Punya Mishra’s Web

Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted
—in Strength to Love, 1964

I had written previously about a blog started by students in our Educational Psychology and Educational Technology Ph.D. program (ideaplay.org) and had designed a couple of ambigrammatic logos for them. You can see the original post here. Here is one of the original designs I had provided:

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How does technology change what we do? Often when a new technology appears we tend to see it in terms of existing practices and structures. So an e-book is the same as a book, except in digital format. E-books still have “pages” which we “turn” (with a flick or our finger or if you are stuck with the Kindle, by pressing a button), though digitality does not require pages or turning them. Similarly the design of most early online courses attempted to replicate face-to-face modes of teaching (capturing lectures through video, for instance), instead of pushing for exploring the possibilities of this new medium. This is often most obvious in the kinds of iconography that new technologies generate. So the icon for Microsoft Word document looks like a piece of printed paper, an email-box looks like a regular mailbox (think AOL and its “You’ve got mail” message) and so on.

However, new technologies do not just replicate what we could do before – they insidiously and fundamentally change the nature of the tasks we perform. Think of the idea of hyperlinks! Regular texts go hypertextual through developments like the table of contents, indices etc. however, these are weak attempts at best. True hypertext emerges only through digitality.

I was reminded of this when reading a recent NYTimes article on video bingo and the controversies it is causing in Alabama. The article begins by describing traditional bingo:

Everybody knows what this is: dozens of people, mostly retirees, hunched over paper grids in a smoke-filled American Legion hall on a Sunday evening listening eagerly to a woman recite numbers.

Now we have a new player on the block, video bingo! which is described as follows:

But what about this: a dim warehouse of flashing, jingling video terminals with names like Boomtown Bonanza where, early on a weekday morning, people sit on stools pushing buttons and watching cherries and 7s reel by.

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As readers of this blog know I love examples of seeing things in new ways. That to me if often the crux of creativity. Anyway here are two examples. The first curtesey of Leigh Wolf is a new advertisement from some credit card company. The ad is actually pretty average but what is really cool are the visuals.
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Now that all of us are commodities, with personal brand names (and brand value) it is time to take the next step. It is time to get your own barcode! A quick scan with a barcode reader and your worth will be known to one and all. I was prompted to thinking of this given today’s Google logo, which celebrates the anniversary of the first patent granted to the barcode. One link led to another and I found this free online barcode genrator… so here it is, my very own barcode. May the $$s come rolling in

Have you heard of the marshmallow experiment? It is a pretty famous experiment conducted at Stanford back in the 60’s. Walter Mischel a psychologist conducted this experiment on four-year olds in which the children were given one marshmallow and promised a second marshmallow if only they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Turns out that some children could and others couldn’t wait. Following up on this study Mischel and his collaborators found that those who waited were better adjusted, dependable and, on some measures, more successful than those who could not delay gratification. In fact they found that these children scored an average of 210 points higher on the SAT!!

You can read more about this experiment and its findings in this New Yorker article titled Don’t: The secret of self control.

I had read of this experiment a while ago, it had also been the focus of a recent RadioLab segment and then I began running across a video titled Oh, The Temptation. As the director describes it he used, 2 Hidden Cameras, A bunch of Kids, 1 Marshmallow each to create this movie. He agrees that this was “not an original idea, but very fun to make.” And it is great fun to watch…

Imagine controlling machines, typing text or juggling balls using nothing but the power of thought. What sounds like far-fetched science fiction is gradually becoming possible, providing hope for disabled patients — and new gimmicks for the computer gaming industry. Read more in Playing With Your Head: The Dawning Age of Mind-Reading Machines

What implications do these new technologies have for learning and education? I mean even Mattel is getting into the action… As the article says

The new system Mattel is introducing at computer trade shows is called “Mindflex.” According to the company’s fact sheet: “A true mental marathon, Mindflex exercises the brain in an entirely new way as players learn to continuously control their brain activity.”

So, you ask, how does it work? To train the brain, the user puts on a headband with sensors at the temples and a cable connected to something that looks like a mini miniature golf course. Then the user tries to master the first task: balancing a small ball above an air current, causing it to levitate and making it pass through a plastic ring.

At this time these interfaces work only in one direction, from the brain to the computer. But can the reverse, from computer to the brain be far behind? The power being discussed here is truly revolutionary. We have all known that computers are cognitive tools i.e. working with them changes the way we think. However, at some level changes in brain states are mediated via our senses and through movement, a somewhat inefficient process. What these technologies indicate is the future is in a merging of our brains directly with the computer… where the distinction between us and the machine will be increasingly blurred till we won’t be able to tell one from the other. Imagine having access to Google like search engines whenever a question pops up in our heads? How can we tell where the brain ends and the machine begins?

I now have a Facebook username! Hah!

Check out http://www.facebook.com/punyamishra/

I just came across this… Online System Rates Images by Aesthetic Quality

Pennsylvania State University (PSU) has launched the Aesthetic Quality
Inference Engine (ACQUINE), an online system for determining the aesthetic quality of an image. The online photo-rating system helps establish the foundation for determining how people will react emotionally to a visual image. ACQUINE delivers ratings–from zero to 100–within seconds, based on visual aspects such as color saturation, color distribution, and photo composition. PSU researchers hope to improve upon the system’s current performance level of more than 80 percent consistency between human and computer ratings. “Furthermore, aesthetics represents just one dimension of human emotion,” says PSU professor James Z. Wang. “Future systems will perhaps strive to capture other emotions that pictures arouse in people.”
Wang says that linking cameras to ACQUINE could potentially enable a photographer to instantly see how the public might perceive a photo.

Now this is the ultimate democratization of the idea of aesthetics – of course diluting the idea of the aesthetic encounter to the lowest common denominator i.e. “how the public might perceive a photo.” The assumptions behind that definition of aesthetics are mind-boggling. Let me count the ways in which this is a boneheaded idea… actually let me not, at least at this time. But the link was worth sharing nonetheless. I hope to write more about this … hopefully soon.

Patrick Dickson just quoted e. e. cummings (one of my favorite poets) and I just had to look it up.

To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting: e. e. cummings