Of all the great names to use — "Slate", "Canvas" (via Daring Fireball), hell even plain "Tablet" is good — I find it amusing how many other "Pads" are on the market now:
The advice you usually get when launching a new product is to set it apart from the competition. This isn't the case in the tablet market because none of the iPad competitors have a value-add or anything they do better than the iPad (OK, the TouchPad looks good, if it ever launches).
So instead of making themselves unique, even if it's on the surface, they've all decided to blend in with their main competitor.
Experts, geniuses, authorities, "authors"--we were taught to believe that these should be questioned, but until now have not often been given a way to do so, to seek out and test for ourselves the exact means by which they reached their conclusions. So long as we believe that there is such a thing as an expert rather than a fellow-investigator, then that person's views just by magic will be worth more than our own, no matter how much or how often actual events have shown this not to be the case. For us to have this magic thinking about "individualism" then is pernicious politically, intellectually, in every way. That is not to say that we don't value those who can lead the conversation. We'll need them more and more, those "who are able to marshal the wisdom of the network," to use Bob Stein's words. But they might be more like DJs, assembling new ways of looking at things from a huge variety of elements, than like than judges whose processes are secret, and whose opinions are sacred.
I think about this idea of experts, DJs and curation in relation to current events in technology like Drudge Report's continued success (on page of curated links) and GroupOn (curated products and events with quality writeups).
Any Web site can offer a daily deal, and in the wake of Groupon's success just about everyone is. There are hundreds of knock-offs and imitators, some of them trying to undercut the original by charging the merchant less than Groupon does. Others try to cater to specialized audiences (babies, gay people). Groupon's closest competitor, Living Social, is backed by Amazon, the retailing giant that has a history of winning.
"We're not at all concerned any competitor is going to come in and start writing like us," says Mr. With. "They try but fall flat." (Living Social declined to comment.) In other words, words will save Groupon. Many more words. Mere words.
Like all the companies that have copied the iPhone over the last 4 years, the companies copying GroupOn are copying surface qualities. To other companies, GroupOn showcases deals, when the reality is owners of GroupOn adds value beyond the 'group coupons' they offer.
I respect GroupOn for trying to create a great product.
Tall and lean, Busquets jogged languidly from the circle into the space between Madrid's central midfield and defense. Messi's return pass was sharp and direct. Busquets received the ball, pivoted and tapped it lightly. What seemed unthreatening a few seconds earlier now became a menacing give-and-go.
"I saw some options," Messi said. "I always try to create danger."
During the careers of the greats to whom Messi is most often compared -- Pelé of Brazil and Diego Maradona, a fellow Argentine -- the pace of the game was slower, with more space to operate and more chance for flamboyant playfulness in the flowing dribbles known as gambeta.
Today, soccer increasingly relies on size and muscle and speed. The best players must be able to operate in claustrophobic spaces. That is the mesmerizing skill of Messi, slithering through these airless openings in top gear, changing direction, providing as well as scoring, his left foot tapping the ball on each stride with blurred and evasive touches. At such moments, the ball becomes an extension of his foot.
Amazon today launched a Mac-specific application download store that will compete with Apple's nearly five-month-old Mac App Store.
The new subsection of Amazon's massive online store, dubbed "Mac Software Downloads," kicked off quietly Thursday. Amazon has long offered software downloads for both Windows and Mac customers, but this was the first time that the company called out its Mac-centric "store."
Yeah! Take THAT, Apple! We challenge you!
. . . by providing people with another marketplace download software for your operating system and help increase it's popularity.
I reject any notion that my generation is afraid. However, I think it is fair to suggest that a generally mistrustful view of adulthood has become more common, and for defensible reasons. One can make a case-by-case argument that every institution we have been taught to hold in esteem has, in the last decade, given us ample reason to question their integrity.
The Church (already struggling to connect with progressive youth) is still dealing with the fallout of widespread pedophilia scandals; The Military is stuck in two unpopular wars (to be clear, the general opinion is that this reflects on the leadership and on the institution itself, not on the soldiers) in which a decisive victory seems to be impossible; The Government is viewed with such cynicism that being able to "run as an outsider" is a more important quality than "being literate," -corruption is expected, fidelity is antiquated and politics play out like a gladiatorial event where campaign promises are "moves" and "countermoves" to which no elected official is held accountable; and finally, The Market has been handled so irresponsibly that we now have Amanda M. Fairbanks writing about us as The Lost Generation.
Acer's decision to delay the Iconia Tab A100 may have come from learning a hard lesson from Apple, sources hinted Wednesday. The tablet was moving from its June target to either August or September as Acer had discovered that Android 3, an OS designed primarily for 10-inch tablets, wasn't working properly on a seven-inch design. With many apps not working properly, Acer was waiting in the hopes Google will have solved the problems later, Digitimes heard.
As my father and John Gruber like to say, measure twice, cut once.
Over all, economists project that it would take about three years for lenders to sell their backlog of foreclosed homes. As a result, home values nationally could fall 5 percent by the end of 2011, according to Moody's, and rise only modestly over the following year. Regions that were hardest hit by the housing collapse and recession could take even longer to recover - dealing yet another blow to a still-struggling economy.
Speaking at a press conference in Cannes, Mr Cador said that "In the PC world, with fewer ways of differentiating HP's products from our competitors, we became number one; in the tablet world we're going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus." Apple's iPad is currently the best-selling tablet around the world.
May you live in interesting times, often referred to as the Chinese curse, is reputed to be the English translation of an ancient Chinese proverb and curse, although it may have originated among the English themselves (or Americans). It is reported that it was the first of three curses of increasing severity, the other two being:
May you come to the attention of those in authority (sometimes rendered May the government be aware of you). This is sometimes quoted as May you come to the attention of powerful people. (Alternately important people.)
May you find what you are looking for. This is sometimes quoted as May your wishes be granted.
Scott Jensen over a frog design talks our current obsession with seeing every possible solution in the mobile space as an app, he calls it app myopia:
Default Thinking comes up frequently when discussing technology, but a particularly virulent form of it has taken hold in mobile: App Myopia. This is a paradigm that sees every possible mobile opportunity only as an exercise in creating an app. This is a rather useful myopia, to be sure, as some people are making lots of money selling apps, but it is beginning to feel like a local maximum and a paradigm that can only get us so far. As Thomas Kuhn might say, we are in need of a revolution.
Scott has a great point. Sure it's wonderful if everyone is using an iPhone, because that means they can all talk to each other because they share a common platform, but we don't live in that kind of world. There's many different phones with different operating systems, and in the ideal world they would all be able to talk to each other and their surroundings.
Apple's developer tools used to consist of two separate applications--Interface Builder for designing user interfaces, and Xcode for writing, debugging, and compiling code. With Xcode 4, Apple has essentially integrated Interface Builder into Xcode itself. Along with the integration, Apple has morphed Xcode into a single window app, using tabs to switch between design, code, and debugging views. Separate panes allow access to various source files, error logs, code templates, interface objects, and other media.
I'm an amateur programmer at best, but the idea of a unified view for code and design is beautiful and poetic.
The pairing of the automobile and the narrow, teeming, crowded canyons of New York City is endlessly fascinating. The Standard Catalog lists 334 different manufacturers based in New York City (most of which, surely, built no more than one or two cars, if any), but beyond that, the Big Apple has a history of dealerships, driving, navigation, cab riding, and automotive legislation all its own.
As Just A Car Guy mentions, 334 is a lot of manufacturers.
When the interviewer suggested that we're in a post-PC era, with most of the innovation happening today on smartphones and tablets, Gates replied:
"The PC is the tablet....You'll see devices and say 'is that a PC, is that a phone?' The words will change because innovation is happening so fast."
Bill, you can cut with the semantics bullshit. When someone says PC, there's no confusion they're talking about their personal computer sitting on their desk with a monitor, hard drive and keyboard and not their phone, tablet, alarm clock or television. We get it, everything has a computer in it nowadays, but the fact remains that Microsoft is way behind in mobile and tablet computing.
The 8813 was built with you, the professional, in mind. It quickly and easily processes cost estimates, payrolls, accounts, inventory, patient/client records and much more. You can write reports, briefs, and proposals on the 8813′s typewriter keyboard, see them on the video screen, and instantly correct, revise, or print them.
Using the 8813, one person can process what would normally require many secretaries, several bookkeepers, and a great deal of time. And data storage takes a small fraction of the space used by previous methods.
You don't need to learn complicated computer languages. The 8813 understands commands in English. If you want to write your own programs, the 8813 includes a simple computer language, BASIC, that you can master in a few days. The 8813 slashes the professional's overhead. It's a powerful time and money-saving ally. Prices for complete systems including printer start at less than $8,000.
Arrested Motion on the beautiful paintings of Pakayla Rae Biehn:
As a technique derived from and almost solely reserved for photographic applications, her ability to so gracefully achieve this signature optic feel with paint and brush could be attributed to her affinity for math, her use of computer applications to break down photographic reference images, as well as her eye disorder strabismus, which imparts a double vision like effect to her sight, all touched on during a recent interview with our friend at Erratic Phenomena. The resulting work is nothing short of majestic, a whimsical mixture of soft colors, delicate focus, enchanting imagery, idiosyncratic composition, and emotional intimacy that is evocative of a nostalgic summer daydream. Illustrating an ability to overcome, if not ingeniously integrate, her visual obstacles into the creative process itself, and with painterly expertise at the core of it all, Pakayla has produced a visceral and emotive experience both distinctive and rewarding.
But, back to Rupert. The Daily is a pure I-don't-get-it-but-I'll-be-damned-if-that-stops-me play (and who can stop me, anyway?). It was conceived by Murdoch himself, willed into being by Murdoch, and executed by him. A man who has an absolute belief in the medium of newspapers and almost no firsthand experience or interest in digital media--save for having sometimes to awkwardly pose next to a computer to suggest he might use one, although he doesn't--decided to address the problem of old ways and new technology with the greatest certainty and resolve. The Daily is the result--a hopeless misreading of the form.
And:
There's a loud, jarring, jumpy, desperate, look-at-me sense of tablet publishing--it tries too hard. It's not just that tablet design invites people to look over your shoulder and enter your space--but it makes the reader self-conscious too. So much design, so little function. So much brand, so little purpose. Vulgar.
I never knew this, but the term "thinking outside the box" came from the puzzle below (which I did years ago). The goal is to connect all nine dots with just 4 straight lines:
Spoiler alert: you have to think outside the box to solve this.
Try this for a day: don't answer every phone call. Stop checking your email every two minutes. And leave work early. You'll be astounded at how much more you'll get done.
According to a study published in the Psychological Review conducted by Dr. K. Anders Ericcson, the key to great success is working harder in short bursts of time. Then give yourself a break before getting back to work.
The trick is staying focused. Ericsson and his team evaluated a group of musicians to find out what the "excellent" players were doing differently. They found that violinists who practiced more deliberately, say for 4 hours, accomplished more than others who slaved away for 7 hours. The best performers set goals for their practice sessions and required themselves to take breaks.
Forbes magazine on Pew Research Center's new study on where big news sites get their traffic from.
Turns out The Drudge Report kicks some ass:
Facebook figures larger in the mix, driving anywhere from 1 percent (AOL News, MSNBC.com) to 7 or 8 percent (CNN, ABC News and, leading the pack, the Huffington Post). But if what you want is a real firehose of visitors, no newfangled social network can compete with the Drudge Report. The 15-year-old aggregator of links was responsible for between 5 and 10 percent of the traffic to the New York Times and USA Today during the period studied. It accounted for 15 percent of the traffic to the Washington Post, 20 percent to the New York Post and an astonishing 30 percent to the Daily Mail.
From Rolling Stone magazine, Paul Simon doesn't like being Second to Dylan:
Simon, who has just released his new album So Beautiful Or So What, says that in his head at least, there has been something of a folk stand-off going on.
He told Rolling Stone: "I usually come in second to (to Dylan), and I don't like coming in second. In the beginning, when we were first signed to Columbia, I really admired Dylan's work. The Sound of Silence wouldn't have been written if it weren't for Dylan. But I left that feeling around The Graduate and Mrs Robinson. They weren't folky any more."
Quite simply, the modal alerts that iOS currently uses are broken not because tech bloggers everywhere are struggling with notifications all the time, but because the iOS system fails to account for the contextual areas in which showing a notification is actually impeding your use of the device. For example: when you're on the phone and an SMS comes in. I've never once been on a phonecall where, after concluding the call, knowing I got an SMS from my fiancée was more important than hanging up the call.
I'm looking forward to the next version of iOS where this is fixed. I know it's something Apple is aware of and has every intention of fixing, but make no mistake, it's a BIG fix. I would say it's on par with copy-and-paste because it's a core feature effecting every part of the operating system.
And like copy-and-paste, Apple is going to take it's time to make sure the solution release is thought out, elegant and easy to use.
I came across a product called Applecore over at Minimal Mac. It's a little piece of plastic you wrap your extra long electronics cables around so they're not a gangly mess:
It's a great idea, but I came up with my own, home-grown, hand-rolled (if you will) solution to the cord problem years ago.
As my friends and anyone who's worked with our near me knows, I'm a bit OCD about my cables, but you don't need an Applecore to fix it, you just need to do this:
If you don't have the patience or dexterity to do what I did, I still think Applecore is a great product.
It irks me when people say that blog posts are too long. Sometimes, I catch myself saying the same. Who ever decided the proper length of a blog post? Not me. Not you. Not anyone. An individual only decides the length of their attention. Text takes time--to make, to design, to read. For things to work, effort must be matched. To return to our kung-fu movie: effort and attention from the student is matched with the attention of the master. Similarly so with the writer and the reader. To be willing to match attention is to be kind and ready.
S&M marked a pivotal moment for pop. In 2007, Rihanna told Paper magazine she aspired to be "the black Madonna", and it's possible S&M was her calculated attempt to top the level of infamy her heroine once attained, but she could just as well have taken her cues from the generation of phenomenally successful good-girls-gone-bad that preceded her: Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera. Their own transmogrifications from wholesome teen stars to FHM poster girls upped the stakes for future pop princesses, who must wear less and promise more to make the same impact on an over-stimulated audience. Pop music has reached a point where it's most successful young women are shooting whipped cream (Katy Perry) and fireworks (Lady Gaga) out of their bras.
I've started a new project and output of this project will be showcased on new website - Tangled Web of Vice. Simply put - I've superimposed quotes from Mad Men episodes on top of screen grabs from the scene I've pulled the quote from.
Making these quote-graphics wasn't my original goal. It started out as an exercise to improve my penmanship after reading this depressing article in the New York Times. So I decided to practice my writing skills in my moleskin notebook, but I needed something to write. I wasn't interested in starting a diary or journal (that's what this site is for, sort of) and since the new season of Mad Men won't start until 2012, I decided to start watching all my DVD sets and write down lines I like:
Once I had dozens of these quotes written down (and I started to feel a little better about my penmanship) I started reading them over and realized they would make great little graphic pieces:
Something about the simplicity really appealed to me.
From here, I thought I'd see what adding a screen grab from the show would do it:
The words had impact on their own, but adding a screen grab behind them gave the piece emotion and context. I also crop the images individually - they're not all dropped in at full frame. The crop amps of the level of impact and emotion.
I've started arbitrarily with Season 2 of Mad Men, and I'm going to continue to create these in no particular order. It will be my daily graphics exercise.
Chinese electronics maker Huadian has stated it will soon build a tablet that will mimic many of the design features of Apple's very popular iPad 2. These include an alloy contstruction, 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen and identical 8.8mm thickness. According to GizChina, the device will be noticeably inferior on the inside and sport an 800MHz AMLogic CPU, 512MB of RAM and 8GB of flash memory. There is no word on the OS, but it's likely to be Android or a freely distributed system.
Imitation is the first phase of the creative process, it's how you find your voice - be it music, design, or art, but as a final output? Yes, I know about the Chinese culture of shanzai, but I still think direct duplication like this is bullshit.
Skype is not profitable. It's really more like a moderately good post-impressionist painting than a company: it only makes money for people when it changes hands.
A big congratulations to my team at Roundarch and the team at Bloomberg Sports on the new Trade Analyzer 2011 app for iPad - especially my design colleague Silvia Brown for the beautiful work she did on the interface design.
With that said, what makes this application great isn't just the great interface design but all the technology and databases and algorithms working behind the scenes. It's the transitions between screens, the reaction of buttons to your touch. It's about all the data getting pulled from MLB for the player cards.
Details, details, details.
As Steve Jobs has said, design isn't just about how it looks, it's about how it works.
I invented a drinking game a while ago.
For any article or other written piece about Android, take a drink if any of the following are in the article:
"Open" (take two hits for this one)
"expected to..."
"soon"
"when ____ arrives..."
"will be able to when..."
"update will enable..."
"in the next few ____..."
I have noticed many people seem to be less fans of Android and more anti-Apple. Microsoft is barely hanging on with its phone OS and they're nowhere to be seen in the tablet game, so PC people have nowhere to go but Android, with all it's inconsistencies and excuses - like why having Flash is great, except Flash doesn't always perform great.
Forty years of research on brainstorming shows that individuals produce more and better ideas than groups do. Studies also suggest that the path to excellence in many fields is not only to practice, but to practice alone. And creativity researchers have found that many highly creative people were shy and solitary in high school, and recall their adolescence with horror. (I explain all this in detail in my forthcoming book, QUIET: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.)
This is one of many reasons that introverts -- who are more likely than others to carve out solitary time -- are often very creative, and make unexpectedly fine leaders.
While a different idea, this brings to mind having one decision maker on on a project versus design-by-committee. As anyone who's been on a project (design or otherwise) knows, when there isn't a go-to person and everyone's voice has to be heard and incorporated into the product, that product inevitably ends up a watered-down mess. Barely competent at many things, great at nothing.
We work because it's a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.
—Charles Eames
via Frank Chimero who has some interesting words in reaction to the quote:
The Eames were sharks. One just has to read what Charles said. In work, it's not that one project leads to the next, it's that one subject leads to the next. If we're really sniffing out solutions to the problems of people, then we'll be going down some serious rabbit holes.
We don't need to say "multi-disciplinary designer" any more. If we're truly trying to make things that help all of us to live better, it's implied and redundant.
The "Bill" in question is 80+ New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. For decades, this Schwinn-riding cultural anthropologist has been obsessively and inventively chronicling fashion trends and high society charity soirées for the Times Style section in his columns "On the Street" and "Evening Hours." Documenting uptown fixtures (Wintour, Tom Wolfe, Brooke Astor, David Rockefeller--who all appear in the film out of their love for Bill), downtown eccentrics and everyone in between, Cunningham's enormous body of work is more reliable than any catwalk as an expression of time, place and individual flair. In turn, Bill Cunningham New York is a delicate, funny and often poignant portrait of a dedicated artist whose only wealth is his own humanity and unassuming grace.
I love documentaries, I love photography, I love New York, and this looks great.
The fourth-generation Chrysler turbine engine ran at up to 44,500 revolutions per minute, according to the owner's manual, and could use diesel fuel, unleaded gasoline, kerosene, JP-4 jet fuel, and even vegetable oil. The engine would run on virtually anything and the President of Mexico tested this theory by running one of the first cars--successfully--on tequila.
We like to think of electric cars and hybrid cars and cars that run on alternative fuel as new concepts but there's been people working on these technologies for a long time.
I have always found myself keenly interested in a seemingly endless list of vintage things, especially ephemera: stamps, postal history, trade cards, billheads, trade cards, broadsides, cartes-de-visite, stereo views, tickets, engravings, chromolithographs, early American glass, Irish blown three-mold glass, patent medicine bottles, flasks, almanacs, postcards, marbled paper, early letterpress printing, typography, books, African art, record album covers, airbrushed restaurant china, Micronesian tapa cloth . . . . I could go on and on, but you get the idea. I've long thought that what I'd most like to do in life, in some better world, would be to put out an ongoing series of high-quality, small publications about such things. As a graphic and publication designer with all the appropriate software, one would think I'd be in a fine position to do just that.
But it ain't that easy. Especially in today's publishing and economic environment, the idea of putting out a lot of
ink-on-paper is just not practical. Or even sane. Eventually I realized that what I can do--and fairly easily--is scan
the images, write the words and then simply post them online. I get it out of my system, and the material gets out there in front of the eyes of anyone who may be interested. Win win. So, here goes . . .
For years now I've casually collecting the same type of stuff (like the manual to my grandmother's '63 Ford Fairlane), although I haven't made it as much of a focus of this site as I could.
NEW YORK, Jan 25 - (AP) - Application of radio principles will enable people by carrying a small instrument in their pockets to see distant events like the sorceress of the magic crystal fairy tales and legends, Nikola Tesla, electrical inventor, predicted today. Mr. Tesla, who on several occasion has tried to communicate with the planet Mars, made his predictions in an interview published in the current issue of Collier's Weekly.
"We shall be able to witness the inauguration of a president, the playing of a world's series baseball game, the havoc of an earthquake, or a battle just as though we were present," Mr. Tesla said.
Once again, another reason for me to love Telsa. He was always overshadowed by the more popular and business-savy bully who was Thomas Edison but the dude needs credit where it's due. I even admire him trying to contact Mars.
Frank Chimero is changing his focus from image-making to writing for his book:
A hammer has two ends: one to drive the nail, another to remove it. One can not use both ends at the same time. I believe the relationship between images and text is much like this, especially for those of us who make both. Writing and image-making intermingle and sometimes negate one another in the name of progress. For those that I know that seriously pursue both, the relationship between the word-work and the image-work is tidal. I will always make images, but for now I need to use the other end of my hammer, because there is a thorn that needs to be pried out of my side and a story that needs to be told that doesn't leave much room for images.
I am prone to falling prey to habits, just the same as everyone else. When I catch myself stuck in a habit -- stuck in a routine -- I pull myself back into the interesting world of spontaneous. I buy a shirt or a pair of pants that don't blend with the rest of my clothes -- that don't fit the preconceived image of me that I store locked away in my brain. Most importantly, to me and to my life, I change up the routes I drive.
WHEN we don't get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don't blame the soldiers. We don't say, "It's these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That's why we haven't done better in Afghanistan!" No, if the results aren't there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.
And yet in education we do just that. When we don't like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don't like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.
And what about the money:
For those who say, "How do we pay for this?" -- well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.
I love the dichotomy between how much money the iPad has made for Apple and how much The Daily has lost.
To borrow a phrase from former Senator Ted Stevens, the iPad is not a dump truck. You're not going to make money with mobile apps and and digital magazines if you just dump your content onto it. Even including videos and pictures doesn't cut it.
3D is not the future. It's not "immersive." At best it makes everything look like a six-inch paper cut-out, and in order to create that effect it has to reduce the quality of the image. After years and years of the entertainment industry working towards making bigger and crisper images, suddenly they're trying to make us forget about all that because, holy shit, a thing looks like it's in front of another thing because of an exploitable quirk in binocular vision. Well, they can't do it. You either need glasses or you need to keep your head still at all times, and no new technology has ever lasted that's less convenient to use than what it's supposed to replace.
Instead of a standard report of his own activities during 2010 (like he did in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 & 2009), he decided to traverse his father's timeline from 1929-2010.
Justin Williams has a nice take on why Apple won't be losing its lead in tablets anytime soon. The bottom line is that too many companies are shipping incomplete products with the promise of updates that will fix all the problems to come later -- except that those updates are shipping.
It reminds me of photographers that snap a picture, look at it and realize it isn't very good -- then go on to state: "Umm, I'll fix it in Photoshop later." Except that "fixing" a photo in Photoshop takes just about as much talent as creating a great photograph to begin with would -- often it takes even more talent in my book.
A designer-founder can bring user-focused insight to everything from interfaces and user experience to information architecture to branding. We think that the world would be a better place were more designer-founders building products that rapidly grow to large scale.
What is this 'design' thing I hear everyone speaking of?
Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words "I" and "me" appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there's been a corresponding decline in "we" and "us" and the expression of positive emotions.
"Late adolescents and college students love themselves more today than ever before," Dr. DeWall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, says. His study covered song lyrics from 1980 to 2007 and controlled for genre to prevent the results from being skewed by the growing popularity of, say, rap and hip-hop.
