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?"

Privacy and religion

Plus psychology of getting scammed

Dreamfall and FRINGE

I have no idea how no one else has noticed, but maybe there is only a small overlap of people who have played the game called dreamfall and also watched episodes from the FRINGE series on FOX. The following is a list of comparisons and they include lots of "spoilers" of course.

- Dreamfall is based in a 2-ply multiverse just like FRINGE.

- most people in each universe are clueless of the other.

- there are those few who have used some form of "technology" to cross between. In Dreamfall, there is a "portal" which can be created by Tibetan monks I think. In FrINGE, you can cross using unspecified strange technology . Patent pending.

- there are also those who have a special ability to cross

curbing littering in NYC ideas

How about the use of self enforcing protocols to curb NYC litter?

The store receipt was invented primarily as an economic incentive against cash register theft [2]. If you do not get the receipt, your purchase is free. I saw this on Bruce Schneier's blog [2] . Similarly the cake cutting protocol [1] is another example of a self enforcing mechanism.

NYC Subways already have the "If you see something, say something" signs, asking customers to be the eyes and ears for everyone else. However, you really have no incentive to say something if you see something. Who cares? There is no economic incentive anyway. If someone is doing something strange, you can just get away from there. Who cares about everyone else?

But how about economic incentives? For example, what if returning old metrocards back to vending machines gave you a free fare or even just an extr a $0.05 off. Wouldn't you submit it to the vending machine as opposed to throwing it away?

The cool thing I noticed in Munich was the use of glassware even for "fast food" stands outside. You can't throw that stuff out, so there's no litter. Usually, you pay a small deposit on the beer stein ( maß glas ) and the value of the deposit is large enough so as to offset people stealing. Maybe we can't get Dunkin Donuts to start selling coffee in permanent containers, but Starbucks has filled up my coffee in containers I brought to them many times over. The incentive is a few cents off the cup actually. Pathmark also takes $ 0.02 off for every plastic bag you offset using your own bags. These are all ways to reduce the trash which may end up in the street.

Vigilante garbage collection. Well, I am curious to find out if the $0.05 value you can redeem from most plastic / aluminum bottles the result of someone's idea in the same direction of recycling. People essentially collect these bottles from all over the city to deposit them for the cash. This saves recycler fees of sorting all of those bottles out of the mixed trash piles and it guarantees part of the recycling rate ( what ratio of recyclables do get recycled ) .

But how about the every day person. Can we be vigilantes too ? Well I think street cleaning as a form of community service is a great idea when it comes to alternatives to jail time. The chain gangs in Arizona ( pink underwear ) are definitely part of an exaggeration, however.






References
[1] http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/value-self-enforcing-protocols-081009

[2] http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/aligning_intere.html

cool marketting method : Toyota

So now it looks like advertising is taking two completely separate paths: very subliminal and very direct. No one likes a salesperson telling you about crap you don't want. But the merchandise has to get sold. The two solutions are (A) subliminal advertising [1] and (B) very direct and obvious advertising [2], [3] .

Subliminal advertising is positioned below the radar and you have to be more than a casual observer to realize you are getting sold [1]. Now I think the opposite strategy is to be very direct about your intention, without beating around the bush or pretending you are doing something else. Even though the theme is parenthood in the Toyota Sienna commercials [3], it is still extremely obvious that this is an advertisement. The second unique part is the use of YouTube. Similarly, Verizon has their Big Red themed [4] silly ad. They bring you back to remember this chewing gum commercial, resurrecting its catchy idea, but reusing it to their advantage. The fact that their advertisement references the chewing gum is not at all a secret. They are playing with the idea right in front of you and you know it. There just happens to be something very appealing about a partnership.

A similar partnership is the combination of familiar Family Guy stylings into Priceline [5]. Will Shatner is reborn at the hands of Seth McFarlane. The concept is not hidden from your view at all, but the viewer is curious about what is going to happen. They are "committed" to the Family Guy perhaps, to the idea itself, and they are therefore more willing to hear what is going to happen in the ad.




References
[1] http://myklingingmindjog.blogspot.com/2010/02/fringe-subliminal-earthquake-adverts.html

[2] http://myklingingmindjog.blogspot.com/2010/02/smart-advertising-new-category.html

[3] http://www.youtube.com/sienna

[4] http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2010/02/verizon-does-big-red-de-beers-ad-parodies.html

[5] http://www.pr-inside.com/priceline-com-negotiates-with-seth-r1030262.htm

Demasculinization in the media

Men outside of their normal SinCity tough guy roles have been creeping into the mainstream and now It is getting covered in the news. The Feb 8 Brian Lehrer show covered this topic with respect to the superbowl ads.

Dodge showed men mentally submitting to their wives whims to "be allowed" to indirectly reclaim their manhood. That Manhood is currently located in a vice jar under the sink and is thematically being compensated for with said car.

In a Dockers commercial, men are walking proud without pants and Dockers says men need to put the pants back on. Then Dockers is at least also being critical of unmanly men.

Men eating Doritos at the gym? Nah that is a "stretch" of an argument.

But the What About Brian show from TV did show the main character to be a very indecisive guy. The last few episodes showed Brian painting and cleaning and fixing for two women who moved in as his new neighbors. His friend the lawyer was much more decisive and indifferent for my taste.

I think that maybe male characters of earlier decades may have been more unrealistic in the other direction, but they were something better to look forward to. Cool hand Luke, Steven Segal, Bruce Lee, Charles Bronson in his westerns, Clint Eastwood in his westerns, Vin Diesel, The Rock, Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver, Pierce Brosnan in 007.

Speaking of The Rock, why is he a tooth fairy now? His image of the past has been cancelled.

This is the type of Neuro Linguistic Programming I was talking about in the earlier post. What is being advertised is not a product, but an image of man I frankly do not want to be exposed to. I am not saying we know enough about the mechanics of the rearing of boys to say what reprecutions this will have, but I do think that people I general need role models.

Well on the other hand, we have the Active.com run called Tough Mudder. The French-army-forces-designed obstacle course is a 7 mile run. The next in the series is being held in May.

Radiolab new normal human domestication

Experts and bias

Does becoming a noted expert mean you stick to your high horse? Is changing your mind become a quality experts should be immune to? Why was flip flopping seen as such a foible in the 2004 and 2008 US presidential campaigns?

I do remember Richard Dawkins had once recounted one of his professor's humble acceptance of having been wrong about one of his theories in favor of being witness to a new discovery.

Pride may be a reason for not accepting any of your opponent's reasoning, but it makes you appear stubborn, to put it crudely.

Or maybe sticking to your position is just your inability to be a clever argumentarian such as Socrates. I think credit should be given when it is deserved and accepting when you are wrong shows you to be the better man. That is, you may maintain your pride by being gracious at the fellow with whom yor are speaking for enriching you with something you did not know before.

Smart advertising. A new category?

Hulu Adzone , sponsored by Coke. Using Tweets FILTERED by the word "coke". So smart! Another perhaps 'category' for advertising?

FRinge subliminal earthquake adverts

The last Fringe included an earthquake that was not really an earthquake. It was the mixing of two universes concentrated on a building . The significance was that I believe it was no coincidence there was an Earthquake in Haiti.

It is perhaps already a many year long turn we are experiencing from boxed Ads you know are clearly ads. These are the ones we consciously avoid. Then there is product placement. When Jon Stewart puts an Apple Air laptop on his news desk or when Cadillacs are the car of choice in the Matrix movie, you are likely very aware of the Brand recognition.

But when a fiction quake is the center of a TV episode while Haiti is ruling the headlines, then we have entered the world of Neural Linguistic Programming.

The messages are delivered through side channels very creatively. I think that NLP advertising is a challenging new career uniting the experiences of psychology, marketing and graphic design.

When I was checking out a Picasso titled the Accordionist [1] at the First Fridays event at the Guggenheim two nights ago, I thought the description added a new
Twist. Apparently one of the owners of the work did not know the Cubistic painting's subject. The image is so abstract that he did not see an accordion or a person. Well art is that way. So then does that mean that everyone is affected by NLP advertising differenly? Do we need to tap Jung's archtypes to sell a product? And does the ability to see through the NLP smoke and mirrors come from one person 's individual collection of experiences ?

It has been said recent on On The Media I think that the puns and references delivered by TV personalities today are sometimes getting lost on younger viewers. They have not seen MASH or Cheers or experienced Ford or Carter.

The human experience of imagery is an illusion and we are strting to understand more about how it works. Hopefully the bountiful new areas of advertising steganography and anti-advert-filter-steganalysis will prove to be an interesting battle for those who think they must maintain control over their awareness and those whose job it is to invade it.

[1] http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/show-full/piece/?search=Accordionist&page=&f=Title&object=37.537

HTML5, AJAX, Flash and A{ppl,dob}e

discussions about the new HTML standard :

http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/

some cool stuff, because as I have learned, the indirect effect would make Flash and similar technologies obsolete, by enhancing what you can do with HTML.

I am rough-specing the description, but the behind the scenes say the low down is that Apple and Google are in charge of the HTML5 specification and Apple does not particularly like Adobe ( current owners of Flash ) :

http://mashable.com/2010/02/01/steve-jobs-google-adobe/

I may have been getting more excited than I should have been. I think HTML5 does introduce a lot of new dynamic content, but the point is that AJAX really is what they were talking about for the most part. AJAX ( which is under HTML after all ) already does replace a lot of the cool interactive interfaces that people are using flash for. The other subset of uses of flash, interactive youtube videos, may be more accessible by HTML5 if their embedding technology improves. Frankly I don't know, but working with existing standards like MPEG is great and the ability for Javascript to wonderfully capture what the user is doing could be enough of a "layer" to make the embedded MPEG content interactive so as to implement what Flash is doing in a non-standard way.

Risk in pick up art

Gladwell's New Yorker article [1] on entrepreneurs who avoid risk got me thinking about the so called naturals of the pick up art. Is the behavior or strategy taught in the pick up community successful when it is less or more risky?

I think one who reads this article lightly may think that no risk is best, but maybe that is not the point. I think the misunderstanding may be that not taking a risk is the key to success in life. This is not an appropriate generalization. Maybe it is better to say that success comes from both chance and taking that chance, while maintaining that you should minimize your risk. This is a tricky concept because it does not leave you at either end of the spectrum.

There is a good Chinese proverb on the tip of my tongue. Hmm a search recovers these:

- "you cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind" (author unknown)

- and I rember this from a Hamlet soliloquy I had to memorize: "a thought which quartered , hath but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward, I do not know why yet I live to say, 'This thing's to do' ."

And there are so many quotes on perseverence, that one could fill a few pages.

"men are made stronger on realization that the helping hand they need is at the end of their own arm" ( Sidney J Philips )

And from the world of Security, I remember a friend saying that really many things in life can be compared to talking to a woman in a bar. There is very little personal risk, but the possibilities are there only for those who try and they are many.

And more from among my other favorite quotes on and related to the pick up art: "there is no growth in your comfort zone and no comfort in your growth zone". That is, you cannot grow personally, without leaving your comfort zone.

Then we have to combine the business risk article and the world of taking a chance when the opportunity arises, along with the teachings from the world of pick up and so many other realms that you cannot really wait for things to happen. You have to make your own opportunities.

Essentially, you must do as John Paulson, the money analyst did, per the Gladwell article. You must do your homework, but also before everyone else does. And to enter the world of the 20-80 rule or the 5-95 rule or the 1-99 rule, you must do what no one else would. Most people are perhaps not aware of what a risk which is not a risk looks like. Talking to an attractive woman in a bar is, again, something which could make most people lose their bladders, but in reality it really is not something akin to going to war or investing your life savings to start a business (not advisable).


References
[1] "the sure thing", jan 18th 2010 New Yorker issue

Thoughts on the issues of women in the work place

I once read about the effect of the 1970s slow wilting of the race professional career barrier. More non-white people were able to get hired within their fields of study and as a consequence, more nonwhites decided to go to college ( don't have the statistic). But there was a side effect as well.

It is to the credit of the general race and gender barrier deterioration that the quality of public school education was noticed to decline. One theory was that the highly educated nonwhites and women who could only teach in public schools were now leaving for their careers and their spaces were getting occupied by less educated people whose ambitions of money/success were bounded within reach of what salaries schools offer.

This theory related to the unfortunate fact that schools do not attract enough talented people. This is not by virtue of some natural desire for talented people to stay far away from K-12, but related to low teacher salaries. I think the lack of women or minorities for that matter in STEMs is very related to the fact that salaries are not competetive as compared with other fields. The recent passing of the Lilly Ledbetter Act may help to de-anonymize wage discrimination, but it goes to show that unequal gender/race distribution in the sciences could be societal and not "genetic". Women may be choosing their field of study based on wage potential.

What can colleges do, through marketting and/or awareness spreading? It seems difficult because it is like trying to prevent a dam from breaching with water by cleaning up the mess as opposed to not building the dam in the first place.

Can colleges help secure entry for women into STEMs careers? Yes. I have seen this with my own eyes. Unfortunately, a sort of reverse-discrimination occurs where the bar is lowered for hiring women in order to meet hiring quotas. It is one method, through college-corporate networking and feedback-policy decision-making, where more women end up in the technical work force. This is a reality. The general argument I am aware of against reverse-discrimination other than "fairness" is that subjecting companies to a potentially lower quality female work force may really hurt the case for men and women being of equal ability. That can have dangerous consequences, because employers are always conservative with respect to factors which contribute to company wealth. One of the conservative components is unfortunately a bias against women.

What then can be done instead? I don't think this is a lost cause. I think wage de-anonymization may be effective, but can also have its form of negative feedback, where employers stop hiring women so they do not have to pay them lower salaries and risk getting sued or risk paying equally. In fact I think the monetary threshold of settling on getting sued instead of paying women more has not yet been reached. No even women in management may not be able to change the situation right away, because of the pre Civil Rights Movement "uncle Tom" effect borrowed from what happens to black men and women when they do not form policy that the whites who hire them want. Their higher status may therefore
Be almost a puppet status. Booker T. Washington is a man who has been considered by W.E.B. Dubois to be such a high figure who was characterized as mainly a mouth piece for the likes of presidents (Wilson?) and other power players (Carnegie ?) .


So where is that positive note ? Maybe that can be arrived at later. I think awareness is the best tactic against discrimination we are _aware_ of.

Your interest in what you do

Paul Erdös co-authored papers with over 500 different people. Some of the topics are described as not part of his real life interest.

Entrepreneurs. They try to start businesses in areas that they do not necessarily hav an interest in, but where they observe a nitch in a market which needs to be filled