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For Toddlers, Toy of Choice Is Tech Device
Source Material The New York Times - November 29, 2007 - By MATT RICHTEL and BRAD STONE

For preschoolers. Cellphones, laptops, digital cameras and MP3 music players are among the hottest gift items this year.

Toy makers and retailers are filling shelves with new tech devices for children ages 3 and up, and sometimes even down. They say they are catering to junior consumers who want to emulate their parents and are not satisfied with fake gadgets. Toy makers are also worried that they might be losing their youngest, most devoted customers to the consumer electronics and video game companies. Mr. McGowan said the industry has even coined a term for the anxiety: KGOY, which stands for Kids Getting Older Younger.

Electronics makers, and entrepreneurs, see opportunity in capturing today's bib-wearing consumers. A cellphone company called Kajeet, based in Bethesda, Md., introduced a cellphone this year for children ages 8 and up. In October, Toys "R" Us started stocking the phones, which have software aimed at children but the same hardware as adult models. "When we put devices in front of kids, if they smack of kid-ness, they're much less interested," said Daniel Neal, Kajeet's chief executive. "They want your iPhone, they want your BlackBerry, and they're smart enough to use it better than you do."

Eric Jorgensen, a programmer at Microsoft, has invented PixelWhimsy, a computer program that allows toddlers to sit at a regular computer and bang away on the keys to create sounds and colors and shapes, but without damaging the computer. Asmin Jalis, who also works at Microsoft and whose 2-year-old boy, Ibrahim, has been using PixelWhimsy, said his son liked it better than his toy computer. "We have a toy laptop for him, and he knows it's a fake," he said.

Consider the "hottest toys" list on Amazon.com, which includes the Easy Link Internet Launch Pad from Fisher-Price (to help children surf on "preschool-appropriate Web sites") and the Smart Cycle, an exercise bike connected to a video game.

Jim Silver, editor of Toy Wishes magazine and an industry analyst for 24 years, said there had been "a huge jump in the last 12 months" in toys that involve looking at a screen. "The bigger toy companies don't even call it the toy business anymore," Mr. Silver said. "They're in the family entertainment business and the leisure business. What they're saying is, ?We're vying for kids' leisure time.' "

Technology has been slowly permeating the toy business for a number of years, but the trend has been accelerating. On Wednesday, six of the nine best-selling toys for 5- to 7-year-olds on Amazon.com were tech gadgets. For all of 2006, three of the top nine toys for that age group were tech-related.

The children were the focus of a brain experiment under way at the California Institute of Technology to explore the neural anatomy of indecision. With the push of a button, the woman in the Caltech scanner could distribute meals at the orphanage more fairly, but only by taking food off the table, not by serving more portions. While she pondered, the 12-tonne fMRI scanner at the university's brain-imaging centre traced the synaptic patterns of equity, remorse and reward in her brain. In these rip tides of neural currents, the researchers sought clues to human variables missing from the mathematics of conventional economics.

The quirky experiment exemplifies the new field of neuroeconomics. Behavioural economist Ming Hsu and his Caltech colleagues combined financial-decision theories and medical brainimaging tools to analyse the brain as a living engine of economics, one fine-tuned by evolution through eons of foraging for scarce resources. These scientists studied hard choices, documenting how competing networks of neurons unconsciously shape the way we buy, sell, risk and trust.

During this test, the scientists wanted to see how synapses valued fairness against the desire to avoid harming others. The dilemma can arise when a limited resource is distributed unequally, and the only way to help one person comes at another's expense -whether in profit sharing, setting affirmative action policy, or rationing health care.

In the summer of 2006, when they organized the test, Hsu and his colleagues could imagine no more agonizing choice, within the constraints of medical ethics, than to ask people to take food away from orphans in a war-torn African country.

An online search led them to the website for the Canaan Children's Home, a one-storeyed green building with a clinic next door, set amid the trees and chicken coops a half hour's drive from Jinja, Uganda. As of April, 100 children were living there, many of them orphaned by AIDS, said Frank P.

Crane in Richmond, Virginia, chairman of the Uganda Missions Action Committee, which monitors the home's finances.

For many decades, pub lishers of business mag azines such as Business Week, Fortune and Forbes thrived by following a simple formula: Target upscale executives and sell ad space to auto makers, financial-services firms and technology companies.

But in recent years, that formula has come undone. The dot-com meltdown in 2000 sent technology advertising into a steep decline. The slump in the auto industry has led to a cutback in car advertising. And then there's the Web, which has weakened the magazines' hold on their readers and advertisers.

Complicating matters further, the three incumbents face a new threat from a deeppocketed competitor: Condé Nast's Portfolio, a glossy general-interest business magazine that debuted in April. McGraw-Hill Publications' BusinessWeek and Time Warner Inc.'s Fortune are responding to these crosswinds with redesigns. BusinessWeek's new version hit newsstands Friday, and Fortune's will debut in December.

With Detroit in a slump and the subprime mortgage crisis taking a toll on the financial sector, the situation may get worse. Total financial advertising pages fell 7.3% in the first half of this year, while technology dropped 12.8%, and autos fell 4.5%, according to the Publishers Information Bureau.

Hardest hit were BusinessWeek and Fortune, each of which saw ad pages drop 20% in the second quarter, while Forbes LLC's Forbes was down 1.1%.

Forbes's competitors say its tally includes supplements and other pages that the rivals don't count. Adjusting for these factors, they say the performance of the three is roughly equal. Forbes denies this and says the data prove that it is well ahead of the competition in terms of ad pages even without the special sections.

"They ought to spend more time making ad calls than slinging mud," says James S.

Berrien, president of the Forbes magazine group.

BusinessWeek, Forbes and Fortune don't publish financial results, but executives at all three acknowledge that their print ad revenue is falling. As the magazines are mostly sold by subscription, rather than on the newsstand, their circulation doesn't tend to fluctuate as much and has remained stable.

While most advertising categories may recover, the loss of ad revenue to the Web is only likely to get worse. The Internet has undermined the business models of nearly all print media.

Magazines, which have a longer shelf life and offer fancier graphics than newspapers, had been seen as less exposed to the Web. While that is certainly true for fashion magazines, it isn't the case for newsier categories like business.

Just kidding! But according to a new book by Ian Ayres, an econometrician and law professor at Yale, this is a microcosm of a powerful trend that will shape the economy for years to come: the replacement of expertise and intuition by objective, data-based decision making, made possible by a virtually inexhaustible supply of inexpensive information. Those who control and manipulate this data will be the masters of the new economic universe. Ayres calls them "Super Crunchers," which is also the title of his book, the latest attempt to siphon off a bit of the buzz that surrounds the hugely successful "Freakonomics." In fields from criminal law (where statistical projections of recidivism are taking discretion away from judges and parole boards) to oenophilia (where a formula involving temperature and rainfall is a better predictor of the quality of a vintage than the palates of the most vaunted experts), "intuitivists" are on the defensive against the Super Crunchers.

Super-crunchable data can be broadly statistical or profoundly personal. Illustrating the former, Ayres chose the title of his book by running two Google ads that appeared in random order when someone searched for phrases like "data mining." The decision was made by the plurality who clicked on the ad for "Super Crunchers" rather than the competing title, "The End of Intuition." This is both a more scientific way of making the choice than over lunch with his editor at Michael's and a case study of how super-crunching can make the economy more efficient and productive. But the same explosion of computing power gives large companies powerful new tools with which to entice or, in some cases, to torment their customers. "It's going to be easier to find the products and services we want," Ayres predicts. "The sellers are doing the work for us." Amazon's computers know what we'll like even before we figure it out for ourselves; Netflix customers, says Ayres, like the movies the service recommends better than the ones they choose on their own. But auto dealers can use the same kinds of data to calculate to a fine point just how far they can push their customers on price and loan rates. When airlines cancel a flight, Ayres writes, they use an algorithm to predict which customers are most vulnerable to being lured away by a competitor and to give them, not the airline's own best customers, priority in rebooking.

And this power necessarily resides in a central computer, not with the agent at the ticket counter. Increasingly, jobs that used to call for independent judgment, especially about other people, are being routinized and dumbed down. Banks no longer care about a loan officer's assessment of whether a borrower is a good risk; everything they need to know is in the numbers. Baseball managers increasingly judge prospects by quantifiable statistics, not their "drive" or "hustle." "We are living in an age when dispersed discretion is on the wane," Ayres writes, even in such intimate settings as the doctor's office. Evidence-based medicine, the use of statistical models to guide diagnoses and treatment, is already changing how doctors practice. "Many physicians have effectively ceded a large chunk of control of treatment choice to Super Crunchers," he writes, and the trend will continue despite understandable resistance from the profession. No one wants to throw away a lifetime of specialized training and experience. Which is why the editors request that if you liked this article, or even more so if you didn't ... please keep it to yourself. Just kidding.

A representation of one of the scenarios that scientists used to study out-of-body experiences.

Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science. When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, an expert on body and mind who was not involved in the experiments.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body. Out-of-body experiences have also been reported to occur during sleep paralysis, the exertion of extreme sports and intense meditation practices.

The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.

The out-of-body experiments were conducted by two research groups using slightly different methods intended to expand the so-called rubber hand illusion.

In that illusion, people hide one hand in their lap and look at a rubber hand set on a table in front of them. As a researcher strokes the real hand and the rubber hand simultaneously with a stick, people have the vivid sense that the rubber hand is their own.

When the rubber hand is whacked with a hammer, people wince and sometimes cry out.

Of all the objects in the universe, the human brain is the most complex: There are as many neurons in the brain as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So it is no surprise that, despite the glow from recent advances in the science of the brain and mind, we still find ourselves squinting in the dark somewhat. But we are at least beginning to grasp the crucial mysteries of neuroscience and starting to make headway in addressing them. Even partial answers to these 10 questions could restructure our understanding of the roughly three-pound mass of gray and white matter that defines who we are.

1. How is information coded in neural activity?
2. How are memories stored and retrieved?
3. What does the baseline activity in the brain represent?
4. How do brains simulate the future?
5. What are emotions?
6. What is intelligence?
7. How is time represented in the brain?
9. How do the specialized systems of the brain integrate with one another?
10. What is consciousness?
Ten Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain - What we know?and don?t know?about how we think

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But at its core, Google remains a search engine. And its search pages, blue hyperlinks set against a bland, white background, have made it the most visited, most profitable and arguably the most powerful company on the Internet. Google is the homework helper, navigator and yellow pages for half a billion users, able to find the most improbable needles in the world?s largest haystack of information in just the blink of an eye.

Yet however easy it is to wax poetic about the modern-day miracle of Google, the site is also among the world?s biggest teases. Millions of times a day, users click away from Google, disappointed that they couldn?t find the hotel, the recipe or the background of that hot guy. Google often finds what users want, but it doesn?t always.

That?s why Amit Singhal and hundreds of other Google engineers are constantly tweaking the company?s search engine in an elusive quest to close the gap between often and always.

Mr. Singhal is the master of what Google calls its ?ranking algorithm? ? the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user?s question. It is a crucial part of Google?s inner sanctum, a department called ?search quality? that the company treats like a state secret. Google rarely allows outsiders to visit the unit, and it has been cautious about allowing Mr. Singhal to speak with the news media about the magical, mathematical brew inside the millions of black boxes that power its search engine.

Google values Mr. Singhal and his team so highly for the most basic of competitive reasons. It believes that its ability to decrease the number of times it leaves searchers disappointed is crucial to fending off ever fiercer attacks from the likes of Yahoo and Microsoft and preserving the tidy advertising gold mine that search represents.

?The fundamental value created by Google is the ranking,? says John Battelle, the chief executive of Federated Media, a blog ad network, and author of ?The Search,? a book about Google.

Online stores, he notes, find that a quarter to a half of their visitors, and most of their new customers, come from search engines. And media sites are discovering that many people are ignoring their home pages ? where ad rates are typically highest ? and using Google to jump to the specific pages they want.

?Google has become the lifeblood of the Internet,? Mr. Battelle says. ?You have to be in it.?