consider using Safety Web internet safety software to monitor children online activity.
37 comments August 31, 2006
Debunking the Seven-Plus-or-Minus-Two Myth
Why are phone numbers seven digits? Because our short-term memory can only store 7 numbers at once.
I heard that first in grade school, and it seems to be one of those things that sticks in your head. It’s so obvious and sensible!
But is it really? So you never forget a phone number between being told the number, to writing it down?
- Zero is perfection. One is focus.
- Two is a bit. Three is the simplest complexity.
- Four is a square. Five is a handful.
- Six is … just after five.
- Seven is many. What’s seven? It’s not a particularly special small integer.
Doumont takes a closer look at the paper that started this all — Miller’s “The magical number seven, plus or minus two” in The Psychological Review.
What George Miller presented as “some limits on our capacity for processing information” [1, p.81] quickly turned into an acceptable average: Miller’s whole paper is now ignorantly summed up as “seven is OK”.
The truth is, Miller’s paper doesn’t really provide much evidence for 7 to be the magic number of our short-term memory.
First, the number seven plus or minus two is at best an ASYMPTOTICAL LIMIT,
In fact, the calculations in Miller’s paper to come up with 7 as the magic number is unclear. He does not claim this to be the case and the experiments come up with a limit between 4 and 10.
Narratively, Miller seems obsessed with the number 7, which undoubtebly biases his judgment. From his original paper,
What about the seven wonders of the world, the seven seas, the seven deadly sins, the seven daughters of Atlas in Pleiades, the seven ages of man, the seven levels of hell, …
But no where in the paper does he actually say 7 is the number of things we can process.
Doumont, J. (2002). Magical Numbers: The Seven-Plus-or-Minus-Two Myth. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, 45(2), 123-127.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. The Psychological Review, 63(2), 81-97. [HTML]
1 comment August 30, 2006
When Can I Expect an Email Response?
No new messages. Why is it taking so long? Did they receive it? Did it get put in the junk mail folder?
How long should you wait before emailing again? You don’t want to seem desperate…
Waiting for an email reply seems to be a common occurance in this day and age of email reliance. We look for contextual clues to why a response may be taking longer than usual, and decide when we should follow up the email.
A paper by Tyler & Tang looks at the the email-replying habits of a group of corporate users in this 2003 paper.
Here’s what they found:
- Most users check their email “constantly”
- Users would try to project a responsiveness image. For example, sending a short reply if a complete reply might take longer than usual, intentionally delaying a reply to make themselves seem busy, or planing out timing strategies for email with read receipts.
- Users would look at shared calendars or other means to estimate how long they should expect a reply
- If an email was urgent, users often used voicemail as a way to bring attention to their email
- Emails were written differently, depending on how long of a delay was expected before a reply (especially if their recipients were in a faraway time zone
- Users would try to reciprocate email behaviors — responding quickly to people who responded quickly to them, and lowering their responsiveness to people who responded slowly to them in the past
Based on past response times, users had a response expection threshold for other users, which was the amount of time in which they expected a response (most said 24 hours). There was also a later breakdown perception threshold — a time when they would follow up on the email by phone or with another, more urgent looking email.
Tyler, J. R. & Tang, J. C. (2003). When Can I Expect an Email Response? A Study of Rhythms in Email Usage. Proceedings from ECSCW ’03: European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, 239- 258. [PDF]
27 comments August 29, 2006
White Space: Nothing Becomes Something
What is the meaning of white space, if not nothing?
White space is the void between objects in ads, the null in a world of materialism. Yet it hardly has no meaning.
This recent paper from the Journal of Consumer Research looks at symbolism in advertising through white space. Since white space itself is simply absence — it has no color (arguably), no symbols or images — any meaning it has is derived from its past.
Pracejus et al. offer three historical movements that have shaped the identity of white space.
The minimalism movement in the mid-1960s was a response to the loud and aggressive advertising in that time period. Corporate art emerged in the late 1950s to provide elegance to the workplace. The clean look of upscale living in the middle of the 20th century was an image to strive for.
The authors performed two user studies. In the first study, they found that creative directors at major North American advertising agencies believed that white space conveyed prestige and an upscale meaning. This was reaffirmed in a second study where consumers were given ads to examine, where the difference was the amount of white space in the ad. Ads with more white space gave the brand a perception of higher quality, prestige, and trust.
The upscale look of white space is evident on the web, as companies such as Google aim for a cleaner interface of its websites. The polished clean look of Apple’s laptops and iPod also help its image as a high quality, upscale brand.
In the end, it’s evident that “nothing” doesn’t necessarily mean nothing. Sometimes, less is more.
Pracejus, J. W., Olsen, G. D., & O’Guinn, T. C. (2006). How Nothing Became Something: White Space, Rhetoric, History and Meaning. Journal of Consumer Research, 33, 82-90. [PDF]
2 comments August 28, 2006
