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Best wishes to all my friends who are celebrating the Festival of Lights on this Winter Soltice!

“When you rule out an entire class of people from doing a job simply because of their appearance, you’re less likely to find the person best suited for the job.”-Michael Lewis in MONEYBALL.

Michael Lewis is a journalist who writes like a novelist. The first time I encountered Lewis’ work was in his book, THE NEW NEW THING. Understand that I’m a very slow book reader. My reading tends to be in the snack-o-tainment style of magazine articles and , now, blog pieces. It can easily take me a month to 6 months to read a book which is why I tend to prefer audiobooks which I can “read” during commutes.

THE NEW NEW THING was an exception. While accompanying my wife on a weekend business trip to Phoenix, I couldn’t stop reading it and completed the whole book in a couple of days. That’s when Michael Lewis became one of my favorite writers.

I don’t buy audiobooks. I get them free from the library. But I did buy the audiobook of MONEYBALL because I was fascinated with the concept of using sabermetrics to assess performance. To me, it was more like a textbook than a mere reading experience. But I was a little surprised when I learned that the book had been made into a movie. Guess I shouldn’t have been given that movie adaptation of “The Blind Side” was such a big hit.

During an interview about the movie version of THE BLIND SIDE, I’d heard Michael Lewis talk about how once he sells the film writes to a book he relinquishes control and is usually eliminated from the project. In his recent interview with Jon Stewart, Lewis indicated that he’d expected the movie adaptation of MONEYBALL to be a disaster but that he’d been pleasantly surprised.

We saw the MONEYBALL movie last night.

Apparently, Paul DePodesta, who is a central character in the book, did not want to be represented in the movie. So the character of Peter Brand as played by Jonah Hill was created as an amalgamation of DePodesta and other members of the Oakland A’s staff. Hill’s movie career has primarily been playing obnoxious geeky characters in Judd Apatow movies. He’s geeky but vulnerably likable in this role.

The book chronicles the pre-Oakland A’s experiences of several key characters: Billy Beane, Paul DePodesta, Chad Bradford, and Scott Haddeberg. We hear anecdotal observations about Beane and his mercurial nature but we don’t really get to know much about him. The movie is more centered around Billy as the main character and, with Brad Pitt in the starring role, we get to learn more of his experiences as a person. It could be titled “Moneyball:The Billy Beane Story”. I’m unclear about how much of the personal interactions between Billy Beane, his wife and her new partner or Billy and his daughter are fictionalized but they play well in the context of a movie. Pitt’s performance is relatively low-key with occasional outbursts and you find yourself rooting for both Beane and his team of outcasts as the underdogs. My emotional reaction reminded me a lot of those I experienced while watching the movie version of “Seabiscuit”

The book ends with the story about how Scott Haddeberg inadvertently broke his Louisville Slugger contract by grabbing the wrong bat when he was unexpectedly called in to pinch hit for what turned out to be a record-breaking game. The movie doesn’t include that story and instead ends with Billy Beane in a “dad” moment.

It works.

Postscript: I’m an advocate for Billy Beane’s sabermetrics approach but there is a certain irony that Tony LaRussa, who Billy forced out, has been the manager of two World Series contending teams since leaving the A’s organization while A’s have yet to make it into the Series. Tony likes to employ all those old baseball tricks like sacrifice bunts, etc that sabermetrics indicate are ineffective.

With all the tributes and commentary since Steve Jobs’ death, I was wondering how NPR’s Scott Simon was going to avoid sounding trite with his inevitable commentary during Saturday’s Weekend Edition show.

I’m glad to report that Scott met the challenge. Here’s the transcript:

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/08/141177659/steve-jobs-whose-imagination-invited-us-to-play

(Memorial logo created by Jonathan Mak)

I expected this book to contain information about various sociological discoveries and David Brooks’ interpretations of what they mean. Instead, Brooks has written an allegory to create a story about his protagonists which represent coalesce and represent various research findings. We learn about factors which influence their development (and our own) from conception, through childhood, young adulthood, middle age, and old age.

For instance, regarding sexual attraction, men tend to prefer women who have a 0.7 waist-to-hip ratio. There’s also equivalent information about qualities which unconsciously attract women to men but I don’t recall off the top of my head what they are. However, I don’t believe it had anything to do with hand and foot size.

Brooks tells us that research shows infants at a very early stage of development can “taste” sweetness in the foods that their pregnant mothers are ingesting which can influence the child’s appetites after birth. There also appears to be some credence that an infant in the womb responds to music which its mother is listening to.

The research does appear to show that we are responding emotionally even when we believe that our responses are based on rational thought.
For instance, the qualities which appear to be most important in predicting our ability to achieve and succeed have to do with our ability to detect patterns, to be attuned to others so that we can learn from them, the ability to be taught, our ability to be open-minded, and our ability to objectively weigh the strengths of our beliefs against the strengths of the actual evidence for or against those beliefs.

During an episode described in The Social Animal, one of the characters experiences a sense of personal fulfillment. Brooks explains that research has discovered that when our personal vision of the world is fulfilled, we experience a surge of pleasure from the release of chemicals in our brains.
He told a story to Charlie Rose during an interview about how Mark Zuckerberg’s biggest complaint about, “The Social Network” was that the movie didn’t do a good job of conveying the sheer passion and joy experienced by a programmer who gets the code right. That observation seemed to reinfornce Joseph Campbell’s advice to “Follow your bliss”.

If you’re interested in how evolution has affected our reactions to our physical environment, how our emotions are created, how ethnic cultures impact our responses to stimuli, and how the aging process affects our physical and emotional development, you should find a lot of food for thought in this book.

I listened to the 16 hour audio book with my teenaged daughter as we drove around the Northeast visiting various schools on her pre-senior year summer college tour. She found it interesting, as well. I would have preferred that the audio version was read by David Brooks but Arthur Morey does a good job and I think you’ll enjoy it.

Here’s David Brooks’ TED Talk about The Social Animal
http://youtu.be/rGfhahVBIQw

If you like Michael Crichton’s novels, you’ll like Daniel H. Wilson’s sci-fi story about artificial intelligence gone wild. As I was listening to the audiobook, I thought “I can see the movie already”. Turns out that Steven Spielberg is producing an adaptation for release in summer 2013. The CG guys will have a blast making this film and it will be interesting (and ironic) to see how advanced the computer graphics technology will be by the time of the movie’s release.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1541155/

The plot is pretty simple. We humans are depending a lot more on computer driven robots and machines in our daily lives. A scientist creates a device, Archos whose artificial intelligence is so great that it creates self-determination, goes rogue, takes control of all the world’s computer-driven machines, and starts annihilating the human population. A definite page-turner.

Since reading this book, I’ve seen the documentary “Transcendental Man” about Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a fascinating scientist/academic/futurist who talks about how the information we have & our technological capacities double every couple of years. He believes that during the lifetimes of many people who are now alive humans and robots will become merged with the release of nanorobots into our bloodstreams. This nanotechnology will enhance our mental and physical capacities to the point where we will evolve into a new species. Of course, hearing Kurzweil speak about this utopian vision reminded me of Robopocalypse.

In fact, Hugo de Garis appears in the documentary to dispute Kurzeil’s vision and warns of an “Artilect War” which is at the core of the story in Robopocalypse. Click between to watch a debate between de Garis and J. Storrs Hall about the two different visions:

Engineered Utopia or Artilect War? from Jeriaska on Vimeo.

Russian journalist, Vladimir Abarinov reports for Radio Liberty, aka svobodanews.ru from his base in Saratoga Springs, New York. Our daughters attended the same school this year which is how Vladimir and I became acquainted.

Apparently, communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who’s most famous observation is “The medium is the message”, is quite revered in Russia. Earlier this month, to mark the centennial of McLuhan’s birth, Abarinov asked if he might interview me about broadcasting and social media in America. What follows is the Google English’s translation of a portion of that interview from the original Russian transcript. Idiomatically, it’s a bit challenging, but….

Brindle: I truly admire the social networks and new opportunities arising with the advent of Internet radio and podcasts, which are now You can listen to the car dashboard. For me it is, in essence, a continuation and extension of what I have done before, but there is also a challenge. If you do business information, you can no longer be only newspaper people. or just a radio journalist, broadcaster or just. You should work on all platforms, in all guises at once incorporated into a product of sound, video and text. In addition, the audience is now more control over the content, it has become more active and more demanding. Those who are accustomed to the traditional one-way communication with the public, it is very difficult to restructure in this regard.

Abarinov Vladimir: We met with Ron because our daughter Mary and Sarah attend the same private boarding school for girls. Once we returned from school, and Ron complained to me that Sarah has blocked his access to his Facebook page”.” I replied that I have not blocked, but sometimes I can hardly understand what is written there. Our daughter while sitting in the back, listened and laughed. Is technology taken away from us our children?

Brindle: I do not think. Kids always find a way to stand apart from their parents. It is growing, and they want better relations with peers than with mom and dad. So they put us to the barriers. When I was in the same age as I did the same thing, just different. I do not think that technology hinder our communication with children, to me they, conversely, help. I will find something of interest in the network, showing her daughter with her and we discuss this information. It is useless to resist – you need to use technology as an opportunity for contact with children. But I recognize that they must also assert their independence. And then there is the risk that the information they publish to social networks, gain access someone else, so they limit their social circle friends whom they trust. Remember Congressman Wiener, who sent a””Twitter their intimate pictures. Now to leak so easily …

You can read the a transcript of the entire article here
http://www.svobodanews.ru/content/transcript/24269535.html

Groupon is one of the hot social media tools which is changing the way businesses are connecting with consumers (aka B2C marketing). Groupon Now is about to launch with an augmented reality component which just makes sense. Watch an example by clicking here: Groupon Now

Radio sales people seem to be in denial about Groupon and are focusing on complaints from business owners who haven’t seen success using the service. Of course, for years the radio industry also has had to deal with those kinds of complaints as well from small business owners with unrealistic expectations. Meanwhile, Groupon is putting boots on the ground in local markets to compete with radio, TV and newspaper ad sales departments.

If you own a smartphone, would Groupon Now be a useful tool for you? How about your friends & family? Would be interested to learn your thoughts.

It happens to everybody. You run into someone at the store, on the subway, while on vacation. You recognize their face but can’t for the life of you remember their name. To the rescue: a facial recognition AR app on your smartphone!

And that’s not all. Watch this courtesy of Augmented Reality guru, John C. Havens:
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Can you see how Augmented Reality might become a useful tool for you?

The social media agency, Ignite has created an infographic which you might find useful. Do you know which social networking site has the most members with graduate degrees? It’s well-known that women like Facebook. Which SN sites do men prefer? Which SN sites do you perceive as “up & coming” and which do you perceive as “over”? Compare your perceptions with the results on this infographic.
(To enlarge it, click on the picture below. You’ll see a lot of white space and a picture to the far left on the next screen. Click on that picture)

What do you think? Anything here surprise you?

Thanks to http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/

Successful advertising is designed to reflect that values and attitudes of the advertiser’s intended audience. It’s interesting to realize that it really wasn’t so long ago that the sentiments expressed in these ads were considered to be appropriate and true. (If you’re having a hard time reading an ad, click on it to enlarge.)

Think about the print, radio and video ads that we see and hear today. How will they look and sound to someone a few decades from now?

Thanks to Dale Brooks for sharing these ads with me.