What to do if your keyboard on the screen. And if there are dozens of screens: At CES, the Russian design Art Lebedev, the company shows upcoming Optimus Aux Optimus popularis keyboard with a mini and a series of six unique keyboard for data input devices on the key to the home screen.
If you're thinking about picking up and moving to a new city, you have a lot of research to do before you even begin looking for jobs there. The average salary, rental or real estate prices, crime statistics, best and worst neighborhoods, transit situation—they're all things you'll have to dig into before you decide if a city is right for you. Here's how to make that research go quickly so you can go back to job hunting in what'll hopefully be your future home.Moving to a new city can go one of two ways: You can either take a risk, throw everything to the wind, and see where you end up, or you can do your homework ahead of time, consider your options, and research extensively before you move.Most of us don't know the ins and outs of a city before we ponder moving there—we just know we have friends in town, or family nearby, or maybe we like something we've heard about, like the city's overall atmosphere or popular industries and companies nearby. If that's where you are, let's look at some tools you can use to research a town through and through before you book plane tickets to go visit.Cities and towns are big places, and you'll probably want an idea of where in town you should live before you even begin looking at stats, prices, and other data. We've offered some great tips to help you pin them down, including visiting sites like StreetAdvisor, which is entirely dedicated to neighborhood reviews and information. We'd also suggest checking out neighborhood details on Foursquare or Yelp, even if you're not specifically looking for nightlife or restaurants—both apps have a wealth of information entered by locals for locals, and don't be fooled, there are reviews for entire neighborhoods at Yelp, and some of them are both hilarious and useful.Similarly, City Data offers a wealth of information about the entire city, as well as specific neighborhoods. The site includes cost of living, average home prices, and even local attractions or famous destinations in the area. Plus, their forums are an invaluable resource—a treasure trove of information and locals who are willing to help you decide where in town you'd like to move, visit, or just learn more about. Similarly, Neighborhood Scout can help you learn more about specific neighborhoods once you've pinned down a few you'd like to live in. You can start with a bird's eye view of a city, and then zoom in on popular neighborhoods, up-and-coming ones, or test your luck with neighborhoods that are more affordable but offer a more authentic and less glossy experience. Whatever you're looking for, both sites will help you find a few neighborhoods you might want to look into.Once you have an idea where in a city you might want to live, your next step is to see how much it would cost you to actually live there. Some of the previous sites will give you averages, like the average home price and average income in the vicinity, but there's no substitute for looking at what's on the market or available to rent right now. Here are a couple of options:For home buyers, Trulia, Zillow, and Redfin all offer virtually every real estate listing in a given city. If you've bought a home in the past, you're familiar with them, but if not, looking for home prices on the market in an area is as simple as typing in the zip code or name of the area you're interested in. You'll see active listings, their asking prices, and even get to see photos of the home and the surrounding neighborhood. Obviously you're not putting in an offer just yet, but it's a great way to familiarize yourself with the real estate market in your preferred neighborhoods.For renters, Apartments.com, MyApartmentMap, Padmapper, and HotPads all collect the best of a city's rental listings and make them easy to browse. The real estate sites like Trulia and Zillow also offer rental listings, but go to the source. These are some of our favorite apartment search sites for good reason. There's always Craigslist too, but many of these sites pull in Craigslist listings. Still, if you don't see them, Craigslist has finally added maps, so they're worth checking out. There's also Lovely, which also caters to top-down neighborhood-browsing. In any event, the best feature of all of these is that they can help you figure out which neighborhoods have rentals you can afford and amenities that you'd enjoy while you live there, and they do it all on a map that you can click and drag around (or drop down into Google Street View with) easily. Many include information on transit options, walkability data (like how close a rental is to transit, shopping, dining, etc), and others, like previously mentioned AutNo, helps you find transit friendly neighborhoods and rentals directly.Once you have an idea of how much it'll cost to rent or buy a home in a specific neighborhood, take a street view tour of the neighborhood and look around. Check out what kinds of shops and restaurants are nearby. The more amenities like transit, dining, and retail are nearby, the higher you'll know the cost of living will probably be—but all of the tools we've mentioned will help you pin down exact numbers.A Google Street View tour will help you determine whether a neighborhood looks a little rough or looks a little too clean for your tastes, but there's no replacement for real, public crime data and police blotter aggregators for the areas you're thinking about moving to. Crime Reports is a great first stop for information on any city in the United States, and Family Watchdog lists convicted sex offenders. SpotCrime is another great database of crime statistics and data, and signing up even gets you regular alerts from a neighborhood or town so you get to see what's going on there before you even visit.Beyond online databases and search tools, you can (and should) reach out to the local police department for the city you're thinking about moving to and ask them for a crime report. You may have to find the precinct or district that covers the neighborhood you want to move to, or you may have to give the department a specific address to get a report of all activity within a given radius of that location, but it's worth doing. It's the only way you'll get completely accurate information, and you'll be able to dig through the reports yourself and judge with your own eyes. Some police departments only provide aggregate data, so keep that in mind when you ask—but almost all of them are willing to give you some information so you can make an educated decision about moving.If you have children or are planning to start a family, you'll naturally want to find the neighborhoods with the best schools—or at least with schools that are well regarded but are still affordable to live in. A good first stop is GreatSchools, a site that helps you find good schools in a specific area, or will guide you to schools within a certain vicinity. The site is more than a search engine: You'll find tools that will walk you through defining "good" or "bad" schools look like, tips on how to assess a school, and even tips for navigating tricky school systems to get the information or help you need.Similarly, Neighborhood Scout's school district ratings page can help you find the best public schools in any area, complete with aggregate data like test scores, class sizes, and student achievement. SchoolDigger is another resource with free, complete metrics on school districts and systems around the country. Before you start piling up statistics though, this old op-ed in the Washington Post, although some of its information is specific to DC residents, is worth a read—it'll calm your nerves and help you focus on what's really important when picking a school system, especially since the competitive rush for exclusive private and charter schools can get out of hand in some cities.Finally, once you have the details you need to decide whether a neighborhood sounds like a good one, take a step further and really dig into the local culture, attractions, and atmosphere. City-Data's forums are perfect for this, because you can probably find someone who's local to where you'd like to live to speak with directly. Look at the city from this perspective: If you moved there, what would you do for fun? The answer doesn't have to involve the city's famous destinations or popular locales (although it certainly should—if you're moving to a new city, we have plenty of tips to help you get the lay of the land once you're there), but it should also involve your own interests and passions. If you're a movie buff, look for movie theaters close to your preferred neighborhood, and check out which movie theaters are the most popular and well loved by local movie fans.Ask yourself what the city is known for, cuisine-wise, and check Foursquare, Yelp, and Google Local for reviews and recommendations. Then think about your favorite foods, and check out where you can get them near your future home. If you're a big fan of Japanese food, make sure you can find a decent restaurant somewhere nearby. If you find a half dozen and a couple of ramen shops to boot, you're in great shape. Repeat the process with your other interests, whether it's live music, nightlife, museums, even local festivals and block parties. Some neighborhoods even have their own Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, and websites designed to alert locals to events happening in their backyard. Pretend it's your backyard too, at least for the time being. Before long, you'll feel like a local.Photos by ollyy (Shutterstock), Perfect Vectors (Shutterstock), Andy Dean Photography (Shutterstock), Carl Wycoff, Seattle Municipal Archives, and dumbonyc.
We like to look at successful people in our field and ask what they did right, but we really ought to ask what they (and others) did wrong. Attempting to distill the virtues of triumph erases the most important element: failure.We favor a look at success due to a phenomenon known as "survival bias," which causes our brains to ignore anything but what went right. For example, we look to old people on advice for living a long life when we should really examine those who died early to learn what to avoid. David McRaney, author of the blog and book on self-delusion You Are Not So Smart, explains why we commonly make this error:
It is easy to do. After any process that leaves behind survivors, the non-survivors are often destroyed or muted or removed from your view. If failures becomes invisible, then naturally you will pay more attention to successes. Not only do you fail to recognize that what is missing might have held important information, you fail to recognize that there is missing information at all. You must remind yourself that when you start to pick apart winners and losers, successes and failures, the living and dead, that by paying attention to one side of that equation you are always neglecting the other.
So what do you do about this? Whenever you're looking at why someone succeeded, consider their mistakes and the mistakes of others on the same quest for success. Don't focus narrowly on their path and what they did, but rather remain open to other experiences. You must look at the entire picture, because if you don't you'll miss the lesson altogether.Survivorship Bias | You Are Not So Smart
You've heard the expression “practice makes perfect” a million times, and you've probably read Malcolm Gladwell's popular “10,000 hours” theory. But how does practice actually affect the brain? What's going on in there when you're learning something new? The team from social sharing app Buffer investigates. When we learn a new skill, whether it’s programming in Ruby on Rails, providing customer support over the phone, playing chess, or doing a cartwheel, we're changing how our brain is wired on a deep level. Science has shown us that the brain is incredibly plastic–meaning it does not “harden” at age 25 and stay solid for the rest of our lives. While certain things, especially language, are more easily learned by children than adults, we have plenty of evidence that even older adults can see real transformations in their neurocircuitry. But how does that really work? Well, in order to perform any kind of task, we have to activate various portions of our brain. We've talked about this before in the context of language learning, experiencing happiness, and exercising and food. Our brains coordinate a complex set of actions involving motor function, visual and audio processing, verbal language skills, and more. At first, the new skill might feel stiff and awkward. But as we practice, it gets smoother and feels more natural and comfortable. What practice is actually doing is helping the brain optimize for this set of coordinated activities, through a process called myelination.A little neuroscience 101 here: neurons are the basic cellular building blocks of the brain. An neuron is made up of dendrites, which receives signals from other neurons; the cell body, which processes those signals; and the axon, a long “cable” that reaches out and interacts with other neurons' dendrites. When different parts of the brain communicate and coordinate with each other, they send nerve impulses, which are electrical charges that travel down the axon of a neuron, eventually reaching the next neuron in the chain.Imagine a row of dominos stacked closely together: when a neuron fires, it's like knocking down the first domino in a long chain. This process repeats from neuron to neuron, until the nerve signals reach their destination. These firings happen at incredibly fast speeds.We sometimes refer to our brains as “grey matter” because from the outside, the brain looks mostly grey. That’s what color our neuron cell bodies appear as. But there is also a lot of “white matter” that fills nearly 50% of our brains. That white stuff is myelin, a fatty tissue that covers much of the long axons that extend out of our neurons. Scientists have found that myelination increases the speed and strength of the nerve impulses by forcing the electrical charge to jump across the myelin sheath to the next open spot on the axon. In other words, myelin turns the electrical signal into the brain version of Nightcrawler, the teleporting X-Man. Instead of traveling in a straight line down the axon, the charge is BAMF-ing down at much faster speeds.Ok, so how do we get myelin onto our nerve axons?First off, a lot of myelination happens naturally—much of it during childhood. Kids are like myelin generating machines, soaking up information about the world and themselves. As we get older, we can continue to generate more myelin onto our axons, but it happens at a slower rate and requires more effort.Scientists believe that two non-neuron (or “glial”) cells that exist in the brain play a role in creating new myelin. The first is a glial cell called an astrocyte. Astrocytes monitor neuron axons for activity, and lots of repeat signals from a particular axon triggers the astrocyte to release chemicals that stimulate the second cell (known as an oligodendrocyte) to produce myelin, which wraps around the axon. So as we practice, whether by writing every week, hitting jumpshots on the basketball court, or playing Call of Duty, we trigger a pattern of electrical signals through our neurons. Over time, that triggers the glial cell duo to myelinate those axons, increasing the speed and strength of the signal. It's like going from dial-up to broadband. There’s one final point to make here–how do we know myelin improves performance?Well, that’s tough to prove definitively. We can tell for sure that it increases the speed and strength of the nerve impulse–which seems helpful for learning, but not conclusive. However, we can’t just cut into people’s brains and look for myelin directly without running afoul a whole bunch of ethical and legal issues.One compelling piece of evidence comes from brain scans of expert musicians. There’s been a lot of research done on how musician brains differ from the brains of ordinary people. One specific study used a particular brain scan called Diffusion MRI, which gives us information about tissues and fibers inside the scan region in an non-invasive way. The study suggested that the estimated amount of practice an expert piano player did in childhood and adolescence was correlated with the white matter density in regions of the brain related to finger motor skills, visual and auditory processing centers, and others. Most significantly, there was a direct correlation between how many hours they practiced and how dense their white/myelin matter was. Another strong point in favor of myelin’s performance-enhancing abilities is what happens when it's missing. Demyelination is a known factor in multiple sclerosis and certain other neurodegenerative diseases which cause symptoms such as loss of dexterity, blurry vision, loss of bowel control, and general weakness and fatigue. This suggests that myelin is an important factor in allowing us make the most of our brain and bodily functions.Understanding the role of myelin means not only understanding why quantity of practice is important to improving your skill (as it takes repetition of the same nerve impulses again and again to activate the two glial cells that myelinate axons), but also the quality of practice. Similar to how the science of creativity speaks about idle time and not crushing through one task after the other, practicing with a focus on quality is equally important.As a young gymnast, my coach put a spin on the old phrase and would always say: “Perfect practice makes perfect." If we practice poorly and don't correct our mistakes, we will myelinate those axons, increasing the speed and strength of those signals–which does us no good.The takeaway: practicing skills over time causes those neural pathways to work better in unison via myelination. To improve your performance, you need to practice frequently, and get lots of feedback so you practice correctly.Why practice actually makes perfect: How to rewire your brain for better performance | BufferJason Shen is a startup founder, blogger, and fitness enthusiast. His blog, The Art of Ass-Kicking, has been featured in Lifehacker, Outside Magazine, and Mashable. His new book, Winning Isn't Normal, an illustrated collection of his best articles on entrepreneurship, fitness, and personal development, comes out later this year. Image via baranq (Shutterstock).Want to see your work on Lifehacker? Email Tessa.
Windows: In the newest version of Windows, you can create a picture password that you unlock with a series of taps or drags. Try using this to drill yourself on information you want to learn.The picture password works with a series of three motion. You can circle, tap, or drag across certain parts of the photo. To unlock your machine, you need any combination of three of these gestures. By using photos of something that you're trying to learn (like the periodic table example above), you can quiz yourself every time you unlock your computer.
Once you have an idea where in a city you might want to live, your next step is to see how much it would cost you to actually live there. Some of the previous sites will give you averages, like the average home price and average income in the vicinity, but there's no substitute for looking at what's on the market or available to rent right now. Here are a couple of options:For home buyers, Trulia, Zillow, and Redfin all offer virtually every real estate listing in a given city. If you've bought a home in the past, you're familiar with them, but if not, looking for home prices on the market in an area is as simple as typing in the zip code or name of the area you're interested in. You'll see active listings, their asking prices, and even get to see photos of the home and the surrounding neighborhood. Obviously you're not putting in an offer just yet, but it's a great way to familiarize yourself with the real estate market in your preferred neighborhoods.For renters, Apartments.com, MyApartmentMap, Padmapper, and HotPads all collect the best of a city's rental listings and make them easy to browse. The real estate sites like Trulia and Zillow also offer rental listings, but go to the source. These are some of our favorite apartment search sites for good reason. There's always Craigslist too, but many of these sites pull in Craigslist listings. Still, if you don't see them, Craigslist has finally added maps, so they're worth checking out. There's also Lovely, which also caters to top-down neighborhood-browsing. In any event, the best feature of all of these is that they can help you figure out which neighborhoods have rentals you can afford and amenities that you'd enjoy while you live there, and they do it all on a map that you can click and drag around (or drop down into Google Street View with) easily. Many include information on transit options, walkability data (like how close a rental is to transit, shopping, dining, etc), and others, like previously mentioned AutNo, helps you find transit friendly neighborhoods and rentals directly.Once you have an idea of how much it'll cost to rent or buy a home in a specific neighborhood, take a street view tour of the neighborhood and look around. Check out what kinds of shops and restaurants are nearby. The more amenities like transit, dining, and retail are nearby, the higher you'll know the cost of living will probably be—but all of the tools we've mentioned will help you pin down exact numbers.
Imagine a row of dominos stacked closely together: when a neuron fires, it's like knocking down the first domino in a long chain. This process repeats from neuron to neuron, until the nerve signals reach their destination. These firings happen at incredibly fast speeds.We sometimes refer to our brains as “grey matter” because from the outside, the brain looks mostly grey. That’s what color our neuron cell bodies appear as. But there is also a lot of “white matter” that fills nearly 50% of our brains. That white stuff is myelin, a fatty tissue that covers much of the long axons that extend out of our neurons. Scientists have found that myelination increases the speed and strength of the nerve impulses by forcing the electrical charge to jump across the myelin sheath to the next open spot on the axon. 
Windows: In the newest version of Windows, you can create a picture password that you unlock with a series of taps or drags. Try using this to drill yourself on information you want to learn.The picture password works with a series of three motion. You can circle, tap, or drag across certain parts of the photo. To unlock your machine, you need any combination of three of these gestures. By using photos of something that you're trying to learn (like the periodic table example above), you can quiz yourself every time you unlock your computer.