Another one of Felice Varini’s amazing illusions
Friday, 25 June 2010
Tuesday, 11 May 2010
Impossible Motion
Another brilliantly executed 3D illusion.
Once again, the beauty of this type of illusion is that as you watch it, your brain "knows" it's a trick, but your eyes believe it completely.
Like the Red Queen, who in her youth managed to believe six impossible things before breakfast, we are all much more inclined to belive impossible things that we would care to admit.
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Audio Illusion
An audio illusion for once.
Play this video a few times - until the pitch of the sound becomes inaudible.
This is a neat example of a Shepard Tone - the illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch without ever changing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
Play this video a few times - until the pitch of the sound becomes inaudible.
This is a neat example of a Shepard Tone - the illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch without ever changing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone
The impression of progress - where none in fact exists - is a common problem in IT projects...
Tuesday, 4 May 2010
Four Failures of Deliberating Groups
Ever noticed how group discussions and deliberations can result in an obviously wrong conclusion? Even when the group is made up of intelligent and informed people?
Yet there is an overwhelming assumption that vigorous debate leading to a decisision - consenual or not - is a good way of solving problems. I've always been suspicious of this. Now Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie have posted their new paper, “Four Failures of Deliberating Groups” on SSRN that explains why. Here’s the abstract:
Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have.
There are four such failures.
(1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of group members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation.
(2) Groups may fall victim to cascade effects, as the judgments of initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Nondisclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades.
(3) As a result of group polarization, groups often end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect.
(4) In deliberating groups, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that groups do not learn what their members know. All four errors can be explained by reference to informational signals, reputational pressure, or both. A disturbing result is that many deliberating groups do not improve on, and sometimes do worse than, the predeliberation judgments of their average or median member.
Yet there is an overwhelming assumption that vigorous debate leading to a decisision - consenual or not - is a good way of solving problems. I've always been suspicious of this. Now Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie have posted their new paper, “Four Failures of Deliberating Groups” on SSRN that explains why. Here’s the abstract:
Many groups make their decisions through some process of deliberation, usually with the belief that deliberation will improve judgments and predictions. But deliberating groups often fail, in the sense that they make judgments that are false or that fail to take advantage of the information that their members have.
There are four such failures.
(1) Sometimes the predeliberation errors of group members are amplified, not merely propagated, as a result of deliberation.
(2) Groups may fall victim to cascade effects, as the judgments of initial speakers or actors are followed by their successors, who do not disclose what they know. Nondisclosure, on the part of those successors, may be a product of either informational or reputational cascades.
(3) As a result of group polarization, groups often end up in a more extreme position in line with their predeliberation tendencies. Sometimes group polarization leads in desirable directions, but there is no assurance to this effect.
(4) In deliberating groups, shared information often dominates or crowds out unshared information, ensuring that groups do not learn what their members know. All four errors can be explained by reference to informational signals, reputational pressure, or both. A disturbing result is that many deliberating groups do not improve on, and sometimes do worse than, the predeliberation judgments of their average or median member.
The Zero-Profit Software Syndrome
It is an accepted economic principle that when the cost of entry to a market drops to zero, the profitability of that market also drops to zero.
Put another way, when the cost of entry to a market is high, the existing players in the market can form effective cartels and defend high profit margins - General Electric in the US is a perfect example of this strategy, focusing on industries with prohibitive entry costs: aircraft engines, medical systems, etc. But as the costs of entry erode, cartels disintegrate and profits disappear.
So what happens if you are a major player in an industry where the cost of entry is disappearing? How do you survive? The only strategy that seems to work is Marketing. Replace the "technical" cost of entry with a "marketing" cost of entry. Spend huge amounts of marketing dollars to convince potential customers that your product is somehow different, and force your competitors to spend equivalent marketing dollars to challenge you. That way the cartels are safe.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams, in his book "The Dilbert Future" made the following prediction:
In the future, all barriers to entry will go away and companies will be forced to form what I call "confusopolies".
Confusopoly: A group of companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price.
So Dilbert's Confusopolies are just the usual marketing performance, focused on desperation.
The business software market seems to have reached the Confusopoly stage. Development tools and environments are vastly more productive than they were a couple of years ago, and Open Source software is now becoming respectable in the business environment. This means that in any given application niche, a new company can develop a new and attractive competitive product at minimal cost. This competition will drive down the price of software until, even with massively productive development tools, it becomes uneconomic to invest in further development.
So what to do?
The obvious strategy is to invest in Marketing. Marketing led companies will confuse the off of their customers and make a fortune – or so the theory goes. But as well as being sad, I believe this strategy is also doomed to fail. Why? Well, marketing doesn't come cheap, and as in all walks of life, most money will be misspent. Customers will eventually spot the fact that most of the money they believe should be spent of new product releases is instead being spent on navel fluff.
But what else is there?
I'm not sure that anyone has a good answer to this question yet. But Amovada is going to have a good go at working it out. Watch this space!
Self-delusion
The great thing about this illusion is that it makes no pretence at being anything other than an illusion.
The video starts off by showing you how the 3D illusion is created in 2D, then the camera pans round and shows you the illusion itself.
But you are still tricked!
This is a splendid demonstration of the way you can go into something - an IT project for example - fully aware of the traps and pitfalls you may encounter. But despite this awareness, you still fall into the first pit you stumble upon.
Sunday, 2 May 2010
amovada.com
We have rewritten the Amovada website.
The new logo was inspired by the work of Fortunato Depero - an Italian futurist who did a lot of work for the Campari brand.
Please let us know what you think!
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