Too Intelligent Marketing Concepts

As advertisers and marketers try to get our attention through the roar of ads, movies, magazines, books, and commercials we are bombarded with continually, they increasingly try to "target" consumers by using knowledge about the consumers preferences, tastes, previous choices, etc. However, if and when this approach works, then our previous choices and/or preferences become self-reinforcing because we are shown more and more of what we "like" to see, we get trained or we train ourselves, depending on how you want to look at it.
This runs contrary to what we should do if we want to "explore" new ideas and concepts, if we want to create new ideas and concepts, because one of the main ingredients of exploration, by definition, is discovery, and discovery implies that something unknown to us becomes known.

Discover the unknown, solve the unsolved, define the undefined!
Concept Explore

Very useful site, EJournals

Ejournals has many links to legit online scholarly journals, a wealth of info for free.

On Opportunities At Boundaries and Intersections

The compartmentalization and specialization that defines academia is both its strength and weakness. However, weakness can be turned to opportunity if one recognizes such weakness as an opening or as a need begging to be filled. If an academic specialty, department, field of study, or discipline were to "miss" something in the area of knowledge that defines its focus, then a good candidate location to look for such a "miss" would probably be in those area that have overlap with other specialties or at boundaries not clearly defined between multiple fields of study. These are the kinds of subjects we are interested in at Concept Explore.

On Reading Your Mind

It may not be long before sensors linked to computers will be able to read our thoughts. This is usually refered to as a neuro-interface.
One question I would like to investigate, related to research on neuro-interfaces and translating brain wave measurements into meaningful data for use in command and control systems is:
What is the difference between the brain waves created when we think about say something like "a new HDTV" and the brain waves produced when we simply speak the words "a new HDTV" silently to ourselves in our mind?

Urban-Suburban, Cram Together or Spread Out

Written after reading article on sprawl and mixed use development in Washington Post today.

What is the opposite of suburban sprawl?
What is this conceptual uptopia that the opponents of suburban development have in mind as an alternative?
They say that they want denser development where people can live, dine, shop, and work all in the same location within walking distance or within the reach of mass transit. It seems that their assumption is that cars and the suburban land use made possible by cars are the roots of all evil, that environment is damaged by suburban development patterns, and that highly planned compact urban development is less harmful.
That said, the "new urbanists" and "smart growth" advocates ignore some simple human traits and practical concerns.

1. People don't always prefer and can't always afford to live where they work and/or perform all of the other activities of life.
2. People don't always prefer to live right on top of thousands of other people.
3. People love the freedom that their cars afford them.
4. Mass transit sucks in most areas of the US and usually can't always get you to your destination in a reasonable amount of time to within a reasonable distance.
5. People do other things on the way to and from work such as shop for groceries, take classes, etc. I can't see myself lugging 10-15 bags of groceries for my family while boarding buses and trains.

Beyond all that, just based on the population and land area of the US, if we were to all spread out evenly to the maximum extent possible, we would each occupy roughly 8 acres. On the other hand, if we all packed together at the density found in Manhattan, NY, we would collectively only occupy a patch of earth with an area of about 100 miles by 100 miles. So we have plenty of room in the US to spread out all that we want.

My take, my bottom line conclusion is that those who don't want "sprawl", don't want it because they are not in charge of it and/or no one is in charge of it, it is not "planned" enough for them, it is not always neat and optimized, it charges forth in error sometimes, it responds to market forces not academic studies, it is unbridled.

I say if you want to spread out then spread out. I say that dense urban development probably does just as much damage to the environment as suburban development, maybe more. I say that in some ways I like the sprawl, the boom town feel, the brand new everything, new malls, new homes, new roads, new schools, new parks, etc. etc.

On Perpetuating Problems and Hyping the Insignificant

Government agencies and non-profit organizations established to fix some problem or shed light on some issue of "concern", no matter how worthy, all soon begin to exhibit self-survival behaviors just like every other living organism. It does not benefit them to solve the problem they were tasked to solve or fix because then they would no longer have a reason to exist.
News media tasked with providing a continual stream of information about something to us all, when short on "significant" information must make the insignificant seem significant, i.e. hype the trival or otherwise focus on some statistcally meaningless event or just get us all worried about something that might intrude in our lives with less probability than being hit by lightning. Usually, we are already aware of the things we should be worried about. Further, the most complex problems will never be solved by agencies because by definition agencies act for us and most important complex problems require our direct participation. We invent agencies to solve problems when we don't care about whether or when those problems are ever solved or not.