A novel use for a social media tool

Posted on April 1, 2007 Written by 6 Comments

CUPERTINO, California (AP) – An online tool to help you get pregnant? Surely, do not let the April 1 dateline fool you.

While dating and romance sites have helped bring couples together for years, there is now an online service that can actually help existing couples find the right time to conceive. Which is not at all what the creators had in mind.

Twitter.com is the breakout web community of 2007. Based on a simple premise, “What are you doing right now?”, hundreds of thousands of “Twitterers” have been sharing their most mundane thoughts and actions for the past several months. Earlier this year attendees at the influential South By Southwest Conference in Austin spurred the site to a new level, bringing together a massive community of users.

It was exactly the sort of data pool Dr. Phil Larkin needed to test his theory.

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Proof, er, Consequences

Posted on February 15, 2007 Written by 6 Comments

My Platonic Talk post drew some attention from some fellow media trainers and communicators. Apparently, I have not been alone in my assertion that “perfect speech” is not the road to perfect communication, but is in fact a hindrance. Backing that up, I have an anecdote from a study that I remembered reading years ago… and now I have other pros who would like the opportunity to cite it.

(Nothing like sticking it to the Toastmasters.)

I still have not found the original study, but apparently there is some other evidence out there backing up the concept: [Read more...]

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Elliptical Thinking

Posted on January 5, 2007 Written by 1 Comment

I promised to bring things full circle, and here we go…

The scientific method does us its greatest service when it simplifies the way we think, understand, and apply our collective knowledge to predicting outcomes. The application of Occam’s Razor is meant to be a guide — not an bulletproof truth in and of itself. In the practical world, there are times when we ought to make fewer cuts. The examples I have in mind involve a different kind of epicycle, focused on time instead of space.

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Epicycles

Posted on January 4, 2007 Written by 3 Comments

One of the neat conversations with my wife that sparked my re-entry into blogging had to do with how science marches on, in a constant quest for refinement. I tried to think of an example of how these incremental gains on the truth sometimes lead to a blind alley, and require a complete paradigm shift. For some reason, Johannes Kepler and his laws of planetary motion came to mind.

In more than one sense, this is rather circuitous, as I had recently recalled my “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” moment as a phone-a-friend… the question? Kepler. (I would bring everything back full circle about now, but that is precisely the problem Kepler was trying to avoid…)

As our celestial measurements grew more precise, and our nautical navigators needed them to be, our men of science discovered a problem: what they observed never quite matched what they predicted. When your best measurement of your location was down to a degree or so, this wasn’t as critical. But the further you got from the coasts, the more the star positions mattered, and the more you needed to fix your tools and algorithms. The best means for testing the “drift” in your system was by observing the planets.

The word planet comes from the Greek word meaning “wanderer,” describing the night-to-night path these bodies tended to trace out on the sky maps. The motion was not apparent until you started charting over time — and some of that movement made no sense. Early on, civilizations recognized the strange backwards turn Mars made. The same “retrograde” motion also goes for outer planets, but being further from the Sun, not as easy to track. (The planets don’t really alter course — it’s just a slow-motion optical illusion, analogous to passing a car that is on the outer lane while you are on an inner lane.)

The answer was to tweak the calculations of the orbits… done by adding a small circle to the big orbital circle. Not terribly elegant to calculate, but it did allow the early astronomer to make a decent enough prediction about where the stars and the planets would be.

At least, until his tools improved again, renewing the cycle of recalibration and recalculation.

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