It’s now easier than ever to register to vote over the web: Google is the latest tech powerhouse to support online registration with TurboVote, a slick step-by-step portal that conveniently mails US citizens a mostly-filled out registration card, along with a pre-printed envelope. However, experimental research into the impact of such online registration systems [PDF] finds that they actually decrease registration. Apparently, the ease of the online process lulls citizens into complacency and they forget to follow through with the rest of the process. The unfortunate drawback can be offset with SMS reminders, which TurboVote encourages. So, depending on the number of people comfortable giving Google their digits, this well-intentioned experiment could backfire.

In the study, researchers Elizabeth Bennion and David Nickerson randomly assigned 260,000 students on 26 campuses to receive an email invitation to register to vote online and verified whether they later registered through an independent database. “Unfortunately, the cost of follow-through is higher than the cost of registering via other avenues,” the report finds, with a 0.3% decrease in actual register for the group that was invited to register online. The counter-intuitive results reveal that noble attempts to make registration more tempting for young citizens could backfire.

In light of the results, youth vote advocacy organization, Rock-the-Vote, found that SMS reminders to finish the paperwork could (slightly) reverse the results, boosting completed registration in the SMS group by 4%.

Unfortunately, though,

THIS IS NOT ORIGINAL CONTENT, BUT RATHER AN ARTICLE I FOUND TO BE AWESOME AND INFORMATIVE.

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http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/28/google-online-voter-registration-could-decrease-turnout/

People often ask what my writing schedule looks like. This is always a hard question to answer, because I’m not much of a structure guy. But I see the value in establishing routines, especially in the morning.

Photo credit: Roger Price (Creative Commons)

This can be a challenge, because routines are all about you and your personality. So they should vary from person to person.

I like what Seth Godin said when Brian Clark asked him how he wrote every day. Seth refused to answer, and then he said:

There is this feeling that if we ate the same breakfast cereal Stephen King ate, then we’d be able to write like Stephen King writes.

So true. Routines are important, but only if you make them your own. Simply copying someone else’s routine probably won’t work.

Why we need routines

Routines are not fun. They’re not creative or imaginative. And frankly, I hate doing them. But routines can do a lot of good, if we can get into the regular discipline of practicing them.

Why is this? Because they help make room in our lives for other things. Having an established routine in the morning is a great way to start the day, because it gets you going in the right direction. Plus, it allows you focus on other things throughout the day.

In our busy lives, sometimes we need to do a few things by rote simply

THIS IS NOT ORIGINAL CONTENT, BUT RATHER AN ARTICLE I FOUND TO BE AWESOME AND INFORMATIVE.

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http://goinswriter.com/morning-routine/

David Galloway

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If you enjoy the presentations on TED Talks you may also enjoy Keen Talks, a webapp that takes thousands of lectures, presentations, and debates on various topics sorted for easy browsing and without many of the distractions normally found on YouTube.

The webapp sports a clean design with one panel of advertisements on the side. I like that you can browse by speaker, topic, category, and year of release. Since it seems much of history since the beginning of audio and video recording has made it to YouTube I hope this webapp keeps fleshing out content and truly lives up to its potential. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of quality content out there now, but when you consider how many speeches, lectures, and presentations could be contained on YouTube it boggles the mind.

Keen Talks | via Make Use Of

THIS IS NOT ORIGINAL CONTENT, BUT RATHER AN ARTICLE I FOUND TO BE AWESOME AND INFORMATIVE.

VIEW THE ENTIRE ARTICLE AND GIVE THE AUTHOR PROPS HERE:
http://lifehacker.com/5937871/