How many times I’ve left this town to hide from your memory, and it haunts me
{ stereohell }
In the rain, the offices, every day, the same, again
{ McCarthy, From The Damned, 1986 | Last FM | Listen }
‘Where there is much light there is also much shadow.’ –Goethe
Neuromarketers are becoming the next generation of Mad Men. They are working for companies like Google, Frito-Lay and Disney. But instead of directly asking consumers whether they like a product, neuromarketers are asking their brains.
Using electroencephalography (EEG)–a technology typically used by neurologists to diagnose seizures–marketers measure brain wave activity in response to advertisements and products. Electrodes placed on the subject’s scalp collect the data. The consumer herself doesn’t say a thing.
And that’s the point. In the new world of neuromarketing, it is the more immediate, unedited emotional brain-level reaction to a product or ad that presumably indicates what the consumer really wants, even if she doesn’t really know it. The rational and deliberate responses elicited in focus groups are considered unreliable.
No wonder EmSense, a San Francisco-based market research company, succeeded in raising $9 million in capital last month. (…)
Brain activation detected through the band’s sensors is believed to signal the consumer’s emotional engagement with a product. Engagement, in turn, is essential to sustaining interest and in enhancing memorability, important for developing brand loyalty. Yet the practical dimensions of neuromarketing are far from well-established.
First, how well does EEG detect emotion? It can gauge alertness, yes, but the more subtle kinds of mental states that relate to purchasing decisions–such as attraction, disgust, nostalgia or aspirational fantasy–are not accessible via brain wave analysis.
Second, the notion of a discrete “buy button in the brain,” as marketers call the holy grail of marketing, is deeply naive. Response to the shape, smell and color of a product is the culmination of complex processes that engage many areas of the brain.
previously { Now, get ready for Genomarketing! }
Smoke from the tires and the twisted machine
Advertising is destroying society, according to a new report from thinktank the New Economics Foundation.
The report, which compares the impact on society of groups of people doing six different jobs, concludes that advertising “can create insatiable aspirations, fuelling feelings of dissatisfaction, inadequacy and stress” among the population. It concludes that ad executives, which it says earn “between £50,000 and £12 million”, “destroy £11 of value for every pound of value they create” - almost exactly the reverse of a hospital cleaner.
photo { Maciek Kobielski }
Together we’ll ring in the new year
How to make the world’s easiest $1 billion
STEP 1: Form a bank.
STEP 2: Round up a bunch of unemployed friends to be “bankers.”
STEP 3: Raise $1 billion of equity. (This is the only tricky step. And it’s not that tricky. See below.*)
STEP 4: Borrow $9 billion from the Fed at an annual cost of 0.25%.
STEP 5: Buy $10 billion of 30-year Treasuries paying 4.45%
STEP 6: Sit back and watch the cash flow in.
Wrapping paper in the gutter, moving slowly as the wind on the sea
What does gift-wrapping do for the recipient? Is all this effort worth it for the recipient? For example, do recipients actually like gift-wrapped presents more than unwrapped gifts?
According to a study that was published 15 years ago by Daniel Howard, professor of marketing at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, it appears so.
box { House Industries }
‘It’s a skill, just like juggling.’ –George Costanza
Here’s a curious paradox related to American Sign Language, the system of hand-based gestures used by around 2 million deaf people in the US and elsewhere to communicate.
Almost 40 years ago, researchers discovered that although it takes longer to make signs than to say the equivalent words, on average sentences can be completed in about the same time. How can that be possible?
Today, Andrew Chong and buddies at Princeton University in New Jersey give us the answer. They say that the information content of the 45 handshapes that make up sign language is higher than the information content of phonemes, the building blocks of the spoken word. In other words, there is greater redundancy in spoken English than signed English.
In a way, that’s a trivial explanation, a mere restatement of the problem. What’s impressive about the Princeton contribution is the way they have arrived at this conclusion.
They say that dreams are growing wild just this side of Burma Shave
Bank robbers have threatened tellers with knives, shot their way into banks and tunnelled up into vaults. But one woman in southern Russia chose a more peaceful method: Police say Galina Korzhova hypnotised a bank teller into handing over tens of thousands of dollars in what is believed to be just one in a series of daring, if non-violent, bank robberies.
Galina Korzhova was arrested, said Anton Kornoukhov, a spokesman for police in the southern city of Volgograd, on suspicion of hypnotising a bank teller in the nearby town of Volzhky into giving her more than $80,000. She is suspected of having robbed up to 30 additional banks in what Russian media have called a “grand tour” around the country.
“She met the woman on the street, saying that she would remove curses and help cure sick relatives,” said Kornoukhov in a telephone interview.
Korzhova is accused of telling the bank employee, whose name has not been released, to put the money into a plastic bag and meet her outside the state bank Sberbank, on Communist Street in the small town. There, the case goes, the teller gave Korzhova the money.
{ The Global Post | Continue reading }
Police in Italy have issued footage of a man who is suspected of hypnotising supermarket checkout staff to hand over money from their cash registers.
I’m a trained hypnotist myself, so my first reaction was skepticism. You can’t hypnotize someone that quickly and reliably. But then I put on my criminal mastermind hat and tried to figure out how this crime could be committed as described.
The trick is to hypnotize the targets well ahead of the actual day of the robbery, perhaps several times, and weed out the people who don’t instantly return to the so-called trance state upon suggestion. Then on robbing day, a simple suggestion at the store or bank can produce the instant results you need. The subjects have been pre-trained.
The hard part of this scheme is finding a way to get the right people to agree to hypnosis ahead of time. I imagine he advertised in a local publication, offering to help people quit smoking or lose weight. When people called for an appointment he would ask what sounded like standard questions, including age and occupation. If someone had the right sort of job, he set up an appointment and started the process. On any given day, he could hypnotize several new clients while testing for the most susceptible subjects who also handle money.
The next part would be a bit tricky. You can’t get a hypnotized person to do something that would violate his basic sense of right and wrong, or to put himself in danger. The brain has some sort of safety mechanism to prevent that.
In the surveillance video on the web, the hypnotist is seen taking the money from the register himself while the clerk seemed to be watching. This might be part of his workaround. The clerk wasn’t committing the crime so much as observing it. And perhaps the hypnotist said he was borrowing the money, or the manager had asked him to bring it to him in the parking lot, or some other story that obscured the ethical boundaries.
It could work. He’d need to be an excellent hypnotist, but that isn’t so rare.
{ Scott Adams }
photo { Elinor Carucci }
The foulest stench is in the air, the funk of forty thousand years
Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?
First, we must know how the mass of Hell is changing over time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave.
Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can make the assumption that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.
Next, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added. This gives two possibilities:
(1) If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
(2) If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over. So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by my Professor during my Freshman year that, “it will be a cold day in Hell before I pass you”, and take into account the fact that I passed his class, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.
The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct…
{ via Albany.edu }
Is Heaven hotter than Hell?
The temperature of heaven can be rather accurately computed. Our authority is the Bible, Isaiah 30:26 reads, Moreover, the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold as the light of seven days. Thus, heaven receives from the moon as much radiation as the earth does from the sun, and in addition seven times seven (forty nine) times as much as the earth does from the sun, or fifty times in all. The light we receive from the moon is one ten-thousandth of the light we receive from the sun, so we can ignore that. With these data we can compute the temperature of heaven: The radiation falling on heaven will heat it to the point where the heat lost by radiation is just equal to the heat received by radiation. In other words, heaven loses fifty times as much heat as the earth by radiation. Using the Stefan-Boltzmann fourth power law for radiation
(H/E)4 = 50
where E is the absolute temperature of the earth, 300°K (273+27). This gives H the absolute temperature of heaven, as 798° absolute (525°C).
The exact temperature of hell cannot be computed but it must be less than 444.6°C, the temperature at which brimstone or sulfur changes from a liquid to a gas. Revelations 21:8: But the fearful and unbelieving… shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone.” A lake of molten brimstone [sulfur] means that its temperature must be at or below the boiling point, which is 444.6°C. (Above that point, it would be a vapor, not a lake.)
We have then, temperature of heaven, 525°C (977°F). Temperature of hell, less than 445°F). Therefore heaven is hotter than hell.
photo { Mark Thiessen }
Call me morbid, call me pale
If your children happened to be born since the year 2000 in developed countries, they will most likely live to be 100, and they will be healthier than elderly people in previous generations, according to a recent article in the medical journal The Lancet. (…)
The gain of about 30 years in life expectancy in Western Europe, the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand — and even more in Japan, Spain and Italy — “stands out as one of the most important accomplishments of the 20th century.” Furthermore, most babies born since 2000 in these countries will “celebrate their 100th birthdays if the present yearly growth in life expectancy continues through the 21st century.” The authors expect that it will: “Continued progress in the longest living populations suggests that we are not close to a limit, and [a] further rise in life expectancy seems likely.”
Given that individuals over the coming decade may routinely expect to work well into their 70s and 80s, what kind of environment can they look forward to? “The good news is that the world of work is changing by itself” in ways that will make it more receptive to older employees, says Peter Cappelli, director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources. “It’s already easier to work at a distance, easier to telecommute…. The physical demands [of many jobs] are falling, commitments are shorter-term, outsourcing of all kinds is on the rise and there is more contract work — all of which makes it simpler for people to come in and out of the workplace, at least in principle….. The question is, to what extent will employers actually embrace older workers and incorporate more flexibility with respect to schedules, less supervision and more empowerment?”
One potential hang-up centers on the fact that older workers, as they stay on the job longer, are likely to be increasingly supervised by younger managers, says Cappelli.
related:
Presley’s what I go by why don’t you change the station
An abundance of brain scans, experimental studies and case histories has, in the end, failed to answer certain vital questions: What is music? Where can we find it in the brain? Why does it do what it does to us?
The brain is, in essence, a musical instrument—taking bits of material from a world of chaos, then shaping and modulating them into one graceful, lyrical stream. Yet, despite some scientific success in mapping its discrete compartments, it is an organ that resists efforts to render its workings in black and white. Cognition involves processes that are simply too wide-ranging and complex to be assigned to a single anatomical location.
Scientists have had to grapple with this, as well as with what is known as “plasticity.” At a recent conference on “Emotion, Music & the Brain” (…) Concetta Tomaino explained the phenomenon: “Simply put, the brain changes as it experiences and learns.” In effect, those attempting to pin down its internal circuitry are chasing a moving target.
Yet, the plasticity that reshapes the brain as we grow is also a blessing. “The challenge is in knowing how it can change when there is damage,” says Dr. Tomaino, “and then working with the neural networks that are still available.”
artwork { James Roper }
When you hear sweet syncopation, and the music softly moans
The success of many attacks on computer systems can be traced back to the security engineers not understanding the psychology of the system users they meant to protect. We examine a variety of scams and “short cons” that were investigated, documented and recreated for the BBC TV programme The Real Hustle and we extract from them some general principles about the recurring behavioural patterns of victims that hustlers have learnt to exploit.
We argue that an understanding of these inherent “human factors” vulnerabilities, and the necessity to take them into account during design rather than naïvely shifting the blame onto the “gullible users”, is a fundamental paradigm shift for the security engineer which, if adopted, will lead to stronger and more resilient systems security.
{ Understanding scam victims: Seven principles for systems security | University of Cambridge | PDF }
illustration { Richard Wilkinson }
The world goin’ one way, people another
But if there was one show that exemplified the highest aspirations of TV-as-art, it was The Wire. Airing from 2002 to 2008, it was the single best show in the history of television, a (yes) Dickensian portrait of an entire city’s corruption. Show-runner David Simon was a classic aughts auteur: arrogant, grudge-bearing, with a bullheaded sense of artistic entitlement. The show he created never became a pop sensation like The Sopranos; it attracted a cult following. Yet despite the show’s tiny fan base, it symbolized what truly brilliant TV could be. A portrait of Baltimore in decay, the series built, over 60 episodes, a prismatic, mordantly funny, bleak, and enraging universe of drug dealers, cops, pier workers, teachers, politicians, journalists, and do-gooders. Animated by a slow-burn moral outrage, it was grounded in Simon’s experience as a crime reporter. And it featured an astonishingly diverse set of African-American male and female characters, often playing roles other crime series would have reduced to fungible thugs. (Standouts included Idris Elba’s stunning turn as business-student/kingpin Stringer Bell.) But the series’ sneakiest achievement may have been the way it elevated, shattered, and remade the format of the police procedural, spider-webbing that old scaffolding with numberless subplots, bits of crackling dialogue, sickening and subtle imagery. Over the seasons, The Wire generated a sheer narrative density that demanded and assumed an intelligent audience was out there, willing to interpret. No wonder critics kept reassuring readers that the show wasn’t homework: It was worth the devotion it required.
related { The Wire Files | What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire? }
‘The stock market has predicted nine of the last five recessions.’ –Paul Samuelson
Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and one of the foremost academic economists of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94.
{ NY Times | Continue reading | Read more: Nobelprize.org }
It’s hard to convey the full extent of Samuelson’s greatness. Most economists would love to have written even one seminal paper — a paper that fundamentally changes the way people think about some issue. Samuelson wrote dozens: from international trade to finance to growth theory to speculation to well, just about everything, underlying much of what we know is a key Samuelson paper that set the agenda for generations of scholars.
{ Paul Krugman/NY Times | Continue reading }
Q: “At this stage, how would you rank Keynes?”
A: “I still think he was the greatest economist of the twentieth century and one of the three greatest of all time.”
Q: “Who are number one and number two?”
A: “Adam Smith and Leon Walras.”
Walras was a nineteenth century French economist who taught at the University of Lausanne. He was the first economist to write down the equations for a ‘general equilibrium’ of the entire economy, incorporating the markets of everything from sugar to iPods. He is widely regarded as the founder of mathematical economics. “We all march in his footsteps,” Samuelson said of Walras. (…)
“Like herpes, math is here to stay,” he said.
{ Interview with Paul Samuelson | New Yorker | Continue reading | And more: Falken Blog }
What she asked of me at the end of the day, Caligula would have blushed
Tonight I walked into the Fedex Kinkos store on Calhoun Street here in Charleston, SC to print our Christmas cards, only to have the clerk, Tammy Johnson, reject my order as obscene.
We Cringelys are known for our Christmas cards, I admit, because we make them ourselves and we’re naked.
The tradition began by accident and now our cards are so popular friends remind us to send them. Making naked Christmas cards that are tasteful isn’t easy, either, but we do it.
