I did it! All 722 feet of it.

Some things are best not explicated in words. The highest free fall in the world at the mercy of an elastic band, in a foreign country may perhaps fall in that category. I'll therefore trust the video and some pictures of the jump to illustrate the sheer terror factor of this undertaking.


But first and foremost, I'd like to thank my supporters who were so generous with their donations that it helped me not only reach but beat the fund raising target for my chosen charity - Mind! Yes, the target was self-set really, but I'm sure, Mind, the people who are supported by their work and I are most thankful for whatever we've raised.

I hope you enjoy the pictures. I must warn you though that the video is not for the faint-hearted. A friend of mine famously claimed he was unable to keep his breakfast down after watching me jump. You've been warned.

1 G short of happiness

This delightful sketch from a comic on theoatmeal.com sums up my situation right now. I have been trying my best to somehow resist my urge to upgrade to the iPhone 4. But thoughts of important, adult stuff like saving for a house, food and clothes penetrated through the haze of my cultish/slavish fascination for all things Apple.

Still thinking, could food really be that important?

Image source: http://theoatmeal.com/comics

Just Jump Already!

Mission

Remember GoldenEye? Remember the terrifying opening sequence where Mr. Bond jumps off a ridiculously high dam in the Swiss countryside? (Please find video attached to refresh your memory).

For my birthday this year (last week of July), I have decided to bungee jump off the Verzasca Dam near Locarno, Switzerland which is the highest pure free fall bungee jump in the world at a giddying height of 220m (722ft). There are no guide ropes to limit the numbing swing after the jump. Just so you know, I am extremely scared of heights and participation in adrenalinefuelled adventures has so far been 'interesting', so there's always a possibility of me coming back with a gripping story or two in return for your generosity! (My last attempt at a sky dive ended in a plane half buried in the ground and shrieks of "Run! Run! Run for your life!" I wish I was joking...

Please try and donate as much or as little as you wish.

Every pound you donate will go straight to Mind, my chosen charity. I have paid for everything associated with the Bungee jump myself.

Why Mind?

Consider this:

• According to the last Adult Psychiatric Morbidity survey approximately one in four persons (23.0 per cent) in England had at least one psychiatric disorder and 7.2 per cent had two or more disorders.
• 1.0 per cent of the adult population had Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The prevalence rate among children is also approximately 1.0 per cent.
• 5.6 per cent of people aged 16 and over reported having attempted suicide.

Having worked with patients with a spectrum of mental health problems - affective disorders, learning disabilities, I know and appreciate the value of work being done by charities like Mind. They not only provide an invaluable source of information for people suffering from psychiatric disorders but also work very closely with communities and local networks to provide specialist training, promote an accepting attitude of mental distress in employers and campaign for the rights of those affected by mental health issues. Mind is independent and envisions "a society that promotes and protects good mental health for all, and that treats people with experience of mental distress fairly, positively, and with respect."

Convinced? Here's what to do...

Please go to my Just Giving Page and hit the neat 'Donate Now' Button and you will be presented with a range of secure payment options.

Mind and I say Thank You!

Please allow me to thank you for taking the time to read this far. I very much hope you will consider donating to Mind.

Hopefully I'll manage to pull this stunt off with no ocular or spinal damage and post photographic proof of the Mind Jump upon my return - watch this space!

Data Morality

This is an age of data. Some boffins say that within the next 6 months we will generate more data than was generated by mankind since documented existence. Not only does this spawn the most obvious question - are we equipped to convert this data into usable, commercially viable information but also a plethora of associated concerns: Where does all this data come from? What is it used for? Who regulates it? Can we afford the spectacular failures that result from an absence or inadequacy of the same?

The capture and analysis of data on customer preferences has been and will be the chief tool for a marketer. The Gold Standard of customer service - a single view of a customer is a result of just such an ability. When a business records past contacts I have made with them, incidents and outcomes etc. and makes it available Enterprise-wide, I can be assured any person I speak to in the Company will know what I’m talking about. This is a powerful feature. When I visit a website regularly to buy BBC Documentaries and Books on SLR Photography, it would be wise to direct me to the most appropriate pages and indeed make informed recommendations based on this proclivity.

But when does this win-win arrangement turn into a one sided encroachment into a customer’s privacy? It would be hard to say that cognition is a uniquely human faculty. What's uniquely human though is the lengths we'll go to either preserve information about ourselves or disseminate it. Both the sides will have reasonable arguments for defending their position. There will be people who would tweet about their recent consumption of an apple and there will be others who have blocked even their names from appearing in Facebook Search results.
I personally believe intrusion begins where volition ends. If there is something that I have tacitly agreed to without being presented with an option to step out of the arrangement, I may view it as an intrusion attempt. No one is interested in the fine print of the Data Privacy legislation, what everyone would be (or rather should be) interested in is the extent to which this is breached. Identity theft concerns aside, there is always a sense of unease about the consequences of our actions where we have voluntarily or involuntarily relinquished our cherished control over our personal information. In summary, I consider that the safe zone for the marketing professional (and the customer) is to allow for optionality, a human choice to customers. As for the customers, they’ll have to make up their own minds and judge if the benefits realized from waiving their rights to certain kinds of information offsets the moral concerns regarding this waiver.

Of Customer Service, Ducks and Brand

Brand is one of those things, which if you get right is an enduring asset for the organisation and a dependable schema for the customer to consolidate their views of your product/organisation.

All the marketing best practice principles aside, if your brand manages to be emotionally charged as well, you have a winner. I am passionate about brands and just like everyone, have a few clear favorites. I do however love to analyse that little bit further, what makes a particular brand 'tick', what was the evolution of the thought process that the creative teams (at the associated Ad Agency) exercised, what might be the size of the target market who may experience the same affective association with the brand as I do...It's a stimulating intellectual workout.

Endless Fascination with Ducks

Having very lovingly observed and enjoyed the advertising work engaged by my phone company, I wanted to let them know of my appreciation. I also wanted a reward out of it. So (in a very British tradition) decided to write them a letter.

My Letter to the phone company (referred to as Telecom Provider X*)

Dear lovely people at Telecom Provider X,

just the other day, I realised that I have been a loyal Pay-monthly customer for a very long time. I thought I'll take this chance to commend you guys for your stellar customer service. Performance aspects aside, your service alone prompted my additional subscription to your Broadband. I also like all the branding stuff that's going on at Telecom Provider X. Especially those Adverts where you promise the customers 'treats'. You know, the one where all these bright, yellow, plastic ducks complete an arduous journey and arrive at a tranquil lake where people dip in and fish them out? Some of these ducks are fancy iPods and other delights. Now, I am not saying I want an iPhone for being so loyal to you and paying all my bills on time but don't I deserve some treats? Do you think I could be sent some promotional ducks?

My heart is set on them.

I am also willing to settle on a shiny new iPod Touch (as I currently lead a miserable life with my 8GB iPhone which is insufficient for my music) and may allow you to engrave it with 'From Telecom Provider X with Love'.

The good people at Telecom Provider X replied:

Good Morning Anupriya,

Thanks for getting in touch about promotional ducks. Anupriya, I'd like to inform you that these promotional ducks which you've seen in the advertisements are being promoted as surprises for Prepay customers. However, I've personally checked your account and can see that you're a loyal customer with us for a long time now so I've gone ahead and added a subscription discount of £10 for 3 months to your account. It will be effective from [dd/mm/yy]. I hope this'll bring a smile on your face.

Guess what, it most certainly did!

They really should have sent me some ducks as well though.

*The Telecommunications provider has been anonymised for obvious reasons.

Crave Creativity? Live abroad.

We all know what a liberating experience being in a foreign country can be. Apparently it can also be a potent creative trigger. There are plenty of artists/thinkers who jump to my mind as brilliant examples of this postulate. Munch's Frieze of Life was conceptualised and executed while he was in Berlin. Nietzsche wandered through Genoa, Nice, St. Moritz and Turin between 1879-1889, writing Daybreak, portions of The Gay Science amongst other writings. Samuel Beckett spent many of his writing years away from Ireland - in London & Germany. Kafka's on and off love affair with Bavaria....the list goes on.

What is it about a foreign land that acts as a Muse?
Research cited in a prominent Social Psychology journal may have an answer. William Maddux (INSEAD) and Adam Galinsky (Northwestern) conducted 5 different studies using a variety of methods to establish a link between time spent living abroad (this explicitly excludes time just travelling abroad) and creativity. The authors start by giving a succinct overview of the personality and contextual variables associated with creativity. These alone make for quite an interesting reading and would be a handy starting point for anyone wishing to explore this area of research. Meta-analytical studies have reported creative persons possessing above-average intelligence, tolerance of ambiguous information, higher levels of energy, self-confidence, intrinsic motivation, ambition, open attitude towards risk and cognitive flexibility (MacKinnon, 1978). It should be pointed out though that the ‘profile’ of a creative person varies with the Industry or professional domain. Creative artists are very different to creative scientists, for example.
The chief components of the authors’ hypothesis explain the rationale behind this study:

• Firstly, (and understandably) living abroad allows people access to a larger number of novel ideas and concepts, which is believed to act as precursors for a creative exercise.
• Secondly, the authors postulate that living abroad gives people access to different perspectives of approaching problems.
• Finally, experiences in alien cultures are indicators of ‘psychological openness’ to novel ideas and result in a marvellous cognitive expansion of the subject’s creative repertoire.

The researchers used a number of different studies to investigate their hypothesis. These included the famous Duncker candle problem (you can read about it here), a task measuring creative one-to-one negotiation skills, a test of convergent thinking (where word association was used), and a creative generation task that requires the participants to draw an alien creature (where you imagine stumbling onto a very different Planet in a Galaxy far, far away and encounter an alien). The results indicated a consistent and robust link between the creativity measures employed and the time that subjects had spent living abroad. Although, I am personally not too convinced by the usage of the Duncker problem as it has been so widely used in undergraduate Psychology classes as well as in ice-breaker sessions across the business world that it hardly comes across as a valid measure of creativity.

The most powerful construct that the authors do explain in this study as being the mechanism beneath the creativity-living abroad link is adaptation. They say, “Because culture is such a pervasive force, impacting and shaping every aspect of one’s life, adapting oneself to a new culture—learning how to behave and think in different way—may make individuals chronically aware of multiple perspectives and approaches when dealing with mundane and novel situations and, thus, may be associated with increased creativity.”

In view of the above, the diversity intention behind those equal opportunity questionnaires makes solid business sense. I think the Corporate world is already onto this. Perhaps it’s time for the recruitment consultants to reformat candidate CVs in terms of Countries visited and lived in! Whether or not the Duncker Candle task makes it to the assessment centres is of course another issue.

References:
Maddux, W, Galinsky, A, Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity (2009), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1047–1061. http://psycnet.apa.org/?fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/a0014861

The Crispy Tale

The crinkle, the rustle, the annoying tussle with Crisp packaging is something we all can absolutely do without. Packaging scientists should be concentrating on ridding humankind of this menace. Why else would you get a degree in Packaging Science? Well, I guess when you were growing up, you could have looked at an M&M bag and thought, "This is it. This bright yellow bag has brought happiness to me. I must dedicate my life to this bag and all that goes into fashioning it."

This is not implausible. Not at all.

There was a time when I wanted to channel my life into sorting the mess that our wired lives have resulted in. The plan was to fabricate a device which would wirelessly charge phones, iPods and cameras. Damn the guys who have just come up with a physical avataar of my concept. Well done though.

But I digress.

Given the years of torment, I have endured with inconsiderate people wrestling with the noisy, foiled demon, I wish I could have patented the idea of 'silent crisp packets' when it first occured to me. No one has done it yet, but I'm sure the snack Industry is at work. Before we know it, we may just be eating out of a serenely quiet flannel bag with crispy, savoury delights.

Analyse This

Everyone knows and appreciates the aggressive drop in price of Data Storage per GB per year. Everyone is frankly very thankful for said phenomenon. Does anyone though, stop and visualise this brilliance of Technology? Moreover, has anyone saved these relics from the past to drill home this privilege? This is where I come in. In the picture alongside appear the Dramatis personæ who were preserved just for this moment. Count your blessings. Also, enjoy and reminisce.
Evolution of my storage expenditure can be traced in the following stats.


Year 2003 (India) 1.44 MB Phillips/Iomega/Samsung/Sony/Amkette Floppy Discs (Bottom right)
Price : 15 Rs. per piece or 150 Rs. for a pack of 10 Diskettes. (Equivalent to 20p and £2 respectively.)

Year 2004 (U.K.)
100MB Zip Disc (Bottom left)
Price: £6-£8

Year 2007 (U.K.)
4GB Flash Disc (Top)
Price: £10

Now (U.K.)
The absolute clinchers are my Lacie Porsche 500GB at around £85 and Seagate 1TB at £64!

I think this is a fabulous world we live in.

Stirred and yes, Shaken.

Long day at work analyzing Financial Reports

Excitement of seeing friend who is moving to Oz for good!

45 mins wait at the Bar of an overrated Covent Garden venue

Participation in a forced banter with the Bartender

2 Chocolate Martinis

One careless Head flick from a girl at the adjacent Table

Craving the Sound of Silence

Where did all the silence go?

I sit on a bus/train and 66% of the people are on their phones, oblivious to the unwelcome intrusion they exercise by belting out details of their mundane lives on top of the stoppage announcements in the vehicle. I don't want to know about your latest crush in school. I also don't need to know what was so shocking in your friend's day that made your entire conversation a recurring series of "No!" and "Really?" and an occasional "Wow!".

I don't understand why everyone doesn't have their phones on vibrate? Making a personal statement via your ring tone? What a depressing death of all known modes of creativity.

My tolerance is also abysmal for the leaky standard iPod earphones.

Psychiatrically speaking though, I wonder if there is something seriously dysfunctional about a world where people cannot wait to actually get home to have a decent conversation with the spouse. They have to get it out of the way while being Publicly transported. I know I am making a prejudiced differentiation between a phone conversation and sitting down with a book. When you think about it, they are not that different. Except for the intrusion aspect, I guess. Rare would be that annoyance that comes off a nicely creased spine, yellowed cover pages of a Penguin Classic. I am prejudiced.

Where did all the Marketing sense go?

A popular consumer opinion website recently ran a survey asking users to comment on which advertisements were annoying them the most. Not surprisingly, with a resounding majority (more than 7000 votes!) the obnoxious winner is everyone's most hated moustached man on Go Compare.

Perhaps, being annoying and loud = memorable = better product recall = effective advertising? Unfortunately not. Amongst the hundreds of blog posts, comments, websites dedicated exclusively to shred any claims of the advertising merit of this promotion, there is no indication whatsoever of any likelihood of using the product based on this campaign.

Let's bring Psychology in
In fact research by Douglas, Kellaris, Cox and Cox and several others suggests that advertisements without music performed better on recall and recognition measures than ads with music.

Therefore even though I wonder if this loud and pointless Promo may perhaps result in the downfall of the product in question, I'd be maligning the scientific method, if I were to say that the usage of the product has or may have suffered due to this marketing fiasco. I would need empirical evidence for that particular website usage over the past few months in order to say that.

Let's check some figures: Market share as on Dec 2009 compared to Dec 2008

1. Moneysupermarket.com 18.97 per cent (-4.3 per cent),

2. GoCompare.com 6.89 per cent (+0.72 per cent),

3. Confused.com 4.23 per cent (+0.5 per cent),

4. Comparethemarket.com 3.32 per cent (+1.93 per cent)

It appears that biggest rising star is the friendly Russian Meerkat.

Crushingly though, GoCompare has also registered a recent increase!

Check the Google Trends report for usage of some websites.

I'll post in another 2 months with more data to corroborate my tentative hypothesis. Right now the rising trend is too small for me to discard my hypothesis and the advertisement is too awful for me to give up moaning about it.

References:

1. Market share data from business.scotsman.com.

http://business.scotsman.com/medialeisure/-Terry-Murden-looks-at.5988705.jp

2. Trends data from Google

3. Douglas, Olsen G, Creating the contrast: the influence of silence and background music on recall and attribute importance. Journal of Advertising (2005)

I'm Green because I'm better than you.

Bought the new environment friendly Tea? Green T-shirts, bags, accessories? Was there a small crowd witnessing your altruistic deed at the time? No? Well done you, as new research suggests that people are more likely to buy green products when said products are costlier than their regular equivalents and also when such a purchase is being made in public.

Research on the shopping habits for environmental friendly products equated buying green products, which are costlier and perhaps of a more basic quality to the Biologists' interpretation of Altruism. Biologists associate altruism with a 'costly signal' which in turn is usually associated with status.

Experimental data revealed that conditions which led to perception of a higher status resulted in a heightened desire for Earth-friendly products. However this was only observed when

shopping was done in public as opposed to private. Participants were also more likely to buy green products when these were significantly higher in price than non-green counterparts. The researchers behind the study are hopeful that these findings may pave a way into manipulating status and competition related messaging to promote Environmentalism.

There has been some truly fascinating research in the Neurosciences linking brain regions to some of the most sophisticated and 'human' experiences and traits like empathy and altruism. E.g. Scientists have found that activation of the Posterior superior temporal cortex (pSTC) predicted subjects' propensity to engage in altruistic acts.

It is of course incredible to see how the discipline of Neuroscience, and specifically functional imaging has evolved from what the cynics argued was glorified phrenology to an instrument unravelling the very nature of being human.

Read More:

1. Griskevicius, Vladas; Tybur, Joshua M.; Van den Bergh, Bram, Going green to be seen: Status, reputation, and conspicuous conservation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. (2010)

2. Tankersley, D, Altruism is associated with an increased neural response to agency. Nature Neuroscience. (2007)

Hazards of Obedience

So, yet another bunch of pop Psychologists, this time in the guise of a panel responsible for a fake French Game Show have attempted to replicate Stanley Milgram's classic albeit controversial experiment conducted at Yale University in the 60s.

The original Milgram experiments investigating obedience to authority used a simple experimental design and placed one of two subjects in the role of a "teacher" and the other was the designated 'Student'. The subjects were informed that the experiment is on memory and learning and on the effects of punishment on these. The 'student' is then put in another room strapped to a chair and explained that he needs to learn word pairs. E.g. When initially presented with 'Butter - Bread' he needs to be able to respond with Bread when the 'Teacher' presents the cue Butter. If he failed to recall the correct second portion of the presented word-pair, he would be administered an electric shock. What is noteworthy is that the 'Student' is actually an actor and receives no real shocks. The subject in the role of the teacher however, does not know this and is expected to operate a panel delivering shocks of varying intensities going right up until a fatal Voltage on the insistence of the experimenter whenever the student is wrong.

How far is too far?

Surprisingly (contrary to the consensus that Milgram himself obtained from a range of individuals including Psychiatrists, general educational community etc.) more than 60% of the subjects were willing to go to the absolute limit of the shock spectrum administering almost 450 Volts at times to the 'students'. This was despite the full realisation of the discomfort being voiced by the actors in the other room who in some cases pleaded to be set free and demanded to be released from the experiment.

What is interesting to note is that while a few subjects refused to carry on, a majority were quite compliant to the demands of the experimenter and pulsed lethal dosages of electric current to strangers! The moral compass, it seemed, collapsed when faced with an authoritative figure. This platform is inadequate for discussing the ethical, moral and legal ramifications of this experiment. Needless to say, the French TV show has brought these issues in the forefront again. Another quite similar offspring of this fascination of Media with Psychology was the Oliver Hirschbiegel movie Das Experiment (German, 2001) which tackled issues of authority and role playing gone wrong.

Milgram experiments of the 21st Century

Try approaching a Grant awarding body with a proposal of replicating Milgram experiments! Understandably the entire issue is laden with too valid an argument against carrying out experiments that knowingly put people in extremely distressing situations and are designed on deception. However, compliance, obedience, authority and personality characteristics that make some people more vulnerable to these than others is a valuable field of research and it would be a shame not to explore it further.

In comes immersive virtual reality.

Slater et al (2006) carried out the original Milgram experiments but replaced the 'students' with a virtual female human being on a computer. The cyber victim protested with genuine discomfort and demands for experiment termination as the original Milgram actors. The researchers concluded that "in spite of the fact that all participants knew for sure that neither the stranger nor the shocks were real, the participants who saw and heard her tended to respond to the situation at the subjective, behavioural and physiological levels as if it were real."

Read More

1. Milgram S. Obedience to Authority: McGraw-Hill; 1974

2. Slater M., Antley A., Davison A., Swapp D., Guger C., Barker C., Pistrang N., Sanchez-Vives M. V. (2006. ). A virtual reprise of the Stanley Milgram obedience experiments. PLoS ONE 1, e39.

3. Telegraph Story on the French Game show, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7457780/French-contestants-torture-each-other-on-TV-Game-of-Death.html

Shots from India #1

You can click on an individual picture to view the title and description. Please feel free to click through to my associated Flickr page and let me know which pictures you liked and/or any suggestions for future photographic activities.

Nervous Cockroaches

One of the most striking Research Studies that I encountered in my Undergraduate Social Psychology year was the work by Robert Zajonc. It, like most seminal works in Psychological Research elicits the response "Oh, I could've told you that!" or "That's just common sense!"

So what did the guy do? Rather, who did he do it on?


72 lovely cockroaches were recruited to run on a race track of sorts (easy) as well as in a maze (difficult).

Another variable introduced into the proceedings was the presence or absence of an eager audience (cockroaches again).

The Roaches were then made to run either in the company of conspecifics (fancy word - identical species) or by themselves.

Results

It was found that the mere presence of other roaches hurt the running times of the antennae sporting athletes, whether it was in the audience stand or alongside on the maze.
However, exactly reverse findings were registered when the difficult maze was substituted with a runway track. Here, the presence of conspecifics on the track or as audience actually resulted in better performance ('facilitation').

Zajonc concluded these results as confirmation of his drive theory centered social facilitation. In Psychology, Drive refers to any state of deprivation. This state of deprivation (physiological - like hunger etc, or psychological - ambition/desire for achievement) leads to actions that seek to reduce this drive or state of inequillibrium. More specifically, it was proposed that presence of an audience or co-participants resulted in an increased state of arousal. This increased arousal aids what Zajonc refers to as 'dominant responses' and impairs 'non dominant responses'. Simply put, think about these as indicators of task simplicity. A dominant response in this experiment was running along a straight, simple track and these are facilitated in the presence of others. The non dominant response would generally require some additional cognitive effort and in this experiment this was the complicated maze where performance was impaired in the presence of additional participants and audience.

What does it all mean? Are there any applications of this today?

You tell me.
Think about the boat races. In an indoor practice gig, how do you think the rowing times of a single rower, rowing in isolation would compare to the times recorded when his Crew joins him? Or reminisce back to your Science projects in school - did you work/research harder when you and you alone were responsible for the output or when you were part of a team with 5 of your best friends?

You know what Social Facilitation would say. Just to complicate things further, read about another phenomenon - Social Loafing and reconsider your answers. Social loafing is described as a decrease in individual effort due to the social presence of others (Latane et al. 1979). Essentially individual effort decreases as the group size increases. In one study, subjects were asked to clap and shout in a large group and alone. The average sound amplitude produced by groups of different sizes was significantly less than the levels produced by each individual participant. This difference increased with an increase in group size. (Latane, Williams and Harkins, 1979). The most agreed on supposition that explains Social Loafing holds individual identifiability/accountability for one's performance at the core of this phenomenon. Indeed loafing can be reduced if identifiability can be introduced into the group by some mechanism.
Of course, individual preferences and working styles do have a great effect on how prone someone is to demonstrate social loafing. Studies indicate that a lower preference for group work is inversely related to social loafing behavior.

Read more:

1. Zajonc, R. B. (1965). Social facilitation. Science, 149, 269-274.
2. Zajonc, Robert B.; Heingartner, Alexander; Herman, Edward M. (1969) Social enhancement and impairment of performance in the cockroach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 13(2), 83-92.
3. Latané, Bibb; Williams, Kipling; Harkins, Stephen (1979) Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol 37(6), 822-832.

NYC

These are few of the pictures from my recent trip to New York for Fleet Week 2009. You can click on an individual picture to view the title and description. Please feel free to click through to my associated Flickr page and let me know which pictures you liked and/or any suggestions for future photographic activities.

Ukraine