Author: Andrew O’Connell

There are 102 startups whose names end in “ify,” many of them probably in imitation of Spotify, says the Wall Street Journal, quoting branding consultant Christopher Johnson. Newcomer businesses include notifications system Xtify, as well as Stackify, an information-technology service provider. Quirky names for startups surfaced about 20 years ago in Silicon Valley, with the birth of search engines such as Yahoo, —which originally stood for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle. The mania for odd names was fueled by a lack of available short, punchy URLs, but it soon developed into an internet aesthetic.

At the beginning of a 30-minute computer-based vigilance task, the average reaction time of participants who were chewing gum was about 70 milliseconds slower than that of non-chewers, but by the end, it was about 100 milliseconds faster, suggesting that chewing gum can stem a decline of vigilance over a long task, says a team led by Kate Morgan of Cardiff University in the UK. Gum chewing has been shown to increase blood flow to the frontal-temporal region of the brain.

When research participants were asked to give a hand-exercise ball 25 squeezes, the time required for the task felt 20% shorter to those who counted down from 25 to 1 than to those who counted from 1 to 25, say Edith Shalev of Technion Israel Institute of Technology and Vicki G. Morwitz of New York University. In a related experiment, people who squeezed a hand grip while counting down, rather than up, had a more favorable attitude about the product and expressed a greater willingness to buy it. Counting down may seem more exciting than counting upward, and the distraction may decrease time judgments, the researchers say.

In experiment, 83% of women said they would confront a job interviewer who asked such sexually harassing questions as “Do you have a boyfriend?” And the more confrontation they predicted for themselves, the greater their contempt for women who didn’t protest. Yet past research shows that most candidates who face such harassment do nothing to protest, says a team led by Kristina A. Diekmann of the University of Utah. People underestimate the costs of confrontation, such as impaired reputation and social status, if they don’t experience the harassment themselves.

Nobel Prize winners live an average of 1.6 years longer than nominees who aren’t selected, a finding that’s consistent with a causal link between status and longer lifespan, say Matthew D. Rablen and Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in the UK. The mechanism for the link is unclear, but it may have to do with higher-status individuals’ greater control over their work lives. Lack of control in the workplace is associated with stress, and high levels of stress hormones damage immunological processes.

Ride-sharing services such as Lyft ask for “donations” that run about 20% less than cab fares in Los Angeles, says The New York Times. The services, which have ignored city regulators’ orders to shut down, appeal to younger riders as a cheaper and more fun way to get around. Cab companies point out that ride-share services can charge less because their cars don’t have to be accessible to the disabled or include safety partitions protecting drivers from riders.

In 1890, the poorest 10% of male U.S. workers labored an average of 10.99 hours per day, while the richest worked 8.95 hours. A century later, the poorest’s hours had dropped to 8.83 hours a day, while the richest’s hours had barely budged, say Diego Restuccia of the University of Toronto and Guillaume Vandenbroucke of the University of Southern California. Over the course of 100 years, the poorest’s productivity rose dramatically, and their resulting higher hourly earnings allowed them to spend less time working and more time going to school, the researchers say.

“Nonsmoking” rooms In hotels that allow smoking elsewhere had up to nearly 5 times the tobacco-related air pollutants as accommodations in smoke-free hotels, according to a study of 40 hotels led by Georg E. Matt of San Diego State University. In some cases, traces of nicotine in nonsmokers’ urine was more than twice as high for those who had stayed in nonsmoking rooms, as opposed to smoke-free hotels, The New York Times says in a report in the study.

Although the 1985 arrival of crack cocaine in large U.S. cities had dire consequences, including a doubling of the homicide rate among black males aged 14 to 17, the epidemic’s social ills subsided after a few years, despite continued high use of the drug, says a team led by Roland G. Fryer Jr. of Harvard. After experiencing severe disruption from this technological innovation, illicit drug markets settled down and crack prices fell sharply, hurting the business’s profitability and reducing competition-related violence among dealers, the researchers say.

In the name of science, 2,500 people have participated in Harvard’s Personal Genome Project, anonymously sharing DNA data along with such information as histories of depression and sexually transmitted disease. But Harvard Privacy Lab director Latanya Sweeney demonstrates what “anonymous” really means. Of 579 participants who listed their birth dates, ZIP codes, and genders, her team was able to identify 42% by name using public records. Previously she was able to identify up to 87% of the U.S. population with just ZIP code, birth date, and gender.