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Concept Frontier

30 FREE IDEAS 2018

30/12/2018

 
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Ideas are fun, interesting, and can create valuable changes to the world. To end the year at Concept Frontier, here are 30 free ones to use however you like.
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  1. Legislation requiring manufacturers to provide post-consumption collection and processing of all plastic packaging of their products post-consumption.

  2. An exercise machine involving resistance from a container slowly filling with water. Rather than adding plates to the bar, this increases muscle tension demand slowly.
    The purpose is to develop slow-twitch myofibril tissue, and the metric for gains are time under tension per rep, water weight reached per rep, and number of reps.

  3. A dipping sauce combining Chipotle sauce and Japanese mayonnaise.

  4. A website that publishes photos of people putting messages in glass bottles and lobbing them into the sea (with the website's URL written in the message or embossed on the bottle) for people who find the message to post on the same website and tell people where their message ended up.
    The bottle contains a positional tracking tab that charts ocean currents.
    The data is generated via this social game available to everyone to play.

  5. A test protocol in which participants are given the opportunity to buy one raffle ticket.
    Control groups:
    Group 1 is all participants who do not want to buy any tickets.
    Group 2 wants to buy a ticket but is told the tickets are sold out, and is therefore forced to keep their money.
    Group 3 buys a ticket but their money is handed back to them immediately after they purchase their ticket. They also get to keep the ticket.
    Group 4 is given their money back immediately after the raffle is called.
    Reactions of the group are measured by a mandatory questionnaire as to how pleased they are on a scale of 1-10 to have their money.
    The test is about how valuable the money they get back is at different stages: whether $10 is worth more earlier or later or at a particular point in the raffle process, to demonstrate the value of money relative to transaction events.

  6. A chemical that suppresses the swallow reflex! Allowing indulgence in delicious foods and chemicals (like Trans fats) without resulting blood-uptake after compulsive swallowing: Just chew, taste, and spit, like a monster.

  7. A household recycling processor that transforms waste plastics into standardised material used by any standardised 3D printer.

  8. Project marketplace.
    People are creative but lazy. There are billions of projects that people have started that never get finished. They take these things with them to the grave.
    Project Marketplace lets you sell partially developed ideas -- be it a book, and invention, an app, a tool, or a piece of art -- to any interested parties. They pay you what the IP is worth to them, and you sell either the full stake or a partial stake: the buyer acquires rights to theentire existing work as is, whatever form that's in. The buyer can develop it to completion or on-sell it as they please, without credit to the originator (or on-seller).
    This will provide a platform to sell your inventions, books, and illustrations that you’ve lost interest in.
    And to give fans a pathway to purchase rights to intellectual properties they love.

  9. An app called Apollo that listens to what you say and (every x minutes, you configure it, or continuously) it Googles topics you’ve expressed an interest in, a question you have asked, (based on an machine-learned ability to detect topics by keywords, also referencing your search and browsing history if you allow it) and at any stage you can say a voice command (like "What do you think, Apollo?" and your phone will read you something off Wikipedia (or a list of websites you like that you have preset) to contribute to any conversation.

  10. An easily-adjustable box that allows you to configure its three dimensions: it allows you to check the 3 dimensional space an object will use before you buy it, to see if it actually works as you imagine it would.
    Packs down flat to store out of the way.

  11. Income inequality app. Share a percentage of your income with a person in poverty to actually take direct corrective action against income inequality.
    Choose between one or more local recipients and global recipients.

  12. A platform that matches you with local people to meet and discuss a topic of your choice, for free or for a fee.

  13. Experiment: create a measure for imagination.
    Give participants a problem, and a set of constraints and ask them to write down as many distinct solutions as they are able to make.
    Score based on the number of solutions, circumvention of constraints, and outside contact points (e.g. if a tool, method, or other solution component isn't specified in the constraints, and the participant mentions it in a solution, this is counted toward their imagination score). Solution simplicity and complexity and pattern should also be included in the scoring mechanism.
    Note: imagination has no upper limit: each metric is simply a distinct count -- only in this way can responses be comparative: e.g. participant A produced 30 solutions and 3 extra-constraint components. Participant B produced 13 solutions, with 50 extra-constraint components.

  14. A free, open source, standardised rehabilitation programme for convicted criminals in prison that they can voluntarily opt into during their prison term. Participants complete course work and cognitive behavioural conditioning to transform problematic thought processes through use of cognitive training techniques for the formation of healthy and safe information-processing habits.

  15. An app that uses the accelerometer on your phone to determine how you're moving and outputs videogame sound effects based on certain actions. Maybe running makes an echoing step sound, walking makes a soft crunching, jumping has a springing sound. You can choose your own sounds from a menu, and toggle the whole thing on or off easily.
    The point is to make movement more fun.

  16. A web app that scans any article online and produces the 3 most valuable pieces of information based on sentence structure and verb analysis rules.

  17. Naptent: A car park service that rents out portable vehicle tents for drivers to cover their cars for privacy and sleep. Comes with an optional wakeup service and full car park security.
    This service commodity is intended for reducing road deaths and collisions, supporting the vision of the New Zealand Transport Authority

  18. App concept: That's Enough.
    An app that detects and forms a list of all the user's apps. The user configures by selecting those apps in their phone that they use to waste time (i.e. for low-cognitive-effort breaks, like Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or Chrome).
    The app thereafter runs automatically, throwing a "That's enough!" message when you've been screwing around in one of those apps for too long.
    You tap to close the message (it won't kick you out of other apps) but it gives you an automated time management check point that's especially useful if you're supposed to be studying or working.

  19. App concept: Hour Yell. An app that shouts out the time every hour in my voice. "Two o'clock!"
    Users can record and upload their own voice files in the app for anyone to use.

  20. Legislation requiring all food products to contain (or to cite a web page containing) details of where every raw ingredient originated, location of every supplier and processor, transport distances, fuel types, and location of transport providers.
    No production costs or companies need to be named, preserving all appropriate trade secrets, while empowering consumers to make informed consumption choices.
    The point is for consumers to have some knowledge about what they're putting into their bodies.

  21. App concept: Otherside messaging service.
    Users who have lost a friend or family member can sign up and upload a bunch of idioms and sayings that their loved one used to say to them, including a list of nicknames they would use, and profile photos of the deceased.
    The service sends the recipient a message to their verified phone number, (to avoid abuse) one message per day, matching one item from the list of sayings (or a generic one like "I'm proud of what you're doing with your life"), one item from the nicknames list (including the recipient's own first name), and with a photo from the list.
    The effect is receiving a lifelike depiction of the loved one you miss to feel like they are still here and reachable.
    The service allows message back, so you can talk to your loved one and have a sense of dialogue even though they are gone.

  22. Shut App Your Face. You open it, and tap the screen. Your phone says "Shut up" from a randomly selected sound file, each in a different voice.
    Input: user taps screen.
    The sequential commands are:
    1. The screen highlights/fades to visually indicate the user has tapped it
    2. It "randomly" generates a number between 1 and N (N = the highest fileID number in the DB table
    3.  It sends an HTTP 'GET' request to the DB to retrieve the sound file corresponding to the fileID
    4. It plays the file through the device’s speaker
    5. It closes the app (this feature can be disabled in settings)

  23. Guitar seam leggings.
    A pair of leggings with five raised seams the diameter of guitar strings down the inside of the leg. Strum her leg like a guitar when she rests it on your lap.
    Matching guitar fret socks.

  24. App concept: Phoney
    The app that gets you out of anything.
    To use it you simply tap once to generate a fake call serving pre-recorded dialogue from a demanding relative or "your doctor" telling you that you need to be somewhere and do something right now, it's urgent and important it can't wait. It's loud enough for the content to be heard by those nearby, and is demanding and shouting and scripted so you can respond any way you like and the caller's belligerence will come through and make semantic sense no matter what you do.

  25. A bookmark sticker you just stick in the front cover. It's a circular card with a window and a rotatable wheel of card underneath. You turn it until it matches the page number you're on.
    Benefits:
    Twice as accurate as a normal bookmark which only marks a 2 page spread, not a single page.
    Adheres to the book: never misplace your bookmark.
    Mark important page numbers in the bookmark without dog-earing or writing on the book.

  26. A high-end cleaning service to forensically sterilise all surfaces in an environment. Optionally provides pre- and post-clean forensic reports for comparison, to enable you to see exactly how thorough the cleaners actually were...

  27. Science Snacks. A brand of snack food which has colourful and informative explanations with diagrams on all compounds in the food and how they interact with the body during chewing, absorption, and cellular action.

  28. A velcro wrist strap between pram and pram-pusher, like on a surfboard, so the pram can't roll away if you lose grip on it for a moment.

  29. A non-toxic foam football with instructions printed on it to take a selfie holding it, post on social media with a particular hashtag, and throw it onward into your North, West, East, or South neighbour's yard.
    Contains a geotagging internal chip for tracking purposes.

  30. Rapping paper: gift wrapping paper with lyrics from licensed rap songs on it.

Bonus idea!
The Fame-O-Meter 

A web crawler that analyses and scores an individual’s social media influence. It does this by identifying their social media accounts, total exposure across different social media platforms, their total follower counts, and any matching public profiles across the internet, and the exposure of those.
It display’s any individual’s fame level on a bell-curve chart drawn from all individuals for whom it has performed this analysis.

Thanks for learning!
​Michael

What happens when you pay employees more than minimum wage?

29/8/2018

 

A parable of two restaurants

In capitalism, the purpose of a business is to maximise profit. 

A business may have other purposes (e.g being indefinitely sustainable, having a positive effect on human life, improving soil fertility) but secondary purposes do not exist without the primary purpose of profit maximisation.

Despite the simplicity of the single dollar metric defining profit, there are multitudes of variables that affect it. The state of the economy, access to consumers, legislation, geography, advertising, business longevity, debt, credit, competition, innovation, access to technology, supply chain, rent, and expenses such as paying employees – all these factors, and many others, impact a business's profit. 

Because almost all businesses use humans acting as decision makers, often profit maximisation is far from optimal. Businesses that may not have access to large-scale data analysis must make decisions based on limited data. These decisions are vulnerable to human error. This can and does compromise profit.

A common and much discussed form of human error arises in cost minimisation. Specifically in the cost of employee wages, simplistic cost-minimisation logic may be used: 
  1. I want my profit maximised.
  2. I need to minimise costs. 
  3. I will pay employees minimum wage. 
  4. This will avoid money being wasted by paying employees more than the necessary amount to get them to work. 

The appeal of this logic is its simplicity. But by focussing on money paid to employees, it ignores other directly relevant variables such as the financial benefits of employee retention, recruitment costs, training costs, and the cornicopia of brand and indirect revenue benefits of having loyal, long-term, passionate, happy staff who want to work and who will go above and beyond their resposibilities to ensure the business succeeds. 

The parable below illustrates the variable of employee wages in a comparison between two small business owners; one who focusses on wage cost minimisation, and another who welcomes the complex value generated by well paid employees. 

Thanks for learning!
Michael 

The content below this line has been published with permission from contributing author Richard Neate 

Business 1
Business 2

Proprietor: Michael Manager

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Mike’s Place!

Proprietor: Lisa Leader

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Lisa’s Place
​Mike and Lisa are opening identical restaurants in Smalltown. They will have the only two restaurants in town.
 
Both have 30 tables. Both need 12 staff. Both serve similar food, of similar quality for the same prices.  The only difference is:
Mike is an excellent manager. He understands that business success come from maximizing income and minimizing costs.
Lisa is a leader. She trusts that if she builds a good team and looks after them everything will turn out OK.
​Both restaurants are in the high street of Smalltown, and both are the same size. Therefore, their property costs are identical.  Ingredients and décor must match their place in the market, so their costs are identical, except for wages:
Michael knows there will be a steady stream of young people keen for work so he only pays the minimum wage.

Therefore, his weekly staffing costs are:
  • ​12people x 40hours x $16.50 = $7,920
Lisa likes to get the best people and look after them. She also has to be careful with money so pays the living wage at the start.
​
Therefore, her weekly staffing costs are:
  •  12people x 40hours x $20.55 = $9,840

SCORE

​+$1,920
+$0
​On average, 40 groups of people go out for dinner in Smalltown.  Therefore, during their first few weeks they both average 20 covers each. BUT.....
Mike’s staff aren’t as good as Lisa’s. Because Lisa is paying more, she gets the best. Mike’s staff don’t like Mike very much because they can see how much money he makes and yet he pays them as little as possible. What does this mean?
​Mike gets more breakages because his staff don’t really care, maybe ten plates, glasses, etc per week, say $100.
 
Mike’s staff also make more mistakes when taking orders and prepping so he wastes a couple of items a night. 2 items @ $10 x 7 nights = $140
Lisa sells more ‘extras', an extra drink, dessert or side, because her staff care and try and help the business.

​Maybe one item at $5 per table per night = $5 x 20 x 7 nights.

SCORE

-$240
​Mike’s staff take more sick leave because they aren’t committed.  1 day each per year.  Equivalent to 0.25 days per week, cost $16.5 x 8 x 0.25
+$700
Lisa’s staff are a good team and cover each other so they manage when one of them is away so they don’t pay a temp to cover. Say, 1 day per month, 0.25 days a week x 8 x $20.55

SCORE

-$33
Mike has to watch his staff like a hawk and has to do his paperwork when the restaurant is closed. 8 extra hours at $20
+$41
Lisa can trust her staff so can have the odd night off or do other tasks while at the restaurant.

SCORE

-$160
+ More free time
Mike’s staff retention isn’t great.  Average retention is 6 months.  Mike needs a replacement every 2 weeks.
  • Interviews: 2hrs @ $20 = $40 = $20/week
  • Job ad: $50 = $25/week
  • Training time 4hrs @ $16.70 = $66.8 = $33.4/week.
Lisa’s staff retention is 2 years.

She doesn’t need to advertise because everyone who works for Mike would rather work for her. So she gets to pick the best staff in Smalltown.

SCORE

-$78.4
+$0
​Both restaurants have been trading for 3 months now.  If we look at the scores, we see that Mike is winning at the moment – in monetary terms at least.  But Lisa is happier and works fewer hours.
 
But now the restaurants are starting to build their reputations.  Lisa’s staff are happier, they care more about the business, and this all means that they are better with the customers.

PROFIT TOTALS SO FAR

$1408.6
$741
Wind the clock forward…
​Mike’s staff costs stay the same:
 
12people x 40hours x $16.50 = $7,920
Lisa likes to get the best people and look after them so she starts to pay senior staff more.  Her average rate goes up.
 
Therefore, her weekly staffing costs are:
 
12 people x 40 hours x $25 = $12,000

SCORE

+$4,080
​+$0
Well done Mike! $4 grand a week!
​On average, 40 groups of people still go out for dinner in Smalltown.  But now Lisa is getting better reviews and building more customer loyalty:
​Mike’s averaging 18 tables a night at $400 per table=
 
7 x 18 x $400 = $50,400 a week
​Lisa is averaging 22 tables a night at $400 per table=
 
7 x 22 x $400 = $61,600 a week

SCORE

+$0
​Mike has to work really hard:
  • He’s there all the time because he can’t trust his staff.
  • He’s doing more recruiting
  • He’s really stressed
  • Envy of Lisa is burning him up.
+$11,200
Lisa is having fun!
  • She gets the odd night off
  • She has a deputy manager who shares the load
  • Her staff love her
  • So do her customers
And Lisa is making much, much more money every week.
The trend will continue. Lisa will get better reviews. She’ll get a better share of the 40 locals but also a few visitors and they’ll pick the place that looks to be humming and has the best reviews. She’ll probably continue to increase her staff wages which might costs a bit more but...
Wind the clock forward another year…
​Mike’s staff still costs stay the same:
 
12people x 40hours x $16.50 = $7,920
​Lisa is sharing the love around and is now paying an average of $30 an hour.
 
Therefore, her weekly staffing costs are:
 
12people x 40hours x $30 = $14,400

SCORE

+$6,480
Well done Mike! $6½ grand a week, but:
​On average, 40 groups of people still go out for dinner in Smalltown.  But now Lisa is getting better reviews even in National and international websites and has a big and loyal customer base because her staff do such a good job of looking after them:
​Mike’s now averaging 15 tables a night =
 
7 x 15 x $400 = $42,000 a week
​Lisa is averaging 25 from locals and 2 visitors = 27 tables a night =
 
7 x 27 x $400 = $75,600 a week

SCORE

+$33,600

FINAL PROFIT TOTALS

$42,000 a week
$75,600 a week
WINNER

​GAME OVER!
Lisa wins hands down.

Lisa is thinking of opening another restaurant…

The DORVA Scale: Measuring human emotion

3/11/2017

Comments

 
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The DORVA Scale of Emotional Response Scoring is a system for self-reported emotional response measurement that generates fast, reliable, and consistent quantitative data on your emotional responses to stimuli.

Let's start by taking a look at the scale itself. 
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Intention and usage of this tool 

  • The DORVA scale is intended to be a simple, fast, and affordable means of producing self-reported data to measure the positivity or negativity of a human subject's emotional experience in reaction to external stimuli. It's terrific for self-examination, but also suitable for documenting the emotional experiences of study participants (including your study of yourself, if you like spreadsheets!). 

  • While self-reported DORVA data has the benefit of being self-descriptive (i.e. a value of “repulsion” is as simple as recognising your own reflexive facial movements, unlike the results of repulsion as returned by brain scanning feedback imagery), DORVA isn't recommended as a substitute for other data production means like EEG feedback, fMRI scanning, and other emotion self-reporting models. ​Data should be obtained from all available sources. 

You'll notice the chart doesn't list the full spectrum of human emotions.

​That would be a big chart! Especially considering emotions can and routinely do occur in complex combinations; not just one at a time!

What the chart offers is a spectrum of emotional intensity to help record emotions based on their perceived severity in the moment in which they are experienced. For this reason, documenting emotions when they are felt is crucial: memory, even immediate-short-term memory, introduces too much of an error margin due to our propensity to compare how we felt about a topic to how we felt about another topic using pseudo-logic: "I was distraught when my puppy was killed yesterday, but I must have felt more distraught when my parent died years ago, so I will rank my emotions relative to each other." When in reality there is no reason that such grief for both events shouldn't have registered at a -5 (abominable) in emotional intensity for both events, for example. 

Data recorded using the DORVA model doesn't cater to memory-alterations made in this way. 

The name of the model, DORVA, is just an acronym for the 5 scores on the negative side of the scale. When self-evaluating, remembering the name can make recollection of the measurement chart a little easier when experiencing intense negative emotions. 

The emotions listed in the chart and their defining characteristics are a usage guide only. Grief, for example, could be felt at an intensity score of -4 (Vile) without any desire to punish or cause suffering. Sincere joy could be felt at an intensity score of 3 (Joyful) without any sensation of warmth. Individuals feel emotions differently, have different physiological predispositions to causative hormones like dopamine and cortisol, and are capable of complex emotion combinations. When recording DORVA data, getting each datum exactly "right" according to the description in the chart not as valuable as logging your data as close to the time it's experienced as possible with your honest evaluation of your emotion.

This is not a perfect tool for measuring emotions. But generating any data set of emotional experience, even with an unknown error margin, is going to provide more valuable insight than undocumented observational, memory-based reflection of emotional experiences. That's the whole point of the DORVA scale! To give you a readily accessible quantitative look without any more sophisticated equipment than notebook or spreadsheet.

Next, let's talk about how you can use it. 

How to create your emotion data

Draw a chart with these columns entitled: Date, Time, Location, Event description, and DORVA response. 
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If you have a smartphone with Google Spreadsheets on it, you can use that. Otherwise a notebook you carry often would be suitable. Here's a template.
Record your data however you wish. Some recommended methods for producing data are below. 

Baseline data: Every day when you wake up (and/or before going to bed) record a DORVA entry. This will show your emotional baseline when you start the day. It can be useful to compare this to how you end the day! (See Using your data below)

Event data: Every time you feel a strong emotion, and successfully remember to record it, and make the choice to record it... make a DORVA entry. This is a powerful way to see the range of your emotional intensity. It can also indicate a possible positive or negative bias. 
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Using your data

Each month or frequency of your choice, review your data representing key parts of your emotional experience. Below are some recommended considerations for analysing your data to produce useful and actionable insights. 

Produce an average on what your general baseline emotional state is. How do I feel about this? Do I want to improve it?

​Review baseline data
Recording your baseline is a key way to see how your emotions have changed over time. If you make an entry every day for years, you may notice a difference or no change at all. But even over a period of a few weeks you can spot differences. What has changed in your life that could explain these? What other changes could you make that could get you waking up happy every day? 

If you record your waking and bedtime emotional state most days, you will be able to compare these trends. Is either or both changing, or are they static over time? Are they the same emotional state?

​Do you generally end the day on a more positive or negative emotional point than you began it? Why might this be the case? Is there a standout recurring difference on a particular day of the week, or between work days and days off? 

What days have you had the happiest wake-up and bedtime? What days were the worst? What can you do differently to wake up and go to sleep feeling consistently contented and happy? 

Review event data

Do you have records of major emotional events multiple times a day? Do you have them only some days or seldom? Are they in some places or anywhere? 

Do you consider yourself an optimist, a pessimist, neither, or both? Which would you rather be?

Does the data show you have more strong negative emotional reactions than positive ones throughout a typical day? 

Think about changes you might like to make to your outlook, if any. How will you achieve those? 

Do you consider yourself a particularly emotional person? Does the frequency or intensity of emotionally significant events meet your expectations or surprise you? In what ways? 

What significant positive events happen regularly in your life. Who are they with? Where do they happen? How might you create more of this positivity?

Do any significant negative events happen regularly in your life? What can I do to change the cause? Do you also want to change your emotional response to that cause? How will you do that?
As you can see from this exercise, these questions are very inward focussed. They are excellent questions to reflect on your life and choices at any time. The advantage of involving DORVA in the mix is that you no longer need to rely on a vague amalgamated feeling built up over time, or specific memories (reconstructions) of individual events and how you think you felt at the time. You can rely on the data which is a reflection of the actual intensity that you honestly felt at that time, and make a more informed evaluation of your emotional experience that will better inform any changes to your life that you want to make. 

And you can completely trust the data source, because it is an honest reflection of your emotional journey and forms part of the record of your life. Now that's something to feel good about. :)

Thanks for learning! 
Michael 
Comments

Concept Giveaway: 30 Free Ideas 2017

4/6/2017

 
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Here are 30 ideas, for free, fun, or profit. Basically for you to use however you want.

  1. An events website (Meetup, Facebook, EventFinda, and every other event content aggregator should steal this) whereby once users sign up, looks at their device's location data (if the user gives the application permission, and location services are active) and calculates when to send the person a reminder based on how long it will take them to get to the venue from where they are using public transport (via a Google or Waze API for the journey planner feature).

    This software just brings existing data together in a way that's helpful to users with more interesting things to think about than when to do stuff.

  2. Snack Roulette: an app that orders food from a randomised local vendor. Delivery, pick up, and eat out options are available. The user simply authenticates their credit card details, sets their maximum budget for the meal and number of eaters, is informed how many options there are, hits confirm, and then receives the result which is automatically billed. The delivery option comes with the surprise of seeing who comes to the door and with what.

  3. Weight guesser: an app that estimates a person's bodyweight when you point your phone's camera at your reflection. Users train (or try and screw with) the app's machine learning by entering the correct value, if known. 

  4. Memory fibres in a necktie, that remembers it's folds once you train it.

  5. A collapsible drinking cup.
     
  6. Moisture wicking shoelaces, to dry your shoes while you wear them.

  7. A lexicon of new words to accurately describe flavour and flavour combinations.

  8. Modular language components for easy general production of new words that are self-describing.

  9. A shirt with an invisible wax coating on some of the fibres so that when you sweat, the darkening of the unwaxed fibres shows an image.

  10. Psychometric testing data analysis to correlate project success rates and ROI with certain personality traits, to quantitatively measure company values.

  11. An app that uses the camera and optical character recognition to parse and save the information on a business card into your address book so you only have to photograph the card, not type anything.

  12. An attachment for table legs that doubles as a decorative floor protector and a precision height adjuster. Your antique wooden table never need wobble, no matter how warped the wood gets over time.

  13. An app that displays a cell network coverage heat map: you can see how many bars you'll have at any place before you go there.

  14. An API for the cellphone coverage heatmap app above which serves data to your route-finder app (like Waze) and warns you before your journey that there will be lost or diminished coverage where you're going.

  15. Measure the minimum distance at which people can sit beside each other facing the same way without being able to legibly see each others mobile device screen, and mark that distance as "privacy distance" at train stations and other public places so it's easy for people to be systematically courteous of each other. 

  16. Two positional sensors attached (or inbuilt) to a monitor that enable monitors to triangulate their positions in relation to each other and automatically configure seamless mouse cursor movement between screens that aligns with the monitors' actual positions in space.

  17. An app that let's you and another user have on your screen a frame showing what's on the other person's screen (minus the frame!).

    Ideal for showing loved ones (or researchers) your screen and content habits.

  18. A background app that lets you record all activity on your phone into a compressed video file that you can refer to later or access remotely, to provide an evidence-based way to know if your phone has been messed with.

  19. A background app that lets you record from both cameras into a compressed video file. An ideal way to document the life of your double-chin.

  20. Public dashcam app that lets you put a live feed of what your car's dashboard mounted camera sees onto the Internet. With an app that lets people view it.

  21. An app like Flightradar24 but which shows all planes, trains, buses, ferries, and other publicly transmitting vehicles, anywhere in real time.

    An additional feature that lets you tap any vehicle and see a dashcam/cockpit live video feed, if available. 

  22. A company with total transparency, automatically Tweeting or publishing business insights as they’re derived from data.

  23. A machine-learning behaviour analysis app that learns via the accelerometer, tilt, and cameras the minutiae of the user’s phone position when in use or in your pocket or bag, and automates features like locking, launching apps, and turning apps on and off according to your usual behaviour.  

  24. GPS for buses - takes users’ positional data and use of journey-planning software and gives bus drivers a dynamic mini-map of nearby bus users who may be likely to board the bus. This feature reduces missed bus trips for users by enabling more informed driver discretion on whether or not they can and should wait for close-running passengers to board before leaving each stop. 

  25. A cochlear insert that voices positive thoughts to the user. Can be set off, to a frequency, or reactive contextual mode using software that determines – via Bluetooth to the mobile device – location, time of day, and inferred activity.

  26. Shirt and trouser pockets tailored to the exact measurements of your device and wallet and keys.

  27. A mass producable, wearable electrocardiogram hardware plugin for smartphones.

  28. Mechanically compactable public trash cans that let a helpful populace fit more trash in.

  29. Data driven ubran planning in industrial parks to plan food vendor availability and revenue by evaluating the number of personnel per area, food suprlus margins, and anonymised individual user habits to feed everyone, minimise waste, and maximise consumer satisfaction.

  30. GPS that factors in the weather by correlating past weather conditions with past traffic patterns, and outputs driving advice per driver factoring in advice it gives to all drivers, to mastermind the traffic network and avoid replacing organic traffic congestion with app-coordinated traffic congestion. 

  31. GPS that that lets you mark and record intersections, roads, and suburbs that you wish to avoid so you never get routed through a place you don’t want to go. ​

Acrocentricity: Why You Think “Higher” Equals Better

3/5/2017

 
Acrocentric
ADJECTIVE;  equating elevation with worth
‘an acrocentric description of the surgeon's skill is that she is at the top of her profession'

This article is about our linguistic trait, in English, of arbitrarily viewing the concept of elevation to be inherently synonymous with positivity (including the opposite, where descent is made synonymous with negativity).
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We speak as though 'Up' equals 'Good'...

“To be thought of highly.” “High quality.” "Elevated status." "Higher public profile." "High prices." “Highly recommended.” "Above and beyond the line of duty." "Having one over on the other guy." "Top scientists." "Highest honour." “To be at the pinnacle of ones career.” “To heighten the risk.” “Heightened senses.” “Upwardly mobile.” “High salary.” "The top of her field." “The top of his game.” "Highest ranked." "Upper management." "Top of the line." “The upper end of the quality spectrum.” "High socioeconomic status." "Get over it." "Highly recommended." “To climb the ladder of success.” "Up and coming." "The highest honour I can bestow." “To take the high ground on a matter.” "High marks." "A higher life." “To have peaked in life.” “To be held in uppermost esteem.” “Lofty ambition.” “Uplifting news.” “A high-end establishment.” “To lift someone up.” “Head of department.” “Elevated status.” “To climb the ladder of success.” “High on life.” “Top professionals.” “The upper class.” “Reaching the upper limit.” “Lofty ambition.” Even "Top of the food chain" and "Apex predator" use height to describe the success of an entire species!

The concept is implicit in popular inspirational quotes: "Your
attitude determines your altitude."

The are countless depictions of Heaven or Paradise as on a plane, physical or spiritual or both located above the plane of the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere: “The Lord above.” “The man upstairs.” “Heavens above.”

We also see very recent idioms adopting the old concept of acrocentricity into new concepts. Like the idea of “trolling at a high level.”

Despite their different subjects, all these examples share the attribute of using language that equates elevation with worth. (There are loads more, and I’d love to see examples you’ve used or encountered. Tag @autonomike on Twitter and use #acrocentricity and I'll add them to this article.)

...and as though 'Down' equals 'Bad'

We say things like this too:

"Bottom feeder." “That’s low.” “Downtrodden.” “You have to learn to crawl before you walk.” and even the term “To put someone down.” “To fall from grace.” “To be taken down a peg.” “To be laid low.” “Scraping the bottom of the barrel.” “To be “tread on” or “stepped over”. And of course depictions abound of Hell as subterranean, “down there”, below our feet, ever presently waiting for us to fail and fall. “It’s all downhill from here,” indicates a “descent” into an inferior circumstance, even despite the considerable biophysical realities of moving downhill consuming less energy than moving uphill.

There are many situations where elevation is not good – or downright dangerous. The fear of heights is one common example. The actual danger of heights is another. Yet humans can also have a rush of adrenaline and dopamine in response to such danger – a physical acrocentric response!

Contradictive idioms

As much as the English speaking language adheres to acrocentric concepts, we also say things that seem to contradict the established equation of height with worth. We say "he is scum" – scum being the uppermost layer on a body of liquid. Or “she has her head in the clouds” which is sometimes used to criticise a person for ambitious ideals. In contrast "down to Earth" is considered a virtue, to be grounded, realistic, and dependable. To be “deep” is to be profound, but in any physical sense the only things characterised by their depth are deep in a downward or laterally downward direction: an ocean, a cave, a mine shaft, a crevice, a tunnel, a chest freezer.

The non-universality of acrocentricity and upness

In our cosmos of space, there’s no universal “up”. There is a global “up” on a celestial body of any size, that simply means “outward, away from the centre,” but even that is self-contradictory; a person standing in Stockholm, and one in Auckland have completely opposite definitions as to what direction "up" actually is, since they each would be pointing out from different sides of the planet.  The global definition of "up" is really just a local definition that indicates a direction outward from a sphere such a sea or ground level. But in a universal sense that considers all of space, “up” is no more than a subjective perceptual concept developed by terrestrial beings with their eyes on the stars. Outward from the centre of the universe isn’t “up”; that would be “outward from the centre of the universe.” The conclusion here is that “up” only exists in the context of orb-dwelling life such as ours.

How can we explain our innate trait to equate 'Up' with 'Good'?

One way to justify the logic of the acrocentricity phenomenon is by considering a bar graph, such as one used to visualise stock price, where our y axis is monetary value, and x is time. If a stock is rising, it is becoming more valuable – if we own that stock then its elevation on the graph is subjectively positive to us since it is a profitable situation for us the owner of the stock. Easy? But if the stock is not owned, then elevation is negative because it denotes a profit opportunity on which one is missing out.
Regardless of whose viewpoint is used, an increasing stock price raises the point of value on the graph to correspond with a greater number in terms of its financial value. That word choice may be relevant to explaining acrocentricity: "greatness" is inherently associated with both size and positivity in the English-speaking parts of the world. The association of these two definitions for the word "great", although illogical in its lack of absoluteness (consider: you probably wouldn't describe a tumour as "becoming greater" as it grew bigger), nevertheless provides a simple etymological possibility for explaining our now deeply entrenched sense of acrocentricity:

"Good means great" > "Great" means "big" > "big" means "tall" > "tall" means "high" > so "high" therefore means "good".


In numerical terms it’s a bit clearer. A graph, be it of share prices or percentages or other values, depicts height (or 'upness') as being further along the y axis from zero, with zero marking the bisection with the x axis and the integer marking the y axis’s end at its furthest point from the bisection. To our human eyes, the y axis goes up and down. So we describe it that way: 6 is a “higher” number than 5 on that vertical axis. In fact 6 is a “greater” number than 5, which means bigger, which means taller, which means higher. Isn’t it interesting how we don’t call 6 a taller number than 5, but we would call it bigger, higher, or greater?

The arbitrariness of up

Set aside humans' arbitrary use of the arbitrary concept of elevation to denote worth, height is actually an arbitrary concept itself. It is purely contextual, and relies on having a very specific shape of a very large size to mean anything at all: specifically a spheroid of such a size that it can be considered a celestial body. "Up" only makes sense, as a direction, when it means "outward from the centre of an environmental spheroid." "Height" only makes sense as a position in context of the same: "Further outward than the subject from the centre of an environmental spheroid." So on a planet, the tape measure of a vertically standing pole is called its “height”. The same dimensional measure of the same object floating in space would be called its “length”.

'Up' as we know it only exists on spherical bodies; not cubes, cones, or hexagonal prisms. Since there's no height without an up against which to measure it, height too is a property of spherical bodies.


Since "up" means "out," and "higher" means "further out," what does this logical definition do to acrocentricity? Does “out” mean good? Does distance from a centre denote worth? Are nuclei bad, and the worth of orbits measured by their distance from them? Not generally. Outness, despite sharing its exact meaning with upness, doesn’t stretch to include worth. (Unless maybe you consider the phrase “that’s far out, man,” to be high praise.)

Talking acrocentrically

We say these things every day. But why do we say them? Why do we instinctively know what it means when we they say "high" and we hear "good"?

The concept of good being up and bad being down indicates that it’s a struggle, and a risk to advance compared to regress. Regression is often as easy as inaction or action: doing the wrong thing, or not doing anything when something needs to be done. This relates to the perpetual embrace of gravity, whereby for many of us our entire lives teach us that moving upward is a matter of concerted and coordinated physical effort which must be conducted just right, whereas moving downward can be as simple as letting go – and perhaps even fatal, if we were to fall too far.

PhD candidate and ecologist Joshua Thoresen considered the matter of acrocentricity during development of this article, and quoted to me Robert Macfarlane’s Mountains of the Mind:  

"Why do people feel the need to climb things? Mountains, rocks, cliffs?

This is the best answer I've seen to this question so often asked:

"The urge to explore space - to go higher - is innate to the human mind... The equation of height with goodness is embedded in our language and consequently the way we think. Our verb 'to excel' comes from the Latin excelsus, meaning elevated or high. Our noun 'superiority' in from the Latin comparative superior, meaning higher in situation... Conversely a clutch of pejorative words are associated with depth: 'lowliness', 'inferiority', 'base', dozens more. We construct our models of progress on a gradient. We move on up, or we sink back down. It is harder to do the former than the latter, but that makes it only more admirable. One does not, under any linguistic circumstances, progress down."
- Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind

It seems we should be asking not ‘why do you climb?’ But, ‘why don't you?’"

The anthropomorphic view

Homo-sapiens as a species is highly vision-reliant. Vision, for those of us fortunate to have it, is our primary sense, our primary means of obtaining information about the world: more so even than television, Google, any book, any map, any diagram. Indeed vision is what enables information to be obtained from these and many other sources. Including our environment.

Never mind internet searches, what about before all this visual technology and all these screens? What about back when homo-sapiens was a canny forebrained ape making its first ventures into the realm of technological advancement with a flat rock and pointed stick? Vision was all important then. Our eyes, at the front of our ape skulls just like our cousin species, are well adapted for hunting. Our night vision is excellent. Our prehistoric communities stood safe thanks to the watchful eyes of sentries who could spot any major threat and raise the alarm. Those sentries would have found that an elevated position -- atop a boulder, a hill, up a tree – afforded a superior view and the ability to see further than the mere ground allowed.

Specifically, spatial elevation affords humans increased visual information.

The further we are upward from the plane supporting us, the further around that plane we can see. The distance it affords allows for there to be more molecules for photons to bounce off and slam directly into the photoreceptor cells of our retinas at the back of our eyes. The more height we gain, the more photons go into the eye, and the more information there is for the brain to make sense and use of. Information is inherently valuable to humans. (I don’t need to tell you that! Look at your greedy eye-brain right now guzzling up all this delicious information.) Through our vision, a little height translates to greater volumes of visual information. Go high enough and you’ll see fully half of the planet!

In practical terms for the development of a species, the principle of ‘elevation = information’ has proven its value over millennia. Be it a forager surveying for a prime picking spot, a hunter searching for prey, a hiker trying to gain their bearings, a lookout in a crow’s nest scanning the horizon, a fort outpost overlooking hostile territory, a firewatch tower placed to monitor bush fire activity, no matter the application the equation remains: ‘Elevation = information’.

If you need to see stuff, higher is most definitely better.

The principle holds equally true today. You can test it right now by looking up from the device near your face to survey your environ. Behold, a slightly broader view of your environment; a larger span of visually-acquired information gained through the simple act of raising your eyes or your head or both at once.

Could this universal principle be the basis for acrocentrcity? I’m not claiming it is, because that would at least require a venture into other languages, which is the topic of a future article. But it does seem likely.

We should note here that in English, acrocentricity is independent of the visual aspect this explanation relies on. We don’t say “at the highest visual vantage point of ones career.” We say “at the height of ones career.” Perhaps vision is implicit. Or perhaps the principle of ‘elevation = information’ is a separate one to the linguistic phenomenon of acrocentricity. Make up your own mind.

Is acrocentricity healthy? Is it safe?

As a communication form, acrocentricity is an efficient language tool. Think how much easier it is to rely on “high” to convey a sense of worthiness, instead of actually describing how worthy you think the subject is and opening yourself up to semantic discussions where you’re asked to substantiate that evaluation of worth.
“The University has the highest reputation in its category.”

“The University has been rated as Reputable by 6 out of 10 survey respondents, compared to 5 and 1 for the other universities in its category.”

Bit of a difference. “Highest” conveys “Let’s not get into exactly how much better it is, OK?” It conveys less denotative information and a great deal more connotation. The second explanation is more useful for analysis. But the acrocentric explanation is more useful for conveying our feelings of the subject as if they are more than just our feelings.

In this way, it would be fair to call acrocentric language a form of Weasel Words.
Arbitrariness and resultant objective silliness aside, acrocentricity is a part of our language that there seems little point in wilfully trying to change. In my observation, we haven’t taken it to a harmful extreme: we don’t assume taller people have more worthy brains than shorter people, even though the brains and eyes of tall people are indeed “higher” than the rest of us. Most English speakers instinctively know the exceptions to acrocentricity, and when to apply them to what we say and the interpretation of what we hear.

Acrocentricity is here to stay. I haven’t finished plumbing ancient texts for instances of it, but at this stage the hypothesis is that the phenomenon is very old.

You might enjoy making a game of spotting acrocentricity when you come across it, or even pointing it out when you hear others discuss their "high" salary or their "elevated" social status. You might even challenge them to say more explicitly what they mean using language that doesn’t connotatively try to convey a sense of worth when all the speaker is really saying is how they personally feel about the subject. Insisting that ones organisation is of higher repute than ones competitors just means that the person thinks it has a better reputation than their competitors: acrocentric boasting offers no objective metric whatsoever. If you do point it out or challenge it when encountered, you might see people struggle to use denotative language, and resent you for putting them to cognitive effort they had tried to dodge by using such easy language. It is, after all, a phenomenon we English-speakers learn from the very outset.

Perhaps that’s the value of acrocentricity: an easy linguistic aid to sell our views on matters we don’t know how to describe in denotative terms.

It can be useful and interesting to be aware of, but there's really no need to get high and mighty about it.

Thanks for learning!
Michael

The limits of objectivity

26/10/2016

 
How do we seek to know the objective truth about a subject? Why, we seek evidence! We crave sources of information we can trust and therefore accept as the basis of the formation of new knowledge, opinions, beliefs, and convictions.

We want that evidence to be empirical! So we form protocols and controls and experiment to produce empirical evidence. Or we have others do it, and we learn from their work because we trust that they did it well and can check that to our satisfaction in their published literature, our peer review processes, and the credibility of the journals that take them, and the others that replicate their results.

Sometimes the empiricality of evidence gets questioned, by ourselves or by others.
"The researchers could have done this extra thing,” or “They should have controlled for this variable of interest to me."

The criticism centres on a lack of specificity in the evidence manufacturing process. Fair enough! Shouldn’t we be completely specific when manufacturing new evidence?
Specificity, after all, is the very basis of empiricality.

But the fact is (or is it a fact? It's observable and testable, but is it pure objective truth?) that no matter how exhaustively specific you are, you can always be more specific.

Test my claim if you like: Find or write any definition that you feel is an example of ultimate specificity, show it to me, and then concede the point when you see me make it more specific.

Even when you produce a definition that is as specific as you know how to be, that doesn't mean it is the most specific it's possible to be. Just because you’ve produced a definition that’s more specific than any other definition ever to exist, also doesn’t mean it is the most specific it’s possible to be – it’s merely the most specific definition that has ever existed so far.

Yet you have to use something for your evidence production. You can’t plumb the infinity of specificity for the rest of time to reach a theoretical endpoint before you begin your process of producing evidence. You simply reach a point of specificity that is adequate for you (or your stakeholders) and you move the work ahead, produce the evidence, and share the knowledge.

That’s an arbitrary point to reach. And it's determined purely by how satisfied we feel about the level of specificity we decide to use. 

Because of our inability to achieve ultimate specificity, evidence therefore can never be truly, objectively, empirical. It can only ever be empirical enough for an individual to accept and choose to consume.

The point is there's no bedrock of specificity; and therefore there is no ultimate form of empiricality.

Evidence is not either "empirical" or "nonempirical". It's only, ever, "less empirical" or "more empirical" in relation to other evidence.

All evidence we produce and consume and base our opinions and beliefs and convictions on is done by drawing our own arbitrary line in the infinite shifting sands of empiricality.

We each make the choice to accept evidence and to form opinions, beliefs, and convictions based on our own completely arbitrary threshold of acceptable empiricality.

Sometimes we sneer at others for having a threshold lower than ours, and polluting their beliefs with low quality information, or scoff at those with higher thresholds at how they damage their living experience with their closed mindedness.

That's embarrassing, because all our thresholds are equally arbitrary (and they change all the time, depending on how we feel and how badly we want to accept a piece of evidence).
Next time you learn something, take a look at how empirical your source was. If it was less empirical than other sources you learned from, ask yourself why.

What you learn about yourself in the process may not be empirical, but it might be useful to you.

And what better purpose could knowledge ever serve than that?

Thanks for learning!
Michael

7 steps to use the scientific method in lawmaking

22/10/2016

 
1. A bill is written and a case is made defining the expected benefits to society of the proposed law change, including specific metrics for measuring efficacy. Current data defining the problem the bill intends to fix is also provided. This is put before the law approvers to implement or reject.
2. The bill is passed and becomes law for a provisional period determined by the approvers.
3. The law change is communicated to the populace.
4. Data is accumulated using the stated metrics for the provisional period.
5. At the end of the provisional period the law is evaluated by the approvers. Did it measurably improve society in the manner expected, or did it make it worse?
6. The law is moved from provisional to permanent status, or is removed.
7. The result and the data on which it is based are communicated to the populace.

Concept Giveaway: 30 More FREE Ideas

1/10/2016

 
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This post is to thank Concept Frontier readers for coming to my website and learning what I have to offer. Here are 30 new ideas for you to do whatever you want with.

  1. A phone-compatible pressure sensor that reads blood circulation to your legs and tells you when you've been sitting still for too long.

  2. Memory-fibre shoelaces that always sit perfectly once tied.

  3. A smoke detector synced with a thermal camera to record data in an emergency.

  4. A company that pays all employees the same salary of $75,000 per year; reflecting the Princeton study that revealed happiness correlates with income only up to that amount.

  5. A notepad app that let's you find a citation on Google Scholar in-app and formats it automatically.

  6. A chat app widget that provides communication data for the people you chat with, that clearly shows you the times and days of the week they're most responsive.

  7. A workout record that examines your gains over time and projects future curves and recommended routines and timings.

  8. An analogue-dial belt buckle that you can adjust by the millimeter. Keeps your belly comfortable no matter how big your lunch was.

  9. A city initiative with kiosks allowing the public to trade illegal narcotics in their possession for the same weight in noopept, racetams, or other over-the-counter smart drugs, no questions asked.

  10. An auto-retracting headphone cable. Like a tape measure.

  11. Vending machine on a bus.

  12. A sturdier office chair with an incline sit-ups mode.

  13. Electronic pen attachment that gives you data about how you write: pressure, legibility, letter consistency, writing speed, and amount written per session.

  14. Modular cologne set enabling users to easily customise themselves a complex, unique library of scents.

  15. An electronic fabric tape measure that sends your measurements to an app. The app matches your measurements to sizes of clothes you browse online, and tells you what sizes and items will fit, without you ever having to think about it.
     
    Also! a carpenter's tape measure that sends measurements to an app that records the dimensions of materials in your project. The app uses that data to create a model of the project to more reliably confirm your timber lengths before you cut.

  16. A medical history app allowing you to easily share relevant parts of your medical history with other users. Makes hooking up safer.

  17. Subscription service weekly pizza deliveries, am I right?

  18. One tap camera and video apps: you point your phone, tap the app icon, and boom you're recording.

  19. An EMF reading device that detects and notifies you when cameras and microphones are active in the vicinity. (So you can stand up straight and look good even in paparazzi pictures!)

  20. Sensors on door and window thresholds that log data on bugs entering in and out.

  21. A heart rate app that measures your heart rate fluctuations during your date to let you know exactly how hard you fell.

  22. Legislation allowing complex placebos to be sold as supplements, offering claims of non-medical health benefits.

  23. An app with optical recognition that can isolate a person's outfit into garments from a photo, recognises patterns and colours, and offers style suggestions based on pre-programmed style rules.
     
    Bonus feature: the user can configure their own style rules, and specify colours, tones, and patterns they like.

  24. A drone-mounted water blaster for cleaning your roof without falling off the ladder.

  25. A study exploring the correlative and causative effect of housing density on urban sprawl, traffic congestion, and pollution per capita.
    (I'm going to do this one, so let me know if you start and I'll help your project instead of duplicating it - Michael)

  26. Long-range metal detector, capable of identifying concealed items from a distance.

  27. An English lexicon of new terms specifically for describing scents.

  28. An experiment showing the neurological effects of changing language to take responsibility for ones own state. Instead of "you made me feel," replaced with "the way I feel about that is."

  29. A thought-prompt generator app and website. Hit a button, get something to think about. If it's not interesting, hit it again.

  30. A browser plug-in that displays a side window containing a list of all information of being transmitted to and from the website when you're on it.

Thanks for learning!
Michael

How Human Behaviour Improves Civilisation

6/9/2016

 
Humans have a lot of defects. The Blame Reflex, and our innate "Us vs Them” pathology are two big ones. 

Our defects lead us to behaviours that aren't in civilisation's best interest, or even our own best interest. No single human's behaviour has been, or ever will be perfect. Every one of us behaves badly sometimes, as you might have noticed. 

Yet civilisation is improving. How is this possible?

Here's one explanation.

If you applied these 2 attributes – 'Good for the individual human', and 'Good for civilisation' – to all human behaviours in a big list, you'd wind up with four types of behaviour: 
  1. Bad for everybody (B)
  2. Good for the individual, bad for civilisation (GI)
  3. Good for civilisation, bad for the individual (GC)
  4. Good for everybody (G)

1. We agree on basic logic

Bad for everybody (B) and Good for everybody (G) are easy. We all agree behaviours that are good for everyone should be maximised, and behaviours that are bad for everyone should be eliminated. That’s a consensus, and a fundamental factor in civilisation’s improvement. But it’s not the only factor. ​

​2. Human productivity increases over time

Despite our innate defects, humans also have innate gifts. One of them is the compulsion to create. We create things, and we share them, and that's all wealth is: productivity. Human wealth production increases over time. Now, we're not as good at sharing that wealth as we are at creating it (take a look at income inequality) but we create wealth at an increasing rate nevertheless. Creating this wealth of new resources is a (G) behaviour (even though it has side effects we need to address, like the effect our prolific productivity has on our climate).

Our productivity creates not just goods and services, but tools that offer us opportunities to do entirely new productive behaviours. Consider how readily available computer coding is now, compared to its non-existence in the 1916's. Our productivity actually creates new (G) behaviours, and it happens all the time.
​

The effect of this trend to create more (G) behaviours is that there is an increasing ratio of behaviours that are good for everybody, and a much slower increase in the number of behaviours that are bad for everybody (B) – because nobody is busy thinking up new ways to do things that harm us all. (Although sometimes we get new (B)s as side effects of our productivity, like in that climate change point above).

This trend is huge. Our increasing ratio of (G) to (B) behaviours is another fundamental way in which civilisation improves inexorably. But that's not all! 

​3. The battle of “Me vs We” has only one winner

The complexity comes in when we look at the other two types of behaviour. (GI) and (GC) have an interesting convoluted interplay of their own.

(GI) behaviours are done by an individual. (GC) behaviours, however, are done by large numbers of individuals. As a result (GC)s are an overwhelmingly more powerful force in human development than (GI) behaviours. Wherever they are at odds, (GC) beats (GI) every single time.

When you do a behaviour that's good for you, but bad for civilisation (GI) – like steal a packet of chips from a shop – you gain something. This is basic resource exploitation: the environment has something you want, you compete with resource competitors (the shop owner, staff, legitimate customers) and try to get what you want from the environment without getting your teeth kicked in, or arrested, or overpowered and the precious chip resource taken off you by someone else, or being forced to pay, or otherwise not getting away with it. It's a high risk for a small reward. All (GI) behaviours carry risk. 

That's an example of (GC) behaviour (law-making, law-enforcing) defeating a (GI) behaviour (theft). One person versus an entire species? Such a conflict can have only one outcome: the victory of the species. “We” beats “Me” every time the two conflict.

The reason the risk of (GI) is so big is because other humans, and yourself included, manufacture that risk to discourage you from (GI) behaviours. If you were to buy the chips a (G) behaviour – good for everybody – there would be no risk. But there would be a small cost: the cost being far smaller than the risk of resource exploitation.

Where does the risk come from?

Remember I said we manufacture" risk for (GI) behaviours? We do it by writing and agreeing to laws, by electing officials whose policies align with the rules we want or can accept as creating risk against (GI) behaviours we don't like. This is politics, and politics is our means of sorting out, through trial and error, what behaviours are (B), (GI), (GC) and (G), and then writing rules for each of them. Murder is a behaviour that's mostly (B) and sometimes (GI). So we penalise it to try to make it always be (B) so people won't do it. We hate murder! We all need to not be murdered, so most of us are willing to give up murdering other people if they'll all agree not to ever murder us. Our consensus therefore generates a law against the murder behaviour, and the existence of that law manufactures an enormous risk for anyone doing it.

What we should note here is that this act of politics, law-making, arguing over who to elect is (GC) good for civilisation but bad for the individual. Bad? It's stressful and taxing to do! It consumes resources. An act of politics can, and routinely does, temporarily reduce a person's quality of life. People abuse and threaten each other over what they want to outlaw and what they want to allow. In other words we sometimes even resort to (B) behaviours (like threatening) in order to push our agenda to classify OTHER behaviours as (B) or (G) or whatever. It's a messy, sloppy, painstaking, slow, but absolutely inexorable game.
​

The outcome of politics has never been perfect. In fact there has never once been an outcome to politics, since it's a process that exists in a continuous state for exactly as long as humans exist. In very literal terms the only "political outcome" possible is humanity's extinction. Elections have outcomes, coups d'état and rebellions have outcomes, but politics itself simply marches on.

​4. Politics and human needs

The fact is, humans all have the same basic needs (though we fulfill them differently, we all share a need for oxygen, water, food, shelter, safety, etc. as mapped in the Maslow hierarchy). And because we have all the same needs, as individuals we can only bicker over how to fulfill those needs, and what needs to prioritise – which we as individuals base on the needs of our own that are not met. Consider all those security-obsessed people clamouring about government technology policy: do you think they feel secure? No, they do not, which is why they want their elected officials, corporations, and fellow humans to satisfy that need for them and everyone else more than they want to feed the starving. They’re not starving; as far as they’re concerned the food need is met! Security is their issue, because that’s their most pressing need not met. Such people instinctively known it's a need for everybody, so they talk about it in terms of everyone's best interest like the (G) it is. Then they feel threatened when people come at them talking about prioritising food for starving people  over the security issue they're pushing because they see it as a threat to their security. Politics, baby!

Because of this narrow scope of political conflict, progress is inevitable. We create and test and scrap and keep systems for enabling human needs. That's all politics is! The systems we use are always imperfect and often terrible, but they will continue to improve over time. That improvement is an inevitability, because human beings are just so compulsively productive.

Thanks for learning! 
Michael

10 Ways Harvard Writes Better Email Subject Lines Than Us

3/9/2016

 
Today Harvard Business Review (publishers of all manner of goodies at hbr.org) emailed me some sales material with the hardest-hitting subject line in the history of sales email subject lines. It was a thing of strangely cohesive abstract beauty, like Frankenstein's monster would be had he been sewn together from various and sundry chunks of Disney Princesses rather than local cadavers.

Here is Harvard Business Review's incredible email subject line:
Get 7 Free Gifts When You Subscribe and Save Up to 80%
That subject line is a rich vein of psychological sales gold. I counted 10 distinct psychological principles utilised in it. Maybe you can spot even more. Here are mine:
  1. Get (a verb that triggers the "what's in it for me" mentality from the outset)
  2. 7 (research shows people click numbered lists, as BuzzFeed will tell you)
  3. Free (English language's most effective buzz word)
  4. Gifts (another way of saying and reinforcing free, uses the power of repetition to sell)
  5. When (not if or should, but when to indicate certitude)
  6. You (personal pronoun, this is conversational language)
  7. Subscribe (your call to action power verb)
  8. and Save (second most effective buzz word)
  9. Up to 80% (a statistic, triggering a sense of measured credibility)
  10. (Bonus psychological principle: Jaden Smith Style First Letter Capitalisation Catches The Eye Like A News Headline!)

This is email list marketing at it's most thoroughly researched and deviously influential. I am richer for the experience.

If you'd like to learn more about how human psychological principles are veritably milked for their applications in clickbait, here's a clever one from Wired.com:

You’ll Be Outraged at How Easy It Was to Get You to Click on This Headline

Thanks for learning!
Michael
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