From the perspective of innovation, I learned quite a bit. I am still trying to sort through it in my head, but there are a few things that really stood out. One thing is that a lot of the folks I met are involved in something based off the internet, and their medium is information. This is pretty fascinating environment. Because the “barrier to entry” is so low, it’s relatively easy to very quickly try many different things on the web – and just see which one sticks. And that appears to be one of the keys to coming up with ideas… many cheap and quick iterations to maximize your ability to learn. I am trying to figure out how to apply this to my world, where it simply isn’t practical to build 10 different designs for a jet engine (at billions of dollars and many years of development) – and then take the best one – we’d go out of business! But it is something we can do on a smaller scale in the lab.
One of the more interesting parts of the conversation we had with David Lee was around thinking about changing the economics of going to the doctor. As David explained, a regular doctor visit has a bad risk/reward situation: There is a low liklihood anything is wrong but good chance that if something is wrong that it’s serious. On top of this, people have a tendency to overestimate small risks and devalue the future, all leading to a situation where it’s hard to get people into a regular routine of visits.
So how can this be fixed? Well, it’s counterintuitive, but first off you’d need to accurately communicate to people the low risk of the situation by letting them know just how unlikely it is that anything is wrong with them. Then, in the case that something actually was, you’d have to be prepared with a good explanation of how to approach the issue and the liklihood of success (again, people will tend to think that the risk is higher than it really is).
During our time out in the Milwaukee-area we spent a fair amount of time talking about and looking at MR and specifically fMRI. I had heard of both and basically understood that fMRI allowed doctors and scientists to watch blood flow in the brain in real time. (I’ll do a post later that goes into the subject more deeply.)
Greene suggests that in some circumstances, real honesty is not about overcoming the temptation to lie but about not having to deal with that temptation in the first place. On an fMRI image, at least, the lying brain may look no different from one that’s simply contemplating whether to lie. “Within the dishonest group, we saw no basis for distinguishing lies from honest reports,” says Greene.
While we were seeing the MR equipment, we got a funny inight into what it’s like constantly being around big magnets. The MR team explained to us that whenever a group of people from the field get together, say for dinner, they all have to explain to the waitstaff that none of the magnetic strips on any of their credit cards work.
Okay, so maybe it’s not a joke, but I bet it would make a good cartoon for MR Monthly (if there is such a thing).
Oh, and when we were in the room we had to take everything out of our pockets that was either metal or could be erased. All our data stored in hard drives, credit cards, etc. seems to have made it out unscathed I’m happy to report.
While we were in Milwaukee we saw a sales presentation for a new MRI machine. Its a pretty funny thing, the marketing of MRI machines – the features are really esoteric, and you need a crane and a reinforced concrete floor to get it into it’s new home.
One of the features touted in a powerpoint we saw is that the new model MRI machine has 5,700 Henrys. At which point Adam the aerospace engineer said “holy crap”. Noah and I said “what’s a Henry?”
So we look it up and a Henry is this: Haha kidding. I don’t understand this equation. But I did some research!
In any situation involving electricity, there is a magnetic field generated by the electricity passing through a circuit, and the field causes a certain amount of interference with the passage of electricity, and the amount of magnetic interference is called inductance.
One unit of inductance is a Henry, and if you are trying to transmit electricity efficiently, you don’t want a lot of Henrys. However! If you are trying to make the mightiest magnets ever for your magnetic imaging device, you want all the Henrys you can get.
So basically, a Henry is more or less the “horsepower” of the MRI industry.
Found this video, which is a good explanation of how MRI works, notable also because its explained by
“Wizard of Schenectady” Howard Hart, who used to work for General Electric on MRI design, and the video is produced by the awesome Edison Museum in Schenectady
Anyone who’s had an MRI knows one thing: they are SO LOUD. Why is that ? Well we found out last week: basically an MRI is giant speaker!
The way an MRI works is by creating a super-powered electromagnet that resonates at specific frequencies.
The way a loudspeaker works is by applying an electric field to a coil in conjunction with a magnet that moves a cone (which produces the sound).
So in the case of an MRI, a byproduct of the really gigantic magnet used to analyze your internal organs is that at some frequencies the magnet is acting like the magnet in a loudspeaker, and the enclosure for the machine itself is acting like the speaker cone.
This isn’t intentional, just a byproduct of the basic technology, and GE actually puts in a bunch of sound insulation and uses other tricks (and recommends ear protection) to make it less loud.
To prove the point that its basically a big speaker, here is an audio-only youtube clip that is a song played by using an MRI machine:
While we were out at Waukasha we spoke to David Lee again. One of the things he said that was very interesting is that one of the best predictors of a person’s health is the question “how are you feeling today?”
Track Your Happiness.org is a new scientific research project that aims to use modern technology to help answer this age-old question. Using this site in conjunction with your iPhone, you can systematically track your happiness and find out what factors – for you personally – are associated with greater happiness. Your responses, along with those from other users of trackyourhappiness.org, will also help us learn more about the causes and correlates of happiness.
This is super interesting to me and starts towards making health a better game, which we’ve been talking lots about.
Hi! This is a blog about a project we are doing for GE. We are from The Barbarian Group, an online marketing company, and GE hired us to help them with their internet behavior, so this is our marketing journal where we will show you what we find and talk about what we might do next.
Haha kidding. I don’t understand this equation. But I did some research! 