Weekly Reading 11/29

The Other Half of “Artists Ship”

“And just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not that you overpay but that the best suppliers won’t even sell to you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you’ll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won’t even want to work for you.”

The Dizzying Diversity of Human Sexual Strategies

“Historically we’ve repressed women’s short-term mating and there are all sorts of double standards out there where men’s short-term mating was sort of acceptable but women’s wasn’t,” says Schmitt. “When you free a society by giving women ample resources, ample daycare and so on, then you see high sociosexuality scores in both men and women.”

Game Mechanics Applied to Marketing And Brands

“Successful games also shape our behavior by engaging us in “flow,” which is achieved through an optimum balance of challenge and skill. As humans, we need appropriate levels of challenge as our skills increase. The ability to match these two components is what makes good teachers good and great games work. It’s not necessarily graphics or sound, but certainly the underlying flow.”

Innovation in America | A gathering storm?

“America also has another advantage: the extraordinary willingness of its consumers to try new things. Mr Bhidé insists that such “venturesome consumption” is a vital counterpart to the country’s entrepreneurial business culture.”

Marketing Lessons from Obama’s Campaign

“Those who pontificate on marketing matters already are prattling on about how Obama created a wiki campaign, in which thousands, if not millions, both influenced and sold the brand. But what’s left obscure is how impossible it is for almost anything else to generate such a response. And it overlooks how disciplined the Obama campaign was in driving its one-word message of “change” from the top down. The genius was not in the wiki. It was in launching a simple-themed campaign that participants flocked to.”

Sex, Drugs and Death: A Conversation With Dr. Rob

“Last year my doctor asked me if I had ever done drugs. When I told him that I had smoked marijuana in graduate school he said, “Not girlie drugs. Every idiot’s done pot in college. Just stay away from the hard stuff.” I’m not entirely sure if he’s a good doctor, but when medical professionals couldn’t care less if you do a little cannibis it makes me think our War on Drugs could stand a little tweaking of philosophy.”

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