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From The New York Times: Movies today are, on average, much pinker than the films of half a century ago. Their shot structure has greater coherence, a comparatively firmer grouping together of similarly sized units that ends up lending them a frequency distribution ever more in line with the lab results of human reaction and attention times. “Roughly since 1960,” Dr. Cutting said, “filmmakers have been converging on a pattern of shot length that forces the reorientation of attention in the same way we do it naturally.” http://s.nyt.com/u/018

““I remember one patient who came in and said she needed to reduce her dosage,” he says. “I asked her if the antidepressants were working, and she said something I’ll never forget. ‘Yes, they’re working great,’ she told me. ‘I feel so much better. But I’m still married to the same alcoholic son of a bitch. It’s just now he’s tolerable.’ ””

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[Depression’s Upside - NYTimes.com]

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html?pagewanted=all)

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In a California gourmet market, Professor Iyengar and her research assistants set up a booth of samples of Wilkin & Sons jams. Every few hours, they switched from offering a selection of 24 jams to a group of six jams. On average, customers tasted two jams, regardless of the size of the assortment, and each one received a coupon good for $1 off one Wilkin & Sons jam.

Here’s the interesting part. Sixty percent of customers were drawn to the large assortment, while only 40 percent stopped by the small one. But 30 percent of the people who had sampled from the small assortment decided to buy jam, while only 3 percent of those confronted with the two dozen jams purchased a jar.

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- [Shortcuts - The Paralyzing Problem of Too Many Choices - NYTimes.com] (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/your-money/27shortcuts.html)

Children exist so we can photograph them and put the pictures on Facebook:

Increasingly, personal technology seems like a delivery device for a lifestyle, a tacit prescription of how to live in the Internet’s symbolic order. Study something like the iPad closely enough, and it seems to set a course for how we’re now to use words and images for business and pleasure. Maybe it shouldn’t be surprising in shaky economic times that the highest calling for the heaps of digital devices in our lives, with their functioning in excess of anything we rationally require, is to shore up our families, and advertise them to the world, and back to ourselves. Sent with Tweetie

“But it was only after Reagan and his GOP successor, George H.W. Bush, left office that congressional Republicans realized they could use political polarization to stymie government — and use government failure to win elections. And with that realization, vicious-circle politics started to become an art form.”

- [American Discontent] (http://bit.ly/9ackpf)

What distinguishes personal branding from other self-cultivation is its emphasis on reputation over talent, on “explicit self- packaging,” as the scholars Daniel Lair, Katie Sullivan and George Cheney have observed: “Here, success is not determined by individuals’ internal sets of skills, motivations, and interests but, rather, by how effectively they are arranged, crystallized, and labeled.” http://nyti.ms/9rG591 Sent with Tweetie