Letters Remain

  • The Evolution of Art Appreciation

    The appreciation of art is not culturally learned, but is in fact an evolved trait, or at least that’s the view of Denis Dutton as elaborated in his latest book, The Art Instinct. In a generally positive review of the book, Newsweek points out the many limitations of Dutton’s conjecture as well as summarizing it’s main points:

    Drawing on Charles Darwin’s second great book, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Dutton argues that art, like broad shoulders in a man and a narrow waist in a woman, facilitates seduction. We tell stories, sing songs, invent tales, recount jokes and draw pictures in order to find a mate and, having found one, produce children. We value art because, Dutton claims, it may be made of rare and valuable materials and require much skill to produce. People value wealth and skill in choosing a mate. We can add to Dutton’s argument the fact that when 3-month-old infants are shown pictures of women who had been rated by adults as either attractive or unattractive, the babies looked much longer at the attractive ones.

    via Arts and Letters Daily

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Using Neighbourhood Comparisons to Promote Conservation

    By comparing customers’ usage to that of others in the neighbourhood, utility companies are starting to reduce their energy consumption. This, from an experiment conducted by Robert Cialdini, author of Influence:

    In a 2004 experiment, he and a colleague left different messages on doorknobs in a middle-class neighborhood north of San Diego. One type urged the residents to conserve energy to save the earth for future generations; another emphasized financial savings. But the only kind of message to have any significant effect […] was one that said neighbors had already taken steps to curb their energy use.

    You can see how effective this is just by looking at the graphic used to head the Times’ article. This has now got me wondering how this could be used with recycling.

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Portfolios Instead of Diplomas

    Jeff Jarvis agrees with teacher Mark Pullen’s opinion that the education system should be modified to produce portfolios instead of, or in addition to, qualifications.

    Perhaps we need to separate youth from education. Education lasts forever. […] What if we told students that, like Google engineers, they should take one day a week or one course a term or one year in college to create something: a company, a book, a song, a sculpture, an invention? School could act as an incubator, advising, pushing, and nurturing their ideas and effort. What would come of it? Great things and mediocre things. But it would force students to take greater responsibility for what they do and to break out of the straitjacket of uniformity. It would make them ask questions before they are told answers. It could reveal to them their own talents and needs. The skeptic will say that not every student is responsible enough or a self-starter. Perhaps. But how will we know students’ capabilities unless we put them in the position to try? And why structure education for everyone around the lowest denominator of the few?

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Designing for the Poorest 90%

    The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.
    —Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises

    Design For the Other 90% is a design exhibition aiming to get people thinking not of the opportunities that lie in designing products for the richest 10%, but for those under the waterline of the ‘poverty iceberg’.

    BrandBuilder talks about the opportunities this mentality can create, giving the $100 laptop as the obvious example.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Survey Art: The ‘Most Wanted’ Paintings

    After surveying thousands of people around the world and online, artists Komar and Melamid produced a series of paintings portraying the respondents’ results. The project was dubbed People’s Choice and consisted of the 30 most and least ‘wanted’ paintings for 14 countries and the web as a whole.

    Interestingly, the Dutch (and the Italians, to some extent) were the only ones included in the survey that ‘produced’ a piece of abstract art as their favourite.

    The artists also produced an even more tongue-in-cheek work: The People’s Choice Music, consisting of ‘The Most Wanted Song’ (a love song with low male and female vocals, of moderate duration, pitch, and tempo) and ‘The Most Unwanted Song’ (an operatic soprano rapping over cowboy music featuring bagpipes and tubas).

    via Cognitive Daily

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Working for Free as Promotion

    Could working for free be one of the best promotional tools available to an individual or SME?

    37signals believes so, saying that their 37Better Project was “one of the best promotional things [they] ever did”. To illustrate their point they also take a look at R.BIRD’s excellent consumer packaging patterns, stating:

    If you’re looking to hire a brand design firm, wouldn’t you want to consider a company that likes this stuff enough to do it for free?

    And doesn’t this apply to much more than just design (I’m thinking of open source projects, etc.)?

    Ben Casnocha goes one further, saying that if you’re looking for work why not reach out and offer to work for free with an idol/hero?

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Timeline of a Car Crash

    In designing the Falcon XT, Ford engineers set out to discover the anatomy of a car crash and found that the accident is typically over before we’re even consciously aware of it happening.

    This is a reconstruction of a crash involving a stationary Ford Falcon XT sedan being struck in the driver’s door by another vehicle travelling at 50 km/h [30 mph].

    0 milliseconds – An external object touches the driver’s door.

    1 ms – The car’s door pressure sensor detects a pressure wave.

    2 ms – An acceleration sensor in the C-pillar behind the rear door also detects a crash event.

    2.5 ms – A sensor in the car’s centre detects crash vibrations.

    5 ms – Car’s crash computer checks for insignificant crash events, such as a shopping trolley impact or incidental contact. It is still working out the severity of the crash. Door intrusion structure begins to absorb energy.

    6.5 ms – Door pressure sensor registers peak pressures.

    7 ms – Crash computer confirms a serious crash and calculates its actions.

    8 ms – Computer sends a “fire” signal to side airbag. Meanwhile, B-pillar begins to crumple inwards and energy begins to transfer into cross-car load path beneath the occupant.

    8.5 ms – Side airbag system fires.

    15 ms – Roof begins to absorb part of the impact. Airbag bursts through seat foam and begins to fill.

    17 ms – Cross-car load path and structure under rear seat reach maximum load.
    Airbag covers occupant’s chest and begins to push the shoulder away from impact zone.

    20 ms – Door and B-pillar begin to push on front seat. Airbag begins to push occupant’s chest away from the impact.

    27 ms – Impact velocity has halved from 50 km/h to 23.5 km/h. A “pusher block” in the seat moves occupant’s pelvis away from impact zone. Airbag starts controlled deflation.

    30 ms – The Falcon has absorbed all crash energy. Airbag remains in place. For a brief moment, occupant experiences maximum force equal to 12 times the force of gravity.

    45 ms – Occupant and airbag move together with deforming side structure.

    50 ms – Crash computer unlocks car’s doors. Passenger safety cell begins to rebound, pushing doors away from occupant.

    70 ms – Airbag continues to deflate. Occupant moves back towards middle of car.
    Engineers classify crash as “complete”.

    150-300 ms – Occupant becomes aware of collision.

    Mind Hacks corroborates these conclusions, stating that the start of concious awareness is typically found to be around 200-300 ms.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Conversations with Charlie Rose

    The archives of Charlie Rose are available on the official website and this past weekend I watched these excellent conversations:

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Psychology of False Confessions and Punishment

    A recent instalment of Scientific American’s ’60-Second Psych’ discusses a series of articles on why innocent people confess to crimes they didn’t commit, and the problems this can pose.

    Scientists had 206 subjects witness a “staged” crime and then were asked to pick the perpetrator from a line up. They were later told that their choice denied the crime, and nearly 30 percent changed their identified pick.

    But the greatest change occurred when participants were told that another person, not the person they picked, had confessed to the crime. Now, 61 percent changed their identification, choosing the confessor.

    On a related subject (via Mind Hacks), another Scientific American article looks at how the brain makes judgements about crime:

    The assignment of responsibility and the choice of an appropriate punishment lie at the heart of our justice system. At the same time, these are cognitive processes like many others—reasoning, remembering, decision-making—and as such must originate in the brain. These two facts lead to the intriguing question: How does the brain enable judges, juries, and you and me to perform these tasks? What are the neural mechanisms that let you decide whether someone is guilty or innocent?

    […] Until recently, such topics would have been out of the reach of cognitive neuroscience for lack of methods; today, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allows researchers to watch the brain “in action” as normal human participants make decisions about responsibility and punishment.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Love and the Existential Vacuum

    I have recently finished reading Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl; an excellent book that is at once an account of Frankl’s time in Nazi concentration camps during WWII and an introduction to his psychotherapeutic theories of logotherapy.

    According to Frankl’s logotherapy, the way to find meaning in life is to dedicate oneself to a cause (“creating a work or doing a deed”), find meaning in suffering (“the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering”), and in learning to love (“experiencing a something or encountering someone”). In fact, Frankl states that “love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire”.

    Now, 60 years later, research into how we deal with existential angst is starting to show that Frankl was correct; love is actually one of the most significant ways in which we deal with existential anxiety:

    In an ingenious 2002 study, [it was] found that reminding people of their demise increased their self-professed romantic commitment, that thinking about a committed relationship reduced the effects of morality salience on harsh social judgements, and that thinking about the end of a relationship increased thoughts of death.

    A year later, they reviewed research on love and death and came to the conclusion that close relationships help us manage the anxiety of mortality, partly through the strength of the bond, but partly through the fact that romantic partnerships give us a symbolic way of transcending death – as families provide a way for our contribution to ‘live on’ after the final curtain.

    You can’t mention Viktor Frankl (who believes that self actualisation is the effect of ‘meaning fulfilment’) without pointing out Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; a psychological theory worth a cursory browse, although please excuse me if I refrain from comment.

    Lloyd Morgan