Iconography
Below is a proposed icon for the Portfolio Armor iPhone app. My design team ignored my suggested colors (silver, light blue, and gold, to stand out against the iTunes background) Update: my project manager informed me today that they tried my color scheme and found it didn’t look right. Let me know what you think of this.
What motivates
Hat tip to Charlie Christle for this video clip. The animation is a little busy for my taste, but the second half of this video is interesting. Hard for me not to think of this when the narrator refers to Steve Jobs and Apple toward the end.
Truth detection
Hat tip to commenter Monkey Pilot for this, How you can tell when corporate executives are lying. Excerpt:
David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice of words, and how he delivered them. They drew on psychological studies that show how people speak differently when they are fibbing, testing whether these “tells” were more common during calls to discuss profits that were later “materially restated”, as the euphemism goes. They published their findings in a paper called “Detecting Deceptive Discussions in Conference Calls”.
Deceptive bosses, it transpires, tend to make more references to general knowledge (“as you know…”), and refer less to shareholder value (perhaps to minimise the risk of a lawsuit, the authors hypothesise). They also use fewer “non-extreme positive emotion words”. That is, instead of describing something as “good”, they call it “fantastic”. The aim is to “sound more persuasive” while talking horsefeathers.
StreetApps contest update
Thanks again to those of you who voted for Portfolio Armor for iPhone in the StreetApps Challenge. We’re at 70 votes now. Voting period ends on August 29th. If you haven’t voted yet, you do so by clicking here. Much appreciated. N.B., you don’t need a Facebook account to vote for the app; alternatively, you can register with ChallengePost by taking 30 seconds to pick a user name and e-mail (you’ll see the option for that when you click “vote” at the link).
Short Screen contest thoughts
Hesperian’s HP 12C financial calculator went out Thursday. We’ve gotten a bunch of new subscribers to Short Screen (and Portfolio Armor) since the demos last week, but we still have only a handful of regular posters on the message boards. In order to encourage more subscribers to post, we’ll probably have more generous prizes for future posting contests. Details to come.
Defying gravity
Saw Wicked Thursday night, seven years after its Broadway debut. The first act drags a little, but the story (based on a 1995 novel by Gregory McGuire) is clever and sophisticated for a musical, and it picks up in the second act. Something new to me: this theater lets you bring your drinks into the show, which is cool. The bartenders will pour your champagne, rum & coke, or what-have-you into a Wicked-branded travel cup — part of the show’s merchandizing bonanza — and send you on your way.
Off the wagon
Afterwords, we got a late dinner at Becco, which was OK, but not as good as its 4-star Yelp rating suggested. The pre-fix dinner + $25 bottles of wine was a decent deal for the area though. Not a diet meal though. After 2.5 months on Atkins, followed by a week off the wagon last week, it’s been hard to get back on the wagon. Gained 5lbs last week, after losing 23lbs before then. Friday’s lunch meeting at the Burger Joint will be another stop off the wagon. I’ll have to start reining things in after that somehow.
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