Things don’t just go away

How my assessment went:

more about "How my assessment went:", posted with vodpod

Sometimes I wish I could save you

Take a breath, I pull myself together
Just another step till I reach the door
You’ll never know the way it tears me up inside to see you
I wish that I could tell you something, to take it all away

Sometimes I wish I could save you
And there’re so many things that I want you to know
I won’t give up till it’s over
If it takes you forever I want you to know

When I hear your voice
Its drowning in a whisper
It’s just skin and bones
There’s nothing left to take
And no matter what I do I can’t make you feel better
If only I could find the answer
To help me understand

Am I busier than Barack Obama?

I can’t imagine a person busier than Barack Obama. But apparently Obama keeps a 60-90 minute workout sessions at least 6 times a week.  Quoted from a Washington Post article:

It’s a schedule he started as a 22-year-old student at Columbia University in New York, and it immediately transformed him. In his 1995 autobiography, “Dreams From My Father,” Obama said he was a casual drug user and an underachiever until he decided to start running three miles each day. He stopped staying out late, fasted on Sundays and became a voracious reader, spending most of his time alone in his apartment reading classic literature and philosophical texts.

Physical fitness yielded mental fitness, Obama decided, and the two concepts have been married in his mind ever since.

“It’s always been a priority in his daily routine,” said Christopher Lu, a marathon runner who worked as Obama’s legislative director in the Senate and was named Cabinet secretary last week. “I think it’s an example of how disciplined he is. It’s one of the things that really keeps him balanced.”

Many people sometimes think they are too busy to exercise, myself included. But seriously man, I can’t be busier than Obama.

Whoooopsie Dasies, an apple pie

apple pie, originally uploaded by hami_nd.

Have a goal bigger than yourself

1. The Greatest Networker in the World by John Milton Fogg

Found this book on one of the bookshelves in my house. I don’t know where this came from, but it’s phenomenal so far. Anecdotal writing, very interesting. One of the things it says that I find to be profound is that we need to have bigger goal than ourselves. Don’t just think about what you can do to benefit yourself, think about what you can do to benefit what you truly care about, things beyond yourself, bigger than yourself.

The Nike brand, for example, is not about shoes or sportswear. It’s about athleticism, a sense of possibility and empowerment. These are values that are bigger than Nike, which it brilliantly chooses to focus on. Obama did the same thing during his presidential campaign.

As we enter a new year, maybe we can consciously think about what we want to focus on, which could well decide the outcome.

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.

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.”

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.