Welcome to the IdeaMatt blog!
My rebooted blog on tech, creative ideas, digital citizenship, and life as an experiment.
2010-11-29: They did WHAT?
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:
- Don't be afraid
- Finally, just do it and have fun.
- Never get caught up in a recipe. You can improvise, add, substitute something else.
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!
New blog series: They did WHAT? Experiments and Ideas from the World Wide Lab
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!
Sports
- Time to Pull the Plug in the Chad Henne Experiment in Miami
- Bills' Toronto experiment falling short of expectations
Government
- Our Turn At The American Experiment : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR
- REAGAN: Congress should repeal 'Obamacare'
- A U.S. Cap-And-Trade Experiment to End
- The Tea Party experiment comes up short in NJ
- Anglo-French experiment is good for EU
"Real" science
- NASA Funded Experiment Selects Coraid for Its Antarctic Mission
- Arizona Researchers Experiment with 'Star Wars' 3D Holograms | News & Opinion | PCMag.com
- Fermilab Experiment Hints At Existence of Brand-New Elementary Particle | Popular Science
- Fusion makes major step forward at MIT through studies of the plasma edge
- 'Kids In Micro-G' Program Seeking 2011 Science Submissions - Space News - redOrbit
Personal
- Navigating teen years requires making space to experiment <- PARENTING?
- Kinect For A Healthier Life - An Experiment In Weight Loss - Platform Nation
- An Experiment in "Thankfulness"
- UNH professor furnishes entire home for $1,000 - BostonHerald.com
Art and entertainment
- Garry Shandling recalls the 'lab experiment' that was 'The Larry Sanders Show' - latimes.com
- The Hindu : Arts / Art : An experiment with nail art
- Evanescence To Experiment On New Album, Drummer Says
- The great expressionist experiment: theatre seizes the essence of life | Stage | guardian.co.uk
Business
- Did the Post's Election Twitter Experiment Work? - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic <- SOCIALn
- Experiment tests Volunteer honesty | The Daily Beacon
- How Amazon Speeds Up Economics Experiments - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic <- COOL!
- At Duke University, an experiment in community health care
- Citizen Economists » David Rand: Social Science experiments with Mechanical Turk
- Nexus One Failed. Yet Why Are There Rumours Of Nexus Two? | AccuraCast Digital Media News
- The Daily Maverick :: Analysis: The great Times UK paywall experiment and why we shouldn't learn from it
Social, environmental
"Self-correction is a sign of intelligent behavior."
Wandering minds, self-tracking, and citizen science
[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?
Using personal tracking to focus the mind
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:
- Objectify your wandering: I've found that applying our powers of scientific observation to ourselves helps to drain energy from the behavior. My thought is that capturing data about when our minds wander and then labeling it might get us back into the flow. A simple experiment is to just count each time your mind shoots off on a tangent. If you want to go retro (and get some tactile stimulation too), get an inexpensive mechanical hand tally counter. Just don't tell anyone here :-)
- Use triggers: The sampling that the study used is a kind of external stimulus that we could leverage to trigger a change. In this case you might simply set a periodic alarm that gives you an opportunity to check in with your thinking and adjust as needed. If you need a more organic reminder, try using events in your environment. One trick is to use a ringing phone to bring you back. The risk is that triggers can themselves be distracting and break our focus.
- Experiment! Because each of us is different, the ultimate truth of what helps you to focus is personal. This means you have to try stuff out to figure out what works for you. For example, an experiment you might try is literally snapping yourself out of mental wandering - see Unwanted Thoughts? Snap the Rubber Band! The idea is to train yourself to stay focused. A disclaimer, though: applying willpower in one area might sap it from another.
From self-tracking through citizen science to citizen researchers
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:
- Improve the science literacy of everyday citizens,
- Provide scientists with richer, finer-grain data sets,
- Increase grassroots participation in government and policy making, and
- Foster understanding and concern for our climate and environment
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:
- Did you participate in the Harvard study? What did you learn from the exercise? How did it change you?
- What experiments have you tried for pulling your focus back to the moment? How did they turn out?
- If you had a potential audience of 100,000 people, what experiments would you personally love to test?