MisEntropy

Why is it hard to fool children with magic?

Magician and author Alex Stone answers at Freakonomics ::

Part of it may have to do with the way children pay attention. As adults, we’re very good at focusing on one thing while ignoring subsidiary distractions. This is great for getting stuff done, but it also makes you susceptible to misdirection, because magicians are good at getting you to train the spotlight of your attention on one thing—the wrong thing—while doing something tricky in the shadows. Kids, on the other hand, tend to focus on more than one thing at a time—their attention is more diffuse—which may make them harder to fool. Moreover, kids are relatively free of assumptions and expectations about how the world works, and magic is all about turning your assumptions and expectations against you.

How nurture becomes nature

Peggy Orenstein, author of 'Cindrella Ate My Daughter', on neuroplasticity :

Consider language: We’re born able to make any sound but we lose the ability to make the sounds needed to speak other languages. In English-speaking culture, for instance, a lot of adults can’t roll their Rs. We were born with the ability to do so but that drops away. It’s not nature vs nurture – it’s how nurture becomes nature.

When humans cry, fall, learn to walk and learn to talk, we’re strengthening some neurons at the expense of others – the younger the child, the greater the effect. 

It isn't patent overload, it's a crowdsourcing opportunity

Slate reports on an initiative that uses crowdsourcing of prior art to defeat patent trolls :

"When companies are sued for patent infringement, or when they’re proactively protecting themselves from an infringement claim, they often hire a prior art search firm to look for related inventions. But such searches tend to be expensive—you usually need to hire researchers in many different countries—and not all that effective, because even professional searchers tend to miss a lot of stuff. More than a decade ago, a young patent attorney named Cheryl Milone had a flash of insight for solving this problem: “I wondered, instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, what if you could ask each piece of hay if it’s a needle?”

That might sound like some kind of riddle, but Milone’s insight has transformed patent litigation. In 2008, she foundedArticle One Partners, a firm that invites amateurs to look for prior art and rewards successful researchers with cash. Over the last few years, Article One Partners has helped hundreds of companies discover prior art to defend against “nonpracticing entities”—jargon for patent trolls—and to protect themselves in new areas of innovation."

And why does crowdsourcing result in better patent searches for clients?

"Milone cites several advantages. First, patent-search contests can attract researchers from all over the world, which is important because prior art found in any language anywhere on the planet is usually applicable in court. Second, because Article One’s search inquiries go out to a large crowd, there’s a good chance that someone in the group can solve a problem without needing to search for the solution. “That happens often, where people say, ‘Hey, I know the answer—I invented it,’ ” Milone says. Article One also encourages people of diverse professional and educational backgrounds to take part in its searches. “There’s a creative component—someone from a bio or pharma background might respond to a high-tech study, and they may come at the question very differently,” Milone says.

In September 2011, The Economist commented on impending patent reform in the form of the America Invents Act with this rejoinder :

"One of the biggest criticisms of the bill concerns the PTO’s funding, which some think should be increased so that the office can hire and keep the best examiners and so reduce a huge backlog of applications. Instead, Congress chose to multiply the alternative dispute-resolution procedures at the PTO, giving the office more work to do without a guarantee of more money. The result is a muddle as well as a missed opportunity."

It so happens that there's a way to incentivise researchers at the patent office without dipping into the public coffers (back to Slate) :  

"There’s also, of course, the money and the fame. Researchers who work in traditional patent search firms don’t get much recognition for their work; the legal business is, after all, a cloistered environment. Successful members of Article One’s community, meanwhile, are toasted on the site, and there’s a spirit of intense, friendly competition among the crowd. (Because of confidentiality agreements, members can’t work together to find prior art; they’re all competing against one another.) Winning a search will get you between $5,000 and $10,000. The company also pays out 5 percent of its profits to community members."

How marketing is reshaping childhood

Peggy Orenstein, author of 'Cindrella Ate My Daughter', on how our commerce-oriented culture is exploiting a developmental phase instead of supporting it :

"Whenever you group people into smaller categories, you sell more. One of the best ways to do that is by age. So they keep slicing smaller and smaller segments of childhood. Toddler was a marketing category before it became a developmental one.

The other way to segment a market is by sex. Baby clothing was white until modern markets realised they could increase sales by assigning different colours to different genders. Pink was initially assigned to boys because it was seen as a shade of red, which was associated with masculinity. Blue was assigned to girls because it was associated with the virtue of the Virgin Mary. It’s not clear when that switched.

But I can say that in the mid-1980s business began to refocus on market segmentation and that since then there’s been a magnification of gender differences. For instance, Fisher-Price made their brightly coloured telephone with wheels, which everybody had when they were little, in pink. They made a pink version of a popcorn popper, a pink version of the classic Little People Bus. At the Toy Fair in New York the Fisher-Price exhibit was broken into two rooms. The girls’ room had a pink banner over it that said, “Pretty, Colorful, Beautiful”. The boys’ room banner said “Power, Energy, Heroes”.  So there you had stark segmentation and the creation of differences where they didn’t need to exist.

There’s a real profit motive for heavily marketing gender difference. The idea is if you have a baby boy first you buy him a multicoloured set of toys and then when you have a daughter you buy everything again in pink or vice versa. Either way, you double your sales.

For girls, market segmentation intensifies the focus on appearance. You get spa parties for preschoolers, make-up lines for eight-year-olds and the Kardashianisation of adolescents. [Keeping Up With the Kardashians is a reality television show about five super-sexualised sisters.] All of that stems from marketers telling girls that, whatever their stage of life, there is a particular way that they’re supposed to look and define themselves. It’s very narrow, it’s generally unattainable but you can try to buy it for a price.

The two (opposing) aspects of a good translation

Edith Grossman on what makes a good translation : 

"There are two things, not in order of importance. One is: Does reading the translation move you to find out more about the original author and their work? The other is: Does the translation make you completely happy as a reader? Do you forget that it’s a translation and simply become involved in the fiction or the poem that you’re reading? In a way those two things move in opposite directions – one towards the original and the other towards the end result of the translation."

How to "conduct" creativity and innovation

On Mervin Kelly and the explosion of innovation he oversaw at Bell Labs :

"His fundamental belief was that an “institute of creative technology” like his own needed a “critical mass” of talented people to foster a busy exchange of ideas. But innovation required much more than that. Mr. Kelly was convinced that physical proximity was everything; phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Quite intentionally, Bell Labs housed thinkers and doers under one roof. Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing. Like an able concert hall conductor, he sought a harmony, and sometimes a tension, between scientific disciplines; between researchers and developers; and between soloists and groups.

ONE element of his approach was architectural. He personally helped design a building in Murray Hill, N.J., opened in 1941, where everyone would interact with one another. Some of the hallways in the building were designed to be so long that to look down their length was to see the end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings."

Einstein's greatest blunder

From a recent Economist article about the expanding universe :

"The cosmological constant is another thing first dreamed up by Einstein. On realising that the equations of general relativity allowed for the universe’s expansion (or, indeed, contraction), he added a parameter describing just such a constant in order to keep it from doing either. For all his notoriously counterintuitive predictions, an expanding universe was one he was not prepared to countenance, at least not in 1917, when he published his theory. After Edwin Hubble’s discovery 12 years later that other galaxies were indeed streaming away from Earth’s Milky Way backyard, Einstein dropped the tweak. No doubt miffed that he had not trusted his maths in the first place, he later called the cosmological constant his “biggest blunder”."

If the greatest scientist of our times couldn't/didn't trust his own math, what hope do the rest of us have?

There's a footnote to this though. Slate ran a piece today about how often has Einstein been proved wrong. Here's how the above story continues : 

"There’s a coda to this story. In 1998, astrophysicist Saul Perlmutter and others discovered that the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an accelerating rate. (The work won them the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2011.) The finding once again caused problems for Einstein’s calculations, and some physicists think that the best way to remedy them is to add a constant back into the equations. So Einstein may have been correct, although for the wrong reasons."