The pen is mightier than the sword, but not the superhero

A true tale from Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner)

Kennedy Stetson, son of the famous Stetson hat company founder, saw a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen tie the family's black maid Flo to a tree and gang rape her for talking back to a white trolley driver who had short-changed her.

Historian Wyn Craig Wade would later write, in his book about the KKK called The Fiery Cross, that Kennedy was "the single most important factor in preventing a post-war revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the north."

Kennedy's plan was simple: he would join the Klan and bring it down from the inside. Within just a few weeks of membership, Kennedy had compiled all the secret passwords, secret language (I'm looking for Mr. Ayak (translation: are you a klansmen?)), and had figured out its corporate structure with proof that the KKK was a slick profit-making, very political organization.

With information comes power, and Kennedy began wielding it. He passed Klan information to the Assistant Attorney General of Georgia, a known anti-clan buster. He presented to the Governor of Georgia the evidence on which the Klan's corporate charter--registering the KKK as a non-profit, non-political organization--was revokable.

The only thing was, it didn't work.

Like a creeping weed that infests the garden by an intricate root system from the bottom up, the KKK was deeply entrenched in the business, politics and law enforcement of the day. It seemed hopeless.

Until Superman literally came to the rescue. In an a-ha moment worthy of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, Stetson Kennedy wrote to the producers of The Adventures of Superman, a radio show broadcast at dinnertime to millions across the nation. Turns out that the show's producers were looking for new villains, having exhausted Hitler, Mussolini, and the like. Kennedy gladly handed over all the secret information he had gathered and the producers wrote four week's worth of programming.

Almost instantly, Klan members started seeing their kids making a mockery of the KKK's most intimate rituals and code words. Towels and pillowcases tied around their heads, running around looking for Mr. Ayak and shouting chants...

In short, Klansmen were humiliated.

Membership applications plummeted and the Klan was never the same again.

It's a good thing that the KKK never had any kryptonite.

Chemical fingers

Can machine learning be enhanced by tactile experience, as in human learning? Well, why not put these chemical fingers on your robot and give it a learning task!

New Sensor Feels Fine

By Adrian Cho
ScienceNOW Daily News
8 June 2006

Even our super-sensitive fingertips would be hard-pressed to top this: A high-tech touch sensor can feel out the likeness of Abraham Lincoln on a penny. Rivaling the human fingertip's sensitivity to texture, the new sensor could give robots a finer sense of the objects they manipulate and help surgeons feel as well as see their way around the insides of the body.

Engineers can give robots eyes and ears by equipping them with video cameras and microphones. But enduing robots with a sense of touch is far more difficult. Simple sensors can tell a machine whether it is in contact with something, but detectors that also sense texture tend either to be too complicated and delicate for commercial use or lack the spatial resolution needed to detect details dozens of micrometers across. Now, chemical engineers Vivek Maheshwari and Ravi Saraf of the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, have developed a relatively simple and sturdy sensor that can sense texture about as well as a human fingertip can.

The device is a film roughly 100 nanometers thick. Within it lie alternating layers of nanoparticles of gold and cadmium sulfide separated by films of polymer. The electrically charged gold nanoparticles repel each other, and because they don't touch, no current can flow along the film. However, if a voltage is applied from one side of the film to the other, electrons can pass from one layer of gold to the next by burrowing through the cadmium sulfide nanoparticles in between. When this happens, the cadmium sulfide nanoparticles emit light. The amount of current flowing and light produced increases dramatically as the various layers are squeezed together. Thus, when something textured presses into it, the electrified film will shine brightest where the object's bumps and bulges push in the farthest, creating a pattern of light that can be imaged with a digital camera.

Maheshwari and Saraf used the film to feel a penny and were able to resolve the tiny lettering on the coin. The detector can measure features as small as 40 micrometers cross and 5 micrometers tall--about as well as the human fingertip.

"There's something novel, something really good about this," says Richard Crowder, an electrical engineer at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. "You put a film on your robotic finger, and you've got your signal." The challenge, he adds, is incorporating a camera into the fingertip. But Saraf says it should be possible to detect the current flowing through the film directly, obviating the camera.

Page design to direct the reader's eye

Visualization is a common theme in Novelvig. Here is a short but clear guidline for page design by Christine Sevilla.

Effective page design maps a viewer's route through information. When designing information, your objective is to lead the viewer's eye directly to your message. Readers of English read from left to right and from the top of the page to the bottom. (The typical page-scanning pattern actually follows a Z). This habit of left-to-right eye movement dominates most design decisions in the West and is the basis for most conventional graphic design of print publications.

Minipreneurship

Worth thinking about!

http://www.allbusiness.com/marketing-advertising/internet-marketing/3871396-1.html

MINIPRENEURS': a vast army of consumers turning entrepreneurs; including small and micro businesses, freelancers, side-businesses, weekend entrepreneurs, web-driven entrepreneurs, part-timers, free agents, cottage businesses, seniorpreneurs, co-creators, mompreneurs, pro-ams, solopreneurs, eBay traders, advertising-sponsored bloggers and so on.

Take the end user with a grain of salt

"If I had asked the public what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

-Henry Ford

The Honda story

This is an anecdote about Honda passed on by one of the professors of my innovation class. I haven't independently verified its accuracy (ELFS), but here it is anyway.

The story goes that Honda was studying how to penetrate the American car market. They sent over some analysts to probe the situation and do some market research. They failed. They could find no way to interest Americans in Honda cars. They gave up. Just before they were scheduled to leave, one of these analysts goes shopping on his little Honda motorbike, and a randomly-encountered random stranger saw this bike and exclaimed surprise and admiration for this novel piece of small-bike engineering. No one had seen anything quite like it.

The analyst was hit with an idea. Perhaps the way in to America was not through cars, which had been the plan, but through little motorcycles.

And the rest is automotive history.

Ben Franklin in Stockholm

The reciprocity norm, tit for tat, the golden rule, the many names of the basic decency in us. At the same time a bayesian-evolutionary cooperative Nash equilibrium to which we have successfully converged.

The rule of reciprocation gives us a strong gut feeling that good deeds ought to be returned, which results in community cohesion and competitive advantage for a group, a society and a whole species. Those who only take and never give are usually hated, punished and ostracized (unless they manage to go unobserved).

Just as our preference for sweet-tasting food (ripe fruits) has been hijacked by the chocolate industry, our reciprocation sense is ruthlessly exploited by marketers, salespeople and master negotiators. When we taste a food sample from the supermarket, we feel obliged to buy something, or at least to listen carefully to the sales pitch. When we get a candy with the receipt, we feel obliged to buy more next time, even if we know it is a cheap trick. When we are flattered, we are more likely to give favors even though we claim to be rational and just. To avoid being seen (or seeing oneself) as ingrate or as a moocher, we overcompensate and engage in disproportionate reciprocation to the great satisfaction of waiters and cab drivers.

People are nice: researchers sent out "Merry Christmas" postcards to random strangers, and got enthusiastic replies from a significant portion of them. Many of the recipients added them to their list of friends to send postcards to on all occasions (this was before people got used to spam).

Nothing revolutionary so far, just Marketing and Psychology 101. The surprise lies in a more subtle and somewhat contradictory phenomenon, the Ben Franklin effect.

An acute observer, Benjamin Franklin noticed that political opponents became more sympathetic and easier to persuade if at some point he asked them a small favor, such as to borrow a book from them. They were both flattered and comforted by the fact that Ben Franklin owed them a book/favor.

Distilled in B.F.'s own words:

He that has once done you a Kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.

The psychological explanation is that people engage in post hoc rationalizing: "Why did I do a favor to this person ?" "It must be because I like him so much."

The effect readily explains a large number of social phenomena and has been tried experimentally: participants in an experiment were given cash reward. After the experiment the professor asked some participants (randomly selected) to give back the reward (on some made up grounds). Most of them complied. In a later study, those who were asked to give the money back were found to have a much better opinion of the professor than those who were not asked such favor.

At an extreme, this might explain the Stockholm-syndrome as well (where captives become sympathetic to their captors).

If one can prepare to defend against an exploit of the reciprocation norm, by simply not asking or accepting favors, the Ben Franklin effect is devastating: you ask me a small favor in order to ask a greater one later and I will gladly comply. You abuse me, and I'll love you even more. A tragic corollary of this effect is that in war we end up hating our victims. The more innocent they are, the more negative our feelings become.

But how can both effects work at the same time, how can they be reconciled when there is seemingly a contradiction ? Are there some cases in which one is stronger than the other ?
Does it depend on whether the favor is asked for or not, or on some other variable ? Are there personality types more vulnerable to one or the other ? How to prepare against being tricked by car-salesmen who use one of these effects ? Where is a resident psychologist when we need one ?