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