Steve Robbins’s arcticle defining NLP
Thom Hartmann NLP Course Week 1
Thom Hartmann NLP Course Week 2
Thom Hartmann NLP Course Week 3
NLP is pretty interesting. A lot of the language stuff turns out to be habits I already have, and now I’m reading theories of them. Weird.
Here is the line up for ABC this week:
This week we’re trying a totally different strategy – almost all our shows are syndicated. This means they are cheaper and less work for us as the descriptions tend to be copied from the originals. We needed to do cheap shows this week as advertising budgets were tight and Jason, our Stern student, insisted that we not commission any shows at a loss.
So creativity and inventiveness has lost out to the bottom line – we are counting on the recognition of our shows pulling in viewers who aren’t interested in any of the other offerings, which should give us ratings approximately as good as our ratings were last week, which wasn’t great.
This class is so weird – no action has a simple predictable effect. The ban on using real actors, which was intended to promote creativity has actually lessened it. Rather than people coming up with original ideas that they then stick a famous actor in to get it promoted and win an audience, people are coming up with ideas entirely based on familiar stories because you don’t get ratings with things that are unknown.
Also the Producers’ Union has not had the desired effect of raising the payment of producers, it’s just changed how people bargain over shows – so now they negotiate over what grade of show it is rather than how much producers should be paid. This will make it harder for producers to improve their margins as far as I can see. I’ve always been very pro-Union, but having to deal with an incredibly difficult union rep last week gave me some sympathy with business owners who don’t want to be locked into inflexible contracts that might put the whole business in jeopardy when the union behaves in a hostile and unco-operative manner.
When somebody starts a negotiation by telling you that if you don’t agree to their terms they’re going to strike and make you go bankrupt, it feels more like blackmail than give and take and your reaction tends not to be terribly sympathetic. My reminders that producers and networks were mutually dependent fell on deaf ears. And I thought the union was a good and fair idea until I saw what it turned into in reality.
So an interesting week and a line up I’m half ashamed of, half utterly tickled by.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Wi-fi cities spark hotspot debate
I do know how I feel about this.
Bastards.
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Countries turn backs on Hollywood
I don’t know how I feel abouut this yet.
The music for this is called Pyramid and it’s by DJET. You can find his stuff on The Internet Archive
My goal for this project is to create a short piece based around the theme of Choice.
I plan to do this using a variation on the theme of a music video.
I want to create a story sequence based on a person choosing a cake. Using metonymy, where a hand stands for a person, I’m going to have a plate piled with Hostess cakes beside a chair and show a hand descending to choose a cake. The “hand’s” will inititally be tempted by many of the cakes and will pick them up and then replace them, gradually getting more covered in chocolate and goo. In between shots of the hands decision I’m going to make sequences of stills of product logos and taglines I invent.
I will use a music sound track for the piece and will also incorporate sound effects to tell parts of the story, e.g. the person eating their chosen cake, or slogans being read out etc.
Reed’s Law: That Sneaky Exponential – subgroups grow at at rate of 2 to the N.
In Albert-Lazlo Barabasi’s Linked, chapter 7 deals with his idea “Rich Get Richer” idea of network growth – i.e. that the earlier a node joins a network the more likely it is to be well-connected as the network grows.
Chapter 3 of Six Degrees by Duncan Watts is about small-world networks – i.e. networks characterised by both low density and low hop count because some nodes do more work than others.
This stuff is so fascinating.
This week’s guest on Earshot was Kevin Bankston from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
He spoke to me about National Security Letters, gag orders, and the Patriot Act’s impact on privacy rights.
BJ Fogg’s Persuasive Technology sets out seven types of persuasive technology tools, or more accurately seven ways that technology tools work: reduction, tunnelling, tailoring, suggestion, self-monitoring, surveillance, and conditioning.
I’ve only read chapters 3 & 5 so far and I’ve found it useful in terms of providing a structure around which to think about ways that computers and other technology affect the ways we behave.
He has some interesting findings from various psychological studies that prove that people treat computers as people in certain circumstances, e.g. people tend to like computers that they perceive as being more like themselves in terms of dominance or submissiveness. There is certainly some persuasive potential if you can leverage the ways that people treat computers as social actors to get them to behave in certain ways.
Of course, just because you perceive someone as a social actor doesn’t mean you’re going to like them. You might even hate them. I guess that paper clip is the global outcast in the social network made up of people and their machines. Every body hates him and ignores him.
In terms of examples of particular persuasive technologies I was particularly intersted in the first method of persuasion Fogg identifies: that of reduction. Reduction means making a task so simple that the barrier to doing it is reduced to a point where you are far more likely to do it, and likely to do it more often.
There are a lot of websites right now offering little bits of javascript that you can move onto your browser and perform an action with just one click of something that is on your browser.
An example of this is New York Times Link Generator, where you can put a little bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar and just clicking it when you’re reading an article from the New York Times will generate a permanent link to that article that you can put on your blog. It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but linking things to your blog is something you don’t want to have to spend a lot of time on – this makes it a lot more likely that I’ll link ot NY Times articles.
