Those studying pink noise have found patterns in the stock market, weather patterns, and Chris Kello looked for pink noise in basic cognitive functions. Now, scientists say that movies – namely, the length of scenes as they are shown in order – follow a pink noise pattern.

From The New York Times:

According to the new report, the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it.

So there you have it: it’s everywhere, waiting to be detected. In our stars, our heartbeats, our thinking, and our movies. Pink noise. It’s out there.

Bing! Short, catchy, and an onomonopia for when you’ve actually found what you want. It’s perfect. As good as, if not better than, Google.

Microsoft needed a new phone operating system to compete with the iPhone, Android, WebOS, and Blackberry. They needed something new and fresh after the holy disaster that is Windows Mobile. They seem to have done a good job with designing the system. But now they needed a name. Zune Phone? Windows PhoneOS? Wait, no, I’ve got it. How about…

Wow. That’s… a mouthful. It’s not catchy, it’s not easy to remember. Windows Phone 7 Series? Windows 7 Phone Series? A Series of Windows 7 Phones? Windows Phone Series 7? I can’t even remember the order that the words go in!

Microsoft Marketing Department: WINS: 1. LOSSES: 1.

Oooh, cheap laptops? How could I not click. Then, I was presented with this unholy mess. Seventeen laptops on the same page. All have the same picture, extremely similar specs, and virtually identical names. (Click for full size)

There were some filtering options on the left side but they would not be very good at narrowing choices, considering how similar these all were.

One part shame on Acer for creating SO MANY similar models: the AOD250-1694, the AOD250-1695, the AOD250-1842, etc. etc. etc.

One part shame on Amazon for presenting all of these options in what is quite possibly the worst method for displaying this kind of information. There should be a much easier way to, at a glance, compare these laptops, or the filters should actually involve computer factors.

Either way, I’m not buying an Acer laptop today – certainly not from Amazon.

The iPad is intriguing. I have seen many people ask why they would want one. I think Apple essentially presented several use cases (eReading, couch surfing, airplane video watching), but it boils down to this: if you’re in the market for something that’s cheaper and less useful than a laptop but is more expensive and useful than an iPhone, the iPad is your device.

I am just curious as to how big that market is.

A friend of mine has an iPhone and Apple desktop. He doesn’t do work when he’s mobile, so he is interested in this device. For me, I can’t justify one right away. I would not get the more expensive 3G model, so I’d be stuck with just a WiFi connection, which means mostly home use. Since I already have a laptop as my main computer that I can bring with me, I don’t see the iPad use case working for me.

In terms of striking the balance between a cheaper laptop and a more useful iPhone, they leaned more towards the iPhone. However, they brought along many iPhone shortcomings – namely, multitasking and Flash in the browser. Therefore, you cannot have Pandora streaming, have your IM client going, and also work on something in Pages at the same time. With a $500 iPad (which Josh Gruber says is fast, fast, fast), you can only do one thing at a time. This just kills it for me.

I don’t think a big enough deal is being made about the fact that Apple is using its own Apple A4 chip in the device that makes it “fast, fast, fast.” Apple bought P.A. Semi and is now designing their own ARM-based chips in house. So, from this, the iPad is faster. I would like to think the processor can handle more than one application at a time, though. Yes, you could say that the iPad would bog down running too many apps, but so too can the MacBook. People expect multitasking and, if Apple could design an elegant system to do so, they should. Essentially, my argument boils down to this: Apple can’t possibly have unitasking as a written-in-stone design goal; at some point, they are going to have to introduce multitasking. It seemed like the introduction of the iPad, with its wickedly-fast processor, was as good of a time as any.

John Timmer, Science Editor of Ars Technica, nails it for me (scroll to the bottom of the page to read his thoughts directly):

Steve Jobs very explicitly placed the iPad in the category class between the phone and notebook, and it very nicely splits the difference between the two. And that’s precisely why I’m a bit disappointed by it—it doesn’t share enough of the features of either one of those two devices to actually make it useful to me.

When I leave the apartment for anything beyond local errands, I’m almost invariably carrying both a cell phone for communicating and a laptop for getting work done. A truly useful device would be one that could let me leave one of those devices and its added bulk, cables, and worries about charge status at home. The iPhone went a little way towards that dream—it was a phone, but its ability to handle a bit of web browsing and some light e-mail meant that leaving the laptop at home was possible in a few additional circumstances—but, for the most part, I’m still stuck lugging two devices.

The iPad doesn’t fix that. It’s clearly not a phone, so my phone would still have to come with me. It would do a better job of e-mail and web browsing than the iPhone but, if I’m carrying one of those anyway, that’s not a huge help. On the other side of its category divide, the iPad might add a few more cases where a laptop is unnecessary, but very few. I’m a touch typist; I take notes on presentations while watching the speaker, and I am often writing in one application while looking over a document in a second. With no physical keyboard and no multitasking, the iPad simply wouldn’t work for me. It’s just too limited to mean I could leave my laptop home any more often than I already do.

Apple looks like it nailed its target of creating a truly distinct device that’s somewhere in between the phone and the laptop. And, for precisely that reason, it doesn’t seem like it would be all that useful to me.

“We have discovered that video game players perform 10 to 20 percent higher in terms of perceptual and cognitive ability than normal people that are non-game players,” said Ray Perez, a program officer at the ONR’s warfighter performance department…”

(Researchers Examine Video Gaming’s Benefits from the American Forces Press Service)

Ever since Green & Bavlier’s (2003) paper in Nature, cognitive scientists have known that playing video games increases one’s performance in basic visual attention tasks. This result has been replicated, extended and restricted (only first-person shooter games lead to this effect and not games like Tetris), and it is good to see these results being applied. Many university laboratories have been working on applications, but now with funding from the Office of Naval Research, actual data has been collected with a focus on practical applications. Many times in my own presentations, I say that the new generation of sailors and soldiers are better because of their video game experience, and now I have practical data I can use as evidence. I look forward to seeing new research in this field and hopefully conducting some of my own.

A note: Ray Perez is essentially a funding officer – he has a PhD and understands the research, but he mostly controls the purse strings and gives money out to universities, industry, and government research labs (such as the one I work for) to do the work. It is disappointing that the article describing this research seems to attribute all the work to Dr. Perez, which is incorrect. He certainly made the research possible with ideas and (most importantly) money, but another organization carried out the work and should be credited in the article.

Study shows that better gamers have bigger brains, are better learners

While we can’t say for sure that videogames, as your grandmother insists, do indeed rot your brain, thanks to research conducted at a variety of Universities around the States we know that better gamers tend to have more gray matter than others — at least in certain areas. Kirk Erickson, Ann Graybiel, Arthur Kramer, and Walter Boot worked together to form a study in which 39 participants’ brains were scanned before those subjects were asked to play a game called Space Fortress (which looks a little like an Atari-era Geometry Wars). Players with larger nucleus accumbens did better learning the game early on, while those with larger caudate nucleus and putamen did better at playing with distractions. There was no sign that playing games actually increased the size of those areas of the brains, meaning some people are just born with a Power Glove on — and that it’s only a matter of time before MRIs replace aptitude tests.

Congrats to Kirk, Ann, Art, and Wally! You’ve hit the big time.

Anyway, I was surprised but pleased to hear that the first interview of the January 16, 2010 show is neuroscientist Dr. Rachel Herz at Brown University. She has published a book called The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell and gave a very good interview about how our sense of smell is tied directly into emotion and memory centers of the brain, and how scent and taste combine to create flavor.

The interview is definitely worth listening to. Go to the episode listing and click on “01:00 – 07:36 The Scent of Desire” to listen, or you can try this direct link, which may or may not work.

Enjoy, and try not to get too hungry when she starts talking about steak.

Let me explain with a concrete example. I was flying back from San Francisco to Providence on Saturday, December 19: the day of record snow (20 inches) in Washington, DC due to a blizzard all up and down the East Coast. Thankfully, I was routed through Atlanta (no snow), but things were messy enough that day that I was worried about being late.

My flight was to leave at 6 AM from San Francisco, but we hadn’t boarded at 5:45 AM yet. The gate said no change, but putting “DL 1064″ into Google brought up these results:

Delayed by 3 hours?! Instead of leaving at 6 AM, we’re leaving at 9 AM?! What? And then I noticed the words “ESTIMATED DEPARTURE” and decided to pull up the Delta site. Sorry for the poor resolution:

However, you can kind of squint and see that the flight was scheduled for an “ON TIME” departure. Turns out that we left maybe 15 minutes late.

The lesson here? The information that Google usually pulls up can be trusted. It’s flight information cannot, because it pulls Estimated Times from flightstats.com instead of current data. In this case, Google has failed to anticipate the information users want (actual data, not wild guesses), and that makes this a human factors error.

The talk itself went wonderfully. I felt like I got into “the zone” of presenting that enabled me to speak smoothly, make eye contact, and be funny, informative, and interesting all at the same time. Both Ricardo, my host at Google, and Alden, the colleague I am on traveling on business with, also said the talk went well. I had a few people ask questions, and I thought they were intelligent.

As a company to work for, Google has rocketed to the top of my list. The exciting atmosphere, beautiful campus, ample resources, free food and drink, and all the perks are absolutely incredible. It is not a matter of whether I want a job at Google, but it’s a matter of whether I can get a job at Google. It’s all of the dot-com excesses that Silicon Valley is famous for, but well-managed and unlikely to implode anytime soon.

I hope to get a copy of the video soon (they have people whose job it is to do this kind of recording). However, the video needs to be processed, which may not happen until January because of the Christmas holiday and everyone taking vacation. As soon as it’s ready, though, I hope to help Google get it up on YouTube.

For now, many thanks to Ricardo for giving me this amazing opportunity to speak along with showing me around campus and talking about Google. Ricardo was the ultimate Google host!

Across the street shot of one of the main Google buildings.

A small part of the main Google campus, nicely landscaped. There is so much more than what this picture shows.

Another part of the Google campus, with the building primarily used for the Google Maps team.

Right outside of the Android development building – the Android logo with the three pastries the software releases have been named after – donut, cupcake, and eclair.

It was suggested that I stick my head through the donut hole for a picture. Yeah, that’s not ridiculous.

Inside the Android building, a big metal sculpture of the Predator from the movies. Next to me is Ricardo, my host at Google and good friend from George Mason University.