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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/technology/27disney.html

the technician and her fellow researchers were eager to know how the man responded to ads of varying size. How small could the banners become and still draw his attention?

A squadron of Disney executives scrutinized the data as it flowed in real time onto television monitors in an adjacent room. "He's not even looking at the banner now," said Duane Varan, the lab's executive director. The man clicked to another page. "There we go, that one's drawing his attention."

. . .

The tools are advanced: in addition to tracking eye movement, Dr. Varan and his 14-member team use heart-rate monitors, skin temperature readings and facial expressions (probes are attached to facial muscles) to reach conclusions.


Idea for mystery novel: Young woman, a research assistant, notices that a male subject whose responses had tended to track pretty close to other people's unexpectedly fails altogether to notice a banner ad that everyone else had. His attention instead is riveted elsewhere on the screen, and he stays on that particular Webpage for over two minutes, though no one else had stayed more than 40 seconds. Out of curiosity, when this particular trial has finished, she checks the page that the man had stared at, but sees nothing out of the ordinary and decides that the man must have just had something on his mind that momentarily distracted him from the experiment. The content on the test pages is fake anyway, so she puts the matter out of her mind. But that evening, working late, collating data and doing other drudge work that's routinely foisted on assistants like her, and being rather tired and bored, she comes across this particular test subject's response data, and once again her curiosity is piqued. She recalls her own instant explanation - "the man must have had something on his mind that momentarily distracted him" - and realizes that it must be false. When someone stops paying attention to page content, his focus becomes diffuse; but she doesn't recall the man's focus going diffuse. So she goes back, reruns the tape while looking at the data, sees that his attention starts with a piece of text, goes to a photo, then is riveted, going back from one to the other, and only goes diffuse at about the one-minute-forty-five-second mark, presumably as he ponders what he's just seen. So she looks at the page content once again, but still sees nothing out of the ordinary, decides that the content must have triggered some personal association in the man, and continues organizing data. When she's done with that, she quickly scans for obvious errors, notices that a particular number seems to be off by an order of magnitude, pulls the original index card, checks back to the number, looks again at the index and decides that indeed there had been a typo... and it hits her that this is exactly what the test subject must have been doing, when his eye kept moving back and forth from photo to text. Something must have seemed off, a contradiction, a mismatch. So she goes back to the Webpage once again, looks hard, and this time sees it, sees what's wrong, and, knowing more about what goes on in the lab than the man would, realizes that he has information that could put him in danger if the wrong person found out, some unknown malefactor. She wonders whether to simply remove the man's file, but decides that there's no way she could cover up for its being missing. And removing his data for that particular page might alert the malefactor. She leaves everything as is, but jots down the man's address and phone number. On the way home she decides that it's likely that she's the only one who noticed the man's behavior - certainly no one commented on it while the test was underway - so talking to him would possibly put him in more danger, and put her in danger as well. But when she arrives at work the next morning, she sees that the man's file is now missing....

OK, I know my talents, and writing a good novel is not one of them, so this novel will never get written. Among other things, I have no good idea what it is that the (attractive) man and the (attractive) research assistant should see on that Webpage.

Obviously, later on in the book, the man will be hooked up once again to the monitoring devices, with the bad guys manning the evaluation booth; but unbeknownst to them the pretty young woman is getting the same data feed in another room, and she's speaking to the man through a tiny receptor he has hidden in his ear...

Date: 2009-07-27 03:13 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] piratemoggy.livejournal.com
I would totally try to write it but I am so flaky that I can never finish anything longer than 500 words these days, let alone an actual novel.

Still, it is a good plot!

Date: 2009-07-28 12:20 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] skyecaptain.livejournal.com
I dunno, maybe it's still Disney research and the discrepancy is between some statistic and the date of tragic death of a recent starlet who had a controversy beyond the company's control, whom they dealt with by hiring a hit on her or something? Like the webpage content says something about the starlet, but has a date that could only be projected from her death, like a memorial service versus the time when the page was created(?). Anyway, point being that the only people who would NOTICE this discrepancy are grown men who pay very very close attention to Disney starlets, i.e. a couple of American Poptimists who happened into the experiment at random.

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