"Mr Branding" is a blog based on RSS for everything related to website branding and website design, it collects its posts from many sites in order to facilitate the updating to the latest technology.
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A Talker Research survey released on July 16 found that 14% of U.S. respondents say they secretly judge people based on their phone background. It also found that some see a person's phone background as a reflection of their personality.
The online survey of 2,000 Americans was conducted between June 11 and June 17, 2026. According to the findings, younger respondents were more likely to report judging people by their phone backgrounds. About one-third of Gen Z respondents (33%) said they do so, compared with 17% of millennials.
The survey also looked at the images Americans use as their phone backgrounds. Family members or children topped the list at 19%. Nature or landscape images and personal photos or memories followed at 11% each, while pets and default wallpapers each accounted for 10%.
Among respondents who said they judge phone backgrounds, 32% said a default wallpaper suggests someone is practical and minimalist, while 25% said it shows a phone is used mainly as a tool. Another 22% said a default wallpaper does not mean anything, while 12% said it suggests the person is uninspired or lacks creativity.
Chart: Phone Backgrounds Used by Survey Respondents. Credit: DIW. CC BY
Yet, neither apocalypse happened. Instead, education adapted, turning these disruptors into essential extensions of human intelligence.
Generative AI marks a similar turning point for higher education. In lecture halls across Malaysia and Indonesia, students routinely use tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude for everything from research and writing to coding and problem-solving .
This response fundamentally misjudges the challenge. The question isn’t whether students should use AI — they already do. The real question is how universities will train them to use it responsibly.
Instead of fighting generative AI as a threat to integrity, institutions in Malaysia and Indonesia should embrace it as a vital productivity tool by focusing on three priorities: teaching AI literacy, redesigning assessments, and embedding ethical frameworks.
AI as a productivity skill
Future graduates will enter workplaces where AI assists with predictive analytics, software engineering, financial analysis, legal research, and strategic decision-making. More than one-third of entry-level jobs now require AI skills, nearly triple the share from fall 2025. Some 28% of employers say they’re seeking early-career talent who can use AI in their work.
Universities should therefore teach AI as a professional competency. Students should learn how to construct effective prompts, evaluate machine-generated outputs, detect hallucinations, verify evidence, and recognise the limitations of AI systems. These are no longer optional digital skills but essential competencies for an AI-enabled workforce.
This approach is consistent with UNESCO’s call for a human-centred model of AI governance that prioritises AI literacy over blanket prohibition. Rather than discouraging students from using AI, universities should equip them to use it critically and responsibly.
Universities should encourage students to move beyond using AI merely to generate assignments. They should become creators of AI-driven solutions.
In Malaysia, for example, Islamic economics and finance students could develop specialised AI applications trained on key concepts like Maqasid al-Sharia (the framework for human wellbeing and justice), waqf (charitable endowments), zakat (obligatory almsgiving), and Sharia-compliant investment principles.
AI should become a platform for innovation rather than simply a shortcut for completing coursework.
Redesign assessment for the AI era
When assignments merely reward memorisation, generative AI feels like a threat. The real challenge isn’t the technology, it’s how we design assessments.
Universities should shift away from traditional take-home essays towards assessments that measure reasoning, judgement, and application. Greater emphasis should be placed on oral presentations, live case analyses, project demonstrations, reflective portfolios, and collaborative innovation challenges.
Where AI is used, students should be assessed on how they engaged with it. What prompts did they design? How did they identify inaccuracies or misinterpretation? Which sources did they use to verify AI-generated information? How did AI contribute to, rather than replace, their own analysis?
By assessing the learning process instead of merely the final written product, universities can preserve academic integrity while encouraging responsible technological adoption.
Embed ethical frameworks
Teaching AI without ethics leaves graduates unprepared for the real-world responsibilities of these technologies. This is why universities may need to twin AI literacy with ethical literacy.
For Malaysia, this dialogue can be grounded in the principles of Maqasid al-Sharia, which hold that any policy or practice must be evaluated by its ability to protect five core human goods: faith, life, intellect, lineage, and wealth.
AI tools that drive financial inclusion, alleviate poverty, or simplify complex policy preserve intellect and wealth. On the other hand, using AI to fake research, deceive lecturers, or bypass critical thinking directly violates these principles.
Ethical AI education should not be limited to preventing misconduct. It should cultivate graduates who understand transparency, accountability, intellectual honesty, and the social responsibilities that accompany technological innovation.
Ultimately, universities should not aspire to produce graduates who simply know how to use AI. They should produce graduates who know when to trust it, when to question it, and when human judgement must prevail.
Preparing graduates, not policing technology
The future of higher education in Malaysia and Indonesia should not be defined by increasingly sophisticated methods of detecting AI use. It should be defined by increasingly effective ways of teaching students to use AI wisely.
Teaching AI as a productivity skill, redesigning assessments to reward critical thinking, and embedding ethical responsibility will better prepare graduates for an economy in which AI is becoming an everyday professional tool.
The universities that lead the next generation of higher education will not be those that police AI the hardest. They will be the ones that empower students to use it more intelligently, creatively, and ethically.
Dozens of companies worldwide develop large AI models, but it can be difficult to get a sense of where the most-used ones tend to come from.
OpenRouter is a large platform that allows users to interact with and write software on top of AI models through a single interface. It includes all the models from large companies like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, as well as many, many others.
I analyzed the data published by OpenRouter on the 50 most used models each day since January 2025 and calculated the average monthly presence by origin country of the models.
As you can see on the chart, US-based companies still account for most models in OpenRouter’s top 50. But their presence has declined, and China-based companies have grown rapidly, from 5 models in the daily top 50 at the beginning of 2025 to 20 in May 2026.
Very few top-50 models come from companies outside the United States and China. Canada was represented early in 2025 by Cohere’s Command R models, while France remains represented by Mistral AI’s NeMo model.
A technology that more people use every year is, so far, almost entirely the product of two countries.
Phones and devices have become inextricably linked with everyday life. They store our credit cards, provide critical bus updates, and allow us to communicate whenever we need to.
But when our device use starts to affect our mood, replace real-life experiences, or interfere with face-to-face relationships, it’s a sign our habits have crossed the line from healthy to unhealthy.
How are teens more affected?
Teenagers are particularly vulnerable to excessive device use, as the part of the brain responsible for planning, imagining consequences and working for delayed rewards has not yet fully matured. They also have heightened sensitivities to rewards and social evaluation (in other words, what your peers think of you).
All of this makes them more susceptible to online triggers that can trap a vulnerable teen in a cycle of conflicting and constantly changing emotions, particularly when information is arriving constantly.
For teens (and adults) it can become a complete world of its own where daily responsibilities are avoided and challenges are only faced with a dependency on phones.
So how do you know when it’s become a problem?
What to look out for
There are some obvious signs excessive device use is becoming a problem for teens (or yourself).
1. They use phones to fill in spare time.
If every quiet moment is filled with scrolling, checking notifications or opening apps, it shows a teen’s device is the primary way they respond to spare time, stress or discomfort.
2. They appear distracted when you talk to them.
If your teen automatically reaches for their phone midway through conversation, it might be a sign they devalue face-to-face exchanges and have lost the discipline to wait.
3. They put off important tasks.
When teens routinely avoid everyday responsibilities such as work, homework, school, household chores or tasks that involve mixing with new people.
4. They seem tired all the time.
Teens may block negative thoughts by scrolling in bed, socialising online late in the night, or even getting into bed after the school day.
How does it get to this stage?
The devices we rely on have the potential to develop what I call the “addictive pull” due to the features and services available on them. The “pull” begins when notifications, such as likes, messages, loot box wins and emails, arrive on devices unpredictably. Some are positive while others are neutral. And some also relieve worries. This creates a powerful dopamine-driven loop.
Over time, the device itself becomes a conditioned stimulus. This means even something as simple as seeing your phone case, or watching your device’s screen light up, is enough to trigger an urge to check it. It’s almost as if we are magnetically pulled to the device in the hope of a reward (such as more messages or likes), or to soothe a preoccupying worry.
This can also create an anxiety loop which means even without a notification, a person checks their device, rechecks it and experiences brief moments of relief via a message or app. When the loop occurs on repeat, it winds up worry and creates emotional dependence on others or apps.
The “addictive pull” can be hard to resist. Over time these unnoticed habits can become associated with the space where devices are often used (such as the bedroom, the apartment, the bus). The “pull” to re-engage with a device is a result of predictable conditioning and reinforcement processes rather than a lack of willpower. The bedroom – a place of rest, privacy and study – can be particularly problematic for teens and adults.
Leading by example
We cannot expect children or teens to break from the “addictive pull” if the adults around them don’t either.
As a parent, these are some ways you can lead by example to be more intentional when using devices.
1. Recognise the subtle tension that builds when you have a worry and want to reach for your device immediately.
2. When you walk into your home, place your phone or smartwatch out of the way and in a bag.
3. Do not have your phone or tablet in arm’s reach when it is designated family time.
4. Work with each family member to put apps being used without restraint onto one device per person. For instance, a parent or older teen might have TikTok on a tablet and not on their phone (so they can use their phone without distraction). They should then try to use that tablet in only one room of the house, outside of the bedroom.
Remember, an honest picture of everyone’s screen time habits sit on the device’s screen time records. We may get a minor fright when looking at it, but rather than resigning ourselves to this new way of life – and ignoring the insidious impact on attention, mood and wellbeing – we can commit to one another to make small changes.
A study of digital advertising in the International Journal of Business and Systems Research suggests that memorable visuals are more likely to encourage consumers to buy than campaigns that rely primarily on emotional impact. The findings challenge the received wisdom about how online advertising influences behaviour.
The researchers analysed survey responses from more than 400 participants using structural equation modelling. This statistical technique tests relationships between multiple factors simultaneously. They examined how four advertising characteristics, provocativeness, emotional tone, cultural relevance, and visual appeal, affected purchase intention through two pathways. The first of these was emotional response, meaning the feelings an advertisement evokes, and the second was advertisement recall, or how well people remembered the details of the campaign.
The findings indicate that provocative advertising and culturally relevant messages were effective at generating emotional reactions. However, those emotional responses did not translate into stronger purchase intentions. Similarly, an advertisement's emotional tone neither improved recall nor influenced buying intentions.
By contrast, visually appealing advertisements consistently improved advertisement recall, and, in turn, stronger recall was linked to greater purchase intention. The results suggest that memory, rather than emotion alone, is the more reliable route from advertising exposure to consumer action.
The research addresses a gap in advertising studies, which have traditionally focused on factors such as credibility and informativeness rather than the effects of provocative or culturally tailored content. As brands compete for attention on social media platforms, the findings imply that striking imagery may be more effective when it helps audiences remember a message, rather than simply provoking an emotional reaction. For advertisers, in other words, the study suggests that attention-grabbing or controversial campaigns may need to be paired with memorable visual design to influence purchasing decisions.
Six years after Instagram launched Reels in response to the growing popularity of TikTok, short-form video has become the dominant content format. Snackable content delivered by ever more powerful algorithms has proven successful in keeping users engaged for longer, as it delivers dopamine hit after dopamine hit – resulting in more screen time for viewers and more ad impressions for platforms.
Despite concerns about its addictive nature and impact on attention spans, short-form video has quickly become the most popular content format. According to Statista Consumer Insights, 62 percent of U.S. adults say that short-form video is among their preferred content formats, putting it far ahead of text (42 percent) and long-form video (40 percent). This is true for all surveyed age groups (18 to 64 years old), illustrating that it’s not a trend limited to Gen Z, the so-called TikTok generation.
Feeling the pressure from Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, which are increasingly dominating screen time, even Netflix – the company that popularized long-form binge-watching – has started to embrace short-form content. Just months after introducing Clips, a vertical video feed serving short snippets from the company’s vast content library, Netflix will soon start offering curated videos from several digital media brands on its platform. The goal is clear – to keep users engaged – and the company is making no secret of it. “Starting next month, you’ll be able to watch some of your favorite videos from around the internet without having to leave Netflix to find them,” the company wrote in its press release. In other words: if you insist on watching short-form videos, Netflix wants you to do it on its platform – a clear sign that the battle for attention cuts across formats.
Consumers are more likely to buy cryptocurrencies when they see them as easy to use, trustworthy, and beneficial, according to research in the International Journal of Blockchains and Cryptocurrencies, which has used the Technology Acceptance Model as a framework to examine perception and adoption.
The team analysed survey data using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). This statistical approach can test relationships between various factors simultaneously. This allowed the researchers to discern that perceived ease of use, trust, and benefits all had significant direct effects on a consumer's intention to buy cryptocurrency. Trust showed the strongest relationship, followed by ease of use, and finally benefits. Perceived risk reduced perceptions of benefit, but this link was not statistically significant, the team reports.
The findings suggest that concerns over volatility, cybersecurity, and the minimal regulation surrounding cryptocurrencies do not necessarily deter buyers if the platforms are seen as reliable and straightforward to use. The researchers argue that consumers are more likely to recognise advantages such as lower transaction costs, borderless payments, and investment portfolio diversification when they trust the technology and can navigate it easily.
The study has implications beyond cryptocurrency markets as governments and financial regulators consider how to oversee such digital assets. The authors recommend that there should be put in place clearer investor-protection rules, standardised compliance procedures, and enforcement of ethical marketing to reduce systemic financial risks.
They also argue that digital platform providers should prioritise stronger cybersecurity, transparent fee disclosures, and accessible interfaces to strengthen user confidence while protecting financial and personal data.
