Learning while playing

Jan 12, 2012. VBeat -- Ryan Carson, the web design guru behind Carsonified, wants to teach you how to code. And he says he can do it in just five minutes using a web-based game. “We’re doing $2 million [annually] in revenue,” he says. “We’re profitable, and we’re increasing revenue by a million dollars every three months.”

Players can race each other to finish coding challenges, and along they way, they unlock rewards.

Code Racer comes from Treehouse, Carson’s code-and-design-focused startup. Treehouse lets visitors watch videos and learn basic web skills. The more you learn, the more badges you can unlock — and some badges, like the Advanced Node.js badge or the Rails Foundations badge, can earn you interviews with companies like Facebook and WordPress. 

This combination of short-term rewards (game prizes) with long-term goals (a job interview at a high profile company) is a very powerful idea. Can be a template for a real breakthrough.

tags: education, problem, solution, information, psychology

Lunch Talk: The meaning of innovation (@GoogleTalks)

Through his experiences as president of the US's leading art and design college, Maeda argues that the critical thinking, critical making and creative leadership which is embodied at RISD can lead us to an enlightened form of innovation where art, design, technology, and business meet. He shares lessons from his journey as an artist-technologist-professor turned president to reveal a new model of leadership for the next generation of leaders.

tags: lunchtalk, innovation, art, technology, creativity

Never ever ever forget to have your dessert!

Patients who experienced an objectively short period of pain (left chart) remembered it as a more painful than the long period of pain (right chart).

This and other psychological experiments show that we remember intensity of experience and forget its duration. But when we plan our experiences we prefer it the other way around. As Kahneman puts it:

The evidence provides a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them. An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory ... has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feeling when the episode was at its end. [Thinking Fast and Slow.]

Some thoughts related to this bias:

1. Can explain "The flash of genius" effect when people remember suddenly "seeing" THE solution to a difficult problem. All previous and subsequent efforts to solve the problem are forgotten. The memory of being a genius has nothing to do with the solution's quality.

2. Short vacations with a peak experiences at the very end will be remembered the best.

3. Taking a lot of pictures during vacations and going over them will create a better memory. Facebook timeline can help too.

4. It is possible to plan a painful experience so that it inflicts the least psychological damage.

5. Desserts are the most important part of any dinner!

Amazon joins the UV cloud.

Storing content in the Internet cloud makes a lot of sense both for consumers and service providers because it allows for access to content from any connected device. Of course, the problem is that there's no cloud. That is, there's no ubiquitous content storage available to consumers independently from service providers. Therefore, cloud content is tied to your content provider; switching the provider means losing the content.
UV, a new video and digital rights format proposed by a consortium of IT, CE, movie studios, and service providers, promises to solve the problem. Amazon seems to be joining the group:

January 10, 2012. CNET -- ... today, Bill Carr, Amazon's executive vice president of digital, said during a panel discussion at CES, that the merchant had signed a deal with one of the major film studios to support UV rights.

Why this transition is potentially important?

Lunch Talk: (TED) How state budgets are breaking US schools.

America's school systems are funded by the 50 states. In this fiery talk, Bill Gates says that state budgets are riddled with accounting tricks that disguise the true cost of health care and pensions and weighted with worsening deficits -- with the financing of education at the losing end.

tags: lunchtalk, education, health, care, government

Shoe recognition instead of face recognition

Face recognition used in public places creates a lot of privacy concerns. A team of researchers solved the problem of tracking people by recognizing their shoes instead of faces.

08 January 2012. NS -- The team developed a system called Bootstrapper which works out who's standing where using a downward-facing Kinect camera to recognise their shoes. By measuring how a shoe distorts the infrared grid projected by Kinect's depth camera, Bootstrapper acquires unique, high-resolution 3D images of each person's footwear. Early tests show the system has an accuracy of 96 per cent.

I don't think the system will be a big commercial success, but the solution looks very clever. 

tags: problem, solution, detection, information

Twitter as the new social immune system

In tracking cholera in Haiti, Twitter updates proved to be much quicker AND as accurate as the official statistics.

Jan 2012. New Scientist -- Now a new study has demonstrated that using Twitter updates and online news websites to track a disease outbreak is not only quicker than more traditional methods - it's just as reliable, too.

They discovered 4697 online reports via HealthMap in eight different languages, and 188,819 tweets. Using this data they were able to monitor how the outbreak was progressing. They found that information gleaned from online sources in this way closely matched the official reports, gathered by surveying hospitals and health clinics. The only difference - and huge advantage - was that the online data was available in almost real time, nearly two weeks before the official reports from the govenerment health ministry were available. 

Not having a Twitter account can be dangerous to your health :)

 tags: 10x, health, information, social, trade-off

Mercedes+Facebook: socializing while driving.

Jan 9, 2011. Reuters -- Mercedes-Benz USA is bringing Facebook to its cars, with a special version of the service that is built-in to a new in-vehicle telematics system that will be unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.

Drivers can also quickly access a list of friends that are nearby, or restaurants in the vicinity that their friends have "liked" on Facebook.

Welcome to Borg. By the way, cars should have a social network of their own. It's only fair to give them a chance to exchange status pics and messages.

tags: social, network, s-curve, transportation, information

Lunch Talk: (TED) Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?

Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that well be miserable if we dont get what we want. Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things dont go as planned.

tags: psychology, mind, bias

Medicare: Disaster 20 years in the making.

One of the reasons for Medicare going broke these days is an accounting rule adopted twenty years ago. It required corporations to account for post-retirement employee healthcare liabilities. Here's what Warren Buffet's wrote in his 1992 letter to shareholders:

Another major accounting change, whose implementation is required by January 1, 1993, mandates that businesses recognize their present-value liability for post-retirement health benefits.

A CEO didn't need to be a medical expert to know that lengthening life expectancies and soaring health costs would guarantee an insurer a financial battering from such a business.

In health-care, open-ended promises have created open-ended liabilities that in a few cases loom so large as to threaten the global competitiveness of major American industries.

Concerned with open-ended liabilities, CEOs began dropping healthcare retirement benefits for their employees. As a result Medicare got hit with a triple whammy: 1) the rising costs of healthcare; 2) the rising wave of retiring baby-boomers; 3) a drastic reduction in corporate healthcare available for the retirees.

Now twenty years after the accounting change, Medicare is struggling to sustain the demand. Reduced levels of reimbursements lead to doctor bankruptcies:

Jan 5, 2012. CNN -- Doctors in America are harboring an embarrassing secret: Many of them are going broke. This quiet reality, which is spreading nationwide, is claiming a wide range of casualties, including family physicians, cardiologists and oncologists.

Pentz said recent steep 35% to 40% cuts in Medicare reimbursements for key cardiovascular services, such as stress tests and echocardiograms, have taken a substantial toll on revenue. "Our total revenue was down about 9% last year compared to 2010," he said.

Unfortunately, we don't know the extent of the disaster because the federal and state governments are not required to account for unfunded liabilities. The rules of the game they imposed on private businesses in 1993 do not apply to them.

tags: problem, detection, trend, health, business, finance

Luncht Talk: (TED) Seth Godin on spreading your ideas.

In a world of too many options and too little time, our obvious choice is to just ignore the ordinary stuff. Marketing guru Seth Godin spells out why, when it comes to getting our attention, bad or bizarre ideas are more successful than boring ones.

link

tags: lunchtalk, information, innovation, diffusion, media

Solution is hard to imagine...

From an interview with Edward Jung, CTO of Intellectual Ventures:

Dec 22, 2011. MTR - Another big problem, whose solution is harder to imagine, has to do with the world's aging population. One piece of this problem is that today the longer people live, the higher their medical costs. Our entire medical system was based around treating acute conditions.

The other piece is that, concomitantly, developed nations tend to have a nongrowing base of workers. So as your aging population grows and your birthrates go down (which is generally true of most developed economies), you're going to hit an economic wall where you don't have a lot of people generating your tax-base revenue—and yet you have a lot of people consuming more.

Fundamentally, biological organisms develop along the S-curve; while renewal of the species occurs through children. The previous generation of healthcare technology was created to extend life till the flat portion of the curve. As we try to extend it [life] further into the future and reduce the number of children, we have to come up with a radically different biology.

tags: problem, health, care, s-curve