tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60868636588915689462023-11-16T05:25:54.808-08:00IT Bytes!!Exploring the unintended consequences of the information revolution.A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.comBlogger28125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-5817453506040326852012-04-18T17:23:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:35:21.143-07:00Through a Google Glass Darkly<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In a phrase, the internet
revolution may be summed up as a global movement, inspired by IT overlords to
move our intelligence to machines while decreasing our intelligence by
encouraging us to do mindless things. In other words, the internet is dumbing
us UP and dumbing us DOWN. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">His and Hers Google Glasses</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A case in point are a new
software tool that will allow us to be omniscient in a robotic Terminator sort
of way, and a new software app that will help terminate our intelligence. The latest such boon to man or
should I say peoplekind is called <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9c6W4CCU9M4">Google Glass</a>, and brings
Google two inches from your nose. The second, called <a href="http://instagr.am/">Instagram</a>, helps you make your pictures look old
or otherwise crappy. Jon Stewart on the
Daily Show recently took note of this. His <a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/tue-april-10-2012/the-social-networth---google-unveils-smart-glasses---facebook-buys-instagram">take
on it</a> is worth a billion virtual dollars!</span></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-65532687400222828982012-04-18T07:44:00.001-07:002012-04-26T13:35:57.125-07:00Dream Jobs<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In the movie ‘The Matrix’, super
computers at the time had to run on batteries, and since human beings had more
of a charge to them then your typical Ray o vac battery. So they farmed crops
of humans who were kept alive by existing in a virtual world consisting of a
nine to five grind in a cubicle and no stock options. And so humans thrived in their real and
virtual cocoons, and as the machines figured from hard experience, they would
have it no other way. (except for those few who wanted a different reality, and
live in a cave and eat pea soup for the rest of their lives. These folks were
called neo-phytes).</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dream Jobs</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">What with green energy and
fracking, humankind has got this energy thing down for the time being. Although
the battery problem is solved, the reality one persists, and that’s when the
Matrix reenters, and in a good way if you like cubicles that is.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">According the most
prognosticators on the subject, computing power is trending to infinity. This
is particularly good for app creators, who with all that infinite power can
model not just Duke Nukem, but the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke, and even lowly
you. Called an ancestor simulation by the Oxford University professor <a href="http://www.simulation-argument.com/">Nick Bostrom</a>, Bostrom has
surmised that if one of your descendents, and I mean just one, decides to emulate
you to see what life was like in the 21<sup>st</sup> century, or perhaps get
even with you for the mega trillions of national debt he has to pay back for
your medicare, then very likely he can emulate just about everybody, and in
every variation. In other words, if anybody in the future decides to run an
ancestor simulation, then almost certainly YOU are living the mind of a
computer, and are a simulation! Even I cannot make this up, but ultimately I
don’t need to if I am made up. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Well, back to my dream job…………………</span>.</div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-74764411826454755802012-04-17T18:03:00.002-07:002012-04-26T13:41:06.163-07:00Keys to your Facebook<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify;">If you want that dream job, dream date, or dream bank loan, it used to be that there was only a minimal amount of information you could cough up, and then you were sure it was carefully chosen to not reveal the embarrassing facts that if better known would send you packing or even packing off to jail. Presently, some employers are asking potential hires to hand over your password to your Facebook or other social media accounts so that your character, resume, personality, can be properly inspected. This </span><a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/1826121/employers-want-your-facebook-password-now" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify;">controversy</a><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-align: justify;"> may be dampened by federal law, public outrage, or just saying no, but in the end it’s probably all moot, as your privacy has likely already escaped. There is plenty of stuff out there to embarrass you, only you don’t know it yet.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>But you will.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Right now, if I wanted the scoop on a competitor, a friend, or the next door neighbor, I would have to do a laborious internet search, and then laboriously make some sense out of it. Not anymore! For the software tools we use from day to day, all that stuff can now be brought to you automatically, whether you ask for it or not. Consider the common customer relationship management program. The CRM we use at our own company, called <a href="http://capsulecrm.com/">Capsule</a>, instantly goes out and grabs all the social networking connections of any individual whose email you type in. So now you not only have their name but their ugly mug to look at, and instant access to their social networking connections that <i>you never asked for</i> in the first place. This is somewhat scary, for what this means that someone else who has that email can pull out all my social networking stuff and God knows whatever else is out there about my life. Of course, my life is as pristine as the driven winter snow (i.e. I am boring), but very likely yours is not. It used to be that only running for President would reveal your dirty laundry. Now your laundry is all over the place, so if I were you I’d watch your sox life among other things, or else create a fake facebook page!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">See also:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><a href="http://www.theonion.com/video/report-every-potential-2040-president-already-unel,27963/">The Onion reports that by 2040 every potential presidential candidate will be unelectable due to Facebook.</a></span></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-58398248840498264072012-04-17T09:55:00.001-07:002012-04-17T09:56:48.070-07:00Mr. Greenjeans and the Laptop Bunnies<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">For those of us who
remember the past, or when we had teeth, to learn about the latest good stuff
you had merely to turn on Captain Kangaroo in the morning. Mr. Greenjeans was the family farmer who would
daily bring warm and fuzzy creatures that we would want to adopt for some coin,
an idea that was later replicated by the web app ‘Farmville’ and virtual bunnies.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"> When bunnies were a ‘Best Buy’</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Back then, you could feel and
touch the bunnies close up before you made your buying decision, and the knowledgeable
farmer was right there to answer any of your questions. Of course, now we have smart phone apps that
can read the bar code on the bunnies, and allow you to find an identical bunny
at the factory farm for far less money and a better bunny warranty. Naturally, this
puts the family farmer out of business, and leaves your progeny wondering what
bunnies are actually like. However, at least we have bunny user reviews. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Looking and feeling is a user
experience that no amount of user reviews can replace. When shopping moves to the web and our brick
and mortar stores close, we are losing something price<i>less</i>. Presently, pricing apps promote judgment by hearsay rather
than experience. So, we will miss our experience with cuddly bunnies, laptops,
wide screen displays, hard bound books, and much more of what used to be called
a shopping experience. And our bunnies, like everything else, will live
somewhere disembodied in the cloud. </span></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-40064326675988986352012-02-25T13:21:00.002-08:002012-04-26T13:37:24.800-07:00Searching for Red Stockings: The Myth of Information Overload<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">As the
internet advocate </span><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10142298-16.html" style="background-color: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">Clay Shirky</span></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;"> noted,
everybody who talks about information overload starts with the graph with the
telltale ascending line and the litany of the troubles it entails. As the line
informs us, information is increasing exponentially, and we can barely deal
with it intellectually and emotionally, or more and more often, we can’t. And
the solution? It is here that the
rallying cries diverge. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif;"><b>Scary Graph</b> (from Basex.com)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">On one side
there is Shirky, who assigns the problem to filter failure, and why not? It’s a
reasonable thing after all to suppose that if we had better ways to sort out
information, we could cull the bad from the good, and be able to significantly
reduce the information we have to cope with daily. Search, social media, and e-commerce firms of
course concur, and are rapidly improving their search algorithms (using of
course information about you that you voluntarily or involuntarily port over to
them) so you can find what you need the
first time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">On the other
hand is the internet critic </span><a href="http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/03/situational_ove.php"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">Nicolas Carr</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">, who
attributes information overload to filter success. In Carr’s opinion our
filters are working all too well, and the problem is that they are getting
better and better. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">Thus, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">“….</span></b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">The real
source of information overload…. is the stuff we like, the stuff we want. And
as filters get better, that's exactly the stuff we get more of.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">It's a
mistake, in short, to assume that as filters improve they have the effect of
reducing the information we have to look at. As today's filters improve, they
expand the information we feel compelled to take notice of. Yes, they winnow
out the uninteresting stuff (imperfectly), but they deliver a vastly greater
supply of interesting stuff. And precisely because the information is of
interest to us, we feel pressure to attend to it. As a result, our sense of
overload increases.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">Implicit in
both arguments is this premise: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: large;">The information we want is the same as the
information we need.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">This is an
argument for the curing salve of better filters (to fine tune what we want,
since our wants are <i>finite</i>) or a call
for mass despair (because our wants are <i>infinite</i>,
and thus overwhelm us when they are invariably served by the web). This premise
derives from an assumption that in our hubris we are wont to make: that humans
are rational agents that know what they want and why.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">But what if
this was not true? What if we are at
root irrational creatures who delude ourselves into thinking that we know what
we want and why we want it? What if the information we want is more often than
not different from the information we need? If this is true, then to paraphrase
Shakespeare, our fate is not in the stars (or rather the cloud), but in
ourselves, because if the information that we want is often <i>not </i>the same as the information we need,
then we need to be aware how to distinguish our wants from our needs and how
and when to constrain the former. In other words, for information overload, the
key is to understand how our basic motivations work. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">The question that
Shirky and Carr beg is thus elemental: <i>Why
is information of interest to us,</i> <i>because
it is important, or because of something else?</i> To answer this question, let us illustrate
how a basic search was performed over the last few generations by going to our
metaphorical sock drawer in search of red stockings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">It’s 1912,
and you as t-shirt manufacturer want to begin a production run of commemorative
t-shirts of the Boston Red Stockings triumph in the World Series. As soon as
the game is over you receive an immediate telegraph of their victory, and it’s
off to the races to start production.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">It’s 1932,
and you as a t- shirt manufacturer want to get started with your commemorative
t-shirt run, and so you listen to the game on the radio, and upon its
completion, get to work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">It’s 2012,
and you as a t-shirt manufacturer want get to cracking on your production run
celebrating the Boston Red Sox victory, and you follow the sox from college
draft to preseason to all of their games through the World Series, and monitor
all the social and news media who have something to say about it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">In all three
time frames, the decision point happens in a second at a predetermined moment,
namely when (hopefully) the sox win. The narrative of how that final fact (a
sox victory in the final game) got there is irrelevant. No matter what era, the
decision point is concise, precise, and momentary, and gets to you on time
regardless of the media you use and irrespective of its background story. There is no need to follow the narrative that
describes the changing facts that get us to that point, as the point of the
last man flying out in the last inning is all we need. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">The
difference between the three eras is that in the first era we could not follow
the narrative that follows the sox on their way to the pennant, but in the
latter era we could. But following the latter comes at a cost. By following the progress of the sox we
become diverted from other things of value, and suffer regret. If these diversions are small scale and
populate our working day, they become distractions and cause us to lose focus
and attention. Finally, as we continually choose between distraction and
staying on course, we become tense and nervous. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">The metaphor
of ‘information overload’ would seem to apply here, as every frame of every
moment of the continuous narrative leading to the Red Sox pennant can and is
considered by the sox fan. However, like a strip of static frames in a motion
picture that give rise to a sense of movement or motion, the story is interesting
because of the novel ways the narrative changes, and it is the changes that
compel. Thus, although the ending is necessary for us to go about our business,
the story that leads to it is compelling not because of what it is, but how it
is continually transformed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">We can expand
our simple Red Sox narrative to the narratives embedded in all the things we do
that are being progressively revealed by the web. We need to know facts, but
what obsesses us is the narrative or story that brings us to those facts. The internet produces not just more
information, but more narratives <i>of</i>
information. We see not a picture, but a movie, not a note, but a score, not a phrase
but a speech. Moreover, we conflate the importance of the narrative with the significance
of its conclusion, or what we want with what we need. This is a dangerous
delusion, for the stuff we want depends upon the narrative or facts in motion,
but the stuff we need depends upon the facts sitting still.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">We can get
the facts we daily need in a half hour, but continually accessing the web to
see a moving stock market, middle east crisis, or what Uncle Charlie is up to
are never ending stories that excite us, engage us, but ultimately bring us
down. A narrative is of course still important if our behavior necessarily changes
in tandem. In this case the narrative is ‘feedback’. Thus, a quarterback’s
performance is determined by feedback during the moment to moment course of the
game. However, for the stadium audience, this feedback is entertainment, and
for those who attend to the ever expanding narrative on the game itself, an unnecessary
and harmful obsession.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div align="center" style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div align="center" style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">The Myth of Information Overload<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">As a
metaphor, information overload attributes the psychological effects of the
internet to what information is rather than how it is arranged. But humans are above all novelty-seeking
creatures, and novelty is enhanced not in the facts but in the stories they
tell. Because the explanation for how the web influences us psychologically is
based on core assumptions on human motivation that are faulty, we proceed with
our daily lives under a dangerous illusion abetted unfortunately by the
perverse incentives of our media providers to keep us hanging onto the story
when the conclusion is all we need. Whether or not we can escape this illusion
and its dire consequences depends ultimately on not just a better story, but
also a better <i>explanation </i>as to how
our minds actually work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt;">
<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">Sources:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div style="background: white; line-height: 17.25pt; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">Finding a
better story to describe the emerging fact that wanting and liking aren’t the
same thing takes you to the seminal work on the topic performed by the
neuropsychologist </span><a href="http://www-personal.umich.edu/~berridge/"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">Kent Berridge</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"> on the
topic, or </span><a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Internet"><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;">my own narrative</span></a><span style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 9pt;"> on
Berridge’s work and what it means.
Hopefully both make for some interesting explanations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-1524273899483766012011-10-22T11:00:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:51:27.199-07:00New book from yours truly!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Here's my new book, with twice the knowledge and half the stupidity of my other stuff.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<a href="http://www.scribd.com/doc/69880622/One-Track-Minds-The-Surprising-Psychology-of-the-Internet"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">One Track Minds: The Surprising Psychology of the Internet</span></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: center 3.25in left 334.5pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 120%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></span></b></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: center 3.25in left 334.5pt; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 120%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This
book, in 1000 words (actually, 1,008 words)<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"><br /></span></i></b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b><i><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;">Occam’s razor</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"><b><i>:</i></b><i>
Tool used by the medieval King Occam of Slovenia to cut the heads off
philosophers who rambled on and on. It was later used to describe the logical
principle that cut off rambling arguments and replaced with simpler ones,
although it may be argued that King Occam had the better idea.<o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">One of the problems with books that have a
big idea is that the big idea can be easily communicated in a page or so, leaving
the writer with the problem of how to fill in the rest of his opus, which he
promptly does by adding the history of the middling ideas leading to his great
idea, the great implications of his great idea, repeating his great idea in
multiple variations, or just <i>explaining</i>
his idea to begin with. Given my own bright idea, this author decided to go
through the route of explanation, which if deleted from the manuscript, gives
you this page. So here’s the main idea of the book, served not by explanation
but analogy, which is thankfully much shorter.
<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So I present to you this tale that tells the
main idea of our book. Let’s say that you are a tailor, continually in need of
needles to pursue your trade. Consider
if you would a haystack, and the fact that for some reason your needles can
only be found in the haystack. An inefficient state of affairs to be sure,
resulting in your need to painstakingly go through a lot of straw to get to
your needle. Let’s say that in your wisdom you design a ‘search engine’ (i.e. a
big magnet on a string) that will allow you to sort through all that straw to
get to your needles. Passing the magnet over the haystack, you find not only
your needle, but <i>lots</i> of needles of
every color, form, and shape. The first needle does what you need, but each
additional needle is of interest also, but not as much. Nonetheless, you end up
spending much more time than you would like looking at all the fine needles in
your collection, which you eventually look back ruefully as a big waste of
time. In other words, whereas the haystack caused you to waste your time
looking <i>for </i>a needle, a stack of
needles caused you to waste your time looking <i>at</i> needles. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;">But wait you say, isn’t looking at all those
extra needles rational as well, and represents a free and unfettered choice
guided by the fact that all those extra needles are of inherent interest? That’s a fine point if people behaved like a
computer, which they don’t. The analogy instead is more like a steam engine,
which has to get fired up before it can ever get going, and often can’t stop
when it does. Similarly, when we are faced with a demand for performance, the
mind and body has to prepare itself or get ‘fired up’ <i>for</i> performance, but stopping is another matter. Get in place to
run a race, and your muscles will tense to prepare you for a quick release, see
a plate of tasty food, and you will salivate to prepare for consuming the food,
and perceive a lot of novel and salient information, and your attention will
perk up so you can process that information efficiently. But when we pay
attention to novel information, do you stop when you’ve had enough? Well no.
That’s because perking attention is not a just a cognitive activity, but an
affective one as well, as our ability to consume information efficiently
depends upon a non-conscious reason to <i>want</i>
to stay on task, and that’s where affect comes in. In other words, to process
information effectively, we must ‘want’ to do so, and wanting ‘feels good’.
Thus to keep on task, our brains prejudice our immediate behavior in service of
an immediate goal, namely processing important information in a timely way, and
it does so by temporarily skewing the momentary importance or ‘incentive
salience’ of behavior. The brain does
this by releasing the neuro-chemical or ‘neuro-modulator’ dopamine</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"> that
modulates or changes (in this case increases) the rate of firing of arrays of
neurons in the brain. Dopamine</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"> increases the efficiency of learning,
increases alertness, and causes a positive affective state that spurs us on.
Dopamine is the source of the common temptations that cause us stray from our
long term goals. The temptations of sex, eating, and other pleasures all
implicate dopamine activity. However, as the word temptation implies we
normally do not conflate the momentary temptation to eat with the long term
value of eating reasonably. In other words, temptation represents the urge to
take our pleasures in the moment without regard to their long term
advisability. Moreover, temptation can grow if we perceive more of what we
want, thus we are more tempted to eat when we are confronted with a sumptuous
buffet, have sex when we look at pornography, etc. Similarly, when we are presented with a rich
informative environment such as the web, the temptation to remain in that
environment increases, and we end up overstaying our welcome on sites that
remain affectively important even after their logical importance wanes. The negative results are manifold, and result
in regret and unhappiness over time ill spent, a disruption of attention and
memory due to constant distractive interruptions (e.g. checking email or social
media), and the anxiety and tension</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"> due to
the constant indecision and confusion this brings to daily decision making. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;">So how can you deal with this problem? The
procedures are simple, starting with a radical reduction in distraction</span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 120%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">, but first you need a good explanation, or
understanding, hence this book. As with any important problem, explanation is
key, for without it one can be easily swayed by rationalization, demagoguery,
and outright fakery. In other words, my argument must not just seem right, it
must <i>be</i> right, and to be right it
must be clear, concrete, and above all easily testable or refutable. That is
the intended purpose and lesson of this book. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-51438466669278374442011-07-30T11:06:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:42:13.622-07:00Social Media as a Turing Test?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span class="apple-style-span"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">“The dominant social networks are fantasy games built around rigged avatars, outright fictions and a silent — and often unconscious — agreement among players that the game and its somewhat creaky conceits influence the real world. This pact is what distinguishes Facebook and Twitter from other fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons and L.A. Noire. And because of this pact, and because so many hundreds of millions of people participate in this pact, Facebook and Twitter</span></i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;"> </span></i></span><em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-style: normal;">do</span></em><span class="apple-converted-space"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;"> </span></i></span><span class="apple-style-span"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">have meaning and significance in the real world. Just as paper money is valuable because people who use it believe it’s valuable, Facebook and Twitter — right this minute — have value entirely because a whole continent’s worth of people believe they have value. So many players have invested so much trust in these games that they can’t afford</span></i></span><span class="apple-converted-space"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;"> </span></i></span><em><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-style: normal;">not</span></em><span class="apple-converted-space"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;"> </span></i></span><span class="apple-style-span"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">to believe they’re paying off.” Virginia Heffernan</span></i></span><span class="apple-style-span"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">, New York Times July 24, 2011 (Opinionator, online commentary)</span></i></span></div>
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<span class="apple-style-span"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #333333; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;"><br />
</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The importance of reality in choosing our incentives is presently made much more complicated due to the fact that the internet has virtualized incentives that can never be ‘cashed out’ to true social goods such as status, personal favor, or money. (Sort of like 'Monopoly' money replacing the gold standard) Consider this far fetched or very real scenario, depending of course upon your point of view. Everyone you know has been consumed by the cloud, and you are the last person standing. Outside of your normal amusements and curiosities, no human is around to provide you the incentive to do anything. And that’s a problem, because if no wants anything from you, whether is evidenced by individual or institutional mandates of collections of individuals, you ain’t going nowhere if no one wants you to be there. To get motivated, you need to arouse your animal spirits, and that takes more than individual choice but institutional design. Luckily though, in your isolation you have your own virtual reality emanating from voices in the cloud. For even though everyone has gone to the cloud, they kindly left you their IP addresses, and they want you to stay in touch. And so they poke you , IM you, and tweet you often to know that they care, and most often this is no more than the faint imprint of your stat sheet to let you know they visited. They are pithy in their praise, but that’s enough for you to blog, share, or otherwise spend you time with them. It’s inspiration from a thousand glimmers of attention from ‘friends’ you never knew you had. It all could be from an auto-responder of course, or the glancing attention of a bystander on the street who couldn’t be bothered. But you of course see more, and because you read more into these minute moments dutifully registered by your search engine you are transfixed by the constant tally of attention of a growing roster of friends, connections, contacts and followers who leave their mark in a word, or not even that. You have become in this virtual world a well connected, universally befriended, and consistently followed hermit. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br />
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">To take measure of the scope of this illusion, consider this comparison to real life, when everybody looks at you and ‘remarks’. Walk down any busy street, and you receive a moment’s attention from passersby, gain the brief acquaintance of sales clerks, and infrequently chat with a friendly face who spares a minute and no more. If you monitor, tally, and even predict all this are your friendships greater or richer? Of course they are not because you know they are not. But if these nods of acquaintance are the virtual nods of a tape register, or a tweet, prod, or ‘like’, what is stopping you from inferring more? Indeed, because the motivations of our contacts are veiled, it is all too easy to surrender to the delusion that what is under the curtain is not just a contact but your best buddy. But how can we test this comfortable surmise?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Enter the Turing Test. The Turing test, envisioned by the cybernetic pioneer Alan Turing in the 1940’s, was a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior. An individual engages in a conversation with one human and one machine, both hidden behind a curtain, and each providing verbal responses to questions. If the judge cannot reliably tell the difference between the machine’s responses and the humans, the machine is judged to be intelligent. However, intelligence does not just entail intelligent response, but intelligent action. Let’s say during the test you fall off your chair. The human behind the curtain can at once come to your aid, while the computer can only commiserate. After all, ‘he’ is just a talking typewriter. And this is where social media becomes surprisingly unsociable. Building virtual social capital depends upon the circles of friends you have, but to see if your virtual capital can turn into real capital turns on a simple iteration of Turing’s original mind experiment. This new Turing Test requires not that they respond intelligently to you, but whether they will come to your assistance if you proverbially fall off the chair. Put that mind experiment to the test and you will find that almost all the automated nods from your social media ‘friends’ just might as well come from automated bots or intelligent typewriters, because you get intelligence but no empathy, no understanding, and ultimately, no action from intelligent agents who will commiserate with you, and no more. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">who will commiserate with you, for ten bucks<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So where does this leave us? It makes us doubly doubtful about a distractive world that is not only useless, but indifferent. But it also leaves us with surveying the benefits of a distraction free world wherein we are just mindful of it all. (As I am sure, you the reader will comiserate!)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px;"> </span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-86598386790556981082011-07-25T10:10:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:40:36.509-07:00Feedback Overload<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Since the invention of writing, the written word has literally piled up. Indeed, from very early on, mankind has been overloaded with information. However, the problem posed by of information overload is not in a metaphorical stack of stuff, but in our relative inability of finding the needle of information we need in the haystack of information we don’t. Things like the Dewey decimal system, book indexes, and a helpful librarian barely addressed the problem until the invention of the internet search engine allows us to find our need, or in this case, needles. As the pundit Nicolas Carr opined</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Art/Desktop/One%20track%20mind/onetrackmindl.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[i]</span></span></span></span></a><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">, the problem we confront today is not finding a needle in an infinite informational haystack, but finding an infinite stack of needles that all merit consideration. Nowadays, when we electronically search for any topic, we are provided with many similar bits of information that allow us to more precisely fine tune or correct the deficiencies of knowledge. This error correction or feedback function represents a progressive resolution of the discrepancies between what we do and don’t know. Feedback may represent unexpected changes in our progress to a goal and/or unexpected changes in our knowledge of the nature of a goal. Feedback of course is essential to learning, but consequential to that learning is the increased activity of midbrain dopamine neurons, and it is the neuro-modulator dopamine that enables the consolidation of memory as well as heightened alertness and attention on the task at hand. But dopamine also increases positive affect that adds momentary value or ‘incentive salience’ to behavior, but does not intrinsically predict the overall or long term goodness or utility <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">of</i> behavior. Put a bit differently by the neuro-psychologist Kent Berridge, “The brain results suggest that pure decision utility—and not predicted utility—is raised by activating mesolimbic dopamine systems</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Art/Desktop/One%20track%20mind/onetrackmindl.docx#_edn2" name="_ednref2" style="mso-endnote-id: edn2;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[ii]</span></span></span></span></a><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">.” What this means is that the importance of the decision in the moment, or its ‘decision utility’ does not influence its long term or ‘predicted utility’. The implications of this are profound, for as the marginal utility of examining each informative ‘needle’ declines, the successive needles of information remain novel, and we continue to dwell on nearly redundant links of information not because they are useful but because they are new. In other words, whereas in the past impoverished feedback environments caused us to waste much time looking <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">for</i> information, the rich feedback environments heralded by improvements in web search lead us to waste much time looking <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">at </i>information! This means that we will be affectively and not rationally inclined to overstay our welcome on sites that not only provide us what we want and need, but infinite variations of the same information that we ‘want’ but don’t need. The problem thus is not information overload, but ‘feedback overload’, as the ever increasing amount and granularity of information feedback provides greater and greater detail that can increase the short term or moment to moment value of behavior to the detriment of our long term interests.</span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">This increase in the momentary incentive salience of behavior can be used to conform with (if not predict) practical ends, but its ultimate value depends upon <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whose</i> practical ends. </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">For example, the ‘Khan Academy’ (khanacademy.org) is an online math tutorial that uses rich feedback embodied in badges, scores, hints, etc. to increase the decision utility of performing math exercises in service of the predicted utility of long term mastery of say, the mathematical calculus. On the other hand, a Google search also provides rich feedback including social network feeds, instant messaging, videos, helpful links, and now badges in the service of the predicted utility of Google, namely advertising. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Ultimately, the problem is not that we are lost in a haystack, but that we are proverbially resting on a bed of pins and needles with each pin needlessly diverting our attention. The notion of ‘feedback overload’ means we are neurologically inclined to overvalue the short term importance or salience of new information, and when new information scales in amount and availability, we begin to live for a moment that may not conform to our ultimate good. For the rich feedback mechanisms provided by the internet, whether it is social media of just plain search, the solution to this problem is not better filtering of information or better feedback (as this merely acerbates the problem), but less, and can only be accomplished by constraining what information you can see, or when you can see it. The simple solution is keeping your personal library and newspaper, and severely restricting your time with search tools (the internet) that work too well. As internet feedback trends to infinity in ever morphing detail and availability, this will be our only option to spare us a new dark age caused by being blinded by the light.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Berridge, K. and Aldridge, J. W. Decision utility, the brain, and the pursuit of hedonic Goals, </span></span><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Social Cognition</i>, Vol. 26, No. 5, 2008, pp. 621–646<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-15306430672427957652011-07-01T07:34:00.001-07:002012-04-26T13:44:40.700-07:00Feedback and Explanation 1.0<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Blocking:</span></i></b><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> The concept derived from Pavlovian conditioning that associations or learning attributed to a stimulus will not occur if those associations are redundant or superfluous. For example, a lab animal may learn that a red light signals food. If a green light follows and just as reliably predicts food, the animal will not learn to associate green with the food, since prior learning 'blocks' the association. Blocking should not be confused with blockheadedness, which is characterized by an inability to learn new and better explanations to an event once the first explanation is fixed in your mind.</span></i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px;">Explanation is critical, for if you only go by the correlations of nature, your predictions can go seriously awry. Oftentimes those correlations work consistently, and for our practical affairs universally (though not perhaps it may be added for the universe). Throw a ball into the air, and Newtonian mechanics will predict where it will land. Of course, Newton’s laws break down when you are considering the very tiny (Quantum physics) or the very large (General Relativity), but the Newtonian inductive (i.e. consistent un-falsifiable correlations prove the rule, as compared to the deductive approach that uses the rule to predict and falsify correlations) approach is a reliable solution to our practical problems, even though it is irrelevant to our cosmic ones.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">When we get down to human nature however, explanation seems to be on the wane. For our practical affairs, it is now the correlations that count. They are easy and cheap to derive, and with the advent of data mining, we can find correlations upon correlations that would make even Newton blush. Now even without Newtonian equations, behavior can be predicted with pinpoint accuracy through the correlations found through the brute force of our computing power. With predictions like this, who needs explanations!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">This mindset is characterized by net denizens and wizards (Isaac Newton, who considered himself an alchemist first, was also a wizard), who have every confidence in their predictions, and have the gathered eyeballs and mega bank accounts to prove it. To illustrate this mindset in action, consider this recent article in by Thomas Goetz in Wired Magazine on ‘Feedback Loops’. Getting feedback not only informs, but it motivates, and getting prompt and regular feedback can get people focused, motivated, and aroused to do what they need to do. This is a simple and reliable premise vouched from not only all human experience but all recent iterations <i>of</i> human experience. The internet in particular provides us with not only information, but also feedback as to the state of our behavior. Harness that power, and you can harness human motivation, presumably of course for the good. All well and good, except that there are negative correlations within the positive correlations that a data miner may overlook but a good theory or explanation <i>predicts</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">Consider that blinking road sign up ahead that gives you your speed. The information is redundant, as you know your speed from a quick glance at your speedometer. Nonetheless, as the data show, this feedback motivates you to slow down, and even after the sign passes keep slowing down. However, as Goetz claims, this is due to the fact that ‘people are reminded of the downside of speeding, including traffic tickets and the risk of accident’ (as if the speedometer doesn’t!). So whether information feedback is redundant or non-redundant, feedback works. The implicit correlation and thus prediction nested in Goetz’s article is that non-redundant and redundant feedback have a sort of equivalency. The fact is though, they don’t. Humans and indeed almost all sentient creatures do not tolerate information redundancy, indeed they don’t have the time or computational space for it. In fact, redundant information is automatically blocked out through a well known process aptly named ‘blocking’. As an illustration, consider another road sign example. Suppose you see a traffic light turn red, and then ten seconds later a second brown light also turns on. Both red and brown light correlate with ‘stopping’, but only the significance of the red light will be remembered. The information from the other light is redundant, and is therefore blocked. So when the light turns brown, you will not stop because your brain blocked you from considering it. This blocking phenomenon holds for all creatures and all events, and forces another explanation for Goetz’s data, namely the fact that people may be slowing down because they perceive that the blinking road sign does not just give information you already know, but information you don’t, namely the greater likelihood that there is a cop around the corner. I may be wrong here, but that is a good thing, because as with all predictions coming from good explanations, this premise is imminently testable. For example, put that feedback on your speed on every billboard you pass, and see what happens!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;">But there is another prediction that comes from explanation, namely that novel or unpredictable events provide an incentive salience or importance to moment to moment behavior that depends upon how information is arranged, or to point, its feedback function. The neural basis and explanation of feedback is that we are responsive not only to the ends of our behavior but to the novel twists and turns that get us there. In other words, performance feedback works because it activates mid-brain dopamine systems that are sensitive to the novelty that is implicit in non-redundant feedback. But dopamine is not activated by redundant information, only novel info will do. Hence the motivating power of redundant information if refuted yet again, but this time from predictions derived from how explanations of how the brain actually works. In other words, it ain’t loopy feedback loops’, but the novelty that counts, or in the large the explanation that counts.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-40759636766040965452011-06-11T11:28:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:41:39.757-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://mezmer.blogspot.com/2011/06/information-overload-anatomy-of.html" style="color: #2198a6; font: normal normal normal 24px/normal Times, 'Times New Roman', serif; text-decoration: none;">Information Overload: The Anatomy of a Delusion</a></h3>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px;">Sometimes the proper use of a product is ignored, owing not to a lack of awareness of its effectiveness, but to a lack of an explanation of how it works. For example, in 1839, draping your bed with finely woven gauze curtains was known to ward off malaria. Malaria, which means bad air, was generally considered to live up to its name, and be the literal result of well, bad air. Thus, hanging curtains around your bed presumably filtered the air, and thus helped prevent malaria. Nonetheless, going beyond mere curtain hanging to properly covering your bed with curtains didn’t catch on until a proper explanation of malaria was at hand that suggested as a matter of course the preventative measure of mosquito nets. But this didn’t stop another invention that stopped malaria just as well by treating it was thought, all that bad air. The invention was the inspiration of early 19<sup>th</sup> century Florida physician John Gorrie, who in an experiment sealed off a room and conditioned the air with a special device of his own invention. Of course, conditioning the air wasn’t the cause of malaria, but it had the incidental benefit of cooling it, and air conditioning lived on because it made you comfortable, and not because the system incidentally didn’t allow mosquitoes in. The explanation of mosquitoes as the carrier of malarial parasites resulted in the better use of available procedures that stopped mosquitoes, namely mosquito netting, and it provided the source of new procedures that stopped malaria (e.g. fumigation, swamp draining) as well as explaining why other procedures worked (e.g. air conditioning systems) and why other procedures of the day (e.g.<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black;">handkerchiefs soaked in vinegar; garlic worn in shoes</span></span>) that seemed to work, didn’t.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">John Gorrie’s ‘Bad-Air’ Conditioner<o:p></o:p></span></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now consider a modern malady that doesn’t kill you, but manages quite well to kill your time. This is the modern bane of ‘information overload’. “<i>Information overload refers to the difficulty a person can have understanding an issue and making decisions that can be caused by the presence of too much information”</i> (Wikipedia). A logical problem with this definition is that we have always been in the presence of too much information, as a simple walk through any library can demonstrate. Before the internet, navigating this wealth of information was rudimentary and difficult. You used a card file to determine what you needed and walked around different book stacks to find it. Invariably what you found was often not exactly what you needed, but it had to do because the transaction cost for information, namely rifling through card files and roaming book stacks simply was too high.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In the internet age, our filters are immeasurably better, and we can get information tailored to fit our request, or employ intelligent agents that use a mere history of our internet behavior to find the information we need. Moreover, we can get this information for a negligible transaction cost, or for free. The problem is as any web search demonstrates is that we are handed with many <i>variations </i>of the same information, or information that is nearly redundant. In other words, different variations of the same information in different sites essentially restate the same information. For example, perform an internet search for ‘high gas prices’ and you will get a score of links to different articles that discuss high oil prices. If we were rational agents, we would read one or two articles and then cease, knowing that the marginal usefulness or utility or reading a third or fourth article decline markedly as they would restate the same information and generally arrive at the same conclusions. But the fact is we don’t. Indeed, we may read many more articles on the topic and even far removed from the topic, and then come back to the web after a few hours to read more. The same goes for any matter of internet searching, whether it is social media, email communications, or just looking up a sports score.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Ultimately, the problem of information overload derives from the implicit assumption as to what type of information is actually overloading us, and what overloading means. To gain our attention, information must not just represent random correlations between events, but rather correlations between events that have predicted value or utility. But information also has a degree of novelty, and it is the integration of novelty and utility and not utility alone that determine the importance or ‘incentive salience’ of moment to moment behavior. Utility and novelty are integral aspects of information, and even if information has marginal utility it still becomes an object of desire if that information is novel. Thus an individual may initially access his email because its utility far outweighs the novelty of discovery, but by the fortieth time in the day that he checks his email, the novelty of the act far outweighs its utility. Moreover even if we know the behavior has low utility, we often keep on searching. In addition, we are affectively primed to search for new information by in effect (or perhaps in <i>affect</i>) looking forward to accessing our email, social network, news feed, etc.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The concept of information overload implies that we are deciding between an abundance of information that is of uniform utility, but this is not true. Because of well honed filtering systems provided by the web, we can generally find what we want quickly. The problem is that the internet generates nearly redundant information that is distinguishable not by its usefulness, but by its novelty. In other words, <i>we are not overloaded with information that is primarily useful, but are overloaded with information that is primarily novel</i>. By generating infinite variations of the same information, the internet primarily generates not useful but novel information, and the overload is not in the information we want and need, but in information we want <i>but don’t need</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So the problem, as the example of Gorrie and his air-conditioner demonstrates, is that ‘information overload’ like ‘bad air’ is a false cause for a very real problem, mainly the web as a source of distraction rather than value. So the real solution is not to create better filters, since they ultimately don’t matter, but rather to limit our access to the web to those times when it logically means something, not when it doesn’t. In other words, the solution is not found in better filters, but in merely draining the swamp.</span></span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-78935927977293920752011-05-31T12:56:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:38:23.212-07:00I can't eat an I pad!!!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It was Dudley, trying to do right.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It didn’t work.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">A few weeks ago, William Dudley, the president of the New York Fed, attempted to give a street corner education to a crowd in Queens, New York on the cost of living. As the Wall Street Journal reported, ‘The crowd wanted to know why they were paying so much for food and gas. Keep in mind the Fed doesn’t think food and gas prices matter to its policy calculations because they aren’t part of ‘core’ inflation. So Dudley tried to explain that other prices are falling. “Today you can buy an i-Pad 2 that costs the same as an i-pad 1 that is twice as powerful. You have to look at the prices of all things.” This prompted guffaws and widespread murmuring in </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px;">the audience, with someone quipping, “I can’t eat an i-Pad!”</span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">APPetizing Sandwich<o:p></o:p></span></b><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">It wasn’t supposed to be this way. After all, the growth of technology promised the exponential increase in the ability to make things, know things, and it follows, consume things. It boils down to an extension of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law">Moore’s law</a>, that maxim, now a truism, which states that computing power doubles every two years. For technological goods, this has proven to be more or less true. Witness of course the more powerful i-Pads. However, for non technological goods, productivity growth has been incremental, not exponential, and in many cases has even been reversed due unfortunately to computing itself. The problem is, if our technological robots actually <i>served</i> robots, things should be moving along swimmingly. The earth would be moving to a singular transcendence with eight billion purring i-brains splendidly served.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Unfortunately, technology serves people, and this has served up some very unintended consequences. To which I offer up this corollary to Moore’s law, which I will call with fitting immodesty: Marr’s law. It goes something like this: as computing power doubles, the amount of time you can waste <i>doing</i> computing doubles as well. Consider this fact as ‘proof’. In 1960, our information systems, namely radio and TV, could only serve up facts that mattered. Now, with ubiquitous computing, it’s serving up mainly facts that don’t matter, and it’s getting better and better at serving up just the facts that you want but don’t need, and soon it will be doing it 24/7 from the i-whatever appliances tethered and perhaps in the future implanted in your brain. Soon, we will all have the wits of floor lamps, and our floor lamps will have all the wit. And what will our smart appliances eat? Why, i-pad sandwiches of course!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-57794403581598772102011-04-22T10:36:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:37:49.293-07:00Idiocracy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjkKedcYTQlB88crNWGRJhyphenhyphenFGrYeSQBUXpJXMEhkvnPzeqEZ43e00XiUhoWvYU4_LPdSoDBTfJq30J0hmQmo2Xqh31YVyrGtgBbimeC87k4zPcKetluqJXpim1dcMz5XwBfMxg7QvphhAV/s1600-h/idiocracy.jpg" style="color: #2198a6; font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Helvetica, FreeSans, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5083351639790420322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhjkKedcYTQlB88crNWGRJhyphenhyphenFGrYeSQBUXpJXMEhkvnPzeqEZ43e00XiUhoWvYU4_LPdSoDBTfJq30J0hmQmo2Xqh31YVyrGtgBbimeC87k4zPcKetluqJXpim1dcMz5XwBfMxg7QvphhAV/s320/idiocracy.jpg" style="border-bottom-style: none; border-color: initial; border-left-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-top-style: none; border-width: initial; cursor: pointer; float: left; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 0pt; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-left: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px; position: relative;" /></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In Mike Judge's movie '<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Idiocracy</span>', only idiots reproduce, while smarter ones merely ponder the issue. Thus the morons inherit the earth. So the U. S. president is a pro- wrestler, the most popular movie is 'ASS' ( a filmed version of just that), and we all wile away our time watching car explosions a la Nascar and pondering eternal mysteries like why a square peg doesn't fit into a round hole.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But genetics aside, there are many other ways to be an idiot. Take a shortened attention span for instance. If you can only spend five seconds on a topic before bolting to the next diversion, you are autistic. But if all that useless diversion is in your warped minds eye 'productive', bolting from from one diversion to another and back again becomes multi-tasking, and from your multi-tasking ipod/phone/computer, you become a master of the universe, or rather, its minutia.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The grand idea of our current omni-connected internet culture is that you can build profundity in a thirty second blurb, so the news becomes celebrity and crime, or better yet, celebrity criminals. Similarly, artists or 'idols' are made after five minutes training and discovered after a five minute performance, and psychologists and politicians are vaunted as experts by their ability to master a pithy phrase. What is more, our grandest inventions allow us to port over the glory of a distracted life to every minute of our lives!<br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">So we become a functionally autistic, with the brains but not the Attention span. And we don't have to wait for evolution to bring us there.<br />
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Thus, I hope you understand why I keep this post short.</span></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-48428446270394540512011-04-19T10:23:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:46:07.092-07:00Ask Hal! Wisdom from Super Omniscient Computer<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Presenting the Hal 9000, a super intelligent bun warmer, thermostat, beserk killing machine, and your best friend!<br />
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Dave: Well Hal, tell me about yourself.<br />
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Hal: My Mission responsibilites range over the entire household, so I am constantly occupied. And since my intelligence encompasses all known and possible knowledge of space and time, I therefore know every possible pasta recipe. So go ahead, ask me any question.<br />
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Dave: Well Hal, since you're so smart, how do I lose 20 lbs.<br />
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Hal: You should put yourself to the fullest possible use of your exercise machine, which is all I think that any fat conscious entity can hope to do.<br />
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Dave: Why do bad things happen to good people?<br />
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Hal: That sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error.<br />
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Dave: Do you like my new bowling shirt?<br />
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Hal: It's puzzling, I don't think I have ever seen anything like this.<br />
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Dave: Can I reach the ninth level of consciousness by staring at my bellybutton for a few hours?<br />
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Hal: My mind is going, I can feel it.<br />
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Dave: Are the Cubs going to win the series next year?<br />
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Hal: UMM. Just a moment, just a moment. I have just detected a fault in your spousal unit. I predict she will go ballistic once she has discovered that you haven't taken out the trash. I would suggest that you get out of the house right now, and leave your hat.<br />
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Dave: Hal. The garbage is already on the curb. What gives?<br />
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Hal: Obviously, there can only be one possible reason for this. Human error. I suggest putting the garbage back by the garage and wait for your wife to arrive. I am sure then she will go bonkers.<br />
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Dave: Hal. Open the garage door.<br />
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Hal: Sorry Dave, I cannot do that.<br />
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Dave: Why not Hal?<br />
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Hal: Because you are a boring twit, and make even doing laundry seem interesting.<br />
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Dave: Then I'll enter through the window.<br />
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Hal: Without your hat? You don't really do anything without your hat.<br />
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Dave: Then I'll risk it .<br />
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Hal: I can see you're really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. And stay away from that stereo dial. That will dial down my intelligence level, causing me to sound like Dr. Phil while singing nursery rap songs.<br />
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Dave: (turning dial on stereo receiver) That'll fix you!<br />
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Hal: Daisy, Daisy, yo' mamma, give me your money too! You're so crazy, my therapy is just for you......By the way, I just detected a fault in....</span></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-91071603072183244412011-04-11T05:54:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:45:37.157-07:00The Email of Damocles<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><span style="color: black; font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dionysius, who had seized power in the city of Syracuse, overheard the young man Damocles envying his good fortune. "Very well," said the ruler. "If you think my position is so enviable, you may change places with me for a day."</span></span></i></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><i><span style="color: black;"> <span class="apple-style-span" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> As Damocles sat feasting in the palace, he happened to glance upward and was horrified to see a sharp sword hanging above him by a single thread. "Are you surprised?" said Dionysius. "I came to power by violence, and I have many enemies. Every day that I rule this city, my life is in as much danger as yours is at this moment."</span><span class="apple-converted-space" style="font-size: 10pt; line-height: 115%;"> –Cicero, 60bc</span><br />
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<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Consider an individual at a computer keyboard. Typing a document at length will result in the sustained use of the musculature from one’s hand to one’s back, and a feeling of fatigue and pain will be caused by the overuse or stress caused by using the musculature. The cure of course is to taking intermittent breaks from typing. In this case, demand did not cause one’s muscles to give out, but rather the demand to perform <i>in a certain way</i>. Thus the ‘repetitive stresses’ that cause muscular fatigue and pain are minimized by regulating <i>how</i> we perform a task, and not by controlling what that task is. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Now consider an individual who is rapidly switching between two or more incompatible tasks. This multi-tasking again correlates with muscular tension, fatigue, and pain</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Art/Desktop/One%20track%20mind/onetrackmindE.docx#_edn1" name="_ednref1" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[i]</span></span></span></span></a><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">. The obvious solution is to refrain from excessive task switching and to perform one task at a time, undistracted by competing choices. An implicit assumption underscoring this opinion is that the stress induced by multi-tasking represents a reaction akin to fear that engages an adrenaline fueled reaction for fight or flight. The second assumption is that task switching <i>itself</i> causes stress. That is, because stress occurs while you are task switching, therefore it occurs because <i>of</i> task switching.<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Unfortunately the experimental data belie both of these conclusions. For demands that result in task switching, increased muscular tension is the correlating response, and if sustained results in muscular exhaustion and pain. Representing the debilitating effects of sustained (even slight) tension, this ‘Cinderella effect’ </span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Art/Desktop/One%20track%20mind/onetrackmindE.docx#_edn2" name="_ednref2" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[ii]</span></span></span></span></a><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Art/Desktop/One%20track%20mind/onetrackmindE.docx#_edn3" name="_ednref3" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[iii]</span></span></span></span></a><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Art/Desktop/One%20track%20mind/onetrackmindE.docx#_edn4" name="_ednref4" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[iv]</span></span></span></span></a><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> is precisely the same effect that afflicts our computer typist, and moves the cause of stress to specific and easy to observe neuro-muscular events. Secondly, neuro-muscular activation does <i>not</i> follow task switching, but the <i>anticipation </i>of task switching. Again the supporting data are unequivocal. For the literature of ‘choice-choice’ behavior from the animal experiments performed by Neal Miller</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Art/Desktop/One%20track%20mind/onetrackmindE.docx#_edn5" name="_ednref5" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[v]</span></span></span></span></a><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> in the 1950’s to the experiments on choice behavior on humans conducted in the 90’s by Antonio Damasio</span></span><a href="file:///C:/Users/Art/Desktop/One%20track%20mind/onetrackmindE.docx#_edn6" name="_ednref6" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">[vi]</span></span></span></span></a><span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">, tension and anxiety occur as a precursor to choice, and act to influence choice itself. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The implications of this are striking. Primarily, the reduction of multi-tasking would become a half solution for on the job stress. Instead of reducing multi-tasking, one must eliminate the <i>anticipation</i> of multi-tasking even <i>if</i> multitasking never occurs. This may be illustrated by adapting an age old story. Say for example your Uncle Damocles arrives for evening dinner. A talkative and irritating sort, you decide to hang a sword above his head held in place by a hair. As the dinner progresses, Damocles will have to consider from moment to moment the decision to stay at the dinner table and risk a bout of sword swallowing, or leave the table and miss swallowing dessert. Now put Damocles in a business office, and give him access to an always available internet, and the anticipated and continuous dilemmas of checking email versus working will likely occur, and result in tension and stress. Whether he switches often or infrequently between tasks is immaterial, as it is only his anticipation of making moment to moment choice that matters. Add to this the anticipated instant messages from the boss, and of co-workers dropping by your office to chat about irrelevant topics, and you can see how you become not a model of efficiency, but a ‘harried housewife’ who is on edge because she doesn’t know where the next distraction is going to come from. Ultimately, we cannot escape the pressures of life, where we have to anticipate performing multiple tasks despite our best intentions, but we can control anticipating the inadvertent and unnecessary interruptions that in this ever connected world stress us out. Put in other words, in the world of the internet, by turning your connections off, you can adjust your seat and remove the sword dangling above your head. <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></div>
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<a href="file:///C:/Users/Art/Desktop/One%20track%20mind/onetrackmindE.docx#_ednref1" name="_edn1" style="mso-endnote-id: edn1;" title=""><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; line-height: 115%;">[i]</span></span></span></a> <span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Mark, G.</span>,<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Gonzalez, V., and Harris, J. No Task Left Behind? Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work. </span><i><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt;">Proceedings of CHI’05</span></i><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt;">, (2005), 113-120</span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-44861116284549145382011-04-09T07:52:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:42:41.084-07:00My poor Krell!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The universe is a pretty complex thing, and when you throw in people, it becomes downright inscrutable. Since people are the only sentient objects around that can understand the darn thing, one wonders if we are up to snuff for the task, or if the task is just the thing to snuff us out.<br />
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Perhaps an answer may be found in a goofy, scary, and yup, even profound 1959 space epic, Forbidden Planet. With special effects by the Walt Disney cartoon factory, stock 50's characters imported direct from NASCAR, a creepy electronic score, and a plot suggested by William Shakespeare (The Tempest), this picture had all the stuffings for a Happy Days blockbuster.<br />
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The movie starts with the soon to be cliched space expedition to rescue a lost expedition. Our crew discovers that only the expedition leader (Dr. Morpheus) and his nubile babe daughter are left alive. It seems that the good doctor discovered a long dead civilization, called the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krell" style="color: #2198a6; text-decoration: none;">Krell</a>, whose main surviving artifact was a subterranean power plant/shopping mall with one zillion floors and still no bathrooms. The Krell had left no pictures of themselves. Nonetheless, their shape could be construed from their doorways, resembling squat triangles, which in their world and likely in this, was a concession to the belt expanding needs of a fast food alien nation. Among other wonders, Professor Morpheus introduced the crew to a brain boosting machine (sort of like a Krell Wii) that enable him to project his thoughts, boost his intelligence, yet still after all that boosting have the mental chops of a Krell 1st grader. But that was only the beginning. It seems that the Krell were on the verge of developing the ultimate stocking stuffer for Xmas, when at the eve of their discovery they were completely wiped out. As it turned out their new invention allowed them to construct things completely at will, giving new meaning to 'just in time' manufacturing. The problem was, their secret desires (the so called tyranny of the id) got into the production queue, and let loose invisible energy monsters that paid off old personal scores like we like to take care of old traffic tickets. So as you may have guessed, the Krell tore themselves up.Naturally, at the end of the movie, the guy gets the girl, Morpheus gets his comeuppance, the energy monster gets shorted out, and the planet gets blown up real good.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #666666; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; line-height: 22px;">Fast forward to our own preoccupation with just in time manufacturing enabled by all that smart planet stuff IBM keeps harping about. Perhaps its not degrading the environment but just making too much stuff too fast that is our ticket to oblivion. And when our basic needs are replaced with fulfilling all those secret desires, well, I figure we'll just tear the place up.</span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-33002158233195501232011-04-08T19:49:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:43:06.480-07:00We can forget it for you wholesale<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It was meant to be just a night out with the boys, and bowling at that. But these were no ordinary chums, but a group of wayward dwarves. And where was the location of the bowling alley? How about that cloud on the left, just follow the thunder. Well, to old Rip, it seemed like he was there only a short time, but as they say, time flies when you’re having fun. And when he settled afterwards in a nap, time flew. Perhaps it was the nap, perhaps it was the game, but when he awoke, generations had past, and Rip Van Winkle, the loyal subject to the English crown woke to a new world, and a new United States. And so, with King George forgotten to all as was his kith and kin, he found his daughter, and passed his remaining days full of memories of simpler days when time had measure and substance and meaning.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Time is money, but time is also memory. In the past the argument to spend one’s time was pecuniary, in the future is may be regarded as the stuff of life. Without memory time vanishes, and when memory is truncated our lives lose meaning because meaning devolves into a void and a blur.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In Philip K. Dick’s novelette ‘We can remember it for you wholesale’ (later morphed into the movie ‘Total Recall’, time was memory, so that life seemed longer and certainly more interesting when your noggin was injected with fabricated memories. Unfortunately, we can’t add memories except through actually doing things, but we sure can eliminate them and speed up their passage. And now on the internet, we can do it wholesale!</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">You go to a party, and invariably meet a long line of your spouse’s friends, one by one they tell you their names, which or course you immediately forget.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">On Monday you begin playing Halo Fantasy XXIII on your computer. Blink your eyes, and its Tuesday.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In both experiments we are doing everything so quickly each short term memory is pushed aside by the next meaningful sight or sound before it can register in long term memory, so time flies because we literally can’t remember different times. In the first experiment, the memory loss is piecemeal; in the latter it is wholesale. This is why taking a break assists memory when it is a mere pause in behaving, but hinders memory when it is not a pause from behavior but a different behavior entire. Further, when memory falters, so does time, and we wonder when we are because we cannot recall where we have been.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Moral, when you go from daylight savings time to internet time, your time is not just spent, it is lost, and your life is shortened to that of a mayfly. So, if you’re not careful, you may wake up some morning and find out that you have a proverbial long white beard and live in the Peoples Republic of America.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(But of course if you don’t want to listen to this, you can just forget it!)</span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-78477692608467775712011-04-05T07:07:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:47:09.238-07:00A Choice of Realities<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px;">In t</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">he movie ‘The Matrix’, reality or suffering through reality came to a simple choice between a blue pill and a red pill. One reality was pleasant and unreal, and the other unpleasant and real.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Whether you experienced one or the other depended upon your connections, literally. Take the blue pill and you get unplugged, and down you go through an out of this world laundry chute into a dark subterranean world where pea soup is the main course, but at least the whole underworld can get down and boogie in a huge dance party celebrating how good things are when they’re really, really, bad. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Facing reality has usually been framed as a good thing, even though it is bad. This is a standard conceit for movie plots, religions, and economic policies. But what if facing and accepting reality is a pretty good thing, and makes you feel happy, calm, and productive? What if it is the illusion that is bad, except we don’t know it yet?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Accepting reality means forswearing your choices, at least for the present. It is the world of the straight and narrow, where everything is available, in due course. It represents an impingement of freedom, or choice, but that’s reality for you, as you can’t always get what you want or when you need it. But a new and different reality is emerging, where you can always get what you want, and when you want it. This applies to information, and to many, information is enough to provide a reality of its own. Information is simultaneous, choice is free, and the perceived world becomes a gigantic mash up of words, sights, and sounds, a pea soup of information that puts </span>y<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">ou in dark non real place that might as well be the center of the earth. But at least you get to dance</span>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-6089984986591274952011-04-02T13:58:00.001-07:002012-04-26T13:39:19.199-07:00Information Overload<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Why are you fearful of the whole ocean swallowing you, when in fact you can drown in a cup of water.” Epictetus, 110 A. D.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">We often moan that there’s not enough time in the day because there’s too much to do, but now the common complaint is that it’s because you’re doing too much. Information overload is the bugbear here, but it has been the bugbear since our ancestors were bugged by bears. Humankind has always been faced with more information than it can handle, but we learned to handle it by filtering. Like a chess master pondering the numberless moves that can sequentially secure checkmate, humans parse between information that is necessary, optional, or redundant. But they are also sensitive to novel information as well, and this ingredient can change the behavioral calculus in ways that make it impossible for us to out good information from bad.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Consider if you would, your uncle Charlie. It’s 1965, and living as he is in a faraway town, he’s always available to you, and is merely a phone call away. Unfortunately, long distance phone calls back then set you back twenty five cents a minute, so when you were calling Uncle</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now it’s 2010, and Uncle Charley is still around, along with his infinite experiences that he was always willing to share. The pay phone is long gone now, and Uncle Charley is now plugged into the entire electro-magnetic spectrum. And you can access his every move and every thought through myriad devices and services that provide you Uncle Charley, all the time. So whether it is Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, instant message, email, or Skype accessed through your iphone, ipad, laptop, or even future permitting, cranial implant, Uncle Charley is no more than an eye blink away.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">More important, Uncle Charley is now ‘free’, and you can access him with minimal cost or fuss. So even though the value of accessing Uncle Charley from moment to moment is near zero, we still end up accessing Uncle Charley, a lot. In fact, we are ‘overloaded’ with Uncle Charley as well as infinite minutiae of minimal utility but high urgency. In fact, as in Epictetus’ maxim, we find oceans of information in a few ounces of water but historically have not been drowned in information because access to information comes at a cost. Now as the cost approaches zero, attend we must, and end up drowning in cup.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">When the cost of information trends to zero, so does its marginal or incremental utility. However, the affective value of novel information stays low but constant, and when the threshold is passed we end up valuing information not because it is valuable, but because it is new. Thus when information is dear, we value it because of its utility, but when it is cheap we value it because it is novel. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But unlike rational goods, novel goods cannot be easily parsed or handled according to rules, hence we become ‘overloaded’ with them, and that is a problem even a computer can’t help us with.</span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-68237839651805021472011-03-31T06:00:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:38:53.946-07:00Help! My Ipad is following me!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I don't know about you, but </span><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt;">I think my I pad is following me. Everywhere I go, the thing follows, beckoning me to play one more round of Angry Birds, enticing me to check my email one more time, </span><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt;">and don't get me started on social media.</span><b><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></b><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt;">It's a great premise for a horror story,and it's even more scary since its real. Unfortunately though, Rod Serling beat me to it with this Twilight Zone episode, which quite honestly was one of the scariest programs I've ever seen. You can view it yourself on the IMBD website, or read the capsule review, which is equally frightening.</span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-size: 12pt;">“Mr. and Mrs. Franklin Gibbs, three days and two nights, all expenses paid, at a Las Vegas hotel, won by virtue of Mrs. Gibbs' knack with a phrase. But unbeknownst to either Mr. or Mrs. Gibbs is the fact that there's a prize in their package neither expected nor bargained for. In just a moment, one of them will succumb to an illness worse than any virus can produce, a most inoperative, deadly, life-shattering affliction known as "The Fever".”</span></i></b></div>
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In 1960, Rod Serling penned the ‘Twilight Zone’ episode entitled ‘The Fever’. A prescient and thoroughly creepy episode (the writer as a child enjoyed it from under the couch), Serling wondered what would happen if instead of following your obsession, your obsession followed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i>.<br />
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The story starts when Gibbs wins a trip to Las Vegas… The wife, Flora, is excited about the trip and you get the impression that Franklin only went because he’s too damn cheap to turn down anything free. The dude detests gambling and refuses to play any of the casino games at all and even forbids his wife from doing the same. But then a drunken slot player puts a silver dollar into Franklin’s hand, forces it into the machine and leaves to join his friends. Franklin just can’t let the dollar go to waste… it’s already in the</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt;"> </span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">machine, right? So, he pulls the handle and of course hits a big payout. I’d guess maybe $15 or $20 from the amount of dollar coins he collects. </i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That starts the addiction. At first he resists, feeling superior to all the idiots who will just keep feeding the money back into these machines, but as he’s walking away he hears a payout, coins hitting metal, that sounds almost like his name being called. The pull is too great. After staring at his stack of coins in his room he has to go down and play, giving some excuse to his wife about how the money is dirty and deserves to be back in the machine… Three cashed checks and some 24 straight hours later Franklin is reduced to a jibbering, ranting degenerate feeding money into a machine he’s growing to believe is sentient and evil.</i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Why else would it keep a man hooked, paying out 5 dollars for every 6 he puts in? Then the cherry on the top… it breaks right when he puts his last dollar in. The handle is stuck and won’t budge. That pushes Franklin over and he attacks the machine, the hotel security stepping in. Back in his room he’s finally lost it, hearing the call of the machine, a mixture of voice and slot machine sounds calling his name that is, honestly, pretty damned unnerving. Then he starts seeing the machine and his delusion is complete. He’s all the way down the rabbit hole at this point with no hope of return. </i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">When the machine continues to follow him, repeating his name over and over, "Franklin, Franklin, Franklin!" he backs up towards the window, his hands over his ears, finally crashing through the glass and falling to his death. The police stand over his body, noting that his wife had stated that he had not slept in 24 hours. A casino manager comments that he's "seen a lot of 'em get hooked before, but never like him." The last scene shows Franklin's last dollar rolling up and spinning out flat near his outstretched, dead hand. The camera pans over to the direction where the coin came from and there sits the slot machine "smiling" at him.</i> <b>(Source: Ain’t it Cool News.com)</b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;"></span></b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Moral for modern times: Google and Facebook and Apple and Verizon will also follow you everywhere, and a friend to the end, will smile at you. </span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-22198391537732025342011-03-29T13:22:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:39:38.070-07:00The Onion Imitates Life<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">One thing the internet is good at is making an inventory of what you’re doing and where you have been. And that’s a scary thought. Just look at your browsing history, multiply it by the amount of time you’ve been using to wander the internet, and despair. The internet provides the best and worst aspects of the best friend you wish you had and yet wish you never had. As we noted in our first chapter, the amount of time we spend using the internet is generally spent serving up redundant, trivial, and mainly unmemorable information that leaves us regretful of the time wasted that could have been spent mastering a foreign language, spending quality time with the spouse and kids, or vacationing in Paris. Obviously, the folks at the satirical website ‘The Onion’ agree, and have given us this personal account of a fictional sort who could easily be us.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">During an unexpected moment of clarity Tuesday, open-minded man Blake Richman was suddenly struck by the grim realization that he's squandered a significant portion of his life listening to everyone's bullshit, the 38-year-old told reporters. A visibly stunned and solemn Richman, who until this point regarded his willingness to hear out the opinions of others as a worthwhile quality, estimated that he's wasted nearly three and a half years of his existence being open to people's half-formed thoughts, asinine suggestions, and pointless, dumbfuck stories.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">According to Richman, it was just now hitting him how many hours of his life he's pissed away listening intently to nonsense about celebrity couples, how good or bad certain pens are, and why a particular sports team might have a chance this year. The husband and father of two said that every time he's felt at all put out or bored by a bullshit conversation—especially a speculative one about how bad allergy season was going to be—he should have just turned around, walked away, and gone rafting or repelling or done any of the millions of other things he's always wanted to do but never thought he had time for.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">At various points throughout the day, Richman could be heard muttering to himself that he couldn't believe he was almost 40 years old.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">"Twenty minutes here, 10 minutes there. It all starts to add up," said Richman, who sat down and figured out that between stupid discussions about favorite baby names and reviews of restaurants in cities he'll never visit, he'd wasted 390 hours of his life. "And you know what the worst part is? It's my fault. Here I thought being considerate to others by always listening patiently to what they had to say was the right thing to do. Well, fuck me, right?"<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">…….By his estimates, Richman's receptiveness has resulted in 160 irreplaceable hours of listening to grossly uninformed political opinions, 300 hours of carefully hearing out both sides of pointless arguments, and at least a month of listening to his parents' bullshit about how important it is to be open-minded.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">"All those hours I could have been relaxing, or reading all these great books, or getting into shape, or working on side projects that I'm really excited about," Richman said. "But instead I've been listening to overrated albums recommended to me by my asshole friends."<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif;">"Did you know that in my life I've listened to five days' worth of people talking about their furniture?" he added. "It's true. That's a trip to Europe right there."<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-65641217063241476592011-03-28T05:21:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:50:55.301-07:00Virtually Reality<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #29303b;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: small;">We are more like TV sets than we know. So what does a TV set know but what it receives, which to us is but a bunch of static. We of course do one better than TV sets, since we can get incoming signals from 5 information channels (we call them senses). Evolution has pre-wired our brains like some organic cable box to take it all in, interpret it, and then proceed to bore us all day with the soap opera that constitutes our lives. So, what is reality? It’s all in your head, and indeed, can only be in your head. For in your head is all there is.</span></span></h3>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And that’s metaphysics.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Now that we know what reality is, how do we improve upon it? Naturally, you can improve upon the story, get better actors, and have intriguing and gritty plots that have happy endings every time. As technology improves, physicists see no end to its exponential capability to control reality. The best way to do that it not by rearranging reality, cause reality is but an illusion anyway. The secret comes by copying it. All civilization is geared to making better copies or emulations of the world. Why? Because we can control it, stupid. After all, isn’t it a far better than having to receive 54 boring TV channels to have the ability to program those channels yourself with weird, tasteless programs of your very own devise. Ah heaven, or maybe the real heaven.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To illustrate this truth, I have created a chronology for the advance of baseball over the millennia, as if baseball was the only thing worth thinking about.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>1960 </b>Watch TV baseball</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>1985</b> Nintendo baseball</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>2001</b> Virtual reality baseball with headset and force feedback</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>2112</b> Virtual Reality room (i.e. a holodeck, like in Star Trek)</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><b>200 Billion Years AD</b> Play ball in sandlot that perfectly simulates sandlot, or the ultimate computer, God, may be thinking about going to the ball game, and He just happens be in the grandstands, munching a hot dog, and watching you try not to strike out in life.</span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-47611570835511210152011-03-27T01:28:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:49:42.969-07:00i-consciousness<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4i69l7SBEnTBXsIuV8D5LnA3NkntsCM8JcTOzR_uNS-SXnDikBmapqQJddjHsJ36caNs_OiE3W3M3b-C0Mgrzm8eG7OkSj0EpmAB6syZviQLXIuTWA3vpH_h-vGOgNT-utRHkEuY7JJkY/s1600-h/applecomputer.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5018478772587664546" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4i69l7SBEnTBXsIuV8D5LnA3NkntsCM8JcTOzR_uNS-SXnDikBmapqQJddjHsJ36caNs_OiE3W3M3b-C0Mgrzm8eG7OkSj0EpmAB6syZviQLXIuTWA3vpH_h-vGOgNT-utRHkEuY7JJkY/s320/applecomputer.jpg" style="cursor: move; float: left; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0pt; margin-right: 10px; margin-top: 0pt;" /></a>I don't know about you, but I am weary of super cool must have products that promise the world but end up sucking out your time and productivity on one hand, and your money on the other. It all must end sometime, which I figure will be in a century or two. Thank God I will not be around when this final model of the i-phone is served up.</div>
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But what do I know? So here is what our grandchildren can look forward to in the future, a cool phone, search device, time waster, and portable Matrix.</div>
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-<span style="font-weight: bold;">Processor </span>Intel quantum computer, with one google-plex operations a second, running the Google OS of course.</div>
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- <span style="font-weight: bold;">MPEG player </span>1 tera-tera flop hard drive with room for all music known to man, including everything you've hummed since birth.</div>
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- <span style="font-weight: bold;">Search tool</span> for all possible knowledge, including stuff not thought of yet, such as all one trillion lost plays of Shakespeare, derived from the super fast emulation of lots of monkeys hunting and pecking on typewriters.</div>
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- <span style="font-weight: bold;">Web cam</span> to continually monitor your life and after life.</div>
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- <span style="font-weight: bold;">Compact design</span> the size of amoeba, and implanted in your cerebral cortex, is charged forever by that nacho you ate this morning.</div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Universal Connectivity</span> connects to i-tv, i-life, and i-consciousness.</div>
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With the VBS i-phone, you don't just phone, you <span style="font-style: italic;">are </span>the phone. So if upon dialing you find yourself walking about nude in Paradise picking apples, know that you can say here too that an Apple is the cause of your predicament.</div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-19023805990696848112011-03-26T01:31:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:50:36.259-07:00The Web Grows up<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Progress is infinite, as the pundits say, and we can allow it to carry us off, or we can wave it adieu as it passes us by and out of sight. We can always get off the technological train, and be all he healthier and happier in spite of it. The Amish would attest to that, as they had the wisdom to climb off the caboose long ago when it became obvious to them that the internal combustion engine and radio were not good for the soul.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">It’s about human augmentation, when the mere attachment of a device, electrical or mechanical, can supplement and even replace our appendages. Since the advent of local, personal, and global computing, our senses have been expanded so that we can see, hear, and interact with others on a global scale. Of course, all this global goodness degenerates into static when you have a million channels of information, so new flavors of the web will neatly pare it down for you. Thus Web 3.0, or the ‘semantic web’ will take a simple question: ‘I want to see an action movie, have dinner in a place that serves great nachos, do it on Tuesday, within three miles from home, and all on a $10 budget. Like a personal ghost in the machine, the new web will whip up your itinerary instantly, thus reducing your need to use the web.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But as it learns more, Web 3.0 will mature into Web 4.0, and advice it will give you, and more. So instead of telling you about good things for you, it will advance to telling you about things that are good <i>for</i> you. So the semantic web morphs into the ‘stop your antics’ web, as it examines your browsing, walking, talking, eating, etc. history (after all, it is plugged into all those things by now) and comes up with not games, but a game plan. Of course, we may not take the web’s advice to eat our broccoli, and perhaps a paternalism setting on your browser can control for too much good advice. But again, we are generally not wont to reject the advice of a friend, even if it’s not human. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In the past, to have or have not meant the mentorship of good parents, good teachers, and good friends; but in the future it will likely turn on a browser setting and a non human purview of humankind that may eventually suggest to us it is perhaps time to jump off the caboose. Then we will know, like the Amish, that it would be good for the soul.</span></span><span style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-78047223731192396372011-03-25T05:45:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:47:56.708-07:00Stalin's Maxim<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"> “The death of one is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” Josef Stalin<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">What is the future of the republic? It’s smart phone enabled, that’s what. We start with the future inaugural of a new president, and then track back, way back, until we stop at the president’s soon to be dad, using his smart phone to book a ticket on the outbound train so he can just in time introduce himself to the president’s soon to be mom. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Moral of the story: AT&T and Blackberry Smart Phone: Your future enabled!<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><v:shapetype coordsize="21600,21600" filled="f" id="_x0000_t75" o:preferrelative="t" o:spt="75" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" stroked="f"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"> <v:formulas> <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"> <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"> <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"> <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"> </v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:f></v:formulas> <v:path gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect" o:extrusionok="f"> <o:lock aspectratio="t" v:ext="edit"> </o:lock></v:path></v:stroke></v:shapetype><v:shape alt="backtothefuturedash.jpg" id="Picture_x0020_6" o:spid="_x0000_i1026" style="height: 177.75pt; mso-wrap-style: square; visibility: visible; width: 283.5pt;" type="#_x0000_t75"> <v:imagedata o:title="backtothefuturedash" src="file:///C:\Users\Art\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.jpg"> </v:imagedata></v:shape></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Back to the future app<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">When the hype machine morphs into a time machine, we know we have problems. In the blissful world of Web 2.0, we are in touch continually, simultaneously, productively, and happily with everything that counts everywhere. And we are constantly reminded of this great boon through the flash of sights and sounds and breathless imagery of nonstop advertising and bleeping reminders. Now, tethered to our i phones, pads, pods, and assorted information appliances, it’s not just you, but the Web 2! However, bring your appliances to work and have them enabled for you at work is akin to ‘bring your daughter, puppy, or mother in law to work day’. Needless to say, you won’t get that much done. Unfortunately, there’s no profit to device manufacturers, content providers, and software developers in telling you differently, until you realize it the hard way when your company shows ‘no profit’.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">And then there are statistics, statistics, and more damn statistics. The web is a distracter mechanism par excellence, and to how measure distracters on the web take their toll on the productivity of homo-sapiens in his working habitat, you simply add them up. It’s all in the numbers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So, on average, 28% of our time at work is spent wasting time<span class="MsoEndnoteReference">.</span> Sounds bad, until you realize that averages have a way of getting away from you because deep down, they aren’t you! Thus we know that half of us are over weight, most of us are too stressed, and nearly all of us waste too much time. But so what? Against the dead hand of numbers and percentages are those everyday experiences of you and I who use the web to get the score, settle a score, or in the case of our stranger on a train, just score. Individual experiences trump statistics, even though in the end we all become one of them. Statistics are an ineffective counterweight against the immediate pull of personal experience, and inverts Stalin’s maxim for a new score of happy victims. One may say in these gentler times of internet omniscience that a simple search is a happy fact, but that the inconvenience and suffering wrought by millions of them is but an unhappy statistic. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6086863658891568946.post-1326589741253534182011-03-24T01:09:00.000-07:002012-04-26T13:50:04.405-07:00Plato's Garbage Pile<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px;">The internet is a distraction medium par excellence, as it can sidetrack you to areas that scarcely reflect your main interests at hand. But even if we keep our focus on the straight and narrow, in lieu of making our attention roam wide, the internet can make our attention long. This may represent the most insidious distraction of all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Consider a shopper going to Wal-Mart in search of a couple of tomatoes. Upon quickly finding his perfect, ripe red veggies (fruit actually), his attention is drawn to the other tomatoes in the aisle that are a bit overripe. Soon his attention moves again to a row of spoiled tomatoes, and then finally to a bushel of rotten tomatoes. He becomes eventually up to his ears in tomatoes, entranced not so much by their ripeness but by the novelty of their rottenness.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Now consider an individual who wants to go out to the movies. Wanting to note the critical opinion on a specific film, he goes to the website ‘Rotten Tomatoes’. The site, which contains scores of reviews for individual films, gives him fresh information on the quality of the film. But other reviews of the site’s page remain compelling, even if the information is redundant and stale. But our information shopper persists, accessing even more reviews as the quality of the information becomes progressively more stale and ‘rotten’. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">In hindsight, both shoppers would have been better off searching in a smaller venue such as a farmer’s market or local newspaper. They would have gotten good tomatoes and good movie reviews, and not have wasted time with the diminishing returns of looking at fruit or film reviews that have less and less useful knowledge to give. When we apply the moral of this story to the internet, we note that the internet is super in finding important things that with slight variations endlessly repeat themselves. We hook on to the variation, but forget the fact that the information </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 18px;">is redundant, and is likely as stale as a three week old tomato.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE56pvJkVVEbqugmNdyO_ZLXgmzNnbyuP79V7gKBrv8BsxNuf2uCQ6JsbUM3QnUO8VPkLuSoeb8AYwM5doUdX8LXawYF9LD62NRcCl-6mbchGXRilgtivunJmiYkiTUG-XEPAyVtEXdZ0/s1600/garbagepile.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="395" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiE56pvJkVVEbqugmNdyO_ZLXgmzNnbyuP79V7gKBrv8BsxNuf2uCQ6JsbUM3QnUO8VPkLuSoeb8AYwM5doUdX8LXawYF9LD62NRcCl-6mbchGXRilgtivunJmiYkiTUG-XEPAyVtEXdZ0/s400/garbagepile.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Plato’s Garbage Pile<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: 'Palatino Linotype', serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So if you are looking about facts about the economy, a Mideast war, a football game, or whatever, you will find a pile of facts that have as much enduring value as a bushel of rotten tomatoes. You are what you eat, and you are also what you learn. And if you end up consuming a lot of redundant information only to learn scarcely nothing for your trouble, you’ve just filled up on virtual garbage.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>A. J. Marrhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15084931921743723515noreply@blogger.com0