Finished reading Ubik just the other night - the paying for every little thing was haunting, almost claustrophobic with this passage about the door (amongst other things - fantastic book though)
I find myself purposefully diving through Tidal's playlists and genres, like I used to flick through CDs in HMV.
The auto-discovery can be really hit or miss (mostly miss) - but so was picking CDs without listening to them. But the nature of streaming means I can flit between genres day to day, maybe I'm feeling psychedelic trance one day, the next schlager, the next prog rock. Prior to digital music I'd discover a lot within my focused genre (ambient electronic) but little else. But now I have the chance to find songs that have that similar feel for me but vary wildly in genre and style without sinking hours into music I don't enjoy.
Yes it requires more intention to discover new music than the streaming services built in recommendations but I feel like my music library has never been so varied and rich.
In the 'other media' category I can highly recommend 'Pyongyang: A Journey In North Korea' by Guy Delisle[1] which is a graphic novel detailing his few months working in North Korea for a more serious look and into the lives of those who actually live/have lived in North Korea is 'Nothing to Envy' by Barbara Demick[2] which is a detailed, if not somewhat harrowing insight.
Absolutely, I live quite near by to and highly recommend it to anyone interested, I've been a few times now, and would quite like to go again. For those who are interested: http://www.fhc.co.uk/ There's Ffestinog further south too, but there isn't a tour around that like the one at Dinorwig.
That seems like a rather small sample size, both in number of people involved and the fact that it the results seem to be based on only a couple of points. (what's the variation in the sleep patterns normally? What about other factors that may affect their sleeping patterns? e.g. previous nights' sleep, exposure to other media content while not at the sleep lab, etc.)
I'm genuinely interested. I do understand that this may be a basis for further study but how much can we really take from this study to encourage further research?
It was an experiment – not exactly a classic design – but still an experiment. In that context 17 participants are not ideal, but workable and typical. As you can imagine, getting people to sleep in a lab for two nights is hard and costs money that often isn’t there.
I wanted to read the actual paper to give some more detailed insight, but the website of the right database is currently down for maintenance. From their abstract I can see that from the outset they excluded everyone with existing sleeping difficulties. That implies that during recruitment and before the experiment started they already asked questions about sleeping patterns (to exclude outliers from the experiment).
I’m willing to bet that they also controlled for other variables, just like you mentioned, for example other media exposure or the previous nights’ sleep. That’s what you usually do.
(While searching for the paper I actually found some other papers about video gaming before sleeping. It seems like quite some found broadly similar results to this one, so in that context the result doesn’t seem super surprising. But note: This was just me browsing around and glancing at a few abstracts, by no means a thorough or even somewhat acceptable literature review.)
I'd quite like to sign-up to this actually, I'm all for specific websites using my tastes to deliver to me what they think I'd like. Saying that, I'd like to sign up using my Google account, why must you be able to 'manage [my] contacts'. Is there a way to opt-out of that, or do I just have to sign up for a stealth account? A little off-topic, I do apologise.
Okay, I'll trust you on this one! It's looking promising, Although I was a little stumped when it stuck me on a "We're learning your interests" page with no indication of...anything, really.
Also, maybe going to the 'landing' page when already logged in should re-direct me to my home page? It gave me the impression I hadn't logged in and got a little faffy.
Besides that,as I said, looking promising and I look forward to seeing what comes up over the next few days/weeks. Thank you!
Forgive me, after a brief look over the Wikipedia article surely it's the opposite of that? "unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average" - so they think they're better than they are, whereas you're suggesting they're doing better than they think they are.
Depends on which English degree you study. I know those who've studied the literature and cultural impact side of things and those who've studied the language with a linguistics spin on it.
