When Happiness and Depression Meet

About a year ago I wrote about happiness and what it is that makes us happy. It turns out that what makes us happy, what motivates us, follows the philosophy of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. We do things for ourselves that help grow us and are important to us, we do things that we have to struggle with to improve ourselves, and we do things that make us part of a bigger world, and all of these three things have the capacity to make us happy or happier.

http://appliedpsychologyresearch.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/happiness-is-synthetic-so-why-not.html

I wanted today to check, basically, how users of Google search for information associated with happiness and depression. This is essentially search volume index over time. As you can see above there is a fascinating convergence between these two search volumes. As the search volume for Depression decreases over time, the search volume for Happiness has increased to almost the same volume matching Depression. Even when you ask Google to extrapolate these trends (in dotted lines) the trend continues.

All you questions answered

Have you ever wanted a system that answers almost your every factual question at home and on the go. For example:-

• What day is the day after tomorrow
• What is DCXCV – 25
• What is the cheapest toaster
• What is brown minus red
• Who stared in Desperate Housewives season 1

Wolfram Alpha is an online system that answers factual queries directly by computing the answer from structured data, rather than redirecting users to reference material potentially containing solutions. So unlike Google, this system looks within. It does this by considering a great deal of information ranging from every weather data point ever collected to the chemical structure of nearly every compound to the names of the notes in a D minor chord, and just about anything else that matters - colours, sports games, shopping, language, etc etc etc. It's not so much a search engine as it is a "knowledge engine."

You submit questions and computation requests via a text field and the system computes answers and relevant visualizations from a knowledge base of curated, structured data. Alpha thus differs from semantic search engines, which index a large number of answers and then try to match the question to one.

Wolfram Alpha is built on Wolfram's earlier flagship product, Mathematica, which encompasses computer algebra, symbolic and numerical computation, visualization, and statistics capabilities. The answer usually presents a human-readable solution. Wolfram Alpha is based on the computational platform Mathematica, written by British scientist Stephen Wolfram in 1988.

This thing is so versatile that Apple even integrated some of Wolfram Alpha's basic functionality with Siri to give factual answers to the user's questions. Guys, give this a go.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/

An iPhone app is also available.

When pedestrians are wearing headphones

It seems hardly a day goes by if we don’t hear about another vehicle accident involving pedestrians. It’s often been thought that the increase in these types of accidents might partly be explained by the fact that more and more pedestrians are wearing headphones while on the roads. So pedestrians can’t hear the traffic around them,

Research from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore (the research was recently published online in the journal Injury Prevention) suggests that serious injuries to pedestrians listening to headphones have more than tripled in six years. In many cases, the cars or trains are sounding horns that the pedestrians cannot hear, leading to fatalities in nearly three-quarters of cases.

Researchers reviewed 116 accident cases from 2004 to 2011 in which injured pedestrians were documented to be using headphones. 70% of the 116 accidents resulted in death to the pedestrian. More than two-thirds of victims were male (68%) and under the age of 30 (67%).

More than half of the moving vehicles involved in the accidents were trains (55%), and nearly a third (29%) of the vehicles reported sounding some type of warning horn prior to the crash. The increased incidence of accidents over the years closely corresponds to documented rising popularity of auditory technologies with headphones.

The O2O trend

Jack Dikian

January 2012

Back in 1998 I become involved in providing strategic consulting to a small Sydney based e-tailing firm (those that know me know the firm). Back then internet business models were less well defined, building technology platforms from scratch was common, and whilst we knew that even large prime movers such as Amazon weren’t turning in a profit (and the internet bubble burst thing was still happily a few years ahead of us), we nevertheless, thought had some novel differentiation.

One of the big ideas was to forge symbiotic relationships with what (at the time) was called brick and mortar (read that as established shops and businesses) and the online services. For example, you might see our marketing material in a participating store, you might return goods purchased online to a local store, and so on. It’s important to note, these weren’t our stores. Just established business that saw value in integration with an on-line store.

The reason I’m writing this is because 13 or 14 years on Australians spend close to $25billion per annum on the net. Almost 40% of bought products on the net in 2011 and online sales are expected to grow 9% annually by 2012. If only we hung in…

The other reason, and, perhaps the more relevant one is the emerging trend for O2O over the next couple of years. O2O is the idea that small business use the internet (Online) to drive people into their traditional stores (Offline). People will agree that the in-person experience (at least across a variety of products) is the ultimate competitive advantage small businesses have. The O2O approach might see small business re-position themselves against the internet offensive.

Friendships, Emotional Wellbeing, and Facebook

Jack Dikian

January 2012

Recently I’ve been thinking about examining correlational factors between the size of a contact list a person contains in their mobile phone and overall psychological well-being.

Sure, this is hugely an over simplification. Pathology aside, we know for example that a raft of factors impacts upon our emotional well-being. And, even when we horde hundreds of contacts, are they of people who we remain in touch with regularly, and are they all positive elements in our lives.

Our capacity to recognize our emotions and express them appropriately can help us avoid depressive, anxiety creating, and/or other negative moods. Having a strong support network, having trusted people we can turn to for encouragement and support can boost resilience in tough times.

I guess what I’m really asking - are people with large groups of [friends] also share good emotional and mental health. I say “friends” in italic because that in it-self has many contentions. For instance, Facebook friends, colleagues, acquaintances, associates, family members, etc sometimes blurred.

An interesting phenomenon, in the United States at least, is the idea that Americans are thought to be suffering a loss in the quality and quantity of close friendships since at least 1985. Facebook friends are on an upward trend. In Britain today, the average 22-year-old has over 1,000 Facebook friends, 50 times more than their parents.

According to the study in the June 2006 issue of the journal American Sociological Review reports that 25% of Americans have no close confidants and that the average total number of confidants per citizen has dropped from four to two. The study reports also:

• Americans' dependence on family as a safety net went up from 57% to 80%.
• Americans' dependence on a partner or spouse went up from 5% to 9%.

Incidentally, that research found a link between fewer friendships (especially in quality) and psychological regression.

The next next-step - the world of re-selling almost anything

Jack Dikian

January 2012

It’s often difficult to gaze into a murky crystal ball and attempt to predict future trends. Of course it is a little easier to talk about those trends that might be seen as evolutionally and, built on current trends with strong inertia.

Having said that, I’d like to talk about an emerging trend that may become significant in our everyday life in the next few years. I’m talking about re-commerce.

It wasn’t that long ago when, almost overnight the term e-tailing become a part of our vernacular. E-tailing is, as we know, the selling of retail goods on the Internet. Short for "electronic retailing." The term seems an almost inevitable addition to e-mail, and e-business.

E-tailing began to work for some major corporations and smaller entrepreneurs as early as 1997 when Dell Computer reported multimillion dollar orders taken at its Web site.

Re-commerce is about consumers being able to unlock the value in past purchases. Whilst we have always re-sold large, durable goods like cars and houses; the next few years will see us reselling almost anything we no longer want or need.

A growing number of novel brand buy-backs, exchange schemes, online platforms and mobile marketplaces offer smart and convenient options for consumers keen to ‘trade in to trade up’, alleviate financial strains.

Some early business supporting the re-commerce market place include:

• Decathlon, a French sports apparel and equipment store, launched Trocathlon for a week in October 2011. Stores bought back any used equipment in return for coupons valid for six months.
• Levi's Singapore offered customers cash and store vouchers when they brought in their old jeans and bought a new pair.
• Amazon Student released in August 2011, enables students to scan the barcodes of books, DVDs, games or electronics they own, and see the trade-in price. If accepted, a shipping label is generated, and the funds awarded as an Amazon gift card.