In 2008, University of Michigan psychologist Jesse Chandler and his colleagues examined donations to disaster relief after seven major hurricanes and found that a disproportionately large number of donations came from people who shared an initial with the hurricane (e.g., people named Kate and Kevin after Hurricane Katrina).

It’s not clear why this is. It’s known that generally people attend to information with unusual care if it’s somehow relevant to themselves; in the case of a hurricane this may mean that they’re more likely to remember concrete information about victims and thus be more likely to donate.

Possibly they also feel more intense negative feelings (or a greater sense of responsibility) when the storm shares their initial. In that case, “Exposure to a same-initial hurricane makes people feel worse, and the most salient way to repair this feeling is the opportunity to donate money to Katrina.”

Legendary TV screenwriter, Ken Levine, made fun of people on the Emmy awards show. Some of those people weren't white. So, of course, people called him a racist.

Took four months for my iPhone to eat up all its storage, again.

As the Apache Foundation pointed out earlier this week, it reported CVE-2017-5638 in March 2017. Doubt us? Here's the NIST notification that mentions it as being notified on March 10th.

Equifax was breached in “mid-May” 2017, realised it in July and got around to telling the world in Early September. If we take “mid-May” as the 15th of the month, Equifax had nine working weeks in which to apply the patch.

That its data breach was entirely avoidable is not the end of Equifax's woes, as the new Progress Update also reveals that “Due to the high volume of security freeze requests, we experienced temporary technical difficulties and our system was offline for approximately an hour at 5PM ET on September 13, 2017 to address this issue.”

The company also appears to have suffered another data breach, this time in Argentina where its Bryan Krebs reports “an online portal designed to let Equifax employees in Argentina manage credit report disputes from consumers in that country was wide open, protected by perhaps the most easy-to-guess password combination ever: “admin/admin.”

Went to put a credit freeze at Equifax. This is what they gave me on the last step:

I'm sure this will turn out fine.

There resides in the British Museum in London, one of the most intriguing gold coins ever minted. It was bought in Rome about a hundred years ago and this is important when considering the purpose of the coin.

The gold coin of Offa, king of Mercia [England, 757-796 AD], is a unique object because it imitates a gold dinar of the caliph al-Mansur. Although the Arabic inscription is not copied perfectly, the declaration that ‘There is no Deity but Allah, The One, Without Equal, and Muhammad is the Apostle of Allah,’ is clear.

Whatever's left of Irma isn't due our way until late next week. Stores are already out of bottled water.

That's a problem I'll take any day over what everybody on the gulf coast and in the Caribbean is dealing with.

The wife of an ethics lawyer for the Trump Organization has been arrested after allegedly having sex with an inmate in a car.

What else would you expect to find at the intersection of "Trump" and "ethics" ?

A woman running for mayor of Charlotte is facing a backlash after appearing to advertise her race as one of her qualifications.

"after appearing to" ?

You probably should have just gone ahead and said that's exactly what she did. Nobody would have argued with you.

“Vote for me!” Kimberley Paige Barnette, a former county magistrate judge running for office for the first time, wrote on her Facebook profile.

Then, following two lines that included her name and “Mayor of Charlotte 2017” was a description of herself, in four capitalized words: “REPUBLICAN & SMART, WHITE, TRADITIONAL”

Tell me more!

“As mayor, what I would like to discourage is assembly,” she said. “Protests are confrontational, they’re chaotic, they scare people. I believe there’s a better way to express yourselves.”

Well that doesn't sound good. Do I dare go on?

“I do not think that we should encourage more lower-income persons to move to Charlotte,” she said. “We want to attract higher-income persons to Charlotte. … They’re going to have the most money to be able to spend in our economy.”

Yipes.

[x] REPUBLICAN
[  ] SMART
[x] WHITE
[x] TRADITIONAL

I've never understood why anyone would think a button that is nothing more than a bare rectangle around some text was intuitive.

Flat designs looked "cleaner" and more "modern" (Microsoft's subsequent portmanteau term for its Metro design), but there was a price to pay.

The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content.

"On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers," the firm notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate.

The Register