The Atlantic: “Why People in Cities Walk Fast”

Most work on urban walking speed dates back to 1976, when psychologists Marc and Helen Bornstein published a provocative paper on the topic in the top-tier journal Nature. The Bornsteins wanted to understand the relationship between a growing human population and an individual person's behavior. So they planted themselves in major activity centers of 15 different cities and towns in six different countries on warm sunny days, and timed how fast a couple dozen solitary, unsuspecting pedestrians covered about 50 feet of space. Eric Jaffe

Interesting study; it would certainly merit revisiting to get more up-to-date data – which I suspect will only further confirm the trend. I also like speeding up, especially when I find myself in a crowd moving along at its own – slow – pace. It’s more about getting in front of them, where I can assume my natural walking rhythm. If I were to speculate about the reason behind the more general trend, I would say people in larger cities have a more pressing sense of their goal – “I am going there to do this and that” – a need for efficient, economical use of time. I think factoring in the purpose of the trip – going to work vs. walking the dog – would yield some interesting correlations.

The Guardian: “When present self meets future self”

Languages can be divided into those that use grammar to make a strong distinction between the present and the future (linguists say these have strong "future time reference" or FTR) and those that blur the two (weak FTR). Where you'd say, "I'm going to buy a house" in English, which is a strong FTR language, you'd say, "I buy house" in Mandarin, with the timing implied by the context. Chen's number-crunching revealed extraordinary correlations. Weak-FTR speakers are 24% less likely to smoke and 29% more likely to exercise; strong-FTR speakers saved far less money. Chen's argument is that the more you think of the future as a radically different thing, the easier it is not to worry about how too many cigarettes – or too little money – might cause problems in that future. It's not your fault you're a wreck. It's your grammar's. Oliver Burkeman

Interesting idea, although the argumentation is sketchy at best. As always, it’s good to keep in mind that correlation doesn’t equal causation. Be sure to read the last paragraph, it puts the entire article in a different perspective.

Going mobile – iPhone edition

I’ve been toying with the idea of buying an iPhone since about a year ago. My previous quasi-smartphone – a Nokia N81 – was starting to show it’s age; after all three years is pretty much retirement age for any phone. I never considered Android an option; it was more a matter of taste than of features or phones. I would see myself instead buying a new Nokia with Windows Phone 7, it looks much more appealing than last year’s version of Android. I had only a small dilemma: I loved the design of the iPhone 4, but didn’t want to buy last years’ model. So you can image I was anything but disappointed when the iPhone 4S was announced, with pretty much the same design, but updated specs!

Long story short: it’s an awesome smartphone, get one if you can! And now for the long story:

JW on Tech: “Why I left Google”

As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy, Google just wasn’t part of it. People were sharing all around us and seemed quite happy. A user exodus from Facebook never materialized. I couldn’t even get my own teenage daughter to look at Google+ twice, social isn’t a product, she told me after I gave her a demo, social is people and the people are on Facebook. Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s party became the elephant in the room.James Whittaker

This story has been circulating a lot on the Internet lately and with good cause. Coming from a former Google who returned to his previous employer (Microsoft), it serves as insider confirmation for the criticism against the direction Google took lately, breaking user expectations, breaking good products, trying to force a new sharing model that simply doesn’t work.

You probably know the saying: If four or five guys tell you that you’re drunk, even though you know you haven’t had a thing to drink, the least you can do is to lie down a little while. Google got drunk on the idea it can do anything and doesn’t want to let it go, no matter how many people tell it otherwise.

The Atlantic: “How Engineering the Human Body could combat Climate Change”

A new paper to be published in Ethics, Policy & Environment proposes a series of biomedical modifications that could help humans, themselves, consume less.

Some of the proposed modifications are simple and noninvasive. For instance, many people wish to give up meat for ecological reasons, but lack the willpower to do so on their own. The paper suggests that such individuals could take a pill that would trigger mild nausea upon the ingestion of meat, which would then lead to a lasting aversion to meat-eating. Other techniques are bound to be more controversial. For instance, the paper suggests that parents could make use of genetic engineering or hormone therapy in order to birth smaller, less resource-intensive children.

Ross Andersen

This idea is just wrong on so many levels! I’m not even going to get into the ethical issues. I’m not an expert, but most of the technologies mentioned in the paper don’t seem ready for mass adoption on a planetary scale. But, for the sake of argument, let’s assume they are, let’s also assume that the entire child-bearing population of the world will voluntarily submit to these limitations (which, of course, isn’t going to happen, for a countless number or reasons, from cultural to status – “I’m rich/a celebrity, so you must make an exception for me!”) and that the world economy can handle the massive cost of these interventions (IVF for roughly 130 million new babies yearly for a rate of 10,000 USD is definitely not cheap and that’s not even counting the cost to set up the necessary infrastructure in developing counties, to train doctors, etc.), let’s assume that all these unlikely events fall perfectly into place, what will it achieve? We will start making a dent in global warming after a couple of decades, when this hypothetical “energy-efficient” generation will reach adulthood, by which time the global warming will be well under way!

Now that’s what I call a solution…

Facebook is not blocking Blogger; it just expects Open Graph markup

These past days a saw a couple of people complaining on Twitter that posting Blogger links on Facebook doesn’t show the nice rich preview we are all used to seeing. There was also a report that Blogger links were marked as spam and required word verification to post. While that issue seems to be fixed in the mean time, the previews are still missing. And now that I think about it, it must have started much longer ago, since I noticed it days ago on some links automatically posted to my profile by ifttt.

Hey @Blogger users: why, when I share a link to my blog on Facebook, does it not display images or blurbs anymore? Just Shows the URL.

— beta dad (@betadad) March 8, 2012

Gawker: “Twitter’s Secret History As the World’s Worst Tech or Media Business”

To collect total revenue of $28.5 million in 2010, for example, the company had to spend and write off more than three times that, leading to a net loss of $67.8 million, according to new financial data on the company provided by our source.
And 2011 hardly got off to a more promising start: Twitter posted a net loss of $25.8 million on revenue of $23.8 million through April 30, according to the same source. In that same period, Facebook took in 26 times as much revenue, converting nearly a third of it into profit — and that was only through the end of March. Ryan Tate

That looks bad for Twitter. And it’s not like they can strike a deal with the most profitable tech company in history to keep themselves afloat.

Oh, wait…