Idea #12: Create a matrix to predict people's decisions

Description
I was walking down the Metro platform on my way home when it hit me: people are completely predictable.

Not long ago I read Phillip K. Dick's Exegesis, which lead me to immediately spot a book with an illustration of his face on the cover in a simulation of a circuit board, called How to Build an Android: The True Story of Phillip K. Dick's Robotic Resurrection by David F. Duffy. That got me interested in reading more about artificial intelligence and the way the brain functions, so I read Ray Kruzweil's How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed. Kurzweil really drives home the concept of the brain as a pattern recognizing machine, starting with low level pattern recognition and building up hierarchically to more complex patterns. But the idea that suddenly struck me was the fact that essentially, the brain responds to stimuli based on past experience. And also based on inherent structure - or what people would normally refer to as personality.

It's a controversial idea, but I think we've all been misguided by the poetic idea that we are complex beings whose inner workings are pretty much unknowable and ultimately unpredictable. I realized that was bullshit. We just don't know enough about ourselves to accept that we're all basically reacting to the world based on our past experience and the way our personhood has shaped. There are all kinds of scientific studies out there that show how we are affected (either consciously or sub-consciously) by various situational and experiential criteria, that there had to be a way to form a model to accurately describe, with a somewhat high degree of probability anyways, a person's decision.

I came up with the idea of creating some kind of matrix to represent the factors that shape the person (a subject profile) and the factors that frame the decision to be made (the circumstances). In the column headings of my spreadsheet, I listed a combination of personality dimensions based on the Five-Factor Model (the nature aspect) and personal experience/socio-economic status/education (the nurture aspect), lifestyle practices, and emotional state. Together, these factors contribute to the development of habits that subjects fall back on in response to stimuli. In my rows, I listed a series of questions about the decision, such as whether it required an immediate response, whether the person affected is friendly or not, the expected outcomes of the decision, and other things that people take into account  when considering how to respond to a decision. 

The decision itself would be framed in simple terms of positive, neutral, or negative. There are a wide variety of reactions that a person can have, but mostly they boil down to a few types of responses that are framed in these three terms.

Steps
1) Create a matrix to contain all the criteria that shape the subject's experience and personality, and the factors included in the event.
2) Research the scientific basis for certain criteria and factors, to ensure it's based on proven ground.
3) Design a program to score a subject's responses to a questionnaire, creating a subject profile. Figure out how to weight the criteria based on expected impact.
4) Create a survey with questions presenting a situation and requesting a decision. The questions would be like those questions presenting moral dilemmas (for example, "A train is speeding toward a person on the tracks. Do you pull the switch and divert it to a crowd of old people?"). 
5) Have a computer program answer this survey using the subject profile as a guide. Compare answers with the subject's completed survey.
6) Collect as many surveys as possible. Revise program based on collected data for more accuracy.
7) Sell to some tech firm as an amazing new model for artificial intelligence. 

Enthusiam: Crazy-high. Nothing like believing you've designed something totally original and brilliant. (Unless you tell me someone out there has already figured this out).
Practicality: Ambitious-much? This is an all-encompassing model that is way beyond my field of study.
Difficulty: With the knowledge demanded, either I spend years studying up, or I get folks to help. Any computer programmers out there interested in helping?

Idea #8: Create a log of story ideas

Description
Recently, I flipped through my journal and stumbled across an idea I had come up with for a story. Nothing crazy or detailed, just a quick blurb that could be fleshed out in the future into a complete plotline. I had jotted it down quickly, the handwriting a scribble, thinking that it would make for a good story and I didn't want to lose it. Then I promptly forgot about all about it.

But this is the point of keeping a journal, right? To capture those ideas that drift out of the smoke in our pre-frontal cortex, before the wisps drift off again into the ether. Our minds are always changing - fail to record an idea, and it might never come back from the hidden lands of inspiration. The problem is, these story ideas are buried in amongst the pages of sketches, grocery lists, designs for furniture or other items to build, dream logs (a future blog post on that shortly), and other mishmash. With no key word or date search capability.

So I just have to go back through my journals, one page at a time, and type them up.

Steps
1) Dig up old journals from the basement.
2) Find the story ideas and type them up.
3) Select the most promising and flesh them out into a complete story.
4) Get them published.

Enthusiam: Moderate. Much like the jotting down of story ideas, enthusiasm for reading through these ideas fades as soon as I get them typed. But at least I have them for the future, right?
Practicality: I'd forgotten how many journals I've kept over the years. And that's not counting the ones from high school (dare I step back into that mindset?)
Difficulty: I had to flip back through years and years of notebooks and journals. And sit down and actually type them up. And I'm still haunted by the feeling that I've missed a few.

And I did. I went back and dug out my journals, flipped through them, and typed them into a Word doc. I now have a list, a sampling of which includes:
- A man with Alzheimers in a nursing home who sends postcards about places he had been to with his wife when she was still alive. His granddaughter puts them together into a story of his life, a biography she would have never known had she not read the postcards.
- A boy who is a thief and punk, but wears a Boy Scout uniform to look wholesome.
- A short short about a lottery winner who sets fire to his own house to fake his death so he can finally shake all the people asking him for money.
- A future in which the government has mandated public servants to have electrodes implanted in their brains to force them to make policies according to laws and regulations, removing emotional thought from policy decisions. Based on a new technology using nanofiber cables implanted in mice's brains, successfully making them turn in certain directions when the light in the cables turns on.
- Based on a man I met in the Philippines, who long since went "off the grid," who is now dying and teaching his lessons to an American who happened by chance to meet him while on vacation.

And that's just a quarter of the story ideas I dug up out of these journals. Someday I'll type them up and get them published.

Idea #2: Lottery Scratchers: An Investment Plan

Description

Buy lottery scratchers with the best odds of winning any prize, so that small winnings (from the amount of the ticket to $20 or so) will offset and maybe even outperform the cost of buying the scratchers. Perhaps some of the prizes will be on the medium side ($20-$200) and result in a modest return on the amount invested in buying losing or small prize-earning tickets. And then there's the hope of every sad sack buying a lottery ticket: hitting the grand prize! A man can dream, can't he?

Steps
1) Research the data available on the state lottery website to find the odds of winning any type of prize, the amount of tickets available, the amount of prizes unclaimed, and the odds of winning the top prize.

2) Pull the data into a spreadsheet and analyze it, picking out the ones with the best overall odds.

3) Go to the nearest convenience store and point at the ones I picked before hand, but try not too look to desperately hopeful when doing it.

4) Track the record of scratcher purchasing costs against the amounts won as a reality check: to keep from thinking that if I just buy a few more I can hit it big time.

Enthusiam: High, until I remember that I'm probably not the first person to think of this. Maybe they've just been really quiet about their strategy?

Practicality: Most people would probably say no, it's not practical, especially in the long run. I should probably set a loss limit of $50 or so, buying no more than $5-$10 scratchers at a time.

Difficulty: Pulling together the data is probably the most time consuming. Then there's the sweating bullets part as I hold up the line of people waiting to buy beer and junk food and endure the cashier's silent scorn so I can eye the tickets displayed under the counter.