Stop Junk Mail by Taking Photos

Nobody likes getting dead trees in their mailbox – particularly when those dead trees are useless adverts for products nobody wants (or even needs). Luck for us PaperKarma has created an app for your mobile that allows you to unsubscribe from junk mail lists by simply taking a photo! For now, it looks like it’s only usable in the USA.

PaperKarma works on magazines, catalogs, coupons, fliers, credit card offers, and even the Yellow Pages. To sign up for the service, you need to hand over a bit of your own information, including your address and email. Once you do, all you need to do is snap a picture of the junk mail in your mailbox and PaperKarma unsubscribes you from the list. The nice thing is that you can pick and choose what you unsubscribe from. If you like getting a particular catalog, you can keep it on your list.

PaperKarma’s site
From LifeHacker.

Time + Money ≠ Happiness

Trying to make a decision about your life and how to spend the time you have? Well don’t thinking about spending time, in fact don’t let the idea of money- as-time factor into your decision at all.

Professor DeVoe and PhD student Julian House based their conclusions on three experiments. In each, a sub-group of participants was primed, through survey questions, to think about their time in terms of money. This group subsequently showed greater impatience and lower satisfaction during leisure activities introduced during the experiments. However, they also reported more enjoyment and less impatience when they were paid during one of those activities, which was listening to music.

Read more here.

Why You Should Talk to Yourself

Talking to yourself is a good way to reason through problems, so there’s no reason to feel awkward about your big debates you have with yourself while walking down the street. At least according to some new research from a few universities.

This new research in questions stems from Talk­ing Aloud Part­ner Problem-Solving (TAPPS) which is meant to help people reason through problems while a person just listens. It turns out that the partner’s role is negligible.

In recent research on TAPPS, reported in the Uni­ver­sity of Arkansas pub­li­ca­tion Research Foun­da­tions, Spring 2011, the author noted that the increased speed and effec­tive­ness of part­ner problem-solving has lit­tle to do with the mon­i­tor and much to do with the prob­lem solver’s own behav­ior; think­ing aloud or TA. The con­stant ver­bal­iza­tion of their thoughts out loud encour­aged the prob­lem solvers to con­tin­u­ously cor­rect faulty steps in logic. The causal mech­a­nism of suc­cess was the problem-solver’s metacognition.

Another study on talk­ing aloud reported in the jour­nal Aging, Neu­ropsy­chol­ogy, and Cog­ni­tion car­ries the intrigu­ing title, “How to Gain Eleven IQ Points in Ten Min­utes: Think­ing Aloud Improves Raven’s Matri­ces Per­for­mance in Older Adult.” At the end of the arti­cle, fol­low­ing the usual iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of study lim­i­ta­tions, the authors stated, “Nonethe­less, these stud­ies pro­vide some evi­dence that indi­vid­u­als with lower fluid abil­ity (e.g., chil­dren and older adults) may ben­e­fit most from con­cur­rent verbalization.”

Read the full article.

Japan Develops Wind Turbine That Doubles Output

A simple addition to the standard wind turbine setup called a wind lens can double, or even triple, the power output.

Professor Prof. Yuji Ohya of the Kyushu University research institute for applied mechanics (RIAM) has been working with a team to improve the efficiency of wind turbines. Combining an inlet shroud, a diffuser, and a brim into a wind lens, power output has been improved by a factor of 2 to 5 times in several experiments. Turbine noise is also decreased.

Here’s more on the matter.

Thanks Greg!