This Week in EID – Episode 28

The articles on EID this week were pre-queued before the HFES conference because I had a feeling I would be pretty HF-brain dead.  The posts all refer to articles from the prior week, but with the benefit that I was able to put some thought into writing about them.  And I think the delay was worth the wait.  Four pretty good topics for the week. 

Activity trackers are such the rage these days I had to put a little kibosh on them.  As with most of my posts on self-delusion, the human condition is not robust enough to resist an excuse to feel superior. 

On the complete other side of the spectrum, work-lifebalance is something I am passionate about on the positive side.  But this post was not just about work and home.  The future of balance could include all kinds of lives – social media life, garage-band life, startup peer to peer company life, and many others.  I have friends who might resist a greater time commitment at work because of their knitting hobby or softball team.

The Thync is an interesting development in the brain stimulation field.  The technology still has a ways to go, but for now it can be used to zap your brain into greater stimulation.  With the right tuning, it might be able to target increased memory, increased creativity, or other specific skills.  But could it add to the digital divide if it is so expensive that it becomes a tool of the wealthy?

But the last post on black hat design is my favorite.  Not because I believe in black hat design but because it is about motivation, incentives, and many other topics that are going into the revolutionary gamification book I am writing. 

Fun with marketers

I just had so much fun with a cold call marketer it almost wasn’t fair.  He was calling from Web Buyer’s Guide to offer me a free eSeminar in Cybercrime. 

He asked for Marc Resnick and when I asked what company he was from, he assumed I was Marc and announced he was from Web Buyer’s Guide.

I said I was not interested.  He asked how I could know; he hadn’t told me what he was calling about yet. I said I had never heard of his company, which is a pretty reliable sign.

He told me I had visited a website (apparently that they mined for my phone personal information) where I had either downloaded an eBook or watched a video.  I asked him which one it was.  He didn’t know. 

I said that wasn’t a good omen for their targeting.  He defended himself by telling me that he knew my email, phone number, and that I worked at Bentley (wow, how impressive).

I asked him if he knew whether I liked the eBook (telling him of course which one I had downloaded).  If not, I probably wasn’t a good target to offer me something new. 

He interrupted my witty comeback by announcing that he was offering me a FREE eSeminar on cybercrime.  Free!!  How can you not like free?

I asked if he had any evidence that I was interested in cybercrime.  He ducked the question and said everyone was interested in cybercrime.  I asked why he thought I would have confidence in Web Buyer’s Guide’s knowledge of cybercrime. He ducked that question too.

I asked him if he had any indication that an eSeminar was a channel I was interested in getting information through.  He was silent.  I let him know that I had never taken an eSeminar and never planned to. 

But I thanked him for a very fun conversation.  He just hung up.