Centives

Meg Miller wrote about the newest terminal at New York City’s JFK, designed exclusively for animals:

• 70,000 animals including dogs, cats, and horses, go through JFK every year and they will now be routed through the new terminal.
• It will be known as the ARK terminal – after Noah’s Ark – and will cost $48 million to build.
• It will include climate controlled dog stalls, a penguin corner, and showers for cows.
• If pet owners are willing to spring for it, dogs can stay in hotel suites built into the terminal for $100 a night.
• Dogs will also get to enjoy a bone-shaped pool, a doggy spa which offers massages and pawdicures, and flat-screen TVs for light entertainment.

Read about how the terminal will work, how it will handle manure, and other details over here.

Source: Fast Company

You may never have noticed but basically every meme uses the same font to write on a picture. Phil Edwards took a look at why:

• The font is called “Impact” and was created in 1965 with hand cut metal letters.
• Because it had thick letters it was known for its legibility, even when it was superimposed onto pictures.
• The font was sold to a company that then licensed it to Microsoft which made it a default font in its Windows products, massively increasing its distribution.
• Then Impact had its threshold moment when it was used in the genre defining meme: the “I Can Has Cheezburger” cat meme.
• Now it has become so associated with memes that any that don’t use the font just won’t look right.

Read more about the history of the font (or strictly speaking, typeface), chart its rise in old brochures and iconic memes, and other details here.

Source: Vox

About a third of our lives we spend asleep. Does this affect the waking two thirds? Here are a few of the findings of the Freakonomics bloggers:

• Laboratory studies, say David Dinges (professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania), show that lack of sleep undoubtedly leads to weight gain.
• A large study (15,000 people) showed that African-Americans sleep longer per night than white Americans.
• There is however considerable spread in the data. African Americans are more likely to sleep less than average, and also more likely to sleep more than average. Interestingly, it was also found that African Americans’ blood pressure doesn’t drop at night as much as it does for white Americans.
• By the age of 5, kids with a bedtime routine (i.e. reading bed-time stories) outperform kids without bedtime routines in cognitive tests.
• Alcohol helps a person to fall asleep, but the quality of the sleep is reduced.
• A test was done asking volunteers to go to sleep in a laboratory. Before they went to sleep they all read the same book, half in paper form and half in iPad form. The iPad readers found it harder to sleep, and once asleep their sleep was lower quality.
• People at opposite sides of the same time zone get up for work at the same time, but tend to go to bed at different times (because of when the sun sets, earlier in the East, and our body clocks tend to follow the sun). This gives us a massive data-set to study the effect of different amounts of time spent sleeping per night.
• Sleeping for an extra hour per week means a wage increase of 4.5%. Sleeping for an extra hour per night, means a wage increase of 16%.
• Ten year ago in Denmark, those who preferred to get up early earned on average 4-5% more than those who preferred to get up late. This was explained by most businesses insisted on workers arriving at 8 am. In the last ten years many businesses have introduced flexible working hours; and the wage gap has decreased considerably.

The two podcasts draw on a great range of academics and studies…that don’t always agree with each other, even over the deceptively simple question of “do people who sleep more earn more?”  For more insights, read part 1 here and part 2 here.

Source: Freakonomics

It’s The Daily Mail which means it should probably be taken with a grain of salt, but Becky Pemberton wrote about a fairly legitimate looking service to help children build sandcastles:

• A travel company is offering to dispatch butlers to various locations in Europe in order to design and construct sandcastles.
• It starts with a brainstorming session to help the patron understand what they want their finished project to look like.
• Then blueprints are created, and the butler will find a good location with high quality sand to build the castle.
• The butler will take the lead in building the castle, and, if so inclined, the patron can help as appropriate.

Read more about the service, see some photos of how it works, and get some tips to build sophisticated sand castles here.

Source: The Daily Mail

Via: Marginal Revolution

Michele Petruzziello looked at some interesting facts about the fashion industry:

• The fashion industry is expected to double in size to $5 trillion in the next ten years.
• As a whole fashion employs more people in the United States than automobiles, fast-food, and video games.
• Other countries get a big boost from it as well. 88% of Haiti’s exports relate to clothes.
• Sadly there is still sexism in the C-Suite. Less than 20% of the major fashion brands have female heads, and only about a quarter of all board members are women.
• The industry is thirsty. A t-shirt “costs” 1,083 gallons of water to make when things such as land for grazing or agriculture is considered.
• It also leads to a lot of waste. The average American throws out 70 pounds of clothes a year.

Read about Fashion Revolution day, why millennials give the industry hope, and more over here.

Source: Agenda – World Economic Forum

Every image or video we see has its colours altered. Annie Sneed wrote about how these changes affect your emotions:

• Warm orange-yellowey colours are friendly while blue is usually considered to be more distant.
• This is why in political ads candidates have an orange glow around them while their opponents are depicted with hues of blue.
• Green can be a mixed bag. Outdoors it’s a positive colour and so if the aim is to create a somber outdoor scene then greens are desaturated.
• Indoors however it elicits a sense of disgust and so the green is ramped up – as in The Matrix films.
• To indicate a dream sequence or a flashback contrast is added which creates a sense of distance from reality.

See what colourists do to create foreign worlds, why we have these colour associations, and visual examples here.

Source: Fast Company

You don’t see as many water fountains as you used to these days. Kendra Pierre-Louis looked into what happened:

• In the old days the poor would drink water bottled from sewage infested sources.
• Then in 1859 London installed the world’s first clean water fountain in a ceremony watched by thousands. The fountain was so popular that at the peak 7,000 people used it a day.
• In the next 20 years London installed 800 fountains and American cities soon followed.
• Bottled water soon lost favour as it was thought that only low-class places which couldn’t afford modern plumbing were forced to use it.
• Then in the 1990s companies saw an opportunity to expand sales of bottled water by creating doubts in people’s minds about the safety of tap water.
• The advertising campaigns were successful and soon people felt that tap water wasn’t safe – even though it has been shown to be about as safe as bottled water.
• Since people stopped trusting tap water they stopped trusting water fountains.
• A water fountain can cost up to $4,500 to install so cities could save on costs by cutting back on an amenity that was becoming increasingly unpopular anyway.
• This has health consequences. People, for example, resort to sugary drinks instead of water when there are no fountains around.
• And all the oil based plastic bottles aren’t that great for the environment.

Read about a possible renaissance for water fountains and more over here.

Source: The Washington Post

Paul Sullivan took a look at the arduous task of figuring out your private jet travel:

• When it comes to flying around in a private jet there are a lot of factors to consider and most people don’t make such a purchase frequently, so there are consultancies who help you figure out your options.
• For example if you decide to charter a jet the consultancy will provide safety support by doing a background check on the pilot to make sure they actually have experience flying that particular type of plane.
• They may also recommend programs similar to international minutes for phone cards. Customers purchase ‘hours’ that they can use on a private jet, and they’re eligible to spend those hours whenever they want.
• They can always top up the hours if they run out.
• The costs usually comes out to $16,000 an hour – before membership fees and fuel surcharges.
• This is substantially cheaper than the millions of dollars that purchasing your own jet costs.

Read more about the factors that Centives readers should consider when they next drop in to their local private jet dealership over here.

Source: The New York Times

The Economist took a look at the market for passports:

• Passport holders of countries in the Caribbean get visa-free travel to various European countries.
• There are many people who’d like to visit Europe but who would have…trouble getting a visa approved or don’t want to go through the hassle of it all.
• Spotting a market opportunity, Caribbean countries are willing to sell citizenship to those who are able to pay.
• The “donation” required for this can be as little as $250,000.
• Some require that you at least spend some time in the country before getting its passport – usually a long weekend will do it.
• The business is lucrative. St Kitts made $100 million from the business – 13% of its GDP.
• It can lead to awkward situations though. Iranians have apparently been using St Kitts passports to circumvent American sanctions.

Read more about the different countries and the amount of money they’re willing to sell citizenship for, and how countries around the world are responding over here.

Source: The Economist