Platinum Is So Passé. In iTunes Era, the Singles Count
For decades, the music industry has been looking to the album charts to establish what made a hit. In the past 10 years, though, album sales have plummeted, sales of singles have surged and new sources of revenue have emerged — like fees for music streamed online and ringtone purchases — that are changing the definition of a hot artist.
» via The New York Times
How To Recover From 10 Types of Demotivation -
It’s said that Eskimos have multiple words for snow because snow is so familiar to them that they can appreciate the subtle differences between different types of snow. These additional distinctions enable Eskimos to respond differently to different types of snow, depending on the challenges and opportunities each particular type of snow is presenting them with.
Most of us have just one distinction for demotivation, which means that you’re likely to assume that you’re struggling with the same problem whenever you’re demotivated, when in fact demotivation is a category of problems that has many different distinctions within it. When you have just one distinction for demotivation, you’ll apply the same old strategies whenever you feel demotivated, which for many people looks like this: set goals, push harder, create accountability checks that will push you, and run your life using GTD methods and to-do lists. These strategies are ineffective with most types of de-motivation, and in some instances they can even make you more demotivated.
“Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage.” — Ben (I’m not a player I just crush a lot) Franklin - (via Mark Sikes) (via colin)
Awesome. Crowley is the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and the chief spokesperson for the State Department. (via TPM)
Album Sales Hit Record Lows. Again. : Planet Money : NPR
The post is good but the best part is the funny line-break effect.
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The Case Against Corporate Social Responsibility - WSJ.com -
Lost the (via) credit somewhere in the day’s activities. Apologies.In the end, social responsibility is a financial calculation for executives, just like any other aspect of their business. The only sure way to influence corporate decision making is to impose an unacceptable cost—regulatory mandates, taxes, punitive fines, public embarrassment—on socially unacceptable behavior.
Pleas for corporate social responsibility will be truly embraced only by those executives who are smart enough to see that doing the right thing is a byproduct of their pursuit of profit. And that renders such pleas pointless.
We Can See the Reputation Market's Event Horizon From Here - The Awl -
You are not Cory Doctorow. Your Whuffie is a finite resource. It’s no more difficult than devoting near-constant attention to an every-changing array of platforms and apps, and, on top of that, knowing when to jump into a specific pool (early) and when to hop out (a microsecond before it gets MySpaced).
The Myth of White Male Geek Rationality « Restructure! -
The realization that you may have biases that you are unaware of, and that you are not as rational and objective as you assumed, can be frightening and disorienting. However, you can reduce bias by becoming aware of implicit bias within yourself and accepting that implicit bias exists in our society. This means that you should no longer maintain naïve notions that you live in a meritocracy; that you are racially “colorblind”; that racism comes from only those who self-identify as racists; that you can ignore somebody’s race and gender when you are evaluating them; or that white men in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] fields are the last people who should worry about being biased. Ignoring bias or pretending it does not exist does not make it go away. Ignorance of bias does not indicate intellectual purity.
I’m not entirely sure why white men are singled out here but the point is good nonetheless.
The Third Replicator [NYT's Opinionator blog] -
All around us information seems to be multiplying at an ever increasing pace. New books are published, new designs for toasters and i-gadgets appear, new music is composed or synthesized and, perhaps above all, new content is uploaded into cyberspace. This is rather strange. We know that matter and energy cannot increase but apparently information can.
It is perhaps rather obvious to attribute this to the evolutionary algorithm or Darwinian process, as I will do, but I wish to emphasize one part of this process — copying. The reason information can increase like this is that, if the necessary raw materials are available, copying creates more information. Of course it is not new information, but if the copies vary (which they will if only by virtue of copying errors), and if not all variants survive to be copied again (which is inevitable given limited resources), then we have the complete three-step process of natural selection (Dennett, 1995). From here novel designs and truly new information emerge. None of this can happen without copying.
The Sofa Wars - Plenty to Watch Online, but Viewers Prefer to Pay for Cable
Entrepreneurs will “keep storming the castle until somebody figures it out,” Mr. Moffett wrote in a recent note to investors. But he also called cord-cutting “perhaps the most overhyped and overanticipated phenomenon in tech history.”
Plenty of people say they have foresworn cable for good. They are largely young adults who know their way around the Internet and have grown accustomed to watching video on computers and other devices.
The Times/CBS News survey found that people under the age of 45 were about four times as likely as those 45 and over to say Internet video services could effectively replace cable.
» via The New York Times
» via The Atlantic
So what I’m wondering is, is financial aid severely lacking in helping low income families send their kids to top schools? Or are lower income families proportionally less likely to raise children who qualify for top schools (as compared to higher income families)?
Would that question be answered by overlaying the tuition costs in a box-and-whisker pattern? I think it would better address your question. It’d also be interesting to see how long it takes each group to pay off borrowing—effectively, if $100K+ parent borrowing is just used as a short-term installment plan.
