How Companies Learn Your Secrets. For decades, Target has collected vast amounts of data on every person who regularly walks into one of its stores. Whenever possible, Target assigns each shopper a unique code . Target can buy data about your ethnicity, job history, the magazines you read, if you. Postal Service, has a . One study from Duke University estimated that habits, rather than conscious decision- making, shape 4. This research is also transforming our understanding of how habits function across organizations and societies. A football coach named Tony Dungy propelled one of the worst teams in the N. F. L. Before he became Treasury secretary, Paul O. The Obama campaign has hired a habit specialist as its . They can explain why some of us automatically go for a jog every morning and are more productive at work, while others oversleep and procrastinate. There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell. Inside the brain- and- cognitive- sciences department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are what, to the casual observer, look like dollhouse versions of surgical theaters. There are rooms with tiny scalpels, small drills and miniature saws. Even the operating tables are petite, as if prepared for 7- year- old surgeons. Inside those shrunken O. R. The maze was structured so that each animal was positioned behind a barrier that opened after a loud click. The first time a rat was placed in the maze, it would usually wander slowly up and down the center aisle after the barrier slid away, sniffing in corners and scratching at walls. It appeared to smell the chocolate but couldn. There was no discernible pattern in the rat. While each animal wandered through the maze, its brain was working furiously. Every time a rat sniffed the air or scratched a wall, the neurosensors inside the animal. As the scientists repeated the experiment, again and again, the rats eventually stopped sniffing corners and making wrong turns and began to zip through the maze with more and more speed. Oddee is a blog on Oddities, Weird stuff and Strange things of our world with over 5 million visits per month. The BEST source for Broadway Buzz, Broadway Shows, Broadway Tickets, Off-Broadway, London theater information, Tickets, Gift Certificates, Videos, News & Features, Reviews, Photos, New York Hotel & Theater Packages. Experience our changing world in immersive virtual reality. Huffington Post RYOT transports you with a growing library of 360 And within their brains, something unexpected occurred: as each rat learned how to complete the maze more quickly, its mental activity decreased. As the path became more and more automatic . DOGMATIC CONSTITUTION ON THE CHURCH LUMEN GENTIUM SOLEMNLY PROMULGATED BY HIS HOLINESS POPE PAUL VI ON NOVEMBER 21, 1964. THE MYSTERY OF THE CHURCH. Christ is the Light of nations. Because this is so, this. Some are simple: you automatically put toothpaste on your toothbrush before sticking it in your mouth. Some, like making the kids. Still others are so complicated that it. When you first learned to drive, that act required a major dose of concentration, and for good reason: it involves peering into the rearview and side mirrors and checking for obstacles, putting your foot on the brake, moving the gearshift into reverse, removing your foot from the brake, estimating the distance between the garage and the street while keeping the wheels aligned, calculating how images in the mirrors translate into actual distances, all while applying differing amounts of pressure to the gas pedal and brake. In monotheism, God is conceived of as the Supreme Being and principal object of faith. The concept of God as described by most theologians includes the attributes of omniscience (infinite knowledge), omnipotence (unlimited. In our first year in Washington, our son disappeared. Just shy of his 3rd birthday, an engaged, chatty child, full of typical speech — “I love you,” “Where are my Ninja Turtles?” “Let’s get ice cream. Help support New Advent and get the full contents of this website as an instant download. Includes the Catholic Encyclopedia, Church Fathers, Summa, Bible and more — all for only $19.99. 0) Introduction 1) LaSallette and Knock 2) Pope Leo XIII vision 3) Pope Pius X's vision 4) Sr. Aiello's prophecy 5) Bl Anne Catherine Emmerich 6) Fatima 7) Sr. Lucia's interview with Fr. Now, you perform that series of actions every time you pull into the street without thinking very much. Your brain has chunked large parts of it. Left to its own devices, the brain will try to make almost any repeated behavior into a habit, because habits allow our minds to conserve effort. But conserving mental energy is tricky, because if our brains power down at the wrong moment, we might fail to notice something important, like a child riding her bike down the sidewalk or a speeding car coming down the street. What Graybiel and her colleagues found was that, as the ability to navigate the maze became habitual, there were two spikes in the rats. Those spikes show when the rats. From behind the partition, the rat wasn. Once it heard that sound, it knew to use the . Then at the end of the routine, when the reward appeared, the brain shook itself awake again and the chocolate signaled to the rat that this particular habit was worth remembering, and the neurological pathway was carved that much deeper. The process within our brains that creates habits is a three- step loop. First, there is a cue, a trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use. Then there is the routine, which can be physical or mental or emotional. Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is worth remembering for the future. Over time, this loop . The cue and reward become neurologically intertwined until a sense of craving emerges. Neurological studies like the ones in Graybiel. And rewards can range from the obvious (like the sugar rush that a morning doughnut habit provides) to the infinitesimal (like the barely noticeable . Most cues and rewards, in fact, happen so quickly and are so slight that we are hardly aware of them at all. But our neural systems notice and use them to build automatic behaviors. Habits aren. So unless you deliberately fight a habit . Habits never really disappear. Take, for instance, a series of studies conducted a few years ago at Columbia University and the University of Alberta. Researchers wanted to understand how exercise habits emerge. In one project, 2. Half the participants received an extra lesson on the theories of habit formation (the structure of the habit loop) and were asked to identify cues and rewards that might help them develop exercise routines. The results were dramatic. Over the next four months, those participants who deliberately identified cues and rewards spent twice as much time exercising as their peers. Other studies have yielded similar results. According to another recent paper, if you want to start running in the morning, it. After a while, your brain will start anticipating that reward . When a computer chimes or a smartphone vibrates with a new message, the brain starts anticipating the neurological . That expectation, if unsatisfied, can build until you find yourself moved to distraction by the thought of an e- mail sitting there unread . On the other hand, once you remove the cue by disabling the buzzing of your phone or the chiming of your computer, the craving is never triggered, and you. To understand why executives are so entranced by this science, consider how one of the world. In the mid- 1. 99. P.& G. In order to market the product . Whenever she eats there, she says, her jacket smells like smoke. A friend tells her that if she uses Febreze, it will eliminate the odor. The cue in the ad is clear: the harsh smell of cigarette smoke. The reward: odor eliminated from clothes. The second ad featured a woman worrying about her dog, Sophie, who always sits on the couch. Then the marketers sat back, anticipating how they would spend their bonuses. Sales started small and got smaller. Febreze was a dud. The panicked marketing team canvassed consumers and conducted in- depth interviews to figure out what was going wrong, Stimson recalled. Their first inkling came when they visited a woman. The house was clean and organized. She was something of a neat freak, the woman explained. They hardly smell at all! The reason Febreze wasn. If you live with nine cats, you become desensitized to their scents. If you smoke cigarettes, eventually you don. Even the strongest odors fade with constant exposure. They collected hours of footage of people cleaning their homes and watched tape after tape, looking for clues that might help them connect Febreze to people. A breakthrough came when they visited a woman in a suburb near Scottsdale, Ariz., who was in her 4. Her house was clean, though not compulsively tidy, and didn. To the surprise of everyone, she loved Febreze. In the bedroom, she made her bed, tightened the sheet. In the living room, she vacuumed, picked up the children. Now they knew what to look for and saw their mistake in scene after scene. Cleaning has its own habit loops that already exist. In one video, when a woman walked into a dirty room (cue), she started sweeping and picking up toys (routine), then she examined the room and smiled when she was done (reward). In another, a woman scowled at her unmade bed (cue), proceeded to straighten the blankets and comforter (routine) and then sighed as she ran her hands over the freshly plumped pillows (reward). The marketers needed to position Febreze as something that came at the end of the cleaning ritual, the reward, rather than as a whole new cleaning routine. The company printed new ads showing open windows and gusts of fresh air. More perfume was added to the Febreze formula, so that instead of merely neutralizing odors, the spray had its own distinct scent. Television commercials were filmed of women, having finished their cleaning routine, using Febreze to spritz freshly made beds and just- laundered clothing. Each ad was designed to appeal to the habit loop: when you see a freshly cleaned room (cue), pull out Febreze (routine) and enjoy a smell that says you. When you finish making a bed (cue), spritz Febreze (routine) and breathe a sweet, contented sigh (reward). Febreze, the ads implied, was a pleasant treat, not a reminder that your home stinks. And so Febreze, a product originally conceived as a revolutionary way to destroy odors, became an air freshener used once things are already clean. The Febreze revamp occurred in the summer of 1. Within two months, sales doubled. A year later, the product brought in $2. Since then Febreze has spawned dozens of spinoffs . Eventually, P.& G. His assignment was to analyze all the cue- routine- reward loops among shoppers and help the company figure out how to exploit them. Much of his department. Look for shoppers who habitually purchase swimsuits in April and send them coupons for sunscreen in July and diet books in December. They learned that most shoppers paid almost no attention to how they bought these products, that the purchases occurred habitually, without any complex decision- making. Living and Dying on Airbnb – Matter – Medium. Photo- illustrations by Matter. The rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied to broke in half and fell on his head, immediately ending most of his brain activity. I was in bed when my mom found him. Her screams brought me down to the yard where I saw the tree snapped in two and his body on the ground. I knelt down and pulled him up by the shoulders. Blood sprayed my blue sweatshirt and a few crumpled autumn leaves. We were face- to- face, but his head hung limply, his right eye dislodged, his mouth full of blood, his tongue swirling around with each raspy breath. What do you do in this situation? I grabbed a washcloth and started mopping up his leaking face. I told my sister not to come outside. She faints when there’s blood.“Tell me each time he takes a breath,” the 9. He’s breathing in; he’s breathing out. He’s breathing in; he’s breathing out.” Saying it aloud like a mantra calmed me down slightly, but was it doing anything for him? I decided to go in for mouth- to- mouth; I ended up with a mouthful of blood. The EMTs arrived and suctioned the blood away from his face to see the damage. His heart is beating,” one of them said, “but it’s very serious.” They called for a helicopter and told us to start driving to Austin. I scrubbed the blood off my lips and took off my soaking sweatshirt. Everything was blurry — adrenaline makes things that way. So does not putting on your contacts. I popped mine into my eyes and got into the car.“It’s only a matter of time until something terrible happens,” The New York Times’s Ron Lieber wrote in a 2. Airbnb’s liability issues. My family’s story — a private matter until now — is that terrible something. Since the incident, I’ve felt isolated by the burden of this story and my sense of obligation to go public with it, but with an unclear aim. Am I “raising awareness,” in the familiar path of the victim speaking out? And if so, to what end? What will sharing my story really mean for Airbnb? Could the company, with its reportedly $2. As Airbnb rises into a global hospitality behemoth — reinventing not just how we travel but how we value private space — what responsibility does the company have to those who have given it their dollars and trust? Startups that redefine social and economic relations pop up in an instant. Lawsuits and regulations lag behind. While my family may be the first guests to speak out about a wrongful death at an Airbnb rental, it shouldn’t exactly come as a surprise. Staying with a stranger or inviting one into your home is an inherently dicey proposition. Hotel rooms are standardized for safety, monitored by staff, and often quite expensive. Airbnb rentals, on the other hand, are unregulated, eclectic, and affordable, and the safety standards are only slowly materializing. To be fair, Airbnb has always put basic safeguards in place, like user reviews. But its general approach to safety is consistent with Silicon Valley’s “build it first, mend it later” philosophy. When an early product produces negative outcomes and bad press, apologize. Then, fix it; make it better. When her blog post documenting the ordeal went viral, they changed their policy to guarantee $5. Less has been done to protect guests against hosts, presumably because fewer horror stories have gone public. When an American man was bit by a dog left behind at a homeshare in Argentina this March, Airbnb refused to cover his medical expenses until after The New York Timesbegan inquiring. In this case, we worked with the guest to help cover his medical and other expenses, and we provided a full refund of his booking costs.”) Home safety tips were not incorporated into the sign- up process for new properties until after my father’s incident. Even so, nothing is currently done to make sure hosts actually comply with safety guidelines (or even read them), which is a problem particularly for newer properties on the platform, which Airbnb’s customers, as opposed to employees, are left to vet for safety. Should the company demand more from aspiring hosts — submitting an application, passing a safety quiz, hopping on the phone with an Airbnb safety rep, or undergoing a home inspection (an idea which Chesky himself has suggested) — they’d burden the seamlessness of the minutes- long sign- up process and deter new registrations. Had the hosts of the Texas property opted to become part of a community of more traditional B& Bs, they would have encountered a cumbersome but rigorous process, according to the Texas Bed and Breakfast Association’s executive director Connie Hall. The more they’re like a bulletin board or an old- fashioned matchmaking service” — in a word, Craigslist — “. Rather, it’s “a trusted community marketplace” and “an online platform that connects hosts who have accommodations to rent with guests seeking to rent such accommodations.” Of course, platforms are not neutral pieces of technology: they are embedded with the values of the marketplace, strategically designed for maximum profit and minimal liability. Companies that take advantage of such ambiguity pose risks to consumers, particularly when they’re trafficking in human experience, not just data or speech like Napster, Tumblr, and others before them who have appealed to their platform status to weather challenges to the legally murky activities they host. But companies are highly strategic about which aspects of their platform they’re willing to invest in and which parts they ignore. Airbnb, for its part, figured out early on that “really bad” photos of its listings in New York City were keeping guests away, as co- founder Joe Gebbia recalled to Fast Company in 2. People were using camera phones and taking Craigslist- quality pictures. No one was booking because you couldn’t see what you were paying for.”Airbnb’s solution was to send professional photographers to document hosts’ properties free of charge. The program was a success: professional photography quickly helped double revenue in New York and is now available nationally. Of course, were Airbnb to invest in safety requirements by offering home inspections or by analyzing photo content to target higher- risk properties and features (pools, saunas, trampolines, etc.) with site- specific safety recommendations, such a program could be far more costly, and might jeopardize Airbnb’s covetable neutrality as a platform. The irony is that amateur innkeepers who couldn’t be trusted with the banal task of photographing and marketing their properties are expected to excel at hospitality’s most important rule: keeping guests safe and alive. The result: Airbnb is willing to send someone to make sure your trees look beautiful in their photos, but won’t deal with whether or not those trees will fall on your head. Disbelief is often the impetus to pull out a smartphone and snap a photo. As I drifted through the daze of the accident, I relied increasingly on documentation to ground myself in the reality of the experience, photographing each strange, sad, and shocking moment to link it up with the one that came before it: the emergency first responders, moving so slowly I thought my dad would bleed to death before he made it to the hospital; the macho helicopter that carried my dad to Austin, parked dramatically in front of the Texas capital’s granite dome; my hospital cafeteria tray loaded up with rubbery turkey for the world’s saddest Thanksgiving meal. The resulting images provided both distance and proximity to the unfolding trauma — it was mine but also outside of me. So began my evidence gathering. After the hospital, I returned to the cottage with my cousins to pick up the items we had left behind in our haste — suitcases, my dad’s clothes, the tray of cauliflower we never had time to cook — and photograph the accident site. I descended the steps of the deck and returned to the tree, this time alone. It was an eerily innocent scene: the soft November sun lit up the blonde wood of the fallen tree’s decaying core. A fresh breeze rustled leaves where my dad had been lying, now matted to the ground with blood. A kelly- green birdhouse clung to the part of the trunk that still stood upright. I could hear the light gurgling of the creek in the distance.“I always feel a sense of peace come over me when I look out at the yard,” our hosts had written beneath a photo of the yard on their Airbnb listing, the company’s insignia floating just pixels from where the trunk later split in two. As I revisited the listing to screengrab photos, I felt bad for our hosts: it was unlikely that their beloved view would ever inspire that feeling again. They didn’t seem like bad people, at least, not from the brief impression they made at the hospital, where they showed up soon after my family and I arrived. Family photos courtesy of the author. At first I had no idea who they were or why they were there. As I paced around the hospital wing for hours, they camped out in the lobby, clearly devastated. When the neurologist told us there was no choice but to take my dad off life support and that it was time to start saying our goodbyes, they cried when they found out. Then, my uncle suggested they say goodbye to us as well, and they left. A few hours later, my dad took his final breath. That night, back at my aunt’s house in Austin, we silently ate pumpkin pie and lit the Hanukkah candles, joylessly going through the motions of tradition. As I sat watching the flames flicker, that day’s violent movie streaming in my mind (as it’d continue to do so, nearly non- stop, for months), the realization that we had booked a second night at the cabin suddenly jarred me. Had the company been told about the accident? What was there to even say?
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