Creativity Quote of the Day: Explaining things.

"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan."
"Then I'm dumber than an eight-year-old," Miss Pefko mourned. "I don't even know what a charlatan is."

Kurt Vonnegut. Cat's cradle.

Genrikh Altshuller used to say that you should be able to strip your idea of all technical jargon and explain your invention to a 12-year-old because the 12-year-old would need only some understanding of physics. The more I work with inventors, the more I realize that most concepts can be easily explained to much younger kids. Unless, of course, adults package their explanations in layers of professional buzzwords, the buzzwords often designed to signal affinity with a certain group and repel the uninitiated. When stripped of packaging, ideas become much easier to understand, and, more importantly, develop  much further into additional inventions.


tags: quote, creativity, knowledge, communication

Google's China lesson

After being hacked last year by Chinese either students or government agents or both, Google decided to add a new security token to the good old password system:

Google is making it harder for Gmail and other Google Apps accounts to get compromised by adding an optional feature that will send a security code to your smartphone for logging in.

The two-step verification feature will put an additional roadblock in the way of online criminals by generating a onetime six-digit code that will be sent to the account holder in order to be able to successfully log in. The code will be sent after the password is provided.

This looks like a good protection for a system where users don't bother creating strong passwords. Criminals capable of hacking into a password database can probably defeat it by changing the address of a smartphone associated with the account which requires additional authentication. Also, imagine a nightmare of replacing your old phone and being stuck with the task to update all "clouds" with your new phone info. Nevertheless, it's a step in the right direction because even the smartest system can be compromised by dumb users.

I wish a similar system were introduced for accessing our personal information by third parties, enabling us authorize the access or at least track it.

tags: information, security, google, communication, problem, solution

Trade-off of the day: Commitment vs Costs

Commitment to a service is a good deal for the service provider, but bad for consumers:

...prepaid customers [month-to-month vs 1-yr+ contract] generate less revenue per month than post-paid customers. They are more likely to switch back and forth between service providers. And they typically use more network resources, averaging around 2,000 voice minutes per month compared to about 1,000 minutes per month, than post-paid customers, according to Craig Moffett, a Sanford Bernstein equities analyst.

Commitment to a regular long-term service reduces the hassle of looking for the best deal and setting up a new account. And you end up paying for the convenience through over-priced plans.

tags: trade-off, communication, network, problem, solution, infrastructure, velocity

Four hugs a day keep the psychatrist away.

The latest research on communicating emotions by touch (click on pictures to enlarge) shows, e.g. that a handshake is probably the best way to "say" thank you. Also, there's significant difference between how effective men and women are in communicating their core feelings: anger, fear, disgust, love, gratitude, sympathy, happiness, and sadness. 

Source: Hertenstein, M. J., Holmes, R., McCullough, M., & Keltner, D. (2009). The communication of emotion via touch. Emotion, 9, 566-573. doi: 10.1037/a0016108

tags:  psychology, health, communication, emotion,

E-mail smileys - a great invention.

I am reading "50 Scientific Ways to Be Persuasive", a new book by a group of psychologists, including R.B.Cialdini. Number 47 on their list of topics is e-mail. This relatively new communications technology is lightning fast, efficient, and economical. But it also creates an important problem:

Research conducted by behavioral scientist Justin Kruger and colleagus shows that miscommunications are much more likely to occur through email than face-to-face or over the phone...
... an even more dangerous problem is that the senders ... are almost completely unaware that their messages may be completely misunderstood...
... written communications can't be fully deciphered even by people who are close to one another...

Thus, a great invention - emoticons. Do not forget to sprinkle them here and there in your cover letter when you apply for a new job online ;)


References:
Kruger, J. et al. 2005. Egocentrism Over E-Mail: Can We Communicate as Well as We Think? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 2005, Vol. 89, No. 6, 925–936.

iPod and Twitter as strategic weapons

Newsweek reports:

To help soldiers make sense of data from drones, satellites and ground sensors, the U.S. military now issues the iPod Touch. ... With their intuitive interfaces, Apple devices—the iPod Touch and, to a lesser extent, the iPhone—are becoming the handhelds of choice. ...Since sharing data is particularly important in counterinsurgency operations, the Pentagon is funding technology that makes it easier for the soldier on the ground to acquire information and quickly add it to databases.

Military, Police, and Firefighters are the early business adopters of the new communications technology.

Kathy Eisenhardt, co-director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program and professor in Management Science and Engineering, talks about research in understanding entrepreneurship. She describes several key strategy aspects that can help a startup to be very successful, including team composition, market selection, fundraising approaches, working with the media, execution, balance between structure and ambiguity, and etc.
She specifically mentions that to get the media interested in your company you have to have a good story. The story doesn't have to be true, though. Whatever creates positive attention is good for the business.

Creativity, personal brilliance, deep dives, brainstorms, epihpanies make exellent stories. Great entrepreneurs and inventors, like Edison, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs and others, had been really good at exploiting this media bias. Probably, that is why the general public's view of innovation work is so distorted ( e.g. see Fundamental Attribution Error). Inventing a good technology helps. Putting a good story around it rules. We should be able to use the Three Magicians technique to help inventors with story development tasks.

David Brooks in NYT about the communications aspect of the current economic crisis:

To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. You’d think that with thousandsof ideas flowing at light speed around the world, you’d get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time.

From a system perspective, communications work to synchronize various elements of the system. Under general information overload, people tend to synchronize on what attracts immediate attention, which nowadays is infotainment rather than information. Therefore, the latest financial bubble can be considered as one of the consequences of rapid media/internet growth. I would argue that in a similar pattern another major economic downturn, the Great Depression, followed a major communications breakthrough, radio, and the emergence of mass media.

Mystery mashup of Apple 1984 ad could mark new campaign era | News.blog | CNET News.com

Mystery mashup of Apple 1984 ad could mark new campaign era | News.blog | CNET News.com: "March 19, 2007 11:09 AM PDT
Mystery mashup of Apple 1984 ad could mark new campaign era

No one is taking credit for a presidential campaign ad buzzing around the Web via YouTube that plays off Apple Computer's famous 1984 Super Bowl ad teasing the introduction of the Macintosh. But bloggers have their own theories--and plenty of them--on its origin and its significance as an example of a new political advertising frontier resulting from emerging and converging media."