Synchronicity

Skimming through papers on Jung's Synchronicity, I want to know whether people's selectivity is identified as the similarity of meaning between events. Also, has probability been determined?

The study from the University of Wisconsin [4] studies similarities college students can identify between each other. Life is not a controlled environment and trying to measure the likelihood of, for example, two robberies at the same fast food franchise may be too difficult.

Does Jung consider that people are really good at finding connections, no matter how loose they are? We have the Six degrees of Kevin Bacon meme that showed that most actors are well connected to Kevin Bacon based on co movie productions. Someone else went on to find that there are even better connected actors out there.

But who has stopped to think that just as a study about similarities between University of Wisconsin psychology students, actors in Hollywood are bound to have roles together. It has been taken for granted that the other billions of people in the world do not have Kevin Bacon numbers because they are neither film actors nor Hollywood film actors. This is a tight knit group of people to begin with.

The prior was the notion that people take initial similarities for granted. Swimmers in the Olympics will have similarly really good times, because they were hand picked from those who swam in Olympic trials. But how about "accidental" similarities ?




[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
[2] http://www.hulu.com/watch/222871/fringe-stowaway
[3] Phil Dowe and Mitch Parsell University of Tasmania, "Jung’s Concept of ‘Coincidence’"
[4] THOMAS C. ROWE AND DOUGLAS B. HENDERSON, "Establishing Prevalence of Commonalities in Randomly Paired Individuals as a Method for Assessing Synchronicity", Dept. of Psychology, University of Wisconsin at Stevens Pt. , 1995.

[5] Malcolm Gladwell , Tipping Point

Searching for "love"

Blekko [1] is a search engine that appears to have a fresh new adaptation to search. Their new algorithm is very clearly represented and it is even a clever way to speed up search. Transparency and optimization aside, how do they handle recall?

In a nutshell, their algorithm depends on experts or maybe let's call them selfperts or self-proclaimed experts, to tell you what sites have what you are looking for. In the olden days, if you had a question, you would be keen on hitting up your local librarium or talk it down with your professional colleagues. The system of tubes we colloquially call the inter-net started out as a tight group of peer universities sharing ideas through a few mail programs and maybe more [DARPA reference needed]. Maybe some pubs were opened up for discussion ( both doctoral publications and public pour houses ), but you could not yet know how a teen pop/rocks fan truly felt after listening to some Bon Jovi tunes. It was not until much later after the 1990s [ref.] that you and I asked Jeeves about how stuff works. These days, the Googles ( Project Guttenberg, Amazon ebooks, Google Books, NY Times digitizers and the Asian text book pirating community at large ) are providing virtual and simultaeous viewing access to volumes of works otherwise only available for free in print at your library.

The real challenge of searching engines is to point you to which of those digitized sultry romance novels makes allegorical references to tragic figures through a socio-pathic love-gasmic pop fiction lens. Maybe Blekko.com feels those algorithms are not yet up to snuff and says we need to all help each other out about where best to look. A helping hand will show the way.

My hope is that when I do my looking around online, I can feel empowered when other people find what they want using slashtags I create. Maybe free commerce will vote down the ones that are not good enough or perhaps
Blekko will even downrate the slashtags I forgot to update for over a year.

I know that no matter how many biblical romance novel subject matter experts I support out there, I would still like to form my own opinion with the widest range of sources possible. And for that, I might not tag along on the SHIFT- revolution just yet.

References

[1] blekko.com

Deceptive visualizations

The daily pothole NYC DOT blog shows off this "pretty" summary of potholes covered during the last 31 days [1]. That's great, but because the map is so small, these dots look like they cover a large area while the dots themselves are big so you can see them.






The problem is similar to the one during te Dec 2010 snow storm. It was difficult to know what streets were getting cleaned up and which needed to be cleaned again. The City uses the beautiful 311 system to crowd-source to get updates on potholes and road snow issues. But because that infrmation is not presented along side potholes that were fixed, you do not get a complete picture about the city's overall responsiveness .

I still love the effort they put into this data collection. Makes me proud.


[1]
http://thedailypothole.tumblr.com/photo/1280/3316951936/1/tumblr_lgonom6bBN1qg9dmn

House MD and why we like distractions

House is able to keep a medical diagnostic discussion going on while juggling his staff's emotional and personal lives at the same time. This keeps them distracted enough to keep them stimulated and diagnosing away.

Now is there also something related to having your mind tickled with frolicking subjects? Yes I think humor during a class lecture can keep you focused, for example. How about when you are the subject of ridicule? Others are amused at your expense and you are in reaction mode. Does that make you a better analyst?

Thinking processes are better when your thoughts can bounce from place to place. Randomness is glory.

That's why House likes two way interactions which lead to his well known epiphanies. When enough subjects coagulate and auto-associate with each other, relationships are formed where none existed. Why is it that varied environments spur on more creative outcomes? I don't know when, but I did read that children's exposure to a higher variety of stimuli strengthens their analytical abilities for the future.

And the same goes for the diagnostic methods. Higher exposure to stimuli force patient responses without waiting for them to happen on their own. Increasing the number of symptoms to help you understand the hidden variables in this graphical analysis is akin to accelerating evolution in that experiment in the Soviet Union when the kinder and gentler foxes were bred in succession. Okay maybe that process was more selective, but expediting the process is key in both cases.

So I think I am in need of a work efficiency booster and this is a good path to take for a mental stimulus.

The even wider subject is not how to be a more efficient worker, but what are the processes behind association and mental sub-conscious voting mechanisms. You know, we're talking about voting to select what enters into your consciousness.

It is also quite interesting to try to understand why we get bored. Can we understand the mind to the extent of how much we need to excite it for it to be healthy? This is entering the realm of concepts like "fun".

And why is interior design is so important. Animals in are in green shrub/tree zoos today, but they used to be packed into cement jungles a half century back. Today we know from scans that brain development in cement containers is heavily restrained. The same connections can be made to humans. Singing in the shower makes us come up with ideas as much as walking in a forest does when all of our senses are diverted. Does that mean listening to wordless music is best for concentration when working? Focus on a particular task is more difficult when distracted unless that one task is creating storms in your brain.

Ironically these investigations are the reasons why TV shows these days flip between multiple subjects for our stimulus-hungry minds to be happy and interested. Did someone say advertising? The benefits of advertising to concept-manufacturers outweigh the negatives to thought-consumers.

Advertising : Cross Show Appearances

Here are more discrete and not so discrete advertising examples. Both of the images below are from hulu.com [3] and seen just seconds apart on Mar 16th 2010.

The first is of Rod Blagojevich apparently appearing in a show called the Celebrity Apprentice. Talk about guest appearances being used to help upstart past careers? Eliot Spitzer has been trying to do TV appearances as well as writing articles for Slate [4], among other places. This was after he left the NY governor spot. Blagojevich is of course the former governor of Illinois.




The next example is Jerry Seinfeld appearing on SNL. Now, there is no direct mention, but Jerry was recently on this other TV show called the Marriage Ref on NBC [5] . In this SNL skit [1] , Jerry helps out in sort-of relationship advice related to the subject of former Congressman Eric Massa. Massa is currently in the news as a result of his resignation in March 2010 [2].



















References
[1] http://www.hulu.com/watch/134724/saturday-night-live-really-with-seth-and-jerry
[2] http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/vacancies_pr.html?pr=house&vid=31
[3] http://www.hulu.com
[4] http://www.slate.com/id/2205995/
[5] http://www.nbc.com/the-marriage-ref/

Border control

I recently heard about Boeing's contract with Homeland Security to build a virtual fence on the US - Mexico border. They were comissioned in 2006 and were to complete a full >1200 mile stretch near 2008-2009, but less than 28 miles are completed. Almost a billion dollars have been spent. I am learning about this from a recent 60 minutes podcast about the topic.

As far as problems, the system uses radar to identify motion, but radar has issues when it rains. Maybe rain is not common on the border, but terrorists planning on using this border will likely make their way during a storm given this information.

Remote tracking was to happen through remote laptop control, but the dry-sandy conditions were causing problems for intended laptops, because the parts were almost off-the-shelf and not military grade.

On top of that, it is reported that the users of the intended system were not consulted for their needs and requirements.

This looks like a classic problem of porting a lab tested project to a real world environment. Not enough design work was done in planing and anticipating rials to the system.

Emotions over text

How good are we at putting feelings into text? Into text messages? Are paintings left to interpretation just as hand written letters between friends? Poetry can be really moving, but maybe that is because a portion is left over for self expression. Written text has many examples of being very clear of course, it just takes good editing. But personal feelings flow just like a brainstorming. So maybe we have a balance between actually saying what you want to say (well written letter) and speed of the tongue. But yes, sometimes the best expressions come from bursts of neural activity in the heat of the moment.

What solutions can we offer to those stressed about being misinterpreted over text messages or emails? Of course, we can apply a "revision process" to email protocols. So your intended recipient doesn't get the message. Instead you get it after a few minutes and get the chance to rewrite. This may be time consuming. How well can NLP be applied to lift sentiment from your text? We may apply the same analysis to pairwise interactions between two endpoints whose pairing is unique, keeping track of it. You can learn about how you communicate with particular people even more fully when we apply speech recognition.

Google has the "off the record" feature. This is a quick switch which can be used when you don't want analytics on your life. Do we trust our phone conversations to be private anyway? The day will arrive when self censorship will be all we have.

I would be interested in a sort of trust mechanism that needs to be established between you an your personal machines. Encryption is one thing. It is applied consciously. There are also ways to automate it. We may also apply rules such that it occurs only when we want it.

Those elements are purely for privacy, but NLP (or other tools) can ask you " did you really want to say that?"