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"In the world of menu engineering and pricing, a dollar sign is pretty much the worst thing you can put on a menu, particularly at a high-end restaurant. Not only will it scream “Hello, you are about to spend money!” into a diner’s tender psyche, but it can feel aggressive and look tacky. So can price formats that end in the numeral 9, as in $9.99, which tend to signify value but not quality, menu consultants and researchers say."
Restaurants Use Menu Psychology to Entice Diners - NYTimes.com
An idea for revision sessions with larger groups.
Creeping Death is a group expression meaning mindlessly repetitive, lazily-structured group activity
Okay, we’ll start over here and finish over here going via here, here, here and here. This is creeping death.
Creeping Death is basically the group work version of Monopoly. Victory is protracted and decisive.
Creeping Death Judo
To take Creeping Death’s downsides and reverse them, you need to make it into a game. In judo you turn your opponents’ strength into your advantage. What is the strength of Creeping Death?
What do Creeping Death and games have in common?
Basically, Creeping Death is like a zombie movie. Zombies shuffle and win by virtue of their sheer obstinacy, immunity against body language and a desire to eat your brains. All zombie movies boil down to a final battle with the heroes having a fixed number of chances/amount of ammunition. And an endless supply of zombies.
In gaming, this is called Survival Horror.
A brief note on Survival Horror
Survival Horror combines the sweaty-palmed action of a First Person Shooter with the mental challenges of a puzzle game. You’re scared, the enemy has overwhelming force so you’re forced to use your brains.
How to play Survival Horror with a group of people
The facilitator starts a clock (I like to count out loud). The only way the group can survive (imagine a timebomb or other infernal machine) is by stopping the clock (ie the counting me) by asking questions or by completing a task.
Level-up
For a revision session, you might give a group a grid and ask them to fill out the major areas they think the revision session should include.
Then for the next level, the group might have to split into two teams and ask and answer questions to the other group - the twist being that the groups have to come up with good questions (mapped to the previous level’s grid) against the clock as opposed to being judged on the quality of their answers. Every second they’re not asking or answering a question is another step forward by the brain-munching zombies.
Facilitator fills in the gaps towards the end.
"Levitin suggests that before there was language, the human brain didn’t have the full capacity to learn langauge. That capacity emerged as the brain worked with sounds and verbalizations. The new structure, he says, made possible three cognitive abilities: Perspective-taking: we could think about our own thoughts, and could realize that others have thoughts different from our own.
Representation: we could think and talk about things that aren’t present.
Rearrangement: we can “combine, recombine, and impose hierarchical order” on things in the world around us."
Dave Ferguson writing about Daniel Levitin’s book, ‘The World in Six Songs’.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about lenses and views. And this seems to fall into both.
Consciousness as a lens to view cognition.
More importantly, and more interestingly (I’m not at all sure that I get what I just wrote above), perspective-taking, representation and rearrangement as ‘views’ on the same learning/facts/knowledge (as compared with and inspired by the 4+1 view idea, the rule of 4 for calculus and RDBs)
"Given Gladwell’s remarkable success, there are many many people sifting through every statement he has made and objecting to their literal meaning. This is just annoyingly foolish use of smart minds. A non-fiction writer in this day and age knows that every fact is a click or two away. Disaffected, or the merely curious, bloggers will dredge these up and throw them out into the web. When Gladwell says “no connection”, it has to be interpreted in the sense of providing a fresh reader with a first-order perspective. Do we really think that his statement is going to send all those executives who read his books and pay to listen to him go scurrying out with agate eyes and trash whatever mental rulebook they have been following in hiring QBs? No. The idea is to suggest that a new perspective, a fresh perspective, is definitely worth something…
Imagine you are a generalist non-fiction writer who want to acquaint your readership to a new field of research or a new, perhaps startling, research finding. How would you go about this if you yourself are unfamiliar with this area? You are like the explorer journeying into exotic new lands and you are reporting back to your domestic readers. Do you, in the name of technical precision, meditate and observe in this new territory for long years gaining intimate expertise before you write up your experiences?
No, there are able experts already penning those, or will be following this surge of interest.
You suggest he is low on neuroticism, and high on openness and agreeableness. Isn’t that exactly what we project when seeking new experiences?
Gladwell speaks to his audience, and he isn’t falsifying, merely simplifying."
Steve Sailer’s iSteve Blog: Pinker v. Gladwell on NFL quarterbacks
From the comments, this is parsimony.
And some more: Previous Pinker feuds - is Pinker a ‘fundamentalist’ as the blogger says. Gladwell responds - politely, sort of. My first thoughts: Gladwell’s basically accused of being a gadabout dilettante. This seems to miss a central point: The definitions of dilettante here indicate superficial or casual interest. But everybody has some superficial or casual interests. The question is not if Gladwell’s a dilettante but what kind. I’ve not read all of Gladwell’s work but the bits I’ve read I’ve liked. Summary of the things I’ve read and what I’ve taken away: The Tipping Point. what we perceive as being a state is often a case of delicate equilibrium. This is a potential antidote to apathy and a spur to greater scepticism. The Quarterback Problem: education often measures the wrong things. Teachers are selected and trained in an ineffective way. Human Capitalisation: We’re not achieving anywhere near the ‘cap rate’ (ie the rate at which we help people to achieve all they could achieve) we’re capable of. Note, I’m not really interested in, say, quarterbacks. This is what I took away from the texts. Which is not the same as what Gladwell says. What I’m interested in is who else is saying this stuff anywhere near as persuasively? The stuff about the Tipping Point needed to be said. It’s counter-intuitive and rationalists need all the help they can get - even if it comes from a master intuitionist like Gladwell. The Quarterback Problem - which Pinker says is ‘just not true’ - is not really a problem of psychology but social sciences. Gladwell hasn’t come up with these ideas himself, he’s reporting them. And the ‘cap rate’ problem is a scandal. In The Tipping Point he practically reveals his M.O. when he talks about the ‘stickiness’ of being wrong (or half right). What’s Pinker’s problem? Gladwell creates social objects. Social objects are rough, they have to be. And they don’t survive intact.
"Today I want to talk about categorization, and I want to convince you that a lot of what we think we know about categorization is wrong. In particular, I want to convince you that many of the ways we’re attempting to apply categorization to the electronic world are actually a bad fit, because we’ve adopted habits of mind that are left over from earlier strategies."
Shirky: Ontology is Overrated — Categories, Links, and Tags
I’ve been talking about gestalts and zombies - but “left-overs” is a much better way of explaining this.
What is ‘news’?
News is one of those words everybody thinks they get. But, in reality, they don’t.
Some definitions:
“Current or recent events broadcasted over a distribution medium or word of mouth. “
Wiki-answers
“News is stuff someone doesn’t want you to write. The rest is advertising”
What is “news” and what is “unethical”? Ted Neward’s blog
News informs, editorials seek to convince. News value is calculated by weighing news determinants and they are timeliness (“news is perishable”), prominence (“important people are more newsworthy than others”), proximity, consequence (“that which directly affects the reader has more news value”), Human Interest ie oddity, conflict, emotion “Notice! Exaggerating or distorting information based upon these factors is sensationalism”
The Gully What is news?
“When people think of news, they usually think of the stories and photographs which will appear on today’s newspaper front-pages - a significant occurrence which is ongoing or recent. News is often new to people… This crash on the highway to Abu Dhabi probably won’t be of much interest to a visitor or newspaper editor in Vienna. But to an Emirati, perhaps one of the thousands who regularly uses this road, this would be interesting news… This photograph of a blind woman in Uganda was uploaded as part of a story about life with sight-problems in the country. It prompts viewers to consider an aspect of African life that they may have not previously considered… Another example, this time from Milan, is photography from a tattoo convention. They are striking images, and provide a fascinated insight into an industry few people have contact with.”
What is news? Demotix
“Stories that are not time-sensitive but that focus on significant issues are often called “news features.” A story about one community’s struggle to deal with AIDS, for example, is a news feature. A story about a new treatment option for AIDS patients would be hard news.”
What is news? America.gov
“News has two priorities: it must be current, and it must mean something to people. A story about the environment and a story about the Oscars can both be newsworthy, for different reasons. On the surface at least, the objective of news is to inform the audience. It’s the job of all the news media to tell people what’s going on in their community - locally, nationally or globally. In this sense, the news media provide a valuable public service.”
What is News? Media Awareness Network
“News is something people WANT to know (interest) or NEED to know (public service).”
Lesson 1: Finding News BBC News educational website
“How do journalists decide what is news and what is not? How do they distinguish between a big news story and a small one? The answer is that they do it in exactly the same way as everybody else. Everybody makes those same judgments whenever they decide to talk about one event rather than another”
What is news? The News Manual
Some quotes on the question of ‘What is news?’ from The News Manual.
All of these definitions come from the first page of returns on a Google search for the question, “What is news?”
