Category: Thoughts
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Stochastic Resonance & Human Perception
One of the things mentioned in The Perfect Mess was “Stochastic Resonance“. The essense of this is the idea that additional random noise can actually help us in deciphering messages than without it. You can read the wikipedia entry for a more indepth response. This idea is interesting when coupled with the idea that humans…
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A Perfect Mess – Part 2
I finished reading A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman. I was hoping that this book would provide a mechanism for thinking through and assessing the cost of ‘neatness’ vs. the benefits of order. Instead, this turned out to be more of a book discussing mess and…
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Dominating the Message
With my wife studying Spanish, I decided to look into some Spanish software so I could learn some too. Rosetta Stone was the first one I started with and then started reading some reviews. From there it lead me to another spanish program called “Learning Spanish Like Crazy” which was recommended. Then I did a…
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Threshhold of Relevance & Group Action
It’s interesting that people essentially don’t take notice of certain things until someone else mentions it to them. This ties into the example that shows up in both Blink and Influence about the woman who was stabbed three different times over some time with over 30 witnesses not one of whom called the police until…
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Blockbuster Security
Recently, when checking out a movie, I saw a very interesting security check. Blockbuster almost always asks for your current address to make sure you are still living at the same place. A woman was checking out a movie and she was doing so on her husbands card. The cashier said, “John?” and she said,…
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The Perfect Mess – Part 1
Taxes suck. Besides being horribly complicated, they highlight my inclination toward disorder rather than order. While I covet organizational systems, I don’t find that I use many of them or use them for long. This isn’t to say that I don’t generally know where to go find stuff, but I’m definitely more of a piler…
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More on Presentations
I’ve started reading a blog done by Seth Godin and have enjoyed some of his thoughts on various things. I thought his summary of a good presentation found by clicking here, presents some additional interesting ideas that are worth considering. I don’t agree with everything he says about a presentation, but the principles he is…
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Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
One of my areas of interest lately has been the emotional side of sales. Essentially, how does one evoke an emotional reaction to what is being provided. Clearly, it is necessary that the service/product being sold meets a fundamental need of the person buying, but the way a solution is presented makes a difference on…
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Office 2.0 Conference
On Friday, I attended a conference on Office 2.0 which I found quite interesting. Here is one bloggers notes. There are some pretty neat tools that are coming to the web. It will be interesting to see how quickly the market is able to adopt their behaviors to the tools found online. It’s also interesting…
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Books
I have started compiling a list of my favorite books that I have read. It is still a work in progress. You can get there by clicking here