A Happy New Year!

It is a bit late but should make it in time for Chinese speaking people who's New Year starts on February 12 this year. I hope New Year brought you a good start and will be a prosperous and peaceful one for all of us on the planet.

I came across something interesting when I was browsing Nikkei Science or Japanese version of Scientific American. This is one article out of a series of articles describing illusion inherent to human senses and its use to practical applications. Illusion is fun itself, and I recall seeing drawings that look distorted or misleading to our eyes. There are some interesting examples of illusion on the web site below if you would like to see what they were and how they work.

http://www.brl.ntt.co.jp/IllusionForum/basics/art/index-e.html

Illusion, like magic, is amusing and entertaining in some cases but it is difficult for us to realize what the practical applications would be for illusion, if any. However, according to the authors who work for NTT Basic Research Laboratory, the study on illusion is very scientific and its applications encompass many areas including the latest IT or computer technologies as a result of the need for processing and compressing data.
It is particularly finding more applications in compressing digitized sound data.

http://www.brl.ntt.co.jp/IllusionForum/menu-e.html

I remember reading an article about how the Mini Disc (MD) was developed at Sony. (It was about a year ago and I could not locate the article so I could be wrong in specifics.) As common at Sony the specifications of the size of the MD media had been fixed independently of the engineering by the market requirements, thus it turned out the data had to be compressed so much that new methods had to be developed. In other words the MD because of its compact size had limited memory capacity, and the normal compressing techniques were not enough to make the music digital data be compressed to fit into the MD. The developer was utilizing all the data condensing techniques available then, yet he could not accomplish what the marketing side demanded. The solution he reached a few days before the release of the product was to skip certain data. He knew that human ears did not recognize some sounds or sounds immediately following sounds of high amplitude or frequencies so he skipped that portion and thus saved memory capacity. (I am not too sure about this part as I read the article sometime ago so don’t make me liable for this explanation. But the point I want to make is human ears can be fooled as fooled by illusion.) Human ears recognize sounds between 20 and 18,000 Hz thus even when there exist sounds beyond these frequencies, they can be deleted when the data are to be digitized, the concept of which all music CD’s utilize. But in case of MD it was not enough as the MD recording media has much less memory capacity, thus the developer had searched for regions of sounds that can be deleted yet do not affect the quality of music.

There was a very interesting example in the article of February 2000 Issue of Nikkei Science. Take a look at the animation below. It is probably difficult, but try to figure out what it is going on.

To most of the people the figure does not make any sense except random marks or smeared stains, yet as soon as we recognize the fact the figure was hidden by round shapes we begin to recognize what the figure behind is. In other words when the noise or the nature of the perturbation is recognized, our senses or brains immediately begin connecting hidden links or reading the missing information. In terms of data deduction one can delete certain data such as the data behind the round shapes as in this example, yet if the round shapes or the noises are made recognizable to human senses, human brains can read the data substantially reduced.


In marketing and sales it is becoming more and more important to know how to read or interpret the data rather than data collection as a huge amount of data have become collectable by a click through webs. Business school created the term “market intelligence” in contrast to information gathering. Information can tell us what has happened at a place at one point of time and how. Or who does what and when, and it can be translated into market sizes and market shares but it does not tell what we must do tomorrow. Business school tells us we need “market intelligence” that gives us comprehensive understanding of the situation that is translatable to strategies or next actions to take.

Looking at the examples of illusion I felt the first step to upgrade ourselves from the state of information gathering to the state of market intelligence may be to find out what the noises clouding the information are. Once we see the nature of perturbation or noises covering the facts or distorting the reality, we may be able to get ideas that can be translated into actions or strategies.

It may be a bit too stretching to suggest “illusion” can give us a hint for success in business, but facing so many uncertainties ahead at the start of the new year, I though this topic of illusion be appropriate. As image training has become one contemporary sports training method cultivated in USA though “image” and "physical" training can be far apart as, “illusion” finding can be a great tool for learning about business and ourselves.