Digital Mind

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Yelp - Power to the People!


Since discovering Yelp last year I have been an avid fan. Long ago I was a big fan of Sidewalk which eventually became Citysearch. The editorial reviews were helpful and having a map to show not only where you wanted to go, but also surrounding businesses was an evolutionary step forward at the time.

Citysearch lost it's coolness for me and my friends. They started skewing too much towards paid advertisements at the site and losing much of what people loved about the site.

So here comes Yelp, full of Web2.0 goodness and ready to take on more established sites. What differentiates Yelp from similar review sites is that there are no editorial reviews. Everything is customer based. Your opinion matters as much as anyone else's. Yelp encourages you to post your own reviews.

There is power in this that is one of the primary reasons I became a devoted Yelper. I went to a movie at a theater and had a horrible experience. I got stuck in one of their small screens and there was a popping sound coming from one of the speakers. I got my money back, but I was pissed off still that my night's expectations had been dashed. So I Yelp'ed about it. And I felt better.

I have wondered how much I could believe the reviews of the masses. It turns out the masses have pretty good taste here in San Francisco. Every place I have tried via strictly Yelp reviewers has hit right on the mark from Sushi to Indian food to bars and where to buy kitchen appliances.

A couple nights ago I reviewed an Indian restaurant we ordered delivery from. I was particularly upset about what I believed was my too small portion of Lamb Biryana I received. The next day I received a message via Yelp from the owner of the restaurant inviting me to the restaurant where the next meal was on her. To be fair I didn't flame the restaurant. I gave them 3 stars and noted their food was good, but I docked them a star for portion size of the lamb dish.

I love Yelp not because I received an offer of a free dinner. I love Yelp because it gives users a venue to dish out the good and back, what they like and what they don't like. And it's obvious that at least in some cases that those being reviewed are listening.

Thank you Yelp.

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Friday, March 09, 2007

Is this why I don't need much sleep?

It appears our genes may answer the question why some of us can skate by on little sleep and why others complain if they get anything less than 8 hours.

How well people perform on tests after being deprived of sleep depends in part on their genes, new research suggests. After staying awake all night, individuals with a long version of the PER3 gene only scored half as well on cognitive tests as subjects with a short version.

What is more, the greatest differences in performance were seen during the small hours – the time when most tiredness-related accidents happen and when shift-workers have most trouble staying awake.

The recordings revealed that although both groups slept for about the same amount of time, subjects with the short PER3 gene spent roughly 15% of this time in deep sleep, also known as slow-wave sleep. Their counterparts with the long PER3, meanwhile, spent about 22% in this restorative sleep stage.

So even though people with the long form of PER3 normally get more deep sleep, they actually perform worse on cognitive tests when deprived of sleep. The findings suggest some people need more deep sleep than others.

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Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Tobacco & Alcohol to be Class A drugs in UK?

The UK is trying to do something that makes perfect sense, which probably means it will be shot down immediately. Classifying drugs according to their relative addictiveness and actual harm to society... it seems rather obvious, but I'm sure the alcohol industry isn't going to like being listed as more harmful than such faves as Amphetamines, Tobacco, Pot, LSD, GHB, and Ecstasy.

The study of 20 drugs - both legal and illegal - weighed up their physical harm, their relative addictiveness and the impact they have on wider society, to produce a new 'rational' league table.

Blakemore suggests current drugs laws are outdated. 'The system has evolved in an unsystematic way from somewhat arbitrary foundations with seemingly little scientific basis. We suggest a new system for evaluating the risks of individual drugs that is based as far as possible on facts and scientific knowledge. It could form the basis of a new classification scheme for the Misuse of Drugs Act.'

The Drugs league table

Drugs assessed in order of danger

1 Heroin

2 Cocaine

3 Barbiturates

4 Street methadone

5 Alcohol

6 Ketamine

7 Benzodiazepine

8 Amphetamines

9 Tobacco

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Torture is torture

I'm not a big fan of torture. Okay I like 24 and watching Jack beat information out of informants is pretty fun, but in all my reading on torture it just isn't a reliable method of gathering information.

I hope the US government wakes up to this fact sometime soon. How can we hold the higher moral ground against our enemies if we torture suspects?

Prisoners subjected only to psychological torture report as much mental anguish as those who are beaten, according to new research.








The study of nearly 300 survivors of torture from the former Yugoslavia found that those who experienced no physical torment later developed equally high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as those who did. The survivors also rated the distress caused at the time by the two types of torture equally highly. Researchers say the findings provide a strong argument against the use of psychological maltreatment of prisoners - referred to by some as "torture lite".

"Torture generates extremely bad intelligence data" and is "enormously counterproductive", according to bioethicist Steven Miles at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, US. He gives the example that some of the information linking Iraq to Al-Qaeda, which later proved wrong, came from a man named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi during CIA interrogations in Egypt that involved torture.

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