Philonoist.net

Even in the best financial times, knowing your credit score and what’s in your credit report is sound practice. Unfortunately, the three credit reporting bureaus make it just about impossible to attain your credit information, especially if you’re a young, mobile individual: the type of person who most needs to know their credit history.

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Every time I watch this, I die a little inside. A reminder: if you won’t eat those Creme Eggs, I sure as hell will.

I think Steven Leavitt (of Freakonomics) best distills this idea to its very core.

“So if you take the drug and pee on a special piece of paper, a secret message appears. If you don’t take the drug, you can pee on it all you want, but it will not reveal the secret message.”

I can definitely see this extending to doping at the Tour Du France, only the message would be “Allez directement en prison, vous porcine américaine.”

via An Ingenious Approach to Drug Compliance – Freakonomics Blog – NYTimes.com.

The graph above appears in a post over at Cognitive Daily. Basically, the colored columns for each age group correspond to three different “finding” tasks associated with objects underneath cups. In all three, a reward is hidden under one of two cups, and then the cups are hidden from view while the table rotates 180 degrees (to swap the location of the cups) or 360 degrees (to keep the cups in the same locations). The tasks vary as follows:

• Colored cups: The cups are the visual indicator that a change has or has not occurred.
• Left/Right: The cups are the same color, but the table is the visual indicator: half-black and half-white. The cups occupy exactly one color.
• Top/Bottom: The cups are the same color, and the table is the visual indicator: half-black and half-white. The cups straddle the color division line. If the table is black on top, rotating it 180 degrees means it will be black on the bottom.

To me, the interesting thing is the decrease in performance in the colored cup task: arguably the most basic. I suspect that not enough data was gathered. I’d love to read the article, but not for the $11.95 asking price.

via Cognitive Daily: Human children versus apes: Who’s better at tracking hidden objects, and why.

This is nothing short of amazing:

BumpTM makes swapping contact information as simle as bumping two phones together. No typing, no searching a list for the right person, no shaking your phone, no modem noises, no mistakes.

via Bump Technologies LLC. Finally, a business-card replacement that makes sense. Bump provides seamless transfer of information using a shared, secured, authorizable medium. You can’t have my contact information unless I want you to have it. I get to pick what contact information you recieve, and there’s no chance for error at data entry.

Simply brilliant. Another reason I’m still impressed with the iPhone and the developer talent.