The Little Hacker's Room

MapEnvelope (via Make)

• Civil War mail art: envelope illustrations from mid-1800s - Boing ...
• Paper and envelopes that look like icons
• Peri Peri keychain emulates envelope tear-off strips ...

Shotgun Shell Candles (via Make)

• Marine accused of exposing self, waving shotgun, shouting white ...
• Shotgun expert shows his stuff
• Shotgun shell shot glasses
• Fully Loaded chair made of shotgun shells
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun: Dice edition Gadgets
• Cheney shoots 78-year old lawyer with shotgun, story ...
• William Burroughs Shotgun painting at auction

I find this site, full of coloring-book images of dinosaurs altered into pretentious cool kids, incredibly charming.

Thanks to the awesome Ashley Stubblefield!

Video Link.

(via BB Submitterator, thanks Antinous!)

I was going through my photo archive and came across this sign for funnel cakes that I photographed in Austin a couple of years ago. Doesn't it whet your appetite?

This video of a cruise ship in heavy seas is intense, and the Rod Stewart soundtrack doesn't make it any less so. I bet it was quite scary for the folks onboard. (Thanks, Mathias Crawford, via Dangerous Minds!)

猫が土下座しながら寝てた, via The Frisky.

Why all beverage bottles aren't shaped like pigs is beyond explanation. (Thanks, Rob!)

Imagine Peace

• John Lennon Died 28 Years Ago Today; a Word to from ...
• Yoko Ono: Celebrate John Lennon's Birthday Today with Peace ...
• Letter from Yoko to John - 12/8/2007
• John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Mike Douglas Show in 1972
• John and Yoko go to Canada

After a 7 month beta test period, we're sad to report that we've reached a decision to cease operation of Makers Market and Boing Boing Bazaar. Although the concept of a marketplace for indie makers invited by the staffs of Make and Boing Boing received strong praise from sellers and customers alike, in the final analysis it is not generating the kind of sales for our sellers that we expected, nor generating the revenue we need to "keep the lights on". Working in close collaboration with Boing Boing we attracted over 150 wonderful makers with creations so magical we frequently found ourselves pulling out our own wallets to buy gifts. However, our model was predicated on a highly cooperative premise: that a marketplace of indie makers actively engaged in their respective communities would quickly begin to draw its own critical mass. In spite of our best effort, this dynamic simply hasn't evolved. Too many sellers have confided in us that they are heavily committed to other projects or too pre-occupied promoting their own sites or preexisting stores to effectively tend to their Makers Market/Boing Boing Bazaar storefront. Which means that on any given day, the only product(s) that sell well are those that Boing Boing and Make have blogged that day.

October 8th will be the last day to sell products on Makers Market and Boing Boing Bazaar. Thereafter, we will keep the market open through November 9th to facilitate communications between sellers and their customers. We will publish a full-width graphical announcement on all marketplace pages explaining that the marketplace is closed, but that orders already placed are being fulfilled, and that customers can continue to access their account and order details and can communicate with sellers as through November 9th. On November 10th, we will replace the marketplace with a static page with a message from Make and pertinent contact info.

Effective immediately, we will waive any new fees other than commissions for those sellers who wish to continue selling through October 8th. For sellers who continue to sell though Oct 8th, standard sales commissions will continue to apply.

We sincerely appreciate your investment in time and energy into Makers Market and Boing Boing Bazaar. We want you to know that we have spent countless weeks evaluating the underlying circumstances, talking with sellers, and analyzing various options. In the final analysis, we are unable to sustain the marketplace without many times the traffic we are generating. We welcome your comments and would be more than happy to answer any questions you may have. Please write us at help@makersmarket.com

One of the most important issues to address in car interfaces is how to deal with upset drivers, as negative feelings are among the primary causes of accidents on the highways. Unfortunately, there is little known about effective strategies that passengers can use when dealing with an upset driver. In particular, should a passenger -- real or virtual -- in a car with an upset driver sound happy and upbeat or depressed and morose?

As an experimentalist, I decided to obtain upset drivers, combine them with either a happy or upset passenger, and see what happened. While one might want to do the study with real passengers, it's often much more effective to study people's reactions to interactive media directly.

My lab and I had participants use a driving simulator with a gas pedal, brake pedal, and force-feedback steering wheel. Along for the ride was a "virtual passenger," a recorded voice played by the car. The voice was of a female actress and made light conversation with the participant throughout the drive. The passenger's remarks encouraged the driver to talk back. For example: "How do you think that the car is performing?", "Do you generally like to drive at, below, or above the speed limit?", and "Don't you think these lanes are a little too narrow?" While the voice said the same 36 remarks to all the participants, its tone of voice was clearly happy and upbeat for some participants, and clearly morose and downbeat for others.

The sad voice sounds almost laughable to most people, and it would seem obvious that these upset drivers would prefer and benefit from the happy voice. To check this, using the simulator and coordinated technologies, we recorded the number of accidents the participant had and how much attention the participant paid to the drive. We also measured people's social engagement with the virtual passenger by recording how much the participant spoke with the agent. After the driving was over, we asked participants a number of questions about their feelings about the car and their driving experience via an online questionnaire.

What happened to these upset drivers? Did the happy passenger help cheer up the drivers? The simulator results suggest an emphatic "no." The happy voice in fact worsened upset participants' driving: upset drivers hearing the happy voice had approximately twice as many accidents on average as the upset drivers hearing the depressed voice. Upset drivers with the happy voice were also less attentive to the road than those with the voice that was clearly flat.

The questionnaire results also suggest that upset drivers were happier with a subdued, rather than happy, virtual passenger. Specifically, upset drivers enjoyed driving more, liked the voice more, and thought that the car was of a higher quality when the virtual passenger was upset. In addition, even though you might think that an upset passenger and an upset driver would avoid conversation with each other, upset drivers spoke much more with the depressed "passenger" than they did with the happy one. Why didn't the upset drivers benefit from the happy voice? When people try to process and pay attention to emotions that differ from their own, it takes a great deal of cognitive effort. As a result, the drivers were distracted, uncomfortable, and performed worse. Furthermore, when the virtual passenger continued to cling to her initial emotion, drivers felt the lack of empathy, even if it was only a technology that was hurtful.

While it is satisfying to inform the design of the car's interface to make drivers safer and more enjoyable, it turns out that there was another benefit. In over one hundred experiments, research emerging from my lab has shown that social behaviors and responses appear in full force when people interact with technology. That is, people treat computers as if they were real people. As a result, just as we can use the most successful social behaviors to inform technology design, we can use studies with computers and other technologies to derive rules that will teach people how to win friends and influence people. Indeed, in my new book, The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us about Human Relationships, I describe almost one hundred rules for social behavior that can be derived from experimental studies of how people use technology and that can make people more likeable, effective, and persuasive. The current study gives us two principles to guide interactions with people (as well as technology): telling upset people to "look at the bright side of life" can be off-putting, and "misery loves miserable company."

Buy The Man Who Lied to His Laptop: What Machines Teach Us About Human Relationships on Amazon

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