Why do the Brecon Beacons look higher when it snows?

As often happens here at this time of year, we've had a fall of snow and it's stayed on the peaks around where we live. Each time this happens, I'm surprised by how much higher the mountains look when they have snow on them - they look like an entirely different (and considerably more impressive) range.

So, what I puzzle about every time is whether this visual effect is either knowledge-based (higher mountains have snow on them - that's how we know they're higher!) or sensation-based (bright objects appear closer (and therefore bigger)). Because of my more Gibsonian background, I'm inclined towards the latter model ... but it's a curious effect.

Art, Gender and Pigeons

We’ve been exploring how people might 'naturally' categorise contemporary art pictures – not art connoisseurs but ordinary people who buy art prints for the walls of their homes.

Not surprisingly, we’re finding that people are reasonably consistent in grouping together pictures which see they perceive as ‘being similar’. However, there does seem to be a marked gender difference operating. Women have a tendency to group together pictures on the basis of similarity of colour and subject even if they have dissimilar visual structure or style (see example below).


















Men, on the other hand, seem more inclined to group together pictures which share similar visual structure or style even if their colours or subject matter are very different (see example below).



















And what about pigeons? We couldn't persuade any to do our experiment but they've certainly been shown to be capable of discriminating between Monet and Picasso and, once trained, can carry over this discrimination to new paintings by these two artists. Apparently, they can also generalise the behaviour to other impressionist and cubist works[1]. Impressive performance but were these arty pigeons male or female? It leaves us wondering....!!

I'll come back to this subject when I've discovered some more.....

Meanwhile, you can read a fascinating article about birds and colour vision here.

And one about possible gender differences in colour perception here.

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[1] Wannabe, S., Sakamoto, J. and Watika, M. (1995), Pigeons’ discrimination of paintings by Monet and Picasso, Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behaviour, 63, 165=174.

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Remote Cricket

A recent edition of the Gadget Show on Channel 5 showed a wired-up operator remotely operating a mechanical hand. The presenter demonstrated how he could catch a ball in this remote hand by closing his fingers, and looked forward to the day when Andrew Flintoff would be able to take a catch in a test match being played in Sydney while actually staying in London. Already, he said, surgeons are able to operate remotely using similar techniques, and NASA is building special space suits so that the astronauts of the future will operate remote replicas of themselves while they stay safely on Earth.

The remote astronaut scenario is clearly going to be challenging to the point of ludicrous if they mean allowing someone to perceive and react to an environment on a planet several light minutes away. But the remote test match sounds more credible until you stop to work out how long Andrew Flintoff has to respond if he's going to take a slip catch. If the ball comes off the bat at 120km/h, it's going 33 metres a second. It will take around a third of a second to reach Andrew's Avatar in Sydney, but he would have to judge its trajectory (from the delayed remote video image) in much less than half that time, and then move to intercept it at the first point where it was reachable, knoiwing that his avatar would only move some time in the future. The satellite delay to Australia can be well over a second, and even if you ping Australia through the Internet you get a round trip delay of about a third of a second.

Playing cricket through a remotely wired avatar would be a weird experience. You'd be seeing and responding to the world as it was around third of a second ago, knowing that any response would only take effect in around a third of a second from now. Facing a fast bowler where the ball only takes about a seond and a half to reach you from the bowler's hand would therefore be tricky. The bowler - even if he's a remote one - wouldn't have quite the same problem. He wouldn't be able to respond to the batsmen's exact position, but otherwise his main problem would be guessing when to stop his run up to avoid no-balls.

Love, Truth and Prunes

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”
(from Metaphors We Live By, G. Lakoff and M. Johnson)

I was recently listening to John Killick on Radio 4 talking about his conversations with people with dementia. It reminded me of the amazing (and lengthy) ‘phone conversations which I used to have with my late father. My father had fronto-temporal dementia and spent his last couple of years in a specialist home in Oxfordshire. Too far away to visit each week, my brother and I used to call him every other day or so – just to chat. Actually, my father used to do most of the talking – sometimes holding the ‘phone to his mouth and, sometimes carefully placing it (mid-sentence) in the pocket of his much-loved, old tweed jacket. At this point the conversations would become inevitably more muffled (at his end) and shouty (at mine).

As a cognitive psychologist, I became fascinated by his increasingly creative use of language and metaphor. As his daughter, I just enjoyed connecting (where I could) with the eclectic mixture of meanings, pleasures, memories and humour which summed my father up perfectly. It certainly taught me that communication with someone you love is not about facts and coherent sentences but about the rhythm of conversation. Even though I often couldn’t follow his precise meaning, I could catch the drift and join in and I found that conversations which didn’t rely on (shared) logic and facts or even any standard notion of coherence were actually warm, fun and insightful and, above all, made me feel close to him.

My father’s conversation was increasingly dominated by a fixed number of interrelating ‘themes’ most of which had been important throughout his life – his Christian beliefs and life as an Anglican lay reader preparing weekly sermons and services, his loving care for his wife (my mother) during her long years with dementia – (had she eaten all the prunes he’d given her?, could he get her clothes dry before morning?). Then there was his lifelong love for sailing and the sea and finally his (recently acquired) fear of MRSA (which he contracted during an earlier stay in hospital).

For a while, prunes (and their consumption) were the single dominating theme ‘Love, Truth and Prunes’ became his recurring phrase – the subject (it seemed) of a sermon he was constantly looking for the right opportunity to preach. Meanwhile, he would devour these fruit by the dozen. Whilst in hospital in Oxford, we took to shipping tins of prunes in by the box load in the hopes of keeping the anxious ward staff abreast of his demand.

Below are some examples of my father’s metaphors which I jotted down as he chatted on the ‘phone and some thoughts on what I took them to mean…

“the idea is 18 prunes, followed by 5 cornflakes and then 3 hymns which is ideal in setting the stage” I guess the cognitive acts of planning a balanced meal and planning a balanced Church service are not that dissimilar – in both cases, my father knew he needed to hold the interest of a potentially distractible audience!

“in the last hour, they’ve been quietly wheeling out the less confident members of the congregation … they’re collecting them in special yellow bags and disposing of them by the lift” Here, I think, there’s a cross-over between the institutional process he witnessed for disposing of unwanted or unacceptable items and the process of ‘disposing’ of unwanted or unacceptable people. As he struggled with nursing home culture, did my father fear that he might be one of the latter?

“you need the confidence here to know how to respond to each eddy and gust… some good friends came alongside and gave me a tow to lunch” Living in a nursing home was a traumatic and difficult experience for my father – I liked this familiar sailing analogy of reacting to gusty, unpredictable wind conditions (over which you have no control) and then the concept of the friendly ‘fellow sailors’ “coming alongside” and offering a slightly slow (and increasingly unstable) vessel a welcome “tow to lunch”.

“so much detail gets increasingly important but it’s very very demanding on my back” Here maybe the increasing ‘pain’ of struggling to manage detailed information in his head became mixed with the physical pain of a stiff back?

“there’s a lot of literature in the bathroom which has not been properly aired .. I tried to build up in my library material about changes in underclothes” In the latter days of caring for my mother, the floors, tables and chairs of their house were always covered with a random selection of my father’s sermon notes, lists, ideas and correspondence together with my mother’s clothes which always needed drying. Maybe my father worried about his sermon plans not being ready (or ‘aired’ we might say) for use on Sunday morning?

“I’ve been towing the content of my origins but the ground is very uneven but I’m leaving literature in the thin patches”. In his small room in the nursing home, my father had a small number of his much loved boxes of ideas, lists, letters and sermon notes – he would constantly empty these out on the floor (and bed and chairs) as he sorted and re-sorted them, read and re-read fragments and tried to make further notes with his vast collection of coloured pens. It felt as if he might be trying to reconstruct his sense of his identity (or ‘origins’) from the paper fragments lying on his floor but maybe this process felt as stumbling and uncertain as his increasingly unsteady attempts at walking along the corridor to lunch.

“it’s very cold here – the heating arrangements were superb but now they’ve been deperbed” – And finally, this is just one of the many examples of my father’s playful use of language. I find it fascinating that a brain, sadly damaged by this stage, could still generate entirely original and consciously humorous turns of phrase.

I miss our conversations.

Video on demand

Will broadband make broadcast TV redundant? I doubt it. Personal video recorders like SKY+ are already changing how many of us watch TV, and their future looks much more promising.

With cheap disc drives now down to below a dollar a gigabyte, the next couple of years should see the first terabyte SKY+ boxes. The cheap disc drives of 25 years ago held 5 megabytes, and if you plot their capacities you see them reaching the terabyte mark around now. That's about 500 hours of cinema, more than many of us watch in a year. If they maintain the same growth rate discs might manage another thousand-fold increase in the next 10 to 15 years. A petabyte disc can store 500,000 hours of video, which is more than all the professional film mankind created in the first 100 years of cinema.

So when the first petabyte Sky+ boxes hit the streets, they'll have to come preloaded with all the film created up to the time of manufacture, and use their remaining capacity to capture every new film as it is produced. At the moment, that's about 5,000 hours a year, or a mere 10 terabytes. With multi-channel decoders, these future generation SKY+ boxes will spend all their time storing new films, as it is broadcast 24 hours a day on high speed channels designed for recording devices. Most of this material will, of course, be encrypted, so you'll still be paying to view it - but you'll be paying to decrypt it off your own recorder.

Watching "real" time TV will then be the exception, rather than the rule, with news bulletins, weather reports and sports events being the only programmes transmitted for instant viewing. As far as professionally produced films are concerned, the Internet need only be used to carry decryption keys and credit card details. That will free up the available bandwidth for amateur narrowcasting and video telephony.

Can you categorise the kind of art you like?

I’m interested in how people describe or even categorise the kind of art they like. I’d really like to know if there are any useful (i.e. common) ways to do it. I’ve now collected data from about 100 consumers talking about the art they like and I’ve found they very rarely use artists’ names or refer to official art movements or styles, e.g. impressionism or cubism. Mostly, the language people use is informal and it’s about colour, shapes, style and emotive content.

So, as an introspective exercise, I tried to see if I could categorise the kind of art I like. Browsing through art sites on the web, I was surprised to find how easy it was! Looking at the selection I’d picked, I discovered (for the first time) that I actually like 4 different ‘categories’ of contemporary art. After that, it was easy to find more examples of any category.

I then tried to describe each category in linguistic terms – this proved a lot tougher to generate (and for others to understand!). Anyway, here are my 4 categories – so, if you want to buy me a picture, you know what to look for!
1. Brightly coloured, semi-abstract landscapes

2. Perceptually interesting abstracts with bold shapes and colours

3.Industrial, evocative, Lowry-like scenes

4. And, finally, sailing boats.....

I’ve now become aware that, if I’m walking along a street and pass an art gallery with an example of any one of these kinds in its window, I’ll stop and go in to look around. If not, I probably won’t.

And, more intriguingly, where did these tastes come from? – the sailing boats are obvious (given my life long interest) but what about the abstract shapes – why do they need to be bold?

Anyway, can I tempt anyone into posting 5-10 examples which exemplify their taste in art? Maybe it’s only me that finds the exercise easy?

Knowledge Workers and the Business of Informing

Ages ago, I wrote a paper about knowledge work called ‘The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker’. It excited a fair amount of debate at the time and another flurry of articles on the topic appeared a couple of years ago in The Economist and New Yorker prompted by the publication of Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper's book 'The Myth of the Paperless Office'.

I recently re-hashed some of the original thinking for a publisher who wanted to understand the kind of publication which would attract a knowledge worker … here it is…

Some years ago, we studied a selection of knowledge workers in different businesses: design, management consultancy, advertising, broadcasting, marketing, finance, I.T. and research and learned some interesting things about how these people consume printed information.

We found that knowledge workers use information (literally) to inform - to change the form of - their own and their company’s thinking, perspectives, assumptions and ideas so that they and the companies they serve will act differently (and more effectively) in their markets and beyond.

Business processes, in contrast, are designed to achieve the same output regardless of who does them and they rely on input consistency. For knowledge work, on the other hand, diversity of both input and output are the norms. A group of knowledge workers will select different magazines to read and even different articles within a magazine. They’ll underline different paragraphs, scribble different notes in the margin and make different sense of what they read. They will then use the information to achieve different effects on their business. Businesses should expect a different output from each of their knowledge workers – it is the value they add to the business. In fact, depending on them for consistency of output is a very bad plan!

Where paper embodies a business process, it’s vital to keep track of it, so filing is a critical element of any paper-based business process. Losing, or worse still disorganising, paper records can spell business disaster. Paper has a different role for knowledge workers. Once they have been informed by it, its value is discharged and they might as well dispose of it or pass it to a colleague who might be differently informed by it. Until that time, however, it might be very unwise to even put it away. Typical knowledge workers have no stable basis on which to file paper, and as soon as they do, they don’t need to! A knowledge worker’s filing cabinet does not contain knowledge; it does not even record knowledge in the sense that business files record the state of the business. Only the knowledge workers’ heads, and the new plans and procedures they propose, can embody knowledge. The important marks in a knowledge worker’s office are on the knowledge worker, not on the paper they keep.

So, if you walk into an office which operates a business process, you’d be right to be concerned to find piles of paper or messy desks. It would suggest that the processes were not being efficiently operated or were out of control. But you shouldn’t be so concerned if you find that a knowledge worker’s desk and floors are cluttered with piles of paper and magazines, often dismembered and annotated with scribbles and Post-It notes. It may look like a mess to you, but just try “tidying” it and the knowledge worker may rightly complain that you are disrupting his or her thinking.

For knowledge workers, the combination of individual sheets, piles of paper and post-it notes are a wonderfully flexible way to help them work out their ideas, create connections between things and re-create their state of mind if interrupted by a ‘phone call or a weekend break. Knowledge workers appear to use physical space, such as desks and floors, as a temporary holding pattern for inputs and ideas which they cannot yet categorise or even decide how they might use. Filing is uncomfortable for them because they cannot reliably say when they will want to use a particular piece of information or to which of their future outputs it will relate. Interestingly, none of the knowledge workers we spoke to seemed able to organise their thinking other than with material, like printed paper, that occupied physical space.

So what does this mean for publishers?

If your target readership is knowledge workers then:-

Recognise that knowledge workers primarily use magazine articles as stimulants for their own creative thinking. Employ writers who are skilled at this ‘think piece’ approach.

Recognise that knowledge workers seek diversity of inputs. For those knowledge workers who have the greatest impact on their businesses, it would be arrogant to try to decide what is relevant - it’s not something a publisher can predict (and nor can the knowledge worker!). So seek out and include miscellaneous or ‘off-topic’ articles alongside the mainstream ones. Knowledge workers appreciate that.

Recognise that paper, which may be no more than a medium of distribution and presentation for you, is a critical thinking tool for your readers. It’s part of their flexible visual vocabulary with which they create context, new meaning and new models of the world. Expect to see pages torn out of your magazine, scribbled on, covered in highlighter and Post-its, and even scattered on the floor! A neatly filed magazine is a dead magazine from a knowledge worker point of view!