Breathe In, Breathe Out

Wii-style Balance Training

I hate leg day at the gym. The every Wednesday series of weight training exercises (leg presses, curls, extensions, and an insidious variety of squats) always makes for sore and stiff Thursdays and Fridays. But somehow I get through them and get a little stronger with more endurance. Ditto for the slow motion jogging on the treadmill. So strength and endurance wise, I think I'm investing my time pretty productively at the gym.

But what worries me is balance. It tends to decline with age; and if I'm honest about it, it was never that great to begin with. Good balance is essential for walking and running more efficiently, as well as sports like tennis and golf. And it helps all of us remain with intact body structures when we don't fall down all over the place.

I've written before about the excellent book on balance by Scott McCredie. Although I know that reading a book likely won't improve my balance, it does suggest some worthwhile exercises and activities to improve the chances of staying upright as long as possible.

I was thinking "what else can I do to improve my balance" when I came across Seth Stevenson's review of the new Nintendo WiiFit on Slate. WiiFit is marketed as a total fitness solution, providing Wii-style exercises to promote overall fitness. According to Stevenson's experience, the aerobics portions of the program aren't all that impressive. You'd probably be better off spending your money and time in a gym if that's all you want.

But the balance and strength portions seem worth the effort; they even reinforce each other:

Balance is an oft-overlooked skill that's a vital asset in any sport. The Japanese are obsessive about it: It's at the heart of sumo, for instance, and it's the secret to Ichiro's unorthodox hitting approach. Sadly, I discovered—after trying out several of these games—my balance sort of sucks. The good news: My failures drove me back to the yoga and strength-training sections of Wii Fit, where many of the drills are designed to address this shortcoming. After doing a round of the more balance-focused exercises, I played the games again to see if I'd notice a difference. I did.

WiiFit seems like it's worth checking out. Wonder if Wednesday is leg day on the Wii?

Technorati Tags: body_schema, wii, wiifit, balance

The Changeable Brain

I've been fascinated with the idea of brain plasticity - the ability of the brain to alter some of its regions in response to experiences and thoughts. This was a pretty strange and uninvestigated scientific idea as recently as 10 years ago. But all sorts of stuff has happened since. Sharon Begley gives a brief overview in to a newsweek blog.

For more, see her books Train Your Mind to Change Your Brain and The Mind and the Brain.

Three-armed monkeys learn to feed themselves

I've written previously about experiments where monkeys learned to control an artifical arm. A new study takes it even farther:

In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill. The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.

link: Monkeys Control a Mechanical Arm With Their Thoughts - NYTimes.com

The most interesting thing here is the monkeys learned to incorporate a detached mechanical device into their body maps. Researches had to open the monkeys' skulls to imbed stuff in their brain, though. Still not ready for primetime, but a promising step.

Mindfulness: Not Just for Therapy

News items on the subject of mindfulness always catch my attention. When I saw the headline Lotus Therapy, I knew I wanted to read it.

According to the article, mindfulness has become a popular concept and set of techniques in psychotherapy, and it seems to be getting more popular today. Much more formal research is devoted to it than used to be the case. But not everyone in the therapy or research community buys into it. Some even think it will become yet another hot self-help fad before all the shouting dies down.

Image by collagekid, via Flickr (CC license)

Well and good, but you might get the idea that mindfulness is somehow always connected with therapy.

It's not. Here are a few of the others:

• Meditation: Jon Kabot Zinn has for years written and talked extensively about mindfulness meditatiion for a variety of situations. Here's a link to avideo of a Google talk he gave.

• Education: Not surprising to those of us whose younger selves were told to pay attention, pay attention, pay attention in classes. Harvard professor Ellen Langer has written about Mindful Learning. . New-to-teaching professor Howard Rheingold has a couple of videos addressing attention in the classroom, particularly regarding multi-tasking. I also ran across this wiki devoted to mindfulness.

• Sports and Athletics: The classics here were developed and written by author Timothy Gallwey. But others are taking it beyond tennis and golf in stuff like triathlons.

As for me, I'm more interested in mindfulness in everyday life. mainly as a tool to help me figure out why things are the way they are. This comes up a lot in my work as a Feldekrais practitioner. Otherwise, it's always good to figure out what's really going on before you try to change it.

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, learning, mindfulness

On Giving Them What They Want

When I was a TV program director, there was always the temptation to program just the stuff I (or my friends) personally liked. That's a good way to low, low ratings. And we all know what that means.

I suppose it's kind of the same situation for marketers or any sort. In the tech content providing biz right now, there's a similiar danger. Many services are frequented by early adopters, and who knows if their needs are the same as the mainsteam that the marketers hope will follow?

Well, it's becoming apparant that the needs or early adopters and potential mainstream users aren't the same. Otherwise, everyone would be an early adopter.

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Note to Web 2.0 Companies: Early Adopters are not the Mass Market does a good job of fleshing out this situation. For example:

Although RSS has turned out to be a key technology which powers a number of interesting functionality behind the scenes (e.g. podcasting) actually subscribing and reading news feeds in an RSS reader has not become a mainstream activity of Web users. When you think about it, it is kind of obvious. The problem an RSS reader solves is "I read so many blogs and news sites on daily basis, I need a tool to help me keep them all straight". How many people who aren't enthusiastic early adopters (i) have this problem and (ii) think they need a tool to deal with it?

So we kinda know that. What do service providers need to do to get beyond the early folks and really start raking it in.  Not as difficult as you'd think; common sense, really.

However the one overriding theme is that all of these recent entrants is that they solve problems that everyone [or at least a large section of the populace] has. Everyone likes to communicate with their social circle. Everyone likes watching funny videos and looking at couple pics. Everyone wants to find information about topics they interested in or find out what's going on around them. Everybody wants to get laid.

So there you go - it always seem to come back to that sort of stuff, doesn't it?

Related articles

• RSS Needs An Easy Button [via Zemanta]

A Unlikely News Source

Here's a journalist with a flair for phrasing:

Here's one way to cut down on TV production costs: Get the unwashed Internet masses to do your programming for you.

link: PBS Taps Wisdom Of The Reddit Crowd - Silicon Alley Insider

The story actually focuses on a deal PBS is making to produce a weekly TV show based on stuff on the Reddit homepage.

Magnetic Brain Stimulation Coming of Age

Watch the video below to see how transcranial magnetic stimulation is developing from research-based curiosity into promising clinical applications. It's not just like parlor tricks anymore; it'll be truly useful very soon.

Friendfeed Activity

I've been spending a lot of time over on Friendfeed lately, so not posting much here. Here's some of the stuff I've been looking at:

Easy Ways to Participate in Social Media

Image by luc legay, via Flickr (CC license)

Earlier, I wrote about why I’m interested in social networking or social media like Twitter and Friendfeed. While these services are heavy with tech/pr content right now, I think services like this can be immensely useful for all sorts of groups and even individuals. Right now, those sites are heavy with tech/pr content, but that's not always going to be the case IMO.

But what can you do if you’ve been curious about social media or social networks like Twitter or Friendfeed or whatever, but you don’t know much about how to go about participating?

You might start with 5 Great Ways to Contribute to Social Media. Sharing can be as simple as one simple click to indicate you like something someone else has shared. Or you might just share information about a new application you've tried and liked. It doesn't have to be complicated at all.

Social Networks: Why I Care

I've been reading a lot about social media, spending time on Twitter and especially FriendFeed. Why? Primarily because of the ideas I read about Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody. Boiled way down, the social networking technologies make it possible to do something that was unthinkable not so long ago - to organize without organizations.

Another effect of these new technologies has to do with traditional filters to publishing content: they just aren't as relevant anymore. Want to write an article about your favorite subject? Go ahead; write and post it for the world to see here on the internet. You don't need an editor to give you the go ahead.

One consequence is the explosion of content available. RSS feeds, twitter streams, etc. And we can feel like we're drowning in information as a result.

So I've begun to think about why I need to pay attention to stuff like Friendfeed and Twitter. But right now, both are primarily filled with Tech/PR types sharing lots of information. And I'm not a Tech/PR person.

If I’m not a PR or Tech guy, so what do I care what Robert Scoble and Louis Gray find interesting? Not to pick on them, mind you. They are two of the most popular and active.

What I’m really interested in is learning to use these new tools most effectively. Some day, the content distributed by these tools won’t be almost exclusively about Tech/PR. I might want to gather a group of Feldenkrais practitioners or clients to share ideas. But if I or they don’t know how to use these tools well, what’s the point? But if we do learn how to use Twitter, Friendfeed or whatever well, then we’ll have a sharing ability we didn’t have before. And that will be a really valuable asset to have.

Every once in a while, you get some gems on using FF or Twitter, or whatever, in a way that wasn’t clear before. For example, Gray posted some useful information yesterday about hiding stuff (that is, filtering information) in FriendFeed.

So I’ll keep on subscribing to their stuff. And someday I’ll figure out how to filter it for what I really need from it. Or some item in Scoble’s or Gray’s feed will help point the way.

Links for May 13, 2008

• Is Religion a Figment of the Human Imagination? Maybe so, maybe not. But what's more interesting here is the idea that imagination is what separates humans from the rest of the species. So why don't you see dogs driving cars? They couldn't imagine themselves doing it.

• How is Twitter Helping or Hurting Your Blog? Twitter offers a dual edged sword to bloggers: you can spend more time Tweeting than blogging, but it can also help drive traffic to your blog. follow me on Twitter.

• Why you should use Friendfeed As concise a guide as any I've seen, and more useful than most. Friendfeed can be as noisy or quiet as you want it to be. Louis Gray shows you how in this interview. (By the way, I'm also on Friendfeed.)

• Lifting Weights: Not Necessarily for Vanity I weight train 3 days a week, but I really go to the gym to use the treadmill. This has me rethinking.

• 6 New Ways to Break Through Writer's Block Other than making lists of links like this one, good suggestions for using recommendation engines and writing comments to jump start your writing.

For more, see my Google shared items page.

A Penalty for Innovation

Here's why I never liked school that much.  It's from a blog post titled You Say That Like It's a Bad Thing.

I never knew much about the workings of Wikipedia before I read Clay Shirky's description of it in his book Here Comes Everybody. Rather than being launched fully-hatched, a Wikipedia article can start as a very simple sentence or so. Then, given the collaborative nature of the site, others chime in adding to it, editing it, vetting it. The simple entry can grow into a full-blown, useful, accurate article in a short time.

In Betcha's post, a kid gets an assignment to write a paper, only he can't find much information about it.

 

Here’s what he did.  He created a Wikipedia entry using the limited information that he did know.  Over the next few days and weeks, the Wikipedia entry on the topic was edited, amended, added-to and improved by many other people.  All of their individual little bits of knowledge gradually built up the topic until there was quite a comprehensive article written about it.  The student then used this article to submit for his research project.

The teacher gave the kid an F! Other teachers the posts author talk to mostly supported the idea of failing the kid, some even talking about "cheating" by doing the Wikipedia thing.

So who would you rather have solving problems for you? Someone who searches for innovative solutions or someone who follows the rules?

I think it's really cool that you can take a first approximation cut at knowledge, and then other, more knowledgeable people contribute to fleshing it out. And it's even cooler that a kid can use it to his advantage.

There's a big gap here somewhere.

Technorati Tags: learning, socialmedia

Related articles

• How Do People Find The Time To Watch Television? [via Zemanta]
• Wikipedia: A Perfectly Acceptable Data Source [via Zemanta]
• The Cognitive Surplus [via Zemanta]

Working with Video

I've been working with video this afternoon, and I don't have a lot to show for it. Not that I haven't done the work. I did, using a combination of VideoCue, Camtwist and Stomp.

Videocue is a combo teleprompter, switcher and recorder. Camtwist is a deluxe switcher that lets you add almost anything to a video stream. And it's free! Stomp is a compression utility to smashes video files down to manageable sizes.

Well, after I did the recording, I uploaded it to Viddler so that I could embed it here. Just one problem with that. It takes a lot of time for them to process the video for include on their site. So, no embed of my teleprompter debut. Maybe tomorrow.

In the meantime, here's one I recorded using Camtwist and Seesmic. They seem to work together nicely.

What was I going to write about?

OK, I had an idea for a post, but can't seem to remember it. What was it?

Oh, I know ... it was Exercise Your Brain Or Else You'll ... Uh ..

Perpetual Early Adoption

How do things change? Yeah, I know, that sounds like a bunch of metaphysical BS. But it starts getting practical when you add a qualifier statement like change "from what in and to what" and then apply that to a specific field, like, say, marketing.

Every business school student comes across the idea of a product lifecycle: a product or service gets introduced, pickedup by early adopters, then mainstream adopters, and then onto late adopters. There's been a lot of early adopter buzz lately among social media geeks. You know, the people who've been on Twitter since it began.

Robert Scoble, champion of early adopters everywhere, wrote about Early Adopter Angst on his blog today. The take away message here, at least for me, is early adopters are the ones driving change in society. I certainly buy into that; you can follow me on Twitter to prove it. But I came away from Scoble's article with a nagging sense of "something's missing here."

A product, service or idea, if it's to appeal to even the earliest of adopters, needs to be seen as worthwhile. And for that, it has to make sense within the context of the current culture. Ideas too far ahead of their time can wither and die without as much as a whimper, let alone an echo.

And that idea came from remembering something I read a while ago in the book The Wisdom Paradox. I don't recall the specific terms used, but the sense of it is something like you never here about the real geniuses because their ideas are so far ahead, no one at the time can relate to them. Passenger service didn't make sense when there were no railroads, buses or airlines, for example.

Scoble promotes the idea that Twitter will be mainstream in a few years. Maybe. But even if an idea does make at least a little sense, I think it can remain in the early adopter stage for a long, long time.

One of the things I do is something called the Feldenkrais Method. Without getting into specifics here - click on the link in my blog's sidebar to read about it - it's been stuck in the early stage of the early adopter stage for about 40 years. And I don's see it getting out anytime soon.

And I think that's a shame. It has real benefits to offer almost anyone. Yet, today, it's somewhat known within the various flavors of physical therapy, and almost not at all outside them.

One of the things it does well, better and easier than anything else I've experienced, is change the state of tonus in your body. That is, it loosens overly tight muscles and tightens overly loose muscles, result in better posture and ease of movement. And, of yeah, it makes you feel good, and even reenergized. And you can get pretty stiff and tight by, say, staring at a computer screen for long periods of time.

It's been in the early adopter stage for 40 years or so. A related method, the Alexander Technique, has been in the early adopter stage for over 100 years!

Will they ever get out of the early adopter stage? Hard to say, but I'm thinking probably not. But I'm glad I adopted it early, even if no one's heard of it. The challenge is relating it to everyday life of all of us, not just people who need to rehab. It really does have benefits for all of us.

Will maintreamers and late adopters get in on it? I hope so, but I fear the answer is no.

But, hey, we can still Twitter about it, can't we?

Technorati Tags: feldenkrais, learning, marketing, socialmedia, change