We are told how the ISO-accepted emergency exit sign is Yukio Ota’s running man, adopted in the late 1970s. Interesting are Ota’s thoughts on pictograms and their function in society on discovering that the two signs competing for ISO adoption (his and one by a Soviet designer) were remarkably similar:

Ota, like many designers of pictograms, is a bit of a romantic about the power of symbolic communication. The first real innovator in the field was Otto Neurath, who developed ISOTYPE, a system of pictograms intended to help workers between the world wars relate to Europe’s increasingly industrial economy. […] Like Neurath, Ota believes that through graphical icons, we can transcend our cultural and linguistic differences and speak to one another as global citizens. […]

The running man is thus the child of both rigorous science and starry-eyed utopianism, and it’s now in use all over the globe.

Note: The complete set of 50 “passenger/pedestrian symbols” from the AIGI have recently been released to the public and are available for free.

via @zambonini

• Web Design Research Results
• Design Patterns for Errorproofing
• Simple Rules for Better Typography

[Psychologist Ellen Bailystok] wanted to explore whether enhanced executive control actually has a protective effect in mental aging—specifically, whether bilingualism contributes to the “cognitive reserve” that comes from stimulating social, mental and physical activity. She studied a large group of men and women with dementia, and compared the onset of their first symptoms. The age of onset for dementia was a full four years later in bilinguals than in patients who had lived their lives speaking just one language. That’s a whopping difference. Delaying dementia four years is more than any known drug can do, and could represent a huge savings in health care costs.

Is there any downside to bilingualism? Yes. […] Bialystok’s studies also found that bilinguals have less linguistic proficiency in either of their two languages than do those who only speak that language. They have somewhat smaller vocabularies, for example, and aren’t as rapid at retrieving word meanings. But compared to the dramatic cognitive advantages of learning a second language, that seems a small price to pay.

via @siibo

• The Benefits of Child Bilingualism
• Social Cognition and Staving Off Dementia
• Realising Metaphors

Suppose that an idea merited 20 pages, no more and no less? A handful of long-copy magazines […] would print 20-page essays, but an author who wished his or her work to be distributed would generally be forced to cut it down to a meaningless 5-page magazine piece or add 180 pages of filler until it reached the minimum size to fit into the book distribution system. […]

Our literary culture is impoverished when every idea is stretched or amputated to fit the Procrustean bed made up by magazine and book publishers. When an author runs out of relevant stuff to say after 20 or 30 pages, that’s how long the essay should be.

Trough the lens of what was able to be published, Greenspun sees publishing’s evolution like this:

• Pre-1990: five-page magazine articles and 200-page books.
• 1990 to 2000: any length essays, with little barrier to entry (static web pages).
• 2000 onwards: one-paragraph ideas and personal thoughts, widely available (production and consumption) with blogs.

• Elderly Becoming Redundant
• Blogs as Public Billboards
• Cory Doctorow’s Experiment: Does Free Work?

There are exceptions, of course, and proponents of cameras can always cherry-pick examples to bolster their argument. These success stories are what convince us; our brains are wired to respond more strongly to anecdotes than to data. But the data are clear: CCTV cameras have minimal value in the fight against crime. […]

The important question isn’t whether cameras solve past crime or deter future crime; it’s whether they’re a good use of resources. They’re expensive, both in money and in their Orwellian effects on privacy and civil liberties. Their inevitable misuse is another cost. […] Though we might be willing to accept these downsides for a real increase in security, cameras don’t provide that.

In August 2009 Schneier discussed a report that showed only one crime per thousand cameras per year is solved because of CCTV and quotes David Davis MP saying that “CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security.”

A Home Office study also concluded that cameras had done “virtually nothing” to cut crime (although they were effective in preventing vehicle crimes in car parks), but do “help communities feel safer” (a case of classic security theatre).

• Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites
• Terrorism and Our Responses
• CCTV Prevalence in Britain

Some of the findings:

• Green tea has been shown to lower cholesterol in a large number of studies, but there’s no sign of cancer prevention properties.
• There’s strong evidence showing Omega 3’s cholesterol-lowering abilities and good evidence indicating it can help improve some ADHD behaviour and lower blood pressure. In terms of preventing arthritis and cancer, and in relieving depression, the evidence is conflicting.
• Fish oil has been shown to help lower blood pressure and the risk of secondary heart disease, but the evidence for it improving general health isn’t strong (but is promising).
• Vitamin D is fantastic: great for all-round general health and cancer prevention.
• Vitamins A and E aren’t beneficial for much at all, while Vitamin C studies are somewhat conflicting.
• Beta carotene’s position surprised me: there is little-to-no evidence of any health benefits. The same goes for acai and goji berries, ginkgo biloba and copper.

The raw data used to generate the visualisation is available–along with citations–in a Google document that is occasionally being updated.

• Ideology Getting in the Way of Evidence-Based Medicine
• The Anti-Vaccine Movement and the Rejection of Science
• Vitamins: A Pointless Expense?

In 2005, Boston-based doctors published the very first clinical trial of alcohol-based hand sanitizers in homes and enrolled about 300 families with young children in day care. For five months, half the families got free hand sanitizer and a “vigorous hand-hygiene” curriculum. But the spread of respiratory infections in homes didn’t budge. […] A Columbia University study also found no reduction in common infections among inner-city families given free antibacterial hand soap, detergent, and cleaning supplies. The same year, University of Michigan epidemiologist Allison Aiello summarized data on hand hygiene for the FDA and pointed out that three out of four studies showed that alcohol-based hand sanitizers didn’t prevent respiratory infections. Then, in 2008, the Boston group repeated the study—this time in elementary schools. […] Again, the rate of respiratory infections remained unchanged, though the rate of gastrointestinal infections, which are less common than respiratory infections, did fall slightly. Finally, last October, a report ordered by the Public Health Agency of Canada concluded that there is no good evidence that vigorous hand hygiene practices prevent flu transmission.

The final advice:

Follow the data and get a flu shot, wash your hands sensibly after using the bathroom and around meals, and stop wasting money on hand sanitizers.

via Link Banana, saying “they could (should) have been most explicit on the differences between hand washing […] and hand sanitizers”. Seconded–I’m no longer sure where hand washing fits in this picture.

Note: The Wikipedia article for hand sanitizers paints them in a slightly more positive light, but with many caveats (e.g. alcohol content and duration of exposure to the product is important, etc.).

• Paper Towels vs. Hand Driers
• Selling Hand-Washing to Africa
• The Evidence For (and Against) Health Supplements: a Visualisation

Elmore Leonard’s ten are included, and he summarises them with the following:

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10: if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

The article’s been mentioned in a few places, being discussed at length by Intelligent Life and Salon (the latter adding five of their own rules).

• 100 Best Fiction and Non-Fiction of the 20th Century – The Modern Library
• Writing ‘On Writing Well’
• Dava Sobel on Writing Science Books Full-Time

Controlling for environmental factors and the tendency of birds of a feather to flock together […] Christakis and Fowler found that we really do emulate those we care about, whether we mean to or not. Being connected to a happy person, for instance, makes you 15 percent more likely to be happy yourself. “And the spread of happiness doesn’t stop there,” they note. It radiates out for three degrees of separation, so that, say, your sister’s best friend’s husband’s mood exerts a greater influence on your personal happiness than an extra $10,000 in income would. If he gains 50 pounds, it will be that much harder for you to stay slim, as the frame of reference for what’s “normal” changes through your network. Or, on the positive side, if he quits smoking, your chances of kicking the habit improve, too, even if you’ve never met him. […]

Public health workers can more effectively stop the spread of sexually transmitted diseases if they know what kind of network they’re dealing with: a hub and spoke (e.g., a prostitute with many clients) or a more transitive “ring” network where people have few partners, but many of these partners overlap (which could happen at a small high school). On another front, they point out that voting makes little sense for an individual—one vote never decides an election—but is far more rational in a network context. As with happiness and obesity, the decision to vote has repercussions through three degrees of connections. […] Since liberals and conservatives tend to form their own social networks, this means that your decision to vote can increase the likelihood of hundreds of other people voting for the same candidate.

I do wonder if these degrees of separation that exert influence on us fluctuate with the size of each ‘degree’?

• The Decay of Social Networks
• Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites
• Identification through Anonymous Social Networking Data

The contributions that appear in the final, published book are freely available as are sixty-eight further contributions that didn’t make it.

This from Don’t Just Learn the Language, Understand its Culture:

Realizing how interwoven foreign words and phrases gave [James Joyce] new ways of expressing himself is something I’ve kept with me in my programming career.

In their seminal book, The Pragmatic Programmer, Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas encourage us to learn a new programming language every year. I’ve tried to live by their advice and throughout the years I’ve had the experience of programming in many languages. My most important lesson from my polyglot adventures is that it takes more than just learning the syntax to learn a language: You need to understand its culture. 
[…]

Once you’ve learned the ropes of a new language, you’ll be surprised how you’ll start using languages you already know in new ways.

Some might argue that Finnegans Wake is unreadable, while others applaud it for its stylistic beauty. To make the book a less daunting read, single language translations are available. Ironically, the first of these was in French. 
Code is in many ways similar. If you write Wakese code with a little Python, some Java, and a hint of Erlang, your projects will be a mess. If you instead explore new languages to expand your mind and get fresh ideas on how you can solve things in different ways, you will find that the code you write in your trusty old language gets more beautiful for every new language you’ve learned.

I guess another could be Don’t Rush?

*Other books in the series (full-content wikis): 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know and 97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know.

• A Guide for Learning Foreign Languages (Resources)
• The Beauty of Programming
• Anti-Patterns

• Invitation should be a core process, that is essential to using the application – this will maximise the chances that your users do invite new users.
• Keep pulling people back in, rather than letting them forget you after the initial invitation, and make this “reminder” process also be central to the use of the application.
• Be useful even to the lone user, because that lone user is the source of all your other users.
• Remove artificial invitation limits, to recognise the reality that most invitations come from a few very active users, and help those users spread the word.

Tenner also notes–in passing–the concept of the viral loop. Andrew Chen’s take on the loop is the best I’ve read on the topic.

• Overcoming Network Effects
• Resources for Community Building
• Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites