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  • Demotivation by External Rewards
    Published: February 25, 2010

    Jesse Schell’s “Future of Games” talk at DICE is getting a good deal of buzz and discussion.

    So here are a few thoughts: The second half of Schell’s talk centers on external reward systems such as the Xbox Live achievement system, and he describes a possible future (that he appears somewhat ambivalent about) in which everything – TVs, toothbrushes, pianos, cars, schools are designed as game-like systems that constantly reward you with points for various actions. Such as, well, brushing your teeth.

    Schell’s basic argument is that external rewards are an incredibly strong psychologically motivator.

    Yes and no. If you think about the car that gives you points for a mundane activity such as driving fuel-efficiently, then certainly external rewards can work as a motivator.

    But I think that Schell a.o. overlook that external rewards are also known to be strong demotivators. A famous 1973 experiment (“Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward“) showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and began drawing less.

    Here’s the graph from a write-up of the results that also mentions similar studies of adults. (Expected reward = consistently receiving a reward for drawing.)

    But how can that be? Aren’t rewards motivating? Not necessarily, because rewards may trick you into forgetting your original motivation. You think you like drawing, but when you are consistently showered with rewards for doing it, you start thinking that you are really in it for the rewards …

    Marc LeBlanc once pointed me to the business book Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. From the book description:

    Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we’re bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery.

    As you can see, this is completely at odds with the argument that Schell is making. I can’t claim to be an expert on the psychology here, but it does seem that external rewards may have a kind of reversal effect: If you dislike the activity, external rewards make it more attractive, but if you like the activity, external rewards make it less attractive.

    So one theory to use could be Michael Apter’s Reversal Theory, according to which we switch between telic (focused on external goals) and paratelic (focused on immediate enjoyment) states. Hence the introduction of an external reward will switch us from the paratelic state where we are enjoying a task, to the telic state where we are performing a task for external rewards.

    On a more personal note: I sometimes hear of universities that want to reward researchers for publishing papers or talking to the media. This always strikes me as unpleasant because it discounts the pride that we (hopefully) have in our research. If we started to do research only for the external rewards, our productivity would surely drop.

    And that, my friends, is why external rewards can be demotivating.

  • From syntax to ego to erasing Rauschenberg
    Published: March 2, 2010
    Source: HTMLGIANT

    Whoa, wikipedia’s bracket illustration totally brought to mind de Kooning’s Woman series, in which the female figure is broken into a kind of provocatively aggressive male syntax. This post is not an invitation to the feminist angle, however called for, as the gestural implications are obvious; this just got me thinking about “Erased de Kooning Drawing,” (1953) by Robert Rauschenberg, who, then a young artist, asked the patriarch if he could erase one of the latter’s drawings, who, in the spirit that marks a great man, said yes. The result is beautiful on all counts, and proves that ego is never destroyed, only transferred from one artist to another. I see my surname in his, so in the spirit of self-abnegation, Mr. Rauschenberg, I ask if I may erase you?

    Unerased de Kooning Drawing” (2010)

    I feel better already. I hope Bill and Bob do too.

  • thebestjpgever.jpg
    Published: March 4, 2010
    My Note: the best jpg ever, via fort90
  • The Holy Spirit is the Only Drug You Need
    Published: March 1, 2010
    My Note: via mikei wish these videos were real

    Behold the endlessly entertaining combination of drum and bass and people freaking out in church:

    thanks, Schork

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  • Do imperatives in the past tense exist?
    Published: February 23, 2010

    Douglas Krupka refers me to the following:

    Although in discussion of the imperative clause type it is routinely denied that it could ever feature a past tense, imperatives in the past tense do exist. Specifically, past imperatives can be found in (Northern) Dutch and Frisian, many speakers of which can produce and understand sentences like (1) and (2).

    (1) At liever eens wat minder! (Dutch)

    ate rather once somewhat less

    The English equivalent seems odd to me, but you would think it is hard to translate into a language which does not have imperatives in the past tense.  Best to put the English out of your mind and focus on the:

    At liever eens wat minder!

    You can do a Google search on the concept here.

  • the elf pinched me
    Published: February 26, 2010
    Source: style rookie
    My Note: kinda refreshing to see high fashion where it generally ends up– hanging out on hangers.(note: the Undercover jackets are from Spring 2006 and Fall 2004– NOT ‘the 90s’ but why do i know that?)
    Good evening, ladies and germs! I completely fail at the instant, fast part of blogging, seeing as I have like..no show reviews up. And London has already started. Wah wah.
    But! I just remembered I had these photos, and I wanted to share. Basically, back in like…October? FOREVER ago, it feels like. My pals and I went to the Art Institute’s Fashion Archives because our pal Shane worked there or something and it was glorious.
    Some notes:
    –Issues of Mademoiselle, Vogue, and Bazaar from the 1910’s on (and a few 1800’s ones, as well).
    VHS tapes of interviews with Issey Miyake, Jean Paul Gaultier, and more, and runway shows from the 80’s and 90’s.
    LOTS AND LOTS OF VINTAGE CLOTHESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSIMG_9603
    We weren’t allowed to try them on but I would be too worried of them disintegrating the moment my mitts touched the right sleeve. Seeing and touching was quite enough. QUITE. enough.

    Margiela
    A top by Margiela from when it was good WHAT WHO SAID THAT NOT ME. Silver coffee filter bra top!
    Align Center

    90s Margiela
    A coat by Margiela from when it was good God, who keeps saying that! Ahem, anyway, HATS! Many hats, covering your arms. Especially helpful if you happen to have a lot of parasites, or are the human version of Cerberus. Or even the Cerberus version of Cerberus! In which case, whaddup! How are the kids! Please don’t eat me!

    don't remember
    I don’t remember who this is by– Junya, I think? Anyway, it needs to be worn with the yellow/black satin seagull pumps from Miu Miu Spring, as well as the yellow/black optic Givenchy leggings, as well as a human that looks/smells/acts like me, and maybe is me. So, let’s make this happen. What, you refuse? Then you can go home.

    Margiela 90s
    More Margiela. An inside-out vintage dress printed, so.good. If you click on the photo and then go to “All Sizes” on the Flickr page you can kind of see the vintage label.

    Next we have what appears to be your average, run-of-the-mill, tiny straw hat.
    you think it's a normal hat but WAIT
    But then! What’s this? An ACCORDION? (Gremlin underneath not included.)
    Comme des Garcons
    Comme des Garcons, duh.

    Prada 1993
    If you have reached this far in this post because you have not yet had a hernia, congratulations! Have a Prada AW 1993 gown. Not really. It’s mine. Well, not really again. It’s the Archives’. But we pretend it’s mine, don’t we? When we play Make Believe? What, you refuse? Then you can go home. Again.

    saddle back
    I’m pretty sure this vest is A.F. Vandevorst. Vest, or…HORSE SADDLE? This makes me think of some type of hybrid between the Richard Prince and Allen Jones sections of the new issue of Pop.

    comme i think
    Comme des Garcons…90’s, I would guess? So pretty. Like a marshmallow. Except now I just remembered how you roast marshmallows over a fire and then eat them, and then I thought about if someone set this on fire, AND THEN ATE IT, and now my blood pressure is rising, so deep breaths.

    IMG_9616
    90’s Undercover t-shirt as a scarf.

    undercover
    More 90’s Undercover, so epic. I mean, this is totally something that some creepy old lady who lives at the end of your street would make and then leave for you in a tree knot because she would actually be Anthony Perkins and think she was Norman Bates and then think she was Mrs. Bates and then think she was Boo Radley, y’know?

    mcqueen
    Alexander McQueen. Even more amazing in real life.

    miyake
    In.SANE. Issey Miyake Converse pants. I would like to wear these with one of the tennis shoe dresses from Herve Leger AW10. Or with a t-shirt and baseball cap and play baseball with the kids in The Sandlot like it was no big thang.

    Actually they would look kind of cool with this Junya dress.

    junya
    Ugh, this is SO PERFECT. Cause you know how sometimes you really love a vintage dress but you wish it was just a little more interesting and less “HI, I AM A VINTAGE DRESS”? Well, this is like that and better. I bet it looks amazing on a person.

    Oh, Comme des Garcons. The tricks you pull.
    commecomme
    A paper doll dress. I mean…so crazy good. Proof that not every idea has been thought of.


    moschinoIMG_9601IMG_9599
    This is adorable. Franco Moschino used to make for his very special muses and lady friends these make-your-own-dress kits, complete with instructions.

    IMG_9598
    Shoes from the late 1800’s, also so tiny. When did people get such huge feet? And McDonald’s size scales? And televisions?

    rockinghorse
    Vivienne Westwood Rockinghorses. I mean…you guyyyyyysssss.

    IMG_9594
    One of the most beautiful dresses I’ve ever seen in person but I can’t remember who it’s by. Like an onion layer/shipwreck/sad wedding dress.

    IMG_9591
    A vintage Chanel jacket, can’t remember the era. Can we get a close-up on those buttons?
    IMG_9592_1
    Lions! Like those little statues outside that one museum I should be able to identify but can’t because I would rather spend my time petting this jacket.

    IMG_9590
    More shoes.
    IMG_9589
    More more shoes.

    comme, back of a coat
    This is the back of this coat.
    comme, front of a coat
    This is the front.
    It’s CdG. Are you really surprised?

    IMG_9582
    I can’t remember who this is by! Which is sort of a good thing, because if I ever got one I would pop the whole thing.

    yohji
    The ultimate swagger coat. Now, I don’t use that word very often–swagger. Sounds like something you kids probably run around screaming to the tunes of that rhythm and blues of yours. BUT, just imagine how you would look walking down the street in this? Oh, Yohji. The things you do.

    IMG_9580
    More more more.

    IMG_9579IMG_9578IMG_9577IMG_9576
    And some pictures I took of the TV when we watched a recording of a Comme des Garcons show. Mid-nineties…maybe Spring ’95? I always go between this one and Lumps and Bumps for my number one favorite collection from Comme.
  • Antichrist
    Published: February 25, 2010
    My Note: A gorgeous meditation on depression simultaneously operating on multiple levels of representation. Heartbreaking.

    After their child dies, a therapist (Willem Dafoe) and his wife (Charlotte Gainsbourg) flee to their cabin in the woods, where they hope to mend their emotional wounds. But the grief-stricken couple watches their troubles multiply when very strange things begin to happen. Acclaimed Danish auteur Lars von Trier divides this tale into multiple narratives, revealing a surreal, horrific psychological adventure about the evils of nature, humanity and desire.
  • Babies and Bunnies: A Caution About Evo-Psych
    Published: February 24, 2010
    My Note: It is embarrassingly easy to come up with evolutionary psychology stories to explain little segments of data and have it sound good to a surface understanding of how evolution works. Why are babies cute? They have to be, so we’ll take care of them. And then someone with a slightly better cause and effect understanding turns it right-side-up, as Dennett has, and then it sounds really clever.
    Submitted by Alicorn 351 comments

    Daniel Dennett has advanced the opinion that the evolutionary purpose of the cuteness response in humans is to make us respond positively to babies.  This does seem plausible.  Babies are pretty cute, after all.  It’s a tempting explanation.

    Here is one of the cutest baby pictures I found on a Google search.

    And this is a bunny.

    Correct me if I’m wrong, but the bunny is about 75,119 times cuter than the baby.

    Now, bunnies are not evolutionarily important for humans to like and want to nurture.  In fact, bunnies are edible.  By rights, my evolutionary response to the bunny should be “mmm, needs a sprig of rosemary and thirty minutes on a spit”.  But instead, that bunny — and not the baby or any other baby I’ve seen — strikes the epicenter of my cuteness response, and being more baby-like along any dimension would not improve the bunny.  It would not look better bald.  It would not be improved with little round humanlike ears.  It would not be more precious with thumbs, easier to love if it had no tail, more adorable if it were enlarged to weigh about seven pounds.

    If “awwww” is a response designed to make me love human babies and everything else that makes me go “awwww” is a mere side effect of that engineered reaction, it is drastically misaimed.  Other responses for which we have similar evolutionary psychology explanations don’t seem badly targeted in this way.  If they miss their supposed objects at all, at least it’s not in most people.  (Furries, for instance, exist, but they’re not a common variation on human sexual interest — the most generally applicable superstimuli for sexiness look like at-least-superficially healthy, mature humans with prominent human sexual characteristics.)  We’ve invested enough energy into transforming our food landscape that we can happily eat virtual poison, but that’s a departure from the ancestral environment — bunnies?  All natural, every whisker.1

    It is embarrassingly easy to come up with evolutionary psychology stories to explain little segments of data and have it sound good to a surface understanding of how evolution works.  Why are babies cute?  They have to be, so we’ll take care of them.  And then someone with a slightly better cause and effect understanding turns it right-side-up, as Dennett has, and then it sounds really clever.  You can have this entire conversation without mentioning bunnies (or kittens or jerboas or any other adorable thing).  But by excluding those items from a discussion that is, ostensibly, about cuteness, you do not have a hypothesis that actually fits all of the data — only the data that seems relevant to the answer that presents itself immediately.

    Evo-psych explanations are tempting even when they’re cheaply wrong, because the knowledge you need to construct ones that sound good to the educated is itself not cheap at all. You have to know lots of stuff about what “motivates” evolutionary changes, reject group selection, understand that the brain is just an organ, dispel the illusion of little XML tags attached to objects in the world calling them “cute” or “pretty” or anything else — but you also have to account for a decent proportion of the facts to not be steering completely left of reality.

    Humans are frickin’ complicated beasties.  It’s a hard, hard job to model us in a way that says anything useful without contradicting information we have about ourselves.  But that’s no excuse for abandoning the task.  What causes the cuteness response?  Why is that bunny so outrageously adorable?  Why are babies, well, pretty cute?  I don’t know — but I’m pretty sure it’s not the cheap reason, because evolution doesn’t want me to nurture bunnies.  Inasmuch as it wants me to react to bunnies, it wants me to eat them, or at least be motivated to keep them away from my salad fixings.

     

    1It is possible that the bunny depicted is a domestic specimen, but it doesn’t look like it to me.  In any event, I chose it for being a really great example; there are many decidedly wild animals that are also cuter than cute human babies.

  • Outlier Bikewear Suits the City and the Office
    Published: February 23, 2010
    Source: GOOD
    My Note: via Rachelwould
    OUTLIER-Heavy-TrafficDressing for a bike commute usually means picking between trip and destination: mangle or sweat through work clothes; ride in performance apparel and change in the office bathroom. Both are badges of honor, of course, but urban cyclists are troubleshooters, and it was time this riddle got solved. lookmap-ny-orangeIn New York City in 2008, Tyler Clemens and Abe Burmeister conceived Outlier, a line of “tailored performance” apparel. The pair’s offerings are built from performance fabrics in flexible cuts — the kicker is that they’re styled on a par with traditional officewear. “We see ourselves right in the middle of three different clothing worlds,” says Clemens. “The athletic companies, the fashion companies, and the outdoor gear companies.” A typical item, the OG Pant, has an appealingly clean profile, but also features a slew of postmodern fabric tricks. Think Nike times Nudie, divided by Patagonia. Outlier’s collection — bendy button-front shirts and slim merino hoodies are standouts — is certainly priced with its peers in fashion, not sports: Triple digits are the norm. But the stout materials and adamantly local production make it hard to quibble. There is also an intriguing psychological component to clothing that’s built to work in every situation. Clemens can sound downright philosophical as he describes what it means to feel right in your clothes. “Comfort comes on a lot of levels,” he says. “Some of it’s technical but a lot of it is social.“ The obvious Outlier follow-up is how far into formal clothing the young clothiers dare to venture. Tuxes are probably a…
  • 12 NEAT PICS: MARK WEAVER
    Published: February 18, 2010


    Mark Weaver is a graphic designer from Boston, Massachusetts, who likes to take old images and transform them into something new.

    Mark Weaver is a graphic designer from Boston, Massachusetts, who likes to take old images and transform them into something new.

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    VAL
    Twitter.com/Valuhrey

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