For Teenage Girls, Swimsuit Season Never Ends

The conclusion of this article may or may not apply more broadly, but I can't imagine that being surrounded by imagery that asks us to reflect on our own personal needs and interests, we do not forgo some of our capacity to think about others.

"In short, when young women are prompted to reflect on their physical appearance, they seem to lose intellectual focus."

VIA: The NY Times

How do you get a young woman to bomb a math test? Have her take it while wearing a bathing suit. More [HERE]

How Corporations Will Use Artificial Empathy to Sell Us More Shit

VIA: Motherboard

Empathy is a tricky business. The range and complexity of human emotion makes it difficult, if not impossible, to ever really understand how someone else is feeling. Nevertheless, empathy is considered to be a crucial aspect of what makes us human—indeed, our brains appear to be hardwired for it. So perhaps it won’t come as much of a surprise that as machine learning becomes ever more sophisticated and capable of mimicking some of the most complex functions of the human brain, figuring out a way to teach a computer empathy is quickly becoming a business in itself. More [HERE]

Invention: Billboards that know you at a touch

This was sent to me by a good friend and is a dark and grim future for us all.

NewScientist.com news service

Justin Mullins

Adverts could be more personal if they can download your personal information when you touch them. Pocket gadgets hold ever more information, but are still mostly unconnected islands of data. One of the most promising ways to change that is to link up a person's devices by using the human body as a conduit. The same approach would make it easier to share data like business cards or photos with other people. Options for such body area networks include skin-clinging radio waves, or tiny vibrations through the skeleton that let people swap data with a handshake. The IEEE – the US body that defines the local area wireless networking protocol – is already working on a standard for body area networks.

Now the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute in Daejon, South Korea, wants to use these new methods of sharing data to revolutionise public advertising. Billboards and electronic advertising displays are inherently inefficient because the bulk of the people who catch sight of them have no interest in the product being promoted. The Korean patent gets around this problem by suggesting that people using a body area network could touch an electronic poster to tune it to their interests. The display would download details about that person's interests and recent activities, and display a relevant advert. Downloads like detailed product brochures could also be offered. Whether people would want to interact with ads in this way is another matter. To address this, the patent suggests goodies could be offered too – for example special-offer coupons, or even music and films. Billboards in places where people wait for buses or trains would be ideal spots to get people interacting, suggest the team.

Read the full body area adverts patent application.

Nielsen And NeuroFocus Alliance

This is a small blurb about the new alliance between the Nielsen Company and NeuroFocus, an innovative leader in neuro marketing research. I think it's worth the read to better understand the lengths to which companies are going to understand consumer behavior and better control the responses. Behavioral psychology grew up hand in hand with advertising and it's no wonder they will hold hands into the future by way of "...electroencephalography (EEG) technology to directly measure the brain’s reaction to a variety of stimuli." Yikes...

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