Dilemma of the Day - creativity

- according to A. Gopnik, children begin playing imaginary, i.e. "what if" (counterfactual) games, at the age of 18 months.



Dilemma:

1)to be new (creative) an idea must be counterfactual. that is, it should not exist in real world.
2) the idea should not be counterfactual to be credible/verifiable or adoptable, e.g. in the marketplace.

Trade-off of the Day: A fearful vision

New Scientist reports:

FEAR changes how we see things, enhancing our ability to identify blurry shapes but impairing our perception of fine details.

From the abstract of the original paper:

Our results show that the brief presentation of a fearful face, compared with a neutral face, enhances sensitivity for the orientation of subsequently presented low-spatial-frequency stimuli, but diminishes orientation sensitivity for high-spatial-frequency stimuli. This is the first demonstration that emotion not only improves but also impairs low-level vision.
...Our results suggest an emotion-induced tradeoff in visual processing, rather than a general improvement. This trade-off may benefit perceptual dimensions that are relevant for survival at the expense of those that are less relevant.

Certain cognitive trade-offs seem to be built into our brains. To solve this particular one, we would have to come up with a neuro-enhancer system that detects fear and enables the brain to switch between high- and low-resolution modes. Getting rid of the emotion itself would be a mistake because it is connected with many other useful mind-body interactions. In other words, fear itself is good, but the loss of control associated with it has to be dealt with.

The modern history of frozen foods

The modern frozen foods technology was invented by Clarence Birdseye in early 1900-s, and it took about 50 years for the original idea to succeed in the marketplace. After World War II, complimentary inventions of affordable refrigerators and microwave ovens created an environment, in which frozen foods industry could develop and thrive.

[Clarence] Birdseye worked as a fur trapper and trader in the Canadian North, where he noticed that fish would freeze almost immediately after being caught, and when cooked later -- even weeks later -- these quick-frozen fish tasted much better than fish mechanically frozen in warmer climates.

Birdseye began his experiments with freezing in 1916, and eventually came to understand that if fish was frozen very, very quickly its cellular structure was damaged far less, so that when thawed it was nearly indistinguishable from fresh fish.
...
Frozen foods went nationwide in 1944, when Birdseye suggested leasing insulated railroad cars for shipping. He further changed the grocery landscape by contracting with American Radiator Corporation to build display freezers, which General Foods then leased to stores. By the early 1950s, more than half of American grocery stores had a 'frozen food' section.

This is not a blonde joke

Blondes found a way to improve the economy:

An association of blonde women in Latvia says it hopes to dispel some of the Baltic state's economic gloom with a parade and ball in the capital, Riga.

A story about how inflatable boat was invented:

Early visitors to the Arctic sometimes ended up dead because they couldn't paddle their way to safety. So sailor Peter Halkett came up with a handy solution: a wearable boat.

Over the last month, Sony's massive multi-player game Free Realms attracted two million registrations:

John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment in San Diego, said the game is scoring well with the intended audience of kids and families. About 75 precent of the players are under 17 and 46 percent are under 13.

The engine behind the success is the:

free-to-play business model pioneered in Asia, where players start playing for free and pay for virtual goods one at a time in micro-transactions.

Sony proactively took down the main barrier to early adoption:

Kids have been slow to adopt MMOs in the past because they don’t have credit cards to pay for subscription fees. But they can play this game for free and can buy Station currency cards to get virtual goods at five major retail chains: Best Buy, Blockbuster, Rite Aid, 7-Eleven and Target.

We can see how company have learned to cross "the chasm" by going beyond a typical free trial period. Now, the access to technology itself is, literally, free. Therefore, the main internet battle for consumer wallets shifted from acquisition to retention. It is no longer about entry costs, but, rather, about exit costs. That is, consumers can now easily cross the chasm in both directions (see the graph). The problem has shifted from how to get people adopt a technology, to how to prevent people from dis-adopting it.

Battle-ready neuro warrior

"There are lots of stories of soldiers who refuse to shoot other soldiers," says Zak. "If you could get rid of that empathy response you might create a soldier that's more prepared to engage in battle and risk their life."

A perfect tool. But not an ideal one :)

iPhone as an art platform has arrived:

These days, all you need to create magazine cover-worthy artwork is an iPhone and Steve Sprang's $4.99 Brushes app. Oh, and insane talent.

Those were the ingredients that produced this week's dazzling New Yorker cover, a traditional-looking blurred street scene that looks like an authentic brush-and-canvas painting.

According to VentureBeat,

Internal Google tests found that most users favored results branded with the Google logo, even when Google swapped logos with another search engine to serve supposedly inferior results under its own brand.

The highest switching costs are inside our minds.

doing, not seeing, is believing

It looks like there's a mechanism in our brain that knows whether something is doable or not:

The team compared how the [mirror] neurons fired when a person grabbed a metallic object within a monkey's reach and again from a greater distance. They found that rather than simply responding to the action, the mirror neurons also responded to whether or not the action was close enough for the monkey to intervene.

To show that those differing responses were to do with what the monkey could reach rather than how close an object was, the experimenters placed a panel in front of the primate's chair, preventing the monkey from reaching objects close to its body.

In this situation, the neurons that previously reacted to reachable objects no longer responded to the human's actions at all, suggesting that mirror neurons change their properties according to the possibility that one can act.

Is it true then that thinking that something is impossible makes it impossible?

Wired provides an insight into Google's sales leads (advertisement) generation machine:

... the quality score. This metric strives to ensure that the ads Google shows on its results page are true, high-caliber matches for what users are querying. If they aren't, the whole system suffers and Google makes less money.

It's not the client's money that controls ad placement. Rather, it's Google's own algorithm that determines the price of admission to the club of web advertisers. With so much traffic through its site, Google has the ability to experiment in real time with algorithms and sales strategies. Very clever, indeed. Advertisement is treated as just another piece of content that needs to be matched to the user's search request.

The ultimate "detection" problem:

There was once a prince, and he wanted a princess, but then she must be a real Princess. He traveled right around the world to find one, but there was always something wrong. There were plenty of princesses, but whether they were real princesses he had great difficulty in discovering; there was always something which was not quite right about them. So at last he had come home again, and he was very sad because he wanted a real princess so badly.

Decision Making and Problem Solving

From a 1987 paper by a group of then present and future Nobel Laureates:

Because the possibilities in realistic problem situations are generally multitudinous, trial-and-error search would simply not work; the search must be highly selective.

The more difficult the problem, the smaller are the chances that a simple brainstorming session would lead to a solution it.

One of the procedures often used to guide search is "hill climbing," using some measure of approach to the goal to determine where it is most profitable to look next.

This is relevant to the Three Magicians technique (3x3). A combination of the "Climb on the Roof" and "Fall back - Spring ahead" usually works the best.

Another, and more powerful, common procedure is means-ends analysis. In means-ends analysis, the problem solver compares the present situation with the goal, detects a difference between them, and then searches memory for actions that are likely to reduce the difference.

In open-ended (inventive) problems setting the goal is often the most difficult task. That's why formulating the Ideal Result and stating dilemmas helps identify the gap between the present and the future. The 10X diagram also comes very handy in this type of discussions.

The third thing that has been learned about problem solving, especially when the solver is an expert, is that it relies on large amounts of information that are stored in memory and that are retrievable whenever the solver recognizes cues signaling its relevance.

During this stage, participation of the subject matter experts is essential. In earlier stages though, they should be kept in check, because they carry "the curse of knowledge". That is, the experts' psychological inertia often prevents them from finding a creative solution.


References:
Decision Making and Problem Solving
Author(s): Herbert A. Simon, George B. Dantzig, Robin Hogarth, Charles R. Plott, Howard Raiffa, Thomas C. Schelling, Kenneth A. Shepsle, Richard Thaler, Amos Tversky, Sidney Winter.
Source: Interfaces, Vol. 17, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1987), pp. 11-31
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25061004

The early stages of human ability to change perspectives:

Before they are three, children do learn about the difference between what they see and what other people see.
Three-year-olds can even tell you about what an object looks like from different perspectives. If you put a yellow toy duck behind a piece of blue plastic, it will look green. You can show this trick to three-year-olds and let them see that the duck really is yellow. Three-year-olds will say that the duck looks green to the person on one side of the plastic but looks yellow to the person on the others side. Contrary to much conventional wisdom, these very young children are already beginning to go beyond an egocentric understanding of other people.
== A. Gopnik, et.all 1999. p.41.

Then we go to school and learn "the right" perspectives.

Newspaper death spiral

"In the world of online classified advertising, Craigslist is by far the most used Web site in the United States," Pew said in the report. "In March 2009, classified sites averaged 53.8 million unique visitors, up 7 percent from February. Craigslist had 42.2 million unique visitors in the month of March."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10247668-93.html

--
To kill a technology, one has to kill the business model that supports it.

The medium is the message.

Evolutionary ecologist Elizabeth Derryberry, of Louisiana State University, found that over the last 30+ years white-crowned sparrows adjusted their songs to match the changes in the habitat:

...the birds' habitat had gone from being mostly grassy, with about 11% scrub, to 26% scrub. The slower modern songs would better penetrate the new scrubby habitat, which Derryberry attributes to reduced livestock grazing.
...
The birds reacted more strongly to recordings of modern songs than they did to old ones, with males moving toward the sound and females doing a little dance.

If birds can change their communications (payload) in response to environmental changes, then humans, which are supposed to be much smarter, must also behave in a somewhat similar fashion. Is there any evidence for that? I think so.
For example, relatively recent changes in our technological habitat caused massive changes in the way we communicate with each other, especially, where mating matters are concerned. While the birds adapted the tone of their songs to better penetrate scrub, people adapted their letters, e.g. from snail- to e-mail, to better penetrate the physical space. So, if today's private messages go through blogs, craigslist, facebook/linkedin, twitter, and etc., tomorrow's business communications will not only adapt to the very same environment, but also drive proliferation of such environment into enterprise infrastructure.

Are we there yet?

Monster Employment Index for April, 2009 is out:

Sector-wise, Education, Maintenance, and Repair grew slightly. People seem to be working to repairing their skills and their environment.

Podcast of the 11th annual top 10 trends as seen by the best and brightest VCs in Silicon Valley.

Here's a brief report on CNET:
...
8. Health care administration will be the fastest-growing sector. (The panelists were so bored by this trend they didn't even discuss it.)

9. Consumption of digital goods on mobile devices is the growth story of the coming decade.

===

#9 sounds like the beginning of the PC software revolution in the 80s and 90s. The amazing part of the mobile revolution is that it is going to happen both on the end device (mobile) and on the server (cloud).

The newly issued US patent 7,536,363 describes a goal-based computerized education system. It's an elaborate piece of work: 18 inventors, 30 figures, and a main claim (claim 1) that spans almost an entire page. It interested me because it referred to my old invention, which was probably an order of magnitude simpler. Nevertheless, I found the patent's title intriguing, and decided to navigate through pages of legalese and discover the original idea. It wasn't easy, but eventually I identified a short phrase in claim 1 that described the main useful function of the system:

(d) evaluating progress toward the goal and providing the feedback that further motivates accomplishment of the goal.

Everything else in the invention was about setting up a simulation environment for making progress and figuring out goals that would motivate further learning.

It seems like the problem they are trying to solve is the excruciating slowness of most real-life-learning-on-the-job education methods. Having a good simulator allows users to make as many business decisions in one hour, as s/he would make in months or even years of running an actual business. The same way, the range/quantity/quality of emotions we experience during a good movie is probably greater than what we experience in weeks and months of normal life.

Which leads me to believe that educational systems of the future will be more like movies and games than like textbooks and lectures.

Smartphone news:

1. Smartphones continued to grow, despite a deepening recession. [as expected]

2. Yahoo ads voice search for iPhone. [cool]

3. Palm Pre shortages expected. [right :)]

4. Even home phones get smarter. [ too late ]