(insert obligatory “I, for one, welcome our new robotic tennis-playing overlords”)
There are some crazy quadracopter vids on YouTube. And bonus points for you if you get the post title.
Author Archives: Ryan Markel
“Paper Airplane”
I’m excited to be seeing new music from AKUS coming soon.
Boo on there not being any harmonies in this track. Otherwise, great stuff.
“Love Is a Battlefield” (And a Pleasant Rock Band Surprise)
A couple of weeks ago I picked up the Pat Benatar pack for Rock Band, mostly out of curiosity. Last night I played “Love Is a Battlefield” for the first time and found it to be a lot more fun than I was expecting. I suppose I hadn’t listened to what the guitar was doing in the background before.
I did 95% on sightread, which was good enough for 1,496th on the leaderboard.
It’s not the best Benatar on Rock Band, though; that honor goes to “Heartbreaker.”
My Rock Band activity page is here, by the way. I really wish Harmonix provided RSS feeds or another way to ingest this information elsewhere. I turned on the Facebook integration today, but I prefer to bring this stuff into my own site where I can control it.
Body Image Jokes = Not Funny
A GraphJam from today.
As a father of two girls, I unfortunately don’t find this to be funny. I worry that they will someday stop listening to me when I tell them they are beautiful or pretty and they will end up feeling like this.
(Their future boyfriends/spouses are already in trouble. They just don’t know it yet.)
CAPTCHAs’ Effect on Conversion Rates
Harry Brignull on CAPTCHAs and conversion rates:
Users were directed to the sign-up form direct from the homepage before they could interact with the product. As you can see, there was a CAPTCHA at the bottom of the form (powered by reCAPTCHA). With this design, they had a conversion rate of roughly 48%. They then removed the CAPTCHA, and it boosted the conversion rate up to 64%. In conversion rate lingo, that’s an uplift of 33.3%! They replaced the CAPTCHA with honeypot fields and timestamp analysis, which has apparently proven to be very effective at preventing spam while being completely invisible to the end user.
In order for CAPTCHAs to be useful and/or effective, they have to render text in a way that requires a human to stop and examine it closely (in order to prevent machines from reading it).
Slowing down a registration or commenting process makes it feel like more work for the user or potential user. It’s an increase in cognitive load.
Ryan Markel 