MisEntropy

An instructive tale about Social Media from the ancient epic The Mahabharata; and 99 other chapters

The brief was to write 400 words on marketing in the social media era. 100 authors - The Project 100 - responded with their pieces and Jeff Caswell, who envisaged the project, edited and put together the submissions.

The resulting collaborative book - 'Connect! Marketing in the Social Media Era' - is now available for purchase.

Proceeds from the sale of the book are being donated towards research into breast cancer.

The chapter I have penned in the book is entitled 'Can brands and consumers be friends? An instructive story from the ancient Indian epic, The Mahabharatha.'

It evokes a story from the epic involving the venerated teacher Drona and his royal students to illustrate what I believe is social media's real and oft-overlooked place in the world of marketing.

The other authors from the Project 100 are:
Adam Broitman - Adam Crowe - Adam Goldberg - Adam Kmiec - Adriana Gil Miner - Alan Wolk - Alison Woo - Ana Andjelic - Anjali Ramachandran - Ann Handley - Bill Green - BL Ochman - Blaine Mathieu - Brandie Feuer - Brian Morrissey - Bryan Hadaway - Carl Moggridge - Dave Knox - David Mullen - David Peck - Denise Cassino - Derek O’Brien - Dirk Singer - Dom Rodwell - Domenick Cilea - Doug Karr - Drew McLellan - Evan Stoudt - Eyal Danon - Facu Medina - Gavin Heaton - Gordon Plutsky - Greg Christensen - Gunther Sonnenfeld - Hussein Fazal - Iqbal Mohammed - Jacquelyn Corbett Cyr - Janeile Cudjoe - Jay Berkowitz - Jeff Bennett - Jeff Caswell - Jessica Valenzuela - Jim Cahill - Jim Canterucci - Joe Hage - Joe Pulizzi - Jon Hsia - Joseph Bachana - Julie Ann Grant - Kat Lyonnias - Kelly Mitchell - Kent Lewis - Kevin Broome - Kim Karalekas - Lani Anglin-Rosales - Lee Maschmeyer - Lisa Donnan - Marc Meyer - Maria Sipka - Marko Bon - Martin Ouellette - Maureen Streett - Max Mills - Michael Carrasquillo - Michael Hastings-Black - Michael Leis - Michael Mossoba - Miguel Cano - Nathan Beck - Oleg Vyadro - Patrick Davis - Paul Dervan - Paul McEnany - Pedro Rocha - Perry Hewitt - Peter Korchnak - Peter Krainik - Phil Barrett - Renee Barrett - Rick Krueger - Robert (Zen Films) - Ronn Torossian - Selina Jane Eckersall - Shane Steele - Shiv Singh - Stephen Larkin - Susan Greene - Tom Humbarger - Victoria Caswell - Wallance Jackson

The Curious Death of Benjamin Button

Watching this TED video of the technology that went behind the making of Benjamin Button, I was reminded yet again of what a crappy movie it really was.

In my opinion, there was much too wrong with the movie all over but one glaring inelegance in the execution still stands out for me - in a movie otherwise filled with crater-sized plot holes.

When Benjamin Button is born, he has the body of an infant but the physical characteristics of an old man. So as the film progresses, his physical appearance is changing on two fronts : his body is growing conventionally - he is growing up in size; and his physical characteristics are ageing in reverse - he is looking and feeling younger.

If you follow that to the logical point - at the time of his death, you'll have a Benjamin Button with a body of an old adult (somewhat smaller in frame than a young adult) but with the physical characteristics of an infant baby.

He definitely will not be growing down from an adult body to a baby-sized one - as is portrayed in the movie.

But you don't need to be 'fearless of technology' (the speaker Ed Ulbrich's description of David Fincher, the director) and spend 4 years researching state-of-the-art TED-worthy technology to figure that one.

You need plain and simple common-sense - and the integrity to tell an honest and compelling story. And you wouldn't find those in Benjamin Button even if you looked for a hundred years.

The future of: CAPTCHAs

This New Scientist article (via Noah Brier) gives an overview about how programmers are being goaded by X-prize-like rewards from spammers to crack CAPTCHAs - and, in the process, are providing a push towards fundamental breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence.

The obvious and tongue-in-cheek conclusion drawn by the report is then "to start designing CAPTCHAs in a different way – pick problems that need solving and make them into targets to be solved by resourceful criminals."

The subtext of this cat-and-mouse game of advances in CAPTCHAs and the technology to crack them is actually a fairly simple task - to define something that uniquely identifies us as human. After all CAPTCHA stands for 'Completely Automated Public Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart' - and if someone is able to automate the solution then it no longer qualifies as a CAPTCHA.

In this escalating arms race, the demise of the CAPTCHA-as-we-know-it is probably very near. But the solution to stopping spam may not lie in moving the bar a bit further each time by repeatedly creating problems that need technological breakthroughs - or (as framed in the above article) problems that need an infusion of funds to motivate programmers to find a solution.

My bet is that the solution to a lasting CAPTCHA is not to focus on exceptional human capabilities (reading distorted text, correcting the orientation of pictures, etc.) but instead to focus on human frailties and chinks in the human mind that allow it to be fooled.

Visual and cognitive illusions - and magic - mask the perception of physical reality by exploiting our sensory and cognitive weaknesses - and could actually be the basis of next-generation CAPTCHAs aiming to establish how to identify humans from non-humans.

Of course, that would set off a race to simulate the mind's shortcomings and the creating of an artifical intelligence mimicking the neural basis of human intelligence. Again, my bet is that it wouldn't be as easy - or as near in the future - as cracking the human mind's specific capabilities, one by one.

And if programmers - spurred by a bounty or otherwise - do manage to recreate the imperfections of the human senses and mind, we would have truly created natural artificial intelligence (as against artificial artificial intelligence) .

And then, spam will be the least of our problems.

(Read more posts from "The Future Of:" series.)