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Archive for July, 2010

Brain Slug Cupcakes at Final Futurama Script Reading

15 Jul

Glenn Fleishman shares a treat with us:

I was lucky enough to attend the last scheduled table reading (where a script is read by the voice actors) for Futurama, the animated cartoon show revived twice now after Fox's broadcast network failed to kill the show. Featured at the reading were piles of delicious brain slug cupcakes. I LOVE THE BRAIN SLUG CUPCAKES, TRY ONE.

The final script is quite hilarious, naturally, and it was a pleasure not just to hear it read in person by the actors, but to watch how much of a family the show is, cast, crew, and their friends and families. That feeling comes through in the show, which was created by Matt Groening and David "X" Cohen, through whose good offices (and my dear friend, his sister) I garnered an invite.

It was especially neat to watch Billy West talk to himself, cycling through Fry, the Professor, Zoidberg, and Zap Branigan, sometimes one right after the other. Also, John DiMaggio, who voices Bender, is 100-feet tall, and breathes fire.

Futurama is one of the only TV shows ever to feature real math and science, as well as multiple alien language alphabets (one a substitution, the other a code), and other supergeekery.

The show hasn't been canceled. This was the last of the current order of episodes by Cartoon Network, but Futurama has rebirthed itself before.

Brain Slug Cupcakes on Flickr


And here's a really cute photo of Glenn with pals on the set, including the aforementioned Messrs. Cohen and Groening.


You can pick up DVDs of past seasons here: Amazon link.
(Thanks, Glenn!)



 
 

Your Superhuman Brain

15 Jul

Jess Bachman has a cool new infographic out -- it's all about the human brain. Specifically....

It's about super savants, you know, like Rain Man. But they are not always handicapped like that. In fact, the ability might be in all of us. It's also amazing how fundamentally our brains are connected to, and adapted to, music.
Superhuman: The Incredible Savant Brain

 
 

Swedish Chef sings “Popcorn” (shrimp!)

15 Jul

Some of the best neomuppetry I've seen in recent years: The Swedish Chef performs the pioneering electronica classic "Popcorn."

The Muppets: Pöpcørn



 
 

How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made

14 Jul

oldspice2How do you take the social web by storm in a day, winning over even the coldest of hearts and gaining international acclaim - with commercials?

A team of creatives, tech geeks, marketers and writers gathered in an undisclosed location in Portland, Oregon yesterday and produced 87 short comedic YouTube videos about Old Spice. In real time. They leveraged Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and blogs. They dared to touch the wild beasts of 4chan and they lived to tell the tale. Even 4chan loved it. Everybody loved it; those videos and 74 more made so far today have now been viewed more than 4 million times and counting. The team worked for 11 hours yesterday to make 87 short videos, that's just over 7 minutes per video, not accounting for any breaks taken. Then they woke up this morning and they are still making more videos right now. Here's how it's going down.

Sponsor

Setting the Stage

Old Spice, marketing agency Wieden + Kennedy and actor Isaiah Mustafa are collaborating on the project. The group seeded various social networks with an invitation to ask questions of Mustafa's character, a dashing shirtless man with over-the-top humor and bravado. Then all the responses were tracked and users who contributed interesting questions and/or were high-profile people on social networks are being responded to directly and by name in short, funny YouTube videos. The group has made videos in response to Digg founder Kevin Rose, TV star Alyssa Milano (now big on Twitter) and many more people, famous and not.

It is well done and it appeals to peoples' egos - but there is something more, too. It feels very personalized, even if it wasn't directed at you. Those people that got responses, and many people who didn't, have Tweeted, Facebooked and otherwise shared links to the videos back out across their social networks.

Iain Tait, Global Interactive Creative Director at Wieden, is leading the effort. "In a way there's nothing magical that we've done here," he explained by phone this afternoon. "We just brought a character to life using the social channels we all [social media geeks] use every day. But we've also taken a loved character and created new episodic content in real time."

How They Are Doing It

Tait says that the primary differentiator between this campaign and others is how closely technical and social media specialists are working with the creative team. "We brought social media experts right into the creative process," he told me. Tell that to the next person who claims that all so-called social media experts are just hot-air. Tait's own savvy no doubt played a large role in the success of the campaign as well. He's just been at Wieden for 3 months, after leaving a UK agency he co-founded 8 years ago. He was voted the Most Influential Person in the UK's New Media Age Top 100 Interactive Agencies Guide last year.

oldspice"In the room there are two social media guys and a tech guy who built a system pulling in comments from around the web all together in real time," Tait says. (Right: Inside the studio, around noon today.)

"We're looking at who's written those comments, what their influence is and what comments have the most potential for helping us create new content. The social media guys and script writers are collaborating to make that call in real time. We have people shooting and we're editing it as it happens. Then the social media guys are looking at how to get that back out around the web...in real time."

The videos aren't being posted in chronological order immediately after the Tweets and comments they are in reply to. They get moved up and down a queue in a deliberate, orchestrated, if very fast way.

Tait: "Those people are having more fun than I've ever seen anyone have in a shoot like this. That's part of why it's doing so well. It's genuinely infectious, it transmits itself through the internet in a massive way."

How loved has the new campaign proven to be? 4Chan, the anonymous nihilist obscene messageboard from whence sprang memes like LOLCats and RickRolling, was the subject of what's now the 3rd most-watched of the Old Spice videos made yesterday, after the ones made for Perez Hilton and Kevin Rose. 4channers hate everything, especially people who talk about 4chan - which this savvy man in a towel did not do. But 200,000 views later, that absurd video response to "Anonymous" has received more than 4000 thumbs up from viewers and less than 100 thumbs down.

Freedom

Tait says that Old Spice's parent company Proctor & Gamble exhibited incredible bravery in allowing his team to write marketing content in real time, with little to no supervision.

"There is such great trust [between the companies]," he said. "But we are being very responsible. They have given us a set of guidelines and if we get close to the edges we contact them."

That trust is all the more necessary because of how new this really is, in some ways. "If the message that comes out of this is that you can make TV commercials in 30 minutes, then we're all out of a job," Tait jokes. "This is something new. We're operating on Internet time but with a level of quality you'd get on a TV slot. That combination was what really got many peoples' attention."

Old Spice continues to post new, personalized videos to its YouTube channel. How long can they go? No one knows, but Mustafa's sure to smile seductively and make a goofy-macho joke about it once the team is done.

The campaign itself is unlikely to end even then, though. You can already get an Old Spice Man voicemail message generated for your phone. The coolest thing about that? That system wasn't even created by Old Spice or Wieden - it was built by a crowd of users at social news site Reddit this afternoon.

Update: At midnight Wednesday night, a very tired looking Mustafa posted the following conclusion.

Double Update: Now Alysa Millano has donned a towel her bathroom and challenged Mustafa to make a $100,000 donation to support wildlife restoration in the Gulf of Mexico. Well done.


Disclosure: Wieden + Kennedy is an occasional consulting client of the author's. But this story was too cool to abstain from telling just because of that.

Discuss

 
 

Starbucks Is the First Brand to Reach 10 Million Facebook Likes

14 Jul

Starbucks became the first brand on Facebook to collect a fan base of 10 million on Wednesday. This growth comes on the heels of Lady Gaga becoming the first person to gather the same number of fans.

Starbucks has undoubtedly been one of the most successful brands on Facebook, partly due to the store’s popularity and ubiquitousness, but also because the company maintains a very active presence on Facebook.

The company’s audience of 10 million people around the world has been hard won with marketing, promotions and advertising. Over the years Starbucks has given away free ice cream on Facebook, been recognized by Facebook and was also the most popular brand.

The Page is consistently one of the top 20 fastest growing Pages, as evidenced by our weekly posts showing the number of fans added to the Pages with the aid of our PageData tool. And Starbucks consistently has an update or promotion for every occasion.

 
 

Plants can think and perform computations, say scientists [Mad Science]

14 Jul
Plants are able to assess their environment by analyzing light, and are able to "remember" light they have experienced recently. By analyzing chemical reactions in leaves, scientists have come to appreciate that plants possess a kind of intelligence. More »
 
 

The Illusion of Transparency

14 Jul

The Misconception: When your emotions run high, people can look at you and tell what you are thinking and feeling.

The Truth: Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions.

You stand in front of your speech class with your outline centered on the lectern, your stomach performing gymnastics.

You sat through all the other speeches, tapping the floor, transferring nervous energy into the tiles through a restless foot, periodically wiping your hands on the top of your pants to wick away the sweat.

Each time the speaker summed up and the class applauded, you clapped along with everyone else, and as it subsided you realized how loud your heart was thumping when a fresh silence settled.

Finally, the instructor called your name, and your eyes cranked open. You felt as if you had eaten a spoonful of sawdust as you walked up to the blackboard planting each foot carefully so as not to stumble.

As you begin to speak the lines you’ve rehearsed, you search the faces of your classmates.

“Why is he smiling? What is she scribbling? Is that a frown?”

“Oh no,” you think, “they can see how nervous I am.”

I must look like an idiot. I’m bombing, aren’t I? This is horrible. Please let a meteor hit this classroom before I have to say another word.

“I’m sorry,” you say to the audience. “Let me start over.”

Now it’s even worse. What kind of moron apologizes in the middle of a speech?

Your voice quavers. Flop sweat gathers behind your neck. You become certain your skin must be glowing red and everyone in the room is holding back laughter.

Except, they aren’t.

They are just bored. Your anxiety is peaking, and it feels like waves of emotional energy must be radiating from your head like some sort of despair halo, but there is nothing to see on the outside other than your facial expressions. Keep those under control and you are home free.

“If you’re quiet at a party, people don’t know if it’s because you’re arrogant and you think you’re better than everyone else or because you’re shy and don’t know how to talk to people…but you know, because you know your thoughts and feelings. So things like anxiety, optimism and pessimism, your tendency to daydream, and your general level of happiness—what’s going on inside of you, rather than things you do—those are things other people have a hard time knowing.”

- Simine Vazire from a 2009 interview in Psychology Today conducted by Sam Gosling

To get information out of one head and into another, it has to be transmitted through some sort of communication. Faces, sounds, gestures, words like the ones you are reading now – we must depend on these clunky tools because no matter how strong an emotion or how powerful an idea, it never seems as intense or potent to the world outside your mind as it does to the one within.

This is the illusion of transparency.

You know what you are feeling, what you are thinking, and you tend to believe those thoughts and emotions are leaking out of your pores, visible to the world, perceivable to the outside.

You overestimate how obvious what you truly think must be and fail to recognize other people in your life are in their own bubbles, thinking the same thing about their inner worlds.

Source: tvtropes.org

When you try to imagine what other people are thinking, you have no choice but to start from inside your noggin. In there, with your perturbations pushing up against you, among your inescapable self, you think your thoughts and feelings must be evident.

Sure, when people are paying attention, they can read you to an extent, but you grossly overestimate how much so.

You can test the illusion of transparency using a method created by Elizabeth Newton.

Pick a song everyone knows, like your national anthem, and have someone else sit across from you. Now, tap out the song with your fingertips.

After a verse or two, ask the other person what you were tapping.

In your mind, you can hear every note, every instrument. In their mind, they can hear your fingers tapping.

(If you record a video performing this experiment yourself and post it on YouTube, I’ll add it to this post if you send me the link.)

Pause here and try it out. I’ll wait.

Ok. I’m going to assume you’ve been tapping. How did you do? Did they figure out what you were trying to play?

Probably not. How confident were you? Was it frustrating?

In Newton’s study, the tappers predicted the listeners would be able to guess the tune half of the time, but the listeners correctly guessed about 3 percent of the songs.

The rich, complex experience of being you is impossible to see. Your subjective experience is wholly unobservable to anyone but yourself.

Yet, much of the time, you assume this isn’t so, that what you think and feel must be apparent.

The huge discrepancy between what you think people will understand and what they really do has probably lead to all sorts of mistakes in text messages and emails.

If you are like me, you often have to back up and restate your case, or answer questions about your tone, or reword everything and try sending it again.

We always know what we mean by our words, and so we expect others to know it too.  Reading our own writing, the intended interpretation falls easily into place, guided by our knowledge of what we really meant.  It’s hard to empathize with someone who must interpret blindly, guided only by the words.

- Eliezer Yudowsky from Lesswrong.com

On the Internet, people often include “/s” at the end of a statement to indicate sarcasm. It was so hard to communicate tone online we had to create a new punctuation mark.

Getting an idea out of one head and into another is difficult, and much can be lost in the information transfer. An insight which slams into you like an avalanche won’t have the same impact coming out of your mouth or fingertips.

In 1998, Thomas Gilovich, Victoria Medvec and Kenneth Savitsky published their research on the illusion of transparency in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

They reasoned your subjective experience, or phenomenology, was so potent you would have a hard time seeing beyond it when you were in a heightened emotional state.

Their hypothesis was based on the spotlight effect – the belief everyone is looking right at you, judging your actions and appearance, when in reality you disappear into the background most of the time.

Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky figured the effect was so powerful it made you feel as if the imaginary spotlight could penetrate your gestures, words and expressions and reveal your private world as well.

They had Cornell students divide into groups. An audience would listen as individuals read questions from index cards  and then answered them out loud. They either lied or told the truth based on what the card said to do on a label only they could see.

Source: Ms L

Audience members were told they would get prizes based on how many liars they detected.

Liars would say something like, “I have met David Letterman.”

They then had to guess how many people could tell they had lied while the audience tried to figure out who out of the five was fibbing.

The results? Half of the liars thought they had been caught, but only a quarter were – they strongly overestimated their transparency.

In subsequent experiments the variables were shuffled around and the lies presented in other ways; the results were nearly identical.

Studies all throughout the 1980s showed you are confident in your ability to see through liars, yet you are actually terrible at it. On the other side, you think your lies will be easy to detect, that you are more transparent than you are.

Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky moved on to another experiment.

They sat students down in front of a video camera and a row of 15 cups filled with red liquid. They asked to students to hide their expressions as they tasted the beverages because five of the drinks were going to be rat nasty.

They then had 10 people watch the tape and asked the students who did the tasting to estimate how many of the observers would be able to tell when they had imbibed something gross.

On average, they guessed about half of the observers would see their revulsion, but only 3.5 percent could.

Pushing ahead, they tried another experiment based on the research of Miller and McFarland on the bystander effect (the more people who witness an emergency, the less likely any one person will leap into action).

“When confronted with a potential emergency, people typically play it cool, adopt a look of nonchalance, and monitor the reactions of others to determine if a crisis is really at hand. No one wants to overreact, after all, if it might not be a true emergency. However, because each individual holds back, looks nonchalant, and monitors the reactions of others, sometimes everyone concludes (perhaps erroneously) that the situation is not an emergency and hence does not require intervention.”

- Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky from their study of The Illusion of Transparency

Once again, their research showed when people were in a situation in which they felt concerned and alarmed, they assumed it was written all over their faces when it reality it wasn’t. In turn, they thought if other people were freaking out, they would be able to see it.

In 2003, Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich conducted a study to determine if they could short-circuit the illusion of transparency.

They had people give public speeches on the spot and then rate how nervous they thought they looked to their audience. Sure enough, they said they looked like a wreck, but the onlookers didn’t notice it.

Still, in this experiment some people got stuck in a feedback loop. They thought they appeared nervous, so they started to try and compensate, and then they thought the compensation was noticeable and tried to cover that up which they then felt was more obvious, and so on until they worked themselves up into a state where they were obviously freaking out.

They decided to run the experiment again, but this time they explained the illusion of transparency to some of the subjects, telling them they might feel like everyone could see them losing it, but they probably couldn’t.

This time, the feedback loop was broken. Those told about the illusion felt less stressed, gave better speeches and the audiences said they were more composed.

Our results thus lend credence to the notion that “the truth can set you free”: Knowing the truth about the illusion of transparency set participants free from the cycle of anxiety…

- Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich

When your emotions take over, when your own mental state becomes the focus of your attention, your ability to gauge what other people are experiencing gets muted. If you are trying to see yourself through their eyes, you will fail.

Knowing this, you can plan for the effect and overcome it.

When you get near the person you have a crush on and feel the war drums in your gut, don’t freak out. You don’t look as nervous as you feel.

When you stand in front of an audience or get interviewed on camera, there might be a thunderstorm of anxiety in your brain, but it can’t get out; you look far more composed than you believe. Smile.

When your mother-in-law cooks a meal better fit for a dog bowl, she can’t hear your brain stem begging you to spit it out.

If you are trying to communicate something complex, or you have vast knowledge of a subject someone else does not, realize it is going to be difficult to put yourself in their shoes. The explanation process may become thorny, but don’t take it out on them. Just because they can’t see inside your mind doesn’t mean they are not so smart.

You don’t suddenly become telepathic when angry, anxious or alarmed. Keep calm and carry on.

Links:

The Speech Anxiety Study

The Illusion of Transparency Study

The Illusion of Transparency and Language at Lesswrong.com

Mixed Signals from Psychology Today


 
 

Our Eavesdropping-on-ET Strategy Not Likely to Work

14 Jul

Bad news for SETI: Even with the most sensitive radio telescopes yet designed, humans probably won’t find intelligent aliens by listening in on their phones and televisions, a new study finds.

“Eavesdropping on ET is very hard, even with the latest radio telescopes,” said astronomer Duncan Forgan of the University of Edinburgh, a coauthor of the study. “If we don’t try any other ways of searching for aliens, then we may never find them.”

Forgan and astronomer Robert Nichol of the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation in the U.K. set out to test the suggestion that rather than building expensive telescopes dedicated exclusively to listening for signals from aliens, SETI — the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence — could be done on the cheap by piggy-backing on other astronomy missions.

Some astronomers hoped SETI searches could ride on the coattails of the planned Square Kilometer Array, which will probe the history of the universe with thousands of small antennas spread out either Australia or South Africa.

“We focused on the SKA because it will be an incredible advancement in radio astronomy,” Forgan said. “It will be the most powerful radio telescope ever built.”

The SKA will also be sensitive in the same frequency range that cellphones, radio and television operate in. If the aliens out there are anything like us, that frequency range is exactly where we should expect to find them, astronomers have suggested.

In 2007, astrophysicists Abraham Loeb and Matias Zaldarriaga of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics calculated that signals similar to those used in human military radar could be detected from more than 160 light-years away using a telescope in the Netherlands called LOFAR, and more than 650 light-years away using the SKA.

But assuming these aliens have technology like ours, there won’t be enough time to find them, Forgan and Nichol argue. Humans, the only intelligent civilization we know of, have been communicating using radio waves for only about 100 years — and we’re beginning to go quiet. Advances in technology mean less power is needed to broadcast, and digital communication is starting to replace radio altogether.

Forgan and Nichol randomly generated about 500,000 alien civilizations based on current theories of planet formation, and an optimistic guess as to how many would develop life. They then assumed that each civilization broadcasts in radio for 100 years, and they can hear each other from up to 300 light-years away.

“All communication disappears,” the team wrote. Even with a telescope like the SKA, the odds of eavesdropping on another civilization are one in 10 million. The results were posted in a paper on the astronomy preprint website arxiv.org and accepted for publication in the International Journal of Astrobiology.

A more fruitful strategy would be to target our searches, Forgan suggests. We may not be able to hear leaked signals, but we could still pick up a deliberate beacon from a civilization that wanted to announce its presence. A telescope dedicated to searching for such a beacon, like the Allen Telescope Array in northern California, would improve the odds to one in 10 thousand.

Jill Tarter of the SETI Institute thinks Forgan underestimates the usefulness of the SKA. “The SKA is being built with a large field of view and many simultaneous beams, so that there should in fact be significant observing time available for SETI,” she said.

Whatever the odds, Loeb thinks we should eavesdrop, anyway. “Rather than speculate about how generic is our own evolution and whether others will be the same, we should just search,” he said. He points out that a lot of technological advances are driven by social forces. For example, Earth gave off the most radio waves during the Cold War, when radar ballistic missile searches were common.

“Politics are impossible to predict, they don’t follow laws of physics,” he said. “We should just explore the sky, and try to set as strong limits as we can.”

Forgan agrees. “We should always continue to eavesdrop as it is a cheap search method, especially if we piggy-back,” he said. “If you don’t listen, you won’t hear anything.”

Image: SKA

See Also:

Follow us on Twitter @astrolisaFor and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.

 
 

Air walk. By Donny Ariefianto.

13 Jul

"Air walk. By Donny Ariefianto."
 
 

Terrace rice fields in Yunnan Province, China.

13 Jul

"Terrace rice fields in Yunnan Province, China."