Though it might seem impossible, and certainly inadvisable, to judge a person by her name, a new study suggests our brains try anyway.

The more pronounceable a person’s name is, the more likely people are to favor her.

“When we can process a piece of information more easily, when it’s easier to comprehend, we come to like it more,” said psychologist Adam Alter of New York University and co-author of a Journal of Experimental Social Psychology study published in December.

The so-called “grandfather theory,” the idea that the brain favors information that’s easy to use, dates back to the 1960s, when researchers found that people most liked images of Chinese characters if they’d seen them many times before.

Researchers since then have explored the roles played by names, and how they affect our judgments.

Studies have shown, for example, that people can partly predict a person’s income and education using only their name. Childhood is perhaps the richest area for name research: Boys with girls’ names are more likely to be suspended from school. And the less popular a name is, the more likely a child is to be delinquent.

In 2005, Alter and his colleagues explored how pronounceability of company names affects their performance in the stock market. Stripped of all obvious influences, they found companies with simpler names and ticker symbols traded better than the stocks of more difficult-to-pronounce companies.

“The effect is often very, very hard to quantify because so much depends on context, but it’s there and measurable,” Alter said. “You can’t avoid it.”

But how much does pronunciation guide our perceptions of people? To find out, Alter and colleagues Simon Laham and Peter Koval of the University of Melbourne carried out five studies.

In the first, they asked 19 female and 16 male college students to rank 50 surnames according to their ease or difficulty of pronunciation, and according to how much they liked or disliked them. In the second, they had 17 females and 7 male students vote for hypothetical political candidates solely on the basis of their names. In the third, they asked 55 female and 19 male students to vote on candidates about whom they knew both names and some political positions.

Altogether the researchers found that a name’s pronounceability, regardless of length or seeming foreignness, mattered most in determining likability. Ease of pronunciation accounted for about 40 percent of off-the-cuff likability.

“These settings were pretty impoverished, of course. In the real world, so many other things are going on that play a role,” Alter said.

In the latter studies, Alter’s team wanted to get a better sense of name-pronunciation effects outside the lab. They collected the names of 500 randomly selected lawyers, which undergraduates then rated for pronounceability and likability. When the researchers compared their tastes against the lawyers’ academic pedigrees, average salaries and corporate positions, they found a small but noticeable correlation.

With other variables eliminated, about 1.5 percent of a lawyer’s success — at least in this study — seemed to rest on the pronounceability of his or her name.

“Obviously that’s a lot smaller than 40 percent, and we don’t know which lawyer is most competent, which is clearly going to matter the most,” Alter said. “But the name still matters.”

Alter has already been influenced by his own work. If and when he has children, he said, he plans to keep their names simple.

Image: Dave Mosher/Wired

Citation: “The name-pronunciation effect: Why people like Mr. Smith more than Mr. Colquhoun.” By Simon M. Lahama, Peter Kovala and Adam L. Alter. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, published online Dec. 9, 2011. DOI: 10.1016/j.jesp.2011.12.002

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally posted by PhotoShelter CEO and founder Allen Murayabashi on the PhotoShelter blog. Murayabashi was kind enough to share it with Raw File readers.

It might sound strange to use the verb “Love” in the title of a rant. But here goes.

I love photography.

Why am I telling you this? Isn’t it self-obvious? Don’t we all love photography? The answer is no.

There is a percentage of photographers who hate photography. They do not appreciate photography. They do not consume photography. They don’t look at photo books or photo magazines. They hate the guy with the iPhone taking Instagram shots. They hate the guy who just bought the D4 because they don’t have one. They hate people using digital because film is what real artists use. They hate photographers who embrace social media because images should stand on their own.

They hate Getty, Corbis, the AP, day rates, photo editors, assistants, rental houses, camera stores, point-and-shoots, iPads, zoom lenses, padded camera straps, wheeled suitcases, younger photographers, older photographers. The photo of so-and-so on the cover of whatever it’s called sucks. That guy copied the other guy, he sucks. Terry Richardson sucks. Chuck Close sucks. Vincent Laforet hasn’t taken a still in 17 years. Kodak hasn’t been managed well since the 70s. Blah, blah, blah.

I love photography. Let me show you why.

The top photo was my favorite image of 2011 shot by Rich Lam for Getty Images during the rioting that occurred after Game 7 of the Stanley Cup. It’s amazing. It’s a crazy juxtaposition of love amidst protest, which was such a dominant theme this year. As many people have commented, it’s a modern day From Here to Eternity. You look at it and you think, “What the hell is going on?” And then you hear the back story and it’s even more amazing that it happened and someone was there to capture it. I’d like to hang it on my wall.

Rüdiger Nehmzow took these incredible photos of clouds from an open door of a plane. Who does that? He’s not complaining about Terry Richardson. He’s too busy creating amazing photos. Speaking of which …

People say the guy has no talent. They hate the on-camera flash. But you know what? That’s Terry Richardson‘s thing. That’s what he does. Do you have a thing? Are you known for your visual style? Sure, maybe you could have taken better photos of Lady Gaga if you had access. But you didn’t. Terry did because he built a reputation and a career. And this photo happens to have some Italian chick with a big nose washing her face and smiling, oh and by the way, she’s an incredibly creative and talented mega star. I was in Tokyo over the New Year’s drinking a coffee in a bookstore, and I flipped through the entire book. Hey man, she was born that way.

This is perhaps the scariest thing I’ve ever seen in my life from the Mainichi Shinbun (literally “Daily Newspaper”). It’s a black wall of water crashing over a seawall from the Tohoku earthquake that killed nearly 16,000 people. I saw a stupid Matt Damon movie called “Hereafter” that had a CGI tsunami. Then I saw video of the real thing, and I was speechless. A tsunami isn’t a wave. It’s a wall.

My high school hired me to take a series of portraits of Bay Area alumni, so I hired my buddy Max Morse to assist me. Here was the set up shot. I really like it. I posted it on his Facebook wall, and he made it his profile picture. I once made a photo that Missy McLamb took of me into my Facebook profile picture. She commented back that it was the highest compliment. I didn’t fully grok what she meant at the time, but now I do.

2011 marked the ten year anniversary of September 11. I live a few blocks from Ground Zero, so I walked down with my camera hoping to make an iconic shot. But it was cloudy as all hell, and I couldn’t see the towers of light piercing into the night sky. Then I see Eric Thayer‘s photo. Where was I? How much more uplifting could a ten year anniversary photo of 9/11 be?

Reuter’s journalist Barry Malone captured this image near Somalia. The juxtaposition is boggling. Guy in suit. Dead cow that is so starved it looks like a leather jacket. And craziest of all, he’s using an iPad as a camera — a scene that couldn’t have existed until last year since the iPad 2 came out in the Spring. Since then, I’ve seen this all the time. In fact, my father uses his iPad as a camera.

Protests were happening everywhere from Wall Street to Tahrir Square. And in Greece where economic issues are abound, Nodas Stylianidis captured this self-immolation photo, which of course, reminds me of Malcolm Browne‘s photo from Vietnam.

Peggy Sirota took these funny photos of comedian Ken Jeong photo bombing super model Kate Upton. I wrote a blog about it. People got upset. Said it was gross. Said it was demeaning. But I laughed when I saw the photos. It made me happy. It’s poking fun at the very things that are supposed to be demeaning. Are you trying to convince me that this is perpetuating negative stereotypes?

My high school classmate Tina and I share a stupid on-going exchange about Nicolas Cage, who has had his share of problems. When my birthday rolled around, she didn’t resort to the typical “happy birthday, allen!” wall post. No, no. She made a composite. It’s some sort of horse head nebula. With a cupcake. And Nic Cage’s floating head atop the cupcake. It’s amazing. This photo, by the way, is perpetuating negative stereotypes of Nic Cage Nebula Cupcake photos.

I love photography.

There’s a teenager in Japan named Natsumi Hayashi. She had some average Canon DSLR, but she came up with this concept to take self-portraits that look like she’s levitating. She takes a few hundred images jumping up and down and trying to strike the right pose. She has a Facebook Fan Page and lots of people take homage shots, but they’re just jumping in the air. They don’t levitate. They don’t jump 100 times for the perfect image. They don’t do it over the course of a few years to make it their own. She’s just a girl with a camera, and then all of a sudden she got a gallery show and a 5D, and I was really psyched for her. Her photos inspired me to levitate, and what could be a greater gift?

I love photography.

Tech. Sgt. Manuel J. Martinez of the US Air Force took this photo of a Special Operations dog jumping out of a plane. I’ve seen a few images similar to this. It’s amazing. It’s amazing that a dog helped Seal Team 6 kill Osama bin Laden. It’s amazing that dogs jump out of planes with people. It’s amazing that military personnel are there to photograph this stuff, and even more amazing that it gets published.

Tony Cenicola humorously photographed a chicken to accompany a New York Times article on cooking with chicken skin. On the Lens blog, reader Carol J. Adams commented:

“Not only has the Times featured a misogynistic image, they are now celebrating it by discussing it in a blog? This is the sexual politics of meat; it is about sexualizing the dead flesh of an animal by associating it with women’s bodies. It is anti-woman, it is anti-animal; it’s a pathetic, dated, sensibility. All around the world meat companies have beaten you to this. This is a new low for the Times. Beheaded female bodies as attractive? Just who do you think you are eating?”

ScottA responded:

“@Carol J. Adams – Your comment does not hold weight with its own blatant disrespect for the male form that is Burt Reynolds. Why your mind took an innocent image of a chicken, and associated it with a female body is beyond me.”

It is a chicken, right? I dunno, I get confused between people and chicken sometimes.

While some photographers complain about stolen images, security and thumbnail sizes, editor Alan Taylor went in the opposite direction. In 2008, he created the Boston Globe’s “The Big Picture” which was one big page of lots of incredible photos that were 990 pixels wide. No tiny thumbnails, no watermarks, no Flash, no bullshit slideshows that were only developed to create page inventory against which to sell ads. Nope. The Big Picture was about showcasing photography, and it’s glorious.

He was so successful that The Atlantic hired him away in early 2011 to start In Focus, which continues the large format tradition.

My friend Caroline doesn’t own a camera. She keeps using the crappy camera on her Blackberry. But it doesn’t matter. It’s not always about the quality of the image, or the composition, or the lighting. Sometimes it’s just about the people in the image and the feeling that it elicits. She went back home to Chicago this summer and had brunch with her mom. Someone took a photo with that crappy little cellphone, and now they can remember that brunch forever.

My best friend got married in September, and I took this photo of him hugging his father at the rehearsal dinner. It’s a pretty crappy photo. The light was really orange, and this was the best I could do with the white balance. His father’s face is obscured, but it’s an honest photo.

Last week, his father passed away following heart surgery. I knew his father for 20 years. I saw my first snow at their house over Christmas break in 1994, where I also did my first snow angel at the age of 18. I spent hours at the piano while his father played the guitar. I spent hours at the computer looking at all his father’s flower photos. Tell me that this is a shitty photo. (It is) Tell me that you could have done better. (You could have) Tell me that I didn’t need a $5000 camera to capture this. (I didn’t) Then tell me how I would feel without this photo, and tell me how photography sucks.

The business of photography is undergoing massive change. People who used to make a ton of money aren’t making the same money any more. Amateurs are giving away photos for free. I totally get it.

But listen. There are so many more incredible photos today than there ever were. And more people consume more photography than they ever did thanks to things like Facebook, Instagram, iPads, blogs, and “best of” compilations. This is the golden age of photography. Everyone takes photos now, and there is inspiration all around us. History is being made, and we’re capturing it.

I love photography.

- – – – – – – – – – – – – – -

Allen Murabayashi is the CEO and Co-founder of PhotoShelter. Allen authors PhotoShelter’s free business guides for photographers and marketing professionals, including topics like email marketing, search engine optimization, and starting a photography business. Allen is a graduate of Yale University, and flosses daily.

Slimming down the keyboard could help Apple shave off a few precious millimeters from future MacBooks. Image: Free Patents Online

Apple is like the Vogue of the tech world. Not only are its models some of the best looking and most fashionable — they also seem to just keep getting skinnier and skinnier.

A new patent application filing from the Cupertino company certainly doesn’t do anything to deter this trend. The patent, called “Single Support Lever Keyboard Mechanism,” describes a few different ways Apple could trim some of the fat from existing notebook keyboards, making them more slender.

The keyboard design comes from a need to create computing products that are “attractive, smaller, lighter, and thinner while maintaining user functionality,” according to the patent application.

Current notebook keyboards often utilize a scissor-switch design, with two plastic support levers that slide outwards when a key is depressed (this is shown in Figure 1 in the illustration above). Another is the dome switch, where a key presses down on a rubber dome beneath it to connect two circuit board traces.

Apple’s method would have the keyboard’s key caps held in place by a single rigid support lever made of stainless steel or aluminum, which could be implemented in a few different ways. Instead of collapsing horizontally, a single lever could rotate downwards when a key is pressed. Or, a more flexible material could be used as this lever so when a key is pressed, the key would just bend downwards slightly. Apple posits that with this method, the top portion of the key cap could be made of materials normally thought of as unsuitable for a keyboard, like wood, glass, or — wait for it — “polished meteorite.”

Is this going to be a MacBook for the one percent?

Keyboard implementations nowadays have a travel distance, how far the key moves when pressed, of 2 mm at a minimum, and up to 3.5 or 4 mm in some cases. Apple’s implementation would bring travel down to a tenth of that: .2 mm. If the keys don’t require as much space to be pressed, the entire chassis can get shaved a few crucial millimeters.

And with all those pesky ultrabooks trying to best the MacBook Air in the slimness department, I’m sure Apple’s eager to show them what’s what.

via Apple Insider

Gartner says that some businesses may need three times as many Wi-Fi access points.
(Photo: Flickr/ Lisa Thumann

Are Apple’s iPads about to overwhelm corporate networks?

The research firm Gartner says that unless businesses plan for it, they could require three times the amount of wireless coverage in order to support the iPad on corporate networks.

The issue? Well, iPads are bandwidth hogs, and they have weaker wireless radios than most laptops. That means that — just like most mobile phones — they can’t connect to an access point as well as a laptop. And with more and more iPads and phones coming on the network, companies that want to support them are going to need to bump up Wi-Fi access points…a lot.

That’s what’s been happening at Paul Hastings, an international law firm that’s decided to allow visitors and employees to use their iPads and mobile phones on a special Wi-Fi network that’s separate from the company’s corporate LAN.

Paul Hastings provided Wi-Fi to visitors for about seven years now. It’s critical for them to be able to use the Internet to check documents or access email while visiting the firm’s offices, where wireless carrier networks don’t always get through.

But mobile phone and iPad use on this network has exploded in the past three years, says Searl Tate, director of engineering at Paul Hastings. “There are probably five times as many devices on the network now.”

At first, the company wasn’t sure it needed to permit these new devices at all, but Tate says that about three years ago iPads and smartphones that were really good at surfing the Web “sort of forced our hand.”

“I think the inflection point was the introduction of tablets, specifically the iPad and high-performance smart phones,” Tate says.

With five times the devices on its wireless network, Paul Hastings is now rolling out a wireless upgrade that will boost its capacity tenfold.

The company is also throttling bandwidth on its wireless LAN, which seems to be a very good idea. An analysis of network traffic by corporate wireless appliance provider Meraki found that iPads use about four times the network bandwidth of mobile phones.

And that’s likely to go up with the upcoming iPad 3, according to Kyle Wiens, CEO of online document site, iFixit.

“Wi-Fi bandwidth saturation hasn’t been a huge problem with the iPad yet, but I expect that to change soon,” he says. IFixit thinks that the iPad 3 will have four times the pixels of the iPad 2 and all that hi-res content is going to chew up networks. “Higher resolution content will be at least double that size, dramatically increasing the bandwidth consumed by iPad users.”

In a worst-case scenario, companies may roll out enterprise-wide wireless networks and then find that they are not up to snuff when it comes to hooking up iPads, says John Merrill, Director of Product Marketing with Xirris, the company that’s selling Paul Hastings its new Wi-Fi access points.

“You almost need to reshuffle your access points throughout the whole facility to compensate for those tablets.”

Having fun bringing iPads on your corporate network? Drop us a line and tell us about it: robert_mcmillan at wired.com

An English court has once again told Tesla Motors to take a hike and dismissed the automaker’s latest libel charge against the BBC, producer of the wildly popular (and equally irreverent) program Top Gear.

Tesla Motors sued the BBC in March, arguing Jeremy Clarkson and his Top Gear cohorts defamed the company by claiming the Roadster achieved a paltry 55 miles of range on the show’s test track. That is significantly less than the 200 miles or more Tesla claims for the car.

The program’s March, 2008, review of the car — which Clarkson praised for its acceleration — included a scene in which a crew is seen pushing the Roadster into a hangar for charging.

“Although Tesla say it will do 200 miles we have worked out that on our track it will run out after just 55 miles and if it does run out, it is not a quick job to charge it up again,” Clarkson said in commentary.

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk called Top Gear “completely phony” and his company sued for libel and malicious falsehoods. A judge dismissed the suit in October saying no viewer of the program could have reasonably compared the Roadster’s performance on the track to real-world performance on the street.

Tesla would not be deterred and returned to court with an amended suit.

The same judge, in a ruling handed down Thursday in London, dismissed the claim. He noted that Tesla’s amendment was “not capable of being defamatory at all, or, if it is, it is not capable of being a sufficiently serious defamatory meaning to constitute a real and substantial tort,” according to The Guardian

He added that “as any reasonable motorist knows, a manufacturer’s statement about the range of a motor vehicle is always qualified by a statement as to the driving conditions under which that range may be expected.”

That, by the way, is a point EV advocates often espouse when explaining range.

The BBC was, as you’d expect, pleased by the ruling. We’re still waiting to hear from Tesla, and we fully expect Clarkson to say something snarky in an upcoming episode.

Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com