This band freaking sound like The Beatles

If you are a fan of The Beatles, you’d think the band Vinyl Kings’ songs, particularly ‘A Little Trip’ sounds familiar, check out their page.

Be one of the few

Stumbled upon Derek Sivers’ speech for 1st year students at Berklee College of Music. An inspiring talk on how to succeed in the music industry, which can be applied to just about anyone with burning dreams, whether within the creative industry or not. Derek says many students try to play it cool in college, they opt to relax more and get distracted by the little things like the internet, the media, or the TV, instead of being focused on their studies. Here are some of my favourite extracts:

Be one of the few who knows how to help yourself, instead of expecting others to do it for you

Be of the few that does much more than is required

..Be one of the few that stays in the shed to practice, while everyone else is surfing the net, flirting on MySpace and watching TV

Are people like rats?

Most amusing thing I read today:

“People are like rats,” Edythe London, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of California says. “If you put a rat in a cage by itself, it won’t do well on cognitive tests. But if you give it toys and put other rats in its cage, they’re going to be smarter rats.”

She’s talking about what people can do to avoid Alzheimer’s disease. It’s what you probably already expect,”…go out and do things and see people every day and be active.”

What Makes Some People So Exceptional

So I read a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book Outliers, which is about people who are really really good at what they do, who are at the top of their fields. How do they get there, what make them exceptional. Gladwell writes that “It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, it is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.” Their culture, family, environment, friendships etc. He also suggests that it is not talent that propels such people to success, but practice. Specifically, 10,000 hours of practice at least. 20 hours of practice a week for 10 years. He calls it the 10,000 Hour Rule.

And if you think practice alone is enough it’s not. No one can make it alone. Take Christopher Langan,

“a man who despite an IQ of 195 (Einstein’s was 150) wound up working on a horse farm in rural Missouri. Why isn’t he a nuclear rocket surgeon? Because of the environment he grew up in: there was no one in Langan’s life and nothing in his background that could help him capitalize on his exceptional gifts. “He had to make his way alone,” Gladwell writes, “and no one — not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.”

The mess that is facebook

Everytime I log on to facebook I got this headache. With all that feeds, status updates, advertisements sandwiched in between those and photo tags all coming in at once on the front page and random people trying to add me as friends, and what, like 723,829 application requests. No, okay, I’m not going to add a million application on my account, cuz that’s ridiculous. FB doesn’t know what I like and what I want to see. There is no hierarchy in terms of the layout, all the content just blasted at you when you log in, it makes your eyeballs turn in all directions. Why can’t they highlight the important ones and just ditch the unnecessary things from the site. It’s like a zoo in there. and what’s with the  status update text field box on the top right corner? I always thought that was my search box on my browser’s toolbar. I missed the days when facebook connected me with my friends and colleagues whom I don’t get to see everyday. Now they are kinda lost in all the feeds and rubbish that swarms my frontpage.

This reminds me of supermalls and huge department stores who tries to sell too much and everything. They try to fill every space they have with goods, even the ones that no one wants. And the good stuff gets lost in the midst of all that random stuff. and the good stuff don’t seem special anymore. That’s why some people turn to boutique stores, who focus on what they do best and just be good at that. Like Twitter. Because the huge department stores are making people feel numb.

But you know what, I think Fb will come around. They have to.

Grab the Nearest Book..

Book meme:

Grab the nearest book.
- Open it to page 56.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Here goes:

Structure creates meaning for us: and for our creativity to have meaning for anyone else, other than ourselves, it will need shape and form-Get Up & Grow by Philippa Davis.

What Makes a Site Addictive: notes from Technology & Psychology talk

Notes from a talk by Suw Charman Anderson
The video of her talk is available at the FOWA London 2008 site.

Suw Charman Anderson is  a social media consultant-trying to orchestrate some behaviour change in users of a site. Technology is only 20% of that battle. The rest is human behaviour. How people work, what makes people react the way that they do, alot of them is unconscious, is not rational.  If we understand how that works, we can develop web apps that sink more deeply with the human brain.

2 questions we will explore:

1. Why is icanhascheeseburger.com addictive?
2. Why is it important to understand why a site is addictive?

addiction is subconscious.

addictive- is about feeling an irresistable urge to do something against our conscious being

There is no sense of narrative in icanhascheeseburger. It means that users can prowl randomly, and that is addictive. There is no schedule. Like once a day. It encourages compulsive behaviour. If you know a site or a blog will only be updated once a week, you wont go back to the site again until the next week. Hence, sites which are randomly updated is more addictive than those which are not.

What are the symptoms of compulsion?

1. occasional behaviours became habitual
2. There is a lot of control over the behaviour,
3. A feeling of pre-occupation
4. The behaviour continues regardless of the consequences
5. There are feelings of anxiety
6. Denial there is a problem at all

Operant conditioning- you get more reward for doing something thats why you keep doing it and there is random schedule for the rewards. Emotional rewards that human beings value.

How to train in a behaviour:

1. Train an initial behaviour with a constant reward
2. and then switch to random reward schedule to strengthen the behaviour

In short, Reward & Random re-inforcement.

What happens if unwanted and unhealthy behaviour is re-enforced?

eg. email, you dont know when a new mail is coming

38% of people get more than a hundred email a day.
60% of people spent more than 2 hours a day in their inbox.
50% people say they check inbox once an hour.
35% say every 15 minutes.
In reality, when they are observed, people actually check their emails every 5 minutes.

With email, you think you have a control over it. Nobody is forcing you to check your email. But you sometimes dont really have a control over it. Especially if the email has alert system that interrupts us. People usually take 15 mins to recover from an interruption.
People crave the emotional reward of getting the email. Not so much of replying the email.

Getting things done: How do you get over a behaviour that’s trained in

Behaviours changed from random reward is much harder to deal with than behaviours changed with a consistent reward. Why? because random reward is not tied to a logic, you dont always get a reward each time, thats why you keep coming back to see if its there. So you’re constantly hoping and checking.

With consistent reward, you stop checking once there is no reward when doing the behaviour.

Number of ways to break operant conditioning:

1. If you can change the reward to be consistent everytime you do the behaviour, you’re less likely to be compulsive about doing the behaviour, you stop looking.

2. Break the link between the behaviour and the reward. Dont reward immediately. Maybe delay it.

3. Remove the reward completely

4. Remove the stimulus to check- (eg. the alert system for email)

5. Provide a schedule for yourself. Like do the behaviour only at certain time, so you dont have to think whether or not to check.

6. Remove the thing that you need to do to do that behaviour. Like dont use the computer so much.

We are creating technology that are sometimes rude. We need to understand how it works, how it affect our lives, so we can diminish bad behaviours and create healthy behaviour around technology that fit into our life.

Something that we design may create a certain compulsion within people that we didn’t expect and we didn’t predict. We need to understand how we can change our tool to decrease that unwanted behaviour.

The field of psychology has a huge amount to teach us. A lot of what we’re learning are not really new. But how we apply it and how we make the best of it, is new.

Reading List

Went to the library yesterday and grabbed a bunch of books. I was painfully aware of the lack of new arrival books. Then went to Kinokuniya at Bugis Junction to browse new titles. One Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel caught my eye. Can’t remember the title but the story is about a girl who one day enters her house and discovers that everything has changed. Then I walked to Arab Street, dropped by Muslimedia bookstore to get “Purification of the Heart” by Hamza Yusuf.

So here’s my current reading list:

1. Heaven and Earth: the making of an epic motion picture.

I watched the film and loved it. Vietnam looks so hauntingly beautiful in the film.

2. Get Up & Grow by Philippa Davis

A book about growing up and becoming an adult.

3. Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos -a Travel Guide by Footprint

4. Purification of the Heart by Hamza Yusuf

5. Flips 8 Moview: Featuring outstanding motion-image makers over the globe

I’m not in a reading mood actually, and has been for almost a year. Which is why I need to read.

Crunch time, baby

It’s definitely the final assessment period in my school when…

1. Your breakfast, lunch and dinner come from the nearest vending machine you can find from where you’re working.

2. You have panda eyes

3. Your mum asks what time do you have to get up tomorrow, you say, “don’t worry, I wont be sleeping”.

4. You see students running about trying to get their projects done

5. It’s 11pm and the school computer labs are still crowded, students don’t want to go home and the security guards have to chase them out

6. You see students carrying huge mounting boards everywhere, and big annoying plastic bags

7. It’s 7am and the printing shops are already open with a long line forming outside the shop

8. The things that you need to buy from Artfriend are out of stock, just when you really need them

9. You and your team mate turn into a pair of conjoined twins

10. You live in front of the computer for at least 3 days straight

11. You’ve only recently found out that Obama has been elected president

But you know, students tend to exaggerate what they’re going through. Like it’s a life and death situation. If there’s one thing I’ve learned this past couple of months, it’s that there are other quite important things other than school and it helps to step back and take in the bigger picture. That could help put things in a better perspective so you’d freak out less when things don’t go as planned.

Forget the resume if you’re looking for a creative job

So here’s an interesting post from Nick Campbell’s photography blog Greyscalegorilla.

It tells people looking for a job in the creative industry to throw away their resumes and just focus on getting their work online.

Some Digital Kitchen buddies and I had a presentation of our workflow at the Art Institute Artimation Festival. I was stunned at how out of date their portfolio class was. Apparently the entire “portfolio” class was structured to help students made a DVD reel and a resume. The students and teachers were asking questions like “What do you look for on a resume?” Are you kidding me?

Here is a note to all the creatives out there looking for a job… We don’t look at your resume! Do not write it and do not worry about it. We only look at your work. If your work isn’t up to our standards, it doesn’t matter how many internships you had or that you were head of the “Poster Screen Printing Club.” And as for making DVD reels, sorry to say we rarely look at those either.

Here is a whole class dedicated to helping get these students a job in the creative field, and they’re filling out resumes? That class should be for getting your work online. It is so much easier for both of us if you can send a link through an email or iChat that leads us to your work rather than physically mail us a DVD and a resume. Your best bet for getting a job? Make it easy for us to see your great work.