"The comments sections on many general-interest news sites lack both the carrot and the stick for encouraging responsible behavior. The carrot is the cohesion of a group you don’t want to disappoint, like Yoshimi25’s Front Burner community. The stick is the shame associated with having your real name publicly attached to embarrassing behavior. Without these two levers, the social contract breaks down."
- Inside the mind of the anonymous online poster - The Boston Globe
ALT/1977: modern technology taken to the late 70’s, superficially redesigned to blend in.
The Swinger
The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half.
"
We had MBA students write down the last two digits of their social security number (mine are seven and nine) and then asked them whether they would pay that number in dollars (in my case $79) for, say, a bottle of Côtes du Rhône 1998. We then asked them to write down the maximum amount they would to pay for the product.
Our results? The mere mention of the last two digits of their social-security number influenced how much they were willing to spend. Students with numbers ending between 80 and 99 placed bids that were 216 to 346 per cent higher than those bids from students with numbers from 1-20.
"- Dan Ariely: Human habits - Wired.co.uk
