Thursday, February 16, 2012

Faces

by Rick Nason, PhD, CFA

Partner, RSD Solutions Inc.

www.RSDsolutions.com

info@RSDsolutions.com

 

Faces are complex.  Recognizing a face is a very difficult task for a computer – much more difficult than recognizing your retina.  Faces convey a ton of information.  They convey emotions.  They also convey understanding or lack of understanding.  Faces are complex (not complicated) and thus are not easily codified.  That is why a computer cannot easily deal with them.

 

Scientific studies have shown that we pay up to 8 times more attention to faces than to objects.  I think that is interesting in a world where faceless social media is so prevalent. 

 

Now, here is a question – do risk managers pay more attention to faces or to data?  Ha!  There is not a single risk management Master’s program anywhere that talks about the importance of faces (or the importance of people for that matter).  A long time ago in this blog series, I blogged about risk management by walking around (RMBWA).  We need more risk managers to manage by reading and understanding faces.  Let the computers take care of the data – let the humans take care of the humans.

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