Kurt Vonnegut’s Uncle Alex

Kurt Vonnegut

“…his principal complaint about other human beings was that they so seldom noticed it when they were happy. So when we were drinking lemonade under an apple tree in the summer, say, and talking lazily about this and that, almost buzzing like honeybees, Uncle Alex would suddenly interrupt the agreeable blather to exclaim, ”If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”

This is what I keep telling my wife and son.When there is something going on nice,why not be conscious of it and verbalize the awareness .It is by being articulate about the good things of life happening to you that you experience the goodness of the thing.An obvious thing I see then is a plain simple reaction : what could be so good as to warrant appreciation ? Was it lots of riches or miracle solutions to life’s problems that have remained intractable all these years ? Miracles do not happen except the small little ones like everything is going on fine when something wrong is in the air or there is a gentle breeze which touches the skin unexpectedly or even a simple thing is the wondrous mix of different hues of filtered light in your drawing room on a summer afternoon.

The gentle nudge

Edge

“In the past three decades, psychologists and behavioural economists have learnt that people’s choices can be dramatically affected by subtle features of social situations. For example, inertia turns out to be a powerful force. If people’s magazine subscriptions are automatically renewed, they renew a lot more than if they have to send in a renewal form. Moreover, people are influenced by how problems are framed. If told that salami is “90 per cent fat-free” they are far more likely to buy salami than if they are told it is “10 per cent fat”.

Social norms matter a lot. If people think others are recycling, or paying their taxes, they are far more likely to recycle and to pay their taxes. The important message is that small details can induce large changes in behaviour.”

Our Bank has taken years to realise that people do not present themselves at the Bank on the due date of the maturity of the term deposit receipt.It is much much later they turn up and ask usually for its renewal with back date and in just 10% of cases only either they do not turn up at all or when they turn up they ask to cancel the deposit .It takes a lot of research to understand a thing like this which essentially bureaucratic institutions do not undertake in the context of constantly changing personnel .Consequently reading behavioural patterns in the depositors is just not done in the normal course and the remedial action such as what our bank has taken i.e.automatic renewals for a similar period as the earlier one with an implied assumption that the depositor will renew the deposit goes by default.

The gentle nudge thing is another practical phenomenon actually seen in daily life.In the way the forms are structured the preferences of people can be easily moulded along a predesigned path leading to the achievement of a desired goal.

The individualist and the collective mentality

Edge

“The world can be divided in many ways — rich and poor, democratic and authoritarian — but one of the most striking is the divide between the societies with an individualist mentality and the ones with a collectivist mentality.

This is a divide that goes deeper than economics into the way people perceive the world. If you show an American an image of a fish tank, the American will usually describe the biggest fish in the tank and what it is doing. If you ask a Chinese person to describe a fish tank, the Chinese will usually describe the context in which the fish swim.

These sorts of experiments have been done over and over again, and the results reveal the same underlying pattern. Americans usually see individuals; Chinese and other Asians see contexts.

When the psychologist Richard Nisbett showed Americans individual pictures of a chicken, a cow and hay and asked the subjects to pick out the two that go together, the Americans would usually pick out the chicken and the cow. They’re both animals. Most Asian people, on the other hand, would pick out the cow and the hay, since cows depend on hay. Americans are more likely to see categories. Asians are more likely to see relationships. …”

Although this conclusion is quite dramatic and leads us to the suspicion that it can be facile,it certainly needs looking into for its accuracy of observation.May be, there is something in it.If you extend it further, can we say that Asians lump things together in their world vision while the Americans and probably all the Westerners look at the individual unit as itself ,without relating it to its class or its environment.Can we extend it further and say that the importance of the family is felt more by the Asian than by the Westerner and hence marriage as an institution has lasted longer in the Asian countries than in the West ?

Is poetry translatable?

Re: Is poetry translatable? – Big Think

If poetry is indeed emotion recollected in tranquility or the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings as Wordsworth believed,it certainly cannot be translated because the language used by the poet is uniquely his own ,created as part of his own poetic experience.A translator may try to recreate his experience by simulating for himself a similar one and try to re-create it for others in an alien language.But that is a mere approximation.

On the other hand poetry is not merely emotion recollected with a
specificity of the experience that caused it,the poetic experience can
be re-created in any language ,looking for approximate symbols for a
similar experience .This is of course on the basis that such
experiences are universal in nature ,being part of the shared human
experience .

The click-clock in our brain

How Your Brain Can Control Time | Memory, Emotions, & Decisions | DISCOVER Magazine

“Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that in order to perceive time in fractions of a second, our brains tell time as if they were observing ripples on a pond. Let’s say you are listening to a chirping bird. Two of its chirps are separated by a tenth of a second. The first chirp triggers a spike of voltage in some auditory neurons, which in turn causes some other neurons to fire as well. The signals reverberate among the neurons for about half a second, just as it takes time for the ripples from a rock thrown into a pond to disappear. When the second chirp comes, the neurons have not yet settled down. As a result, the second chirp creates a different pattern of signals. Buonomano argues that our brains can compare the second pattern to the first to tell how much time has passed. The brain needs no clock because time is encoded in the way neurons behave.”

Poetic justice

Lab Notes : Poetic Justice in Climate Change

Not that anything about global warming is fair, but one of the most unjust things about it is that the nations that have spewed most of the greenhouse gases into the atmosphere tend to be in the north (the U.S., Europe and now China), while the nations that stand to suffer the most—as in having their entire island covered by the rising seas—tend to be in the south. If a German researcher is right, it looks like nations will reap what they sow.

According to a new paper by Detlef Stammer of Hamburg University, once Greenland melts, most of the water will hang around in the Atlantic Ocean rather than spreading through the world’s seas. As New Scientist reported, most of the meltwater will add to the Atlantic for some 50 years, causing sea levels to rise—and rise more than if the water were evenly distributed around the globe, which it will not be. As Stammer told the magazine, a melting Greenland “is much less of a threat to tropical islands in the Pacific than it is for the coasts of North America and Europe.”

Call it poetic justice, climatologically.

Blog off ,you blogger

Blogging–It’s Good for You: Scientific American

“Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.”

“Page hit” -and- run usage and “ad-(nauseum)-sense” internet

Why my mom 1.0 hates your web 2.0 | Blue Screen of Duds

“Hit-and-run usage: The Indian Internet never grew up from the age of the eyeball bandits that spanned the early years. The mentality and thinking are pretty much the same all over the place. We have a three step routine which is hardwired into the stakeholder cranium: 1) Get the eyeballs 2) Monetize! monetize! monetize! 3) Profit!

In an era where everyone is desperately looking for better user engagement that should ideally lead to better profiling and targeting, Indian Internet is busy stomping on time’s rewind button, trying to look cool wearing floral prints and bellbottoms like the 70s never went out of fashion and wonder rather naively, “why is everyone looking funny at me?”

Why is it that we don’t like to engage our users in any meaningful fashion, beyond treating them as page view fodder? The reasons vary, but the primary source of the problem is from the old school eyeball bandit line of thinking. Secondly, it is hard work actually engaging users. It necessitates the acceptance of the fact that you may have been wrong in your thinking. It also necessitates the acceptance of the fact that a million people clicking a button in the wrong way is actually the right way, in contrast to your idea of the right way which was accepted by a sum total of four people in the senior management.

User engagement is 90% learning and 10% implementation and we in India tend to look down upon our audience. At one of my previous jobs I’d once told the COO, “we have a monopoly on the dumb Indian internet audience, they keep coming back day in and day out even if we are practically slapping them on their faces every time they come to our website.” The trouble with hit-and-run usage is that it gives you little value, incremental or otherwise. You will have a great deal of trouble, with such usage, in monetizing the traffic beyond the standard display advertising route.”

“Flow” -a concept in psychology

Flow (psychology) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Flow is the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by positive psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, the concept has been widely referenced across a variety of fields.

Life dancing

Yoga Journal – Yoga Philosophy – Life Dancing

Life dances and you have to dance with it, whether it is taking you on a wonderful ride or is stepping on your toes. This is the necessary price and transcendent gift of being incarnate—alive in a body. But it is just life dancing. Life will move you in the rhythm and direction of its own nature. Each moment is a fresh moment in the dance, and if you are lost in clinging to the past or clinging to your hopes or fears of the future, you are not present for the dance.