Week 1 Homework

Faces, Faces Everywhere

The main reason humans are so good at facial recognition is because it's a major evolutionary adaption. Faces convey important messages to each other and it's crucial that humans be able to understand them. One side effect at being so hypersensitive to facial recognition is registering faces in images that are not actually faces. Some are more clear than others but people can generally identify at least some features. This phenomenon is not a miracle or worth buying a piece of old toast over, it's just critical human survival technique.


The Naked Face

Regardless of whether other mammals are just as expressive as humans, humans can convey some pretty subtle things to each other with a slew of different facial expressions. Some people read and transmit these expressions without even knowing and others actively research and practice these messages. Psychoanalysts have found that facial expressions are hundreds of times more complex than angry sad, etc. The human face is an important tool for the most cultural animal on the world, and it's no coincidence.

Confidence game

Faces are useful for communication and they can be helpful the very cultural human world, but faces can also be used for less than honest means. Con men can pull off grandiose lies about themselves, making others believe their phony reputations or their fabricated achievements. Con men take advantage of the fact that people generally believe one another when initial meeting. There are other genetic factors that tie in rather than just the pure skill of lying and that is the genetic factor. Some people will simply appear more trust worthy than other and vice versa. Some faces, even with the slightest variations, can look radically different and produce a different effect when trying to lie. The height of the eyes, the narrowness of the nose, the sharpness of the cheekbones, every aspect of the face yield a different response. In addition to the face, con men also elicit body language, and the best of them, can even make themselves appear to be an aloof millionaire, recluse.

Beauty is in the Processing

On a subconscious level, humans instantly decide who they like and dislike simply based of the initial processing of a face. Average looking faces are generally found to be attractive to most people because the more common the face is, the easier it is to process and whether or not people are aware of it, it pleases them. One related phenomenon is that criminals faces are seen to be average looking and attractive, making them more successful in their crimes because people initially like them more.

How to give and receive criticism

People giving and receiving criticism act as if they always know everything. Critics especially do this, making it seem like they are all powerful in their decision making and can conform any piece of work to one measurable scale. People receiving the criticism act as if they too know everything and instant start to defend their topics, never listening to the critic. Good critics will always talk about the good and the bad equally and good receivers will always just listen before trying to rebuttal.

Bruce Mao's Manifesto for Growth

Experiments should be seen as living things and have to be let to go their own way. People conducting them should do nothing more that try to guide the experiment in the right direction, only stepping in when things can go deeper and become more useful and meaningful. Even mistakes made in experiments are not necessarily bad, because everything is learned from.

Ted Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity

After watching this video, Mr. Robinson makes some very good points. He points out how the current education system is formed around an ill-advised hierarchy system that places the math and sciences departments at the top. Robinson points out how this completely neglects other talents that students possess, and forces them to discard their creativity in the areas that they could flourish. The educational system sees the human brain like it does any other landscape and haphazardly mines for two resources, math and science skills. Any other talents are belittled, never truly accepted as "respectable" abilities. No one encourages people to be an artist or a dancer, instead it's always mathematics talents that are reinforced, trying to shape everyone into a university professor even when the mold doesn't fit. This is an enlightening video and makes some fairly disturbing predictions about a kind of bleak future where college degrees in math and sciences are completely common and while more people are out of a job, the human arts slowly dwindles away. I can say that I was moved by it, but then again, I'm not on an education board.

A Vision of Students Today

I really didn't like this video. It seems like it's trying to be more shocking than informative. I'm pretty sure the creators of the video would be much more pleased with themselves if their audience pissed themselves instead of actually taking into account that statistics shown via quick cuts and edits of gloomy students holding sheets of paper. This video tells us what we already know: college is a lot of bullshit in many aspects, people are studying for jobs that don't exist yet, the teaching systems are largely ineffective for most people. Why was this video created? Because someone thought that scratching statistics into the wall was clever. Informative, but really annoying.

Matt Webb Scope

Webb's speech was very inspiring and I've never quite realized just how easy it can be to become "good" at something. The 100 hours that he claims is all that's required is a very cool idea. For this class specifically, I want to spend my 100 hours becoming "good" at programing. If Webb is right, then in 10,000 hours, I can become a master. I think I'll even apply this concept to my other classes and hobbies.

Henry Jenkins et al, "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for he 21st Century"

Technology has exploded to such an extent of the last thirty years that it encompasses every aspect of modern life. Where curmudgeons could hold their ground in the past, ignoring such advances while still being able to live normally, nowadays, avoiding how ubiquitous electronics has become and refusing to learn about them is cultural suicide. Anyone who decides simply to not use computers or not watch youtube cannot be considered normal. Maybe ten years ago that might have still been okay, but it's become too apparent that technology is here to stay. And just like people needed to learn how to drive cars once they made their niche in society, people are going to have to start learning how to use computers and all of the road signs and turning singles of the virtual world as well. Programming is not a novelty talent, but a means to survive a future where not knowing how to program would be as fatal as not knowing how to put on a seatbelt.


I Use This

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm a student at Arizona State University. I'm majoring in design studies.

My Laptop: An HP Pavilion with an 11.5 inch screen. As far the hardware, I was only really concerned with the video card, which is an ATI Radeon 3600 Mobile. It's not that great, but it can handle most of the old school stuff that I'll play and occasionally some of the new stuff. In retrospect, I should've gotten a netbook and opted for more battery life.

My Phone: an LG VX9400. It has no redeeming qualities other than it being in the Iron Man movie. Also there's a huge hidden antenna on the back that looks pretty funny.

Software

Phone: Nothing. Not even tetris

Laptop: A version of photoshop that someone handed me a while back, a bunch of different emulators and a very buggy version of microsoft word.

Other than that I use gmail, google reader and google docs when my word isn't working correctly.