Want to understand your own personality? Ask Facebook!

Stanford researchers have found that computers can judge personality traits more accurately than one's friends and colleagues.

The computer predictions were based on which articles, videos, artists and other items the person had liked on Facebook. The idea was to see how closely a computer prediction could match the subject's own scores on the five most basic personality dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The researchers noted, "This is an emphatic demonstration of the ability of a person's psychological traits to be discovered by an analysis of data, not requiring any person-to-person interaction.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/07/1418680112

The original idea of using Thumbs UP and Thumbs DOWN buttons in the digital world belongs to TiVo. Facebook took this idea — knowingly or unknowingly — and scaled it across the entire range of digital content, making every piece of communication "likeable."

In System Model terms, Like helps solve Detection and Control problems. We discuss it briefly in Scalable Innovation, Chapter 22, Seeing the Invisible. "Like" represents the Aboutness of an element. Once the Aboutness detected, the Control sub-system uses it to compose and channel content streams according to its policies.

Paper books will last another 39 years.

An unbiased opinion on the future of digital books from a 3-year old:

For Mr. de Halleux...and his wife both read to their 3-year-old son, Tristan. He reads Winnie the Pooh to the child on a screen. She reads it in old-fashioned paperback form.

Mr. de Halleux said he was confident the boy would eventually favor the digitized version. “He really likes it because you can zoom in on things,” he said.

Zooming in on things is a must have feature for an e-book. Children know it better than adults.

tags: content, information, payload, dilemma, problem, solution, packaging

Money as a mobile application.

Credit cards are becoming extinct:

just wave your iPhone at any Visa payWave terminal, which can already be found at some 32,000 retailers, and voila, you've made your transaction.

Visa has the market power to make interface devices ubiquitous, while the banks can be made responsible for distributing mobile applications. As the result, we've got the credit card business model, but without the credit card.

tags: money, ideality, distribution, packaging, tool, digital, information, commerce

In the domain of science publications transition to electronic documents causes "twitterization" of research media:

The move to online science appears to represent one more step on the path initiated by the much earlier shift from the contextualized monograph [books]... to the modern research article.

As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.

Science 18 July 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5887, pp. 395 - 399
DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473

It's quite possible that proliferation of e-book devices will benefit magazines more than books. Shorter chapters/articles are easier to jump in and out on the go; embedded audio and video clips are better suited for the "show, not tell" style of presentation; more recent events mentioned in the text are more fresh in the mind and psychologically close to connect for the reader. To summarize, attention spans are getting shorter, authors and publishers will have to find ways to feed readers with small easily digestible info-chunks.

tags: information, payload, system, time, internet, digital,  media

CNet's has a list of most innovative Consumer Electronic devices of the last decade. Apple is clearly the champion, Sony and Nintendo are distant seconds.
Palm Treo is #11, which shows that first mover's advantage doesn't amount to much if the company cannot sustain it with 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generation of improved products.

tags: market, technology, electronics, innovation, efficiency, application, 4q diagram, , digital

The digital TV industry is beginning to overcome the cost vs quality trade-off - a good indication of a breakthrough innovation:

the difference now is that technology is increasingly creating an environment where less money doesn't necessarily mean lower quality.

via The Hollywood Reporter.


tags::tradeoff, dilemma, evolution, detection, digital

A new concept from Philips Design
http://www.design.philips.com/probes/projects/tattoo/index.page

The Electronics Tattoo film expresses the visual power of sensitive technology applied to the human body. The film subtly leads the viewer through the simultaneous emotional and aesthetic transformations between two lovers.

via http://centralasian.vox.com

This effect would look really cool in movies, stills, and live picture frames.