Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we’re not as rational as we think when we make decisions.
This is a Well delivered: clear, engaging, humourous. Succinct and persuasive use cases. Even if one were to doubt the results (as some other people have expressed in other comments), I think one would find it hard to refute the points made are indeed convincing. Years ago someone told me to always give your boss three options (one always a dud) to give him/her the illusion of choice and to get done what you really want in terms of your own objectives. I used this to great effect for years but didn’t make the connection this same principal can be applied so broadly. Totally agree that we humans are quite inept at perceiving “real” value, also.
I find Dan Ariely’s talks very insightful. His behavioral experimets help explain much of the nonsense that surrounds us (which really is no nonsense, it seems to me, after knowing some the “behind the scenes” mechanisms). The concepts presented here are easily applicable in real life, and I do think that they are being applied rutinely in areas such as electoral politics, which helps to explain the shortage of good “value and principle based” leadership, and the abundance of “marketing campaign” candidates.
Psychology would be well-served by focusing on publicizing, identifying and addressing the “cognitive limitations” and “cognitive illusions” that are pointed out in this talk. Dan Gilbert’s “mistaken expectations” ideas scratch the surface of this question, but don’t delve into it in depth. Perhaps Dan Arriely’s work is, or others are or will be addressing questions such as: What is the psychology of decision-making? What constitutes an education in decision-making? What strategies or therapies successfully address common cognitive limitations? How do we best address the dysfunctions in how we process decisions, and/or how do we to learn new ways to process decision-making?
Using a webcam and flash. A new and exciting way to interact with your flash content. The possibilities are wide open.
Try it for yourself below:
1. Make sure you download and print out our NEW symbol
3. Open the flash movie in your browser window
2. Allow flash access to your webcam below when it asks (or right click flash and select settings).
3. Point your webcam at the printed symbol, ‘Proto’ will appear on top.
For those having trouble on the MAC, we’ve noted that you may need to manually select the camera in the flash settings by:
right click on flash and select settings.
select the webcam icon tab
choose your camera from the drop down list (if your camera is an inbuilt one, it’s likely to be the firewire or USB version).
June 1, 2007 lecture by Bill Buxton for the Stanford University Human-Computer Interaction Seminar (CS 547). Designing for experience comes with a whole new level of complexity. This is especially true in this emerging world of information appliances, reactive environments, and ubiquitous computing, where, along with those of their users, we have to factor in the convoluted behaviors of the products themselves. In this talk, Bill discusses the design process itself, from the perspective of methods, organization, and composition.
In a friendly, high-speed presentation, Will Wright demos his newest game, Spore, which promises to dazzle users even more than his previous masterpieces.
I appreciate the idea of the educational aspect of video games .. though the character creation section led me to thinking about intelligent design more than evolution. … (perhaps there is a random mutation option that is present in the game) Would need to see what happens for “creations” that don’t survive.
“I would like to somehow give people [...] better calibration on long-term thinking, because I think that a problem that our world faces right now is the result of short-term thinking.”
I completely agree. It seems that as people are getting more and more pushed to specialize in specific fields, we are lacking ones that see and analyze overarching structures and tendencies of our world. People have called these persons philosophers, leaders, geniuses - but regardless of their backgrounds, they are the ones that, in my opinion, can give humanity wise directions for improving the world on the very long-term.
Create 3D models using Google SketchUp and add them to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. Learn more at http://sketchup.google.com/
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What does a friend of a friend of a friend know about you?
The video provides an insight into a much wider topic of depleting individual privacy. Its not just social network sites that process our data. Look at others like our credit card companies(they know our shopping patterns), loyalty cards or grocery store cards(they know how much of what you consume every week), banks, email service providers, Google (it knows your browsing/searching patterns), ebay, amazon, paid digital tv channels. All of them earn something by analysing our patterns.
I never heard of this organization until I saw this video, I am comforted by its existence. It’s scary what can be done with data mining and web services. But, web services don’t have to be vilified, there are ways to manage personal information and advertising needs without infringing on users rights and expectations. This is a topic everyone really should learn more about.
Tom Kelley at the Creativity World Forum 2008:
Tom Kelley is the general manger of IDEO, the design and development firm that brought us the Apple mouse, the Miele vacuum cleaner and hundreds of other cutting edge products.
IDEO’s success, Kelley says, comes from its philosophy: you don’t have to be a genius to have a great idea and companies that encourage this creativity will excel.
This demo — from Pattie Maes’ lab at MIT, spearheaded by Pranav Mistry — was the buzz of TED. It’s a wearable device with a projector that paves the way for profound interaction with our environment. Imagine “Minority Report” and then some.
This is great for those who wish to consciously access information from our physical world maybe it’s better to access Truth from our Universal Collective Consciousness we can though our brain using the Delta State.
so many posters here seem focussed only on the obvious technological limitations of the product, simply as it exists just now. open your minds and look at the bigger picture.
the world will, in the not-too-distant future reach a point where technology is so advanced that even the most educated minds will struggle to comprehend how it actually works - this knowledge will not be forgotten or lost, it will simply become mostly unnecessary to know.
in my opinion, the most obvious application for this technology is educational. you could access every single piece of information about an object that was in front of you, simply by pointing at it - do you want to understand how an engine works? do you want to know what that particular component does? how was it built? how likely it is to fail? what are the consequences? what is the current condition of it? how do i get a replacement? how would i best make a replacement from the things i have available to me? etc…
medical - it’s not unreasonable to assume that the technology will advance so that there is no longer just a simple camera, but an advanced sensor that could measure and analyse not only the visual but also things such as - body mass & skin temperature, blood flow, bio-mechanical movements, respiration, skin tone, blood pressure, bacteria concentration, etc
the ability to easily and quickly access knowledge like that would be an incredibly powerful tool.
this technology, like every other thing invented since the dawn of time has the potential to be ultimately useless to the human race, but it’s just plain silly to dismiss it as a gimick simply because you are unable or unwilling to look further than your own imagination. of course, it also has the potential to be exploited horribly for nefarious means - in the same way the hammer or the printing press could be “abused”.
I enjoyed the video, and i look forward to seeing this technology evolving into what i’m fairly sure it will become.
In this powerful talk, P.W. Singer shows how the widespread use of robots in war is changing the realities of combat. He shows us scenarios straight out of science fiction — that now may not be so fictitious.
P.W. Singer is not pro- or anti- war; he is asking us to think about our relationship to war. He’s asking us to question our very basic ideas of responsiblity and connections to others on this planet. In boot camp they take young men and women who have been raised to be friendly and kind , and rewire their brains with exercises where they stab dummies and scream “The spirit of the bayonet is to kill without mercy: and the drill sergeant tells them to twist the bayonet. No one on this planet was born hating or being violent. Thank God, even in America, we have to teach people to fight in a war; imagine if we only had to put them on a plane and send them to kill. No wonder when they come home they have trouble fitting in. Human nature is not to kill.
Something that wasn’t heavily stressed in the talk was the possible threat that single tech-empowered individuals can pose in the relatively near future. A unibomber-on-steroids scenario will increasingly become a very real possibility with either robots or biological weapons. People seem to believe that because the industrialized countries are becoming more and more reluctant to go to war that threats by association will go down, but this seems to be wishful thinking to me. The book goes into heavier detail on this, and I highly recommend it. Whether or not you agree with him completely, he definitely sketches out one of the biggest problems of the early 21st century. Here is the navy’s own assessment on robots.
At CES in Las Vegas, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates shows attendees the company’s new “mobile navigator” technology that can be used to point at a person or place, and get more information. The new software will be incorporated into devices such as cameras, PDAs, and phones.
