openpolitics.com

It's not always bad to make a class require another, but it strongly depends on what your goal is. In this example, I show you a good way to use composition in PHP Object Oriented Design (OOD). Inheritance is not the life-blood of OOP, yes it has it's uses. However, it's better to favor composition over inheritance.

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news.

.. Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.

So I say, look up, look at one another, and let’s start the conversation.

Take Google, Facebook and Twitter, for example. Those companys’ consumers and customers are different populations. The consumers are the users. The customers are the advertisers. In fact, our consumption is what’s sold to advertisers. “If it’s free, then you’re the product,” the saying goes. It’s not exactly right, but it’s close enough to make some points, one of which is that your influence on those companies is far less than it would be if you were paying for services rather than merely using (or consuming) them.

Although psychology has always been one of the three major fields with a ‘stake’ in hypertext, this interest has often been manifested through the applied field of human-computer interaction (HCI) or human factors.

.. As even non-psychologists have occasionally noted, psychological problems are often more responsible for the failure of effective system use than technical problems.

It’s tricky to maintain this kind of thing over the long haul. There’s a great book by Will Kaufman called “The Comedian as Confidence Man,” which examines the careers of American satirists from Mark Twain to Lenny Bruce, and finds that nearly all of them eventually succumb to what Kaufman calls “irony fatigue.” This arises, he says, from the frustration that comes from trying to engage in sincere social or political critique while having to maintain that one is “only kidding” in order to continue to be heard. If Colbert suddenly “turned serious” — owned up to having a sincere purpose — he would no longer be granted the kind of indulgence he gets as a comedian.