Linkpile (via Delicious)

• Gallery of default anonymity: A work in progress: A link to my own site? Yes. The gallery has grown to 50+ and is awesome. So there.
• The Magic of Mystery: Interesting essay addressing, among other things, the weird hunger for spoilers. “Lately I go to Amoeba Music in Hollywood just to watch people flip through albums. It’s a lost art.”
• Happiness research & policy: Overview.
• What’s Your Story? The Psychological Science of Life History Research: Fascinating overview, via Mind Hacks. “Life stories are based on biographical facts, but they go considerably beyond the facts as people selectively appropriate aspects of their experience and imaginatively construe both past and future to construct stories that make sense to them and to their audiences, that vivify and integrate life and make it more or less meaningful.”
• Do professional movie critics evaluate films the same way as the rest of us?: Results seem obvious, but this is “one of the first studies to compare expert and lay opinion on films in a systematic way.”
• It’s cheap — but can you swallow it?: Salon tests fast food “value” meals.
• Quantified Stand-ins for Social Status: Those of you who came by my Blowing up the Brand chat should be interested in this: Interesting thoughts about measurability and social capital from Alice Marwick.
• Thinking man’s filter: “The deeper question has to do with whether the mountains of data now available to us inhibits thought or enables it, or has no particular effect on the quality of thought.”
• Irish student hoaxes world’s media with fake quote: Depressing. “The sociology major’s made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer’s death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.”
• Book about fan-films and the obsessives who make them: “Homemade Hollywood delves into the technique, meaning, and creativity behind fan films, showing how imitation can be original, and how great creative people get their starts copying the things they love. Young also explores the love/hate relationship copyright holders (especially big studios) have with the fans who knock off their goods.”