My rebooted blog on tech, creative ideas, digital citizenship, and life as an experiment.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 1:31PM 
... because it is what it is. However, we do control what we do with it and how we interpret it. We can accept and move on. We can question and continuing pushing. We can deny and throw a tantrum.
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 8:09AM 
Quick links from the past week of experiments in the World Wide Lab
Cultural changes allow magazine to experiment: Talks about the merging of Newsweek and The Daily Beast. I love this thought, made popular they say by "Ralph Waldo Emerson and other lesser lights" who offered audiences recipes for self-improvement: The man and woman of character, they said, must possess a well-furnished mind. Further,
To be respectable, it is necessary to spend your leisure time sampling the great masterworks of culture. To fight off the grubby materialism of American culture, it is necessary to be conversant in philosophy, theology and the great political events of the wider world.
The writer goes on:
About a generation ago, this earnest self-improvement ethic came under attack. People no longer believed that there was such a thing as a common culture that all educated Americans should study and know. The new ethos valued hipness, not class.
Tim Burton's Cadavre Exquis Twitter Experiment: The movie director is using his Twitter-based site to solicit story ideas from followers. Actually, it goes beyond that:
Cadavre Exquis or "Exquisite Corpse" is a technique used to collectively tell a story. Each contributor adds to the story in sequence, building on the last line revealed.
Nokia Amazing Product : Touch Screen From Ice: I can't resist: Talk about a cool user interface.
Ask a Chef: Learn to experiment: The chef answers a question about waste and mistakes with cooking. Very Think, Try, Learn:
Apple Pie Lab Experiment #1: Hey, It's Not That Hard After All: In another food-related experiment, here's a gal who really got into the Thanksgiving spirit through experimentation. I love how she made explicit her own mental myths.
In the Beginning, the Universe Was a Liquid : Discovery News: physicists at the Large Hadron Collider "have discovered the Universe acted like a fluid in the moments immediately after the Big Bang."
CSIRO experiments with 'no email' day: Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is trying a switching off email for an entire day, with the idea of motivating people to try alternate (and more effective) communication modes. These include Twitter, telephones, and face-to-face conversation. While this is becomming more common for organizations, I'd like to hear more about how they intend to make it truly an experiment. What variables are they controlling for? What are they measuring? How will they use the results?
Prostitution in Canada: On the brink of a social experiment?: It's hard to imagine a more controversial experiment. Maybe prohibition?
Palin, Gingrich Wrong About American Exceptionalism: A nice write-up of perspectives through US history on the "great American experiment," George Washington said warranted a "full and fair experiment."
Our Turn At The American Experiment : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture. I love this quote:
Democracy is always a leap of faith, an act of reason and a game of numbers. Most importantly, democracy is always an experiment in the most fundamental, and most scientific definition of the term. Like every well constructed experiment, you can not know what will happen until it does happen.
Clenched Muscles Assist Self-Control: Scientific American Podcast: People who clenched a muscle were able to increase their will power in a series of tests.
Why "Magical Thinking" Works for Some People: Scientific American: Defines superstitious behavior and magical thinking: the belief that an object, action or circumstance not logically related to a course of events can influence its outcome. The result was surprising; participants who were in the presence of their charm performed better. This is possibly because they reported setting higher goals and demonstrated increased perseverance. The bad news?
The influence of the charm depends crucially on your belief in its inherent powers. Once you acknowledge that performance is a function of what goes on in your brain rather than a product of any mystical properties of the object itself, it becomes useless.
The latest offbeat experiment from filmmaker David Lynch: pop singles: I like his attitude: "I started experimenting with music. I'm not a musician, but I love to experiment and try to make music." Don't forget, the verb for making music is "to play." Reminds me of The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra, who make their own instruments. For every performance. A little about them here: Video: 'This is our world: the acoustics of vegetables'. Don't take it too seriously, though!
Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 12:01PM This week I'm starting a new mini-series as an experiment, patterned after the excellent Mind Hacks "Spike activity" posts (e.g., 2010-11-26 Spike activity). The idea is for me to share interesting, stimulating, and useful experiments in the news related to The Experiment-Driven Life, with a goal of tiying them in to my Think, Try, Learn work. (My original Edison experiment was use Google Alerts for "experiment" to promote TTL and Edison.)
I'll post my first one shortly, but I wanted to share here a few candidate category patterns that *might* be in what's reported in the news. Following are a few very rough groupings that I've noticed. Comments always welcome!
Sunday, November 21, 2010 at 1:54PM Self-correction is a sign of intelligent behavior.
From yours truly.
Examples: Admitting what you're trying is not working, and then changing direction. Requirements: Humility, honesty. Thoughts?
Saturday, November 20, 2010 at 8:50AM [cross-posted from Quantified Self]
A reader over at my blog shared the NYT article Wandering Mind Is a Sign of Unhappiness, which reports on research by Killingsworth and Gilbert showing some surprises about distractedness. (My take: First, the least surprising result may be that the world's happiest activity is reproduction. Second, almost half of the time we are not focused on what we're doing, and this makes us unhappier.) The timing of this report is perfect given Ian's recent Self-Tracking Tools post, where he talks about the Track Your Happiness project that the scientists used, along with supporting mobile apps and tools. The study is well-reported, so I'll riff on it from two perspectives: How do we combine the results with self-experimentation to be happier? and What are the wider implications for citizen science and an experiment-driven life?
The article quotes Killingsworth as saying "We see evidence for mind-wandering causing unhappiness, but no evidence for unhappiness causing mind-wandering." I see this as good news, because if the results hold true then we can use the directionality to be happier: wander less by focusing more on the task at hand. This is a popular time management topic (along with her sister, continuous partial attention), but let's take an experimental attitude and ask how our quantified self work can give us some practical tools. (There are benefits to mind-wandering, but my focus here is on the value of staying focused.) A few ideas:
The second thing I took away from the study was how lovely an example it is of a large application of collecting personal data. This is a natural use of mobile technology - something that we all appreciate here - and the collaboration between scientific study and personal informatics will continue to gain momentum. I like the promise that Urban Atmospheres describes:
However, this kind of citizen science model (see this introduction from NSF) is still focused on expert researchers calling on us for data, and then sifting through the results to support (or disprove) professional theories. I think the next step beyond that is to move from citizen science to citizen researchers. My personal work is creating the principles, practices, and tools so that not just Harvard researchers but anyone with an idea to test can set up experiments that motivated self-trackers can participate in. And these would apply not just to health, but to all aspects of the human condition, such as the potential relationship above between wandering minds and happiness. In other words, citizen science writ large: DIY science + crowd sourcing + statistics?
I'm curious:
