October 2008 Archives
The takedown of the neuromarketing book Buyology by Jonah Lerer (editor of Seed, author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist and one of my favorite blogs, The Frontal Cortex) in the Washington Post is pretty fantastic. Basically he says the author, Martin Lindstrom writes well and knows a ton about advertising, but when it comes to brain science, he oversimplifies and generally applies theories incorrectly.
The best part of the review is his comments on Lindstrom's use of the mirror neuron theory applied to advertising: "Take mirror neurons, a much-hyped circuit of cells in the pre-motor cortex. These cells have one very interesting property: They fire both when a person moves and when that person sees someone else move. In other words, they collapse the distinction between seeing and doing. That's an exciting idea, but Lindstrom isn't content to stick with the science. Instead, he uses mirror neurons to explain everything from the atmospherics of an Abercrombie & Fitch store (the "large blow-up posters of half-naked models" make your "mirror neurons fire-up") to the smell of coffee in the morning, which causes these cells to "see a cup of Maxwell-House." Lindstrom cheapens the mirror neuron hypothesis by turning it into a justification for almost every successful marketing campaign: Even the triumph of the iPod is merely mirror neurons at work."
We've all been guilty of oversimplifying that which we don't understand and applying it to something that doesn't make sense (I definitely have ... often), so it's always fun to see one of us get put in our place.
Leave a Comment
Tags: brain, marketing, science
My First Tweet is my latest invention and is really quite a simple idea: Create a database of people's first words on Twitter. I've been thinking about it for a while and finally got around to building it. So, if you use Twitter and are curious what your first words were, pop over to My First Tweet.
Leave a Comment
Tags: me, twitter
The Economist Free Exchange blog and James Surowiecki weigh in on the media's effect on people's perception of the economic crisis. Surowiecki makes an interesting point, explaining that he thinks the media's use of "impending" to describe the recession "implies that the markets haven’t yet fully come to terms with reality. And that, in turn, is likely to make investors even more skittish than they already are." The Economist replies with a quote from their archives (1990s) supporting the idea the media can move markets, but finally concludes, "I can also imagine a world in which the media has become increasingly benign, and where the incredible volume of information available has had a net calming effect on the economy. I would probably lean toward this possibility, in fact. But as someone who sits in front of a computer all day reading blogs, I imagine I'm not representative."
I've been trying to wrap my head around this question for awhile and can see both sides. We certainly live in an age where the economic crisis can seem all the more serious because media is literally everywhere we turn and it's all covering the same stuff. On the other hand, for me (and the Economist it seems), the access to information has allowed me a much greater understanding than I could have had if this had happened 15 years ago. The number and diversity of voices available on the web is staggering and I've been able to learn quite a bit about economics. In the end, though, I think it's the Economist who sums it up best with "I'm not representative."
Leave a Comment
Tags: economics, media
Some thoughts from a panel on digital marketing strategy.
It's been awhile since I had an explicitly marketing post, so I figured I'd write a little about what I talked about yesterday at the Boards Summit on a panel called "Spread the Good Word". While the panels' description was kind of odd ("The Big Idea? All well and good, but unless you get it out it there to consumers, it's worthless. New media platforms, fragmented outlets and ADD consumers mean that digital strategy is taking an increasingly crucial place in agency thinking. Hear from some of the digital world's top strategists as they discuss how to get your creative to go global.") it ended up being a lively discussion and a good old time.
There were a few specific things that I figured I'd bring up here, since you'd probably all enjoy them (some are more interesting than others, and it's all from memory as I couldn't really take notes).
- Beforehand Faris and I were joking around about how we would answer "what is a big idea?" in case it came up. The answers we came up with were: The internet, people talking to other people and moving images. Folks seem to be really into all those things at the moment. While we were kidding, it did strike me that this was a damn good answer.
- Success requires starting out by understanding what a client wants to accomplish. Without that it's really hard to judge your ideas. (This is something I talk about a lot at work. It's really important to dig in and understand the context of the assignment before digging in.)
- Justin talked quite a bit about the need for marketing to be additive, which I think it quite a nice way of describing things. This is something we talk about a lot at The Barbarian Group (and something I brought up on the panel) but basically the internet is the place we all live these days (well all of us geeks anyway). People are passionate about the internet in a way they were never passionate about television (people were passionate about television shows). If you are passionate about the web you don't want to junk it up with a bunch of crap in the same way that you wouldn't throw spaghetti on your floor at home (I've used this analogy to describe why I think people clean up Wikipedia entries as well). Anyway, thinking of how you can be additive to the web is a great way to put it.
- On that topic, I specifically think additive is a better word than utility. Unfortunately, utility has come to mean something very specific for people (think Swiss Army Knife) despite the fact that it's an economic term meaning the relative satisfaction from consumption of goods.
- Faris talked (and I might be slightly butchering) about how television is all about scarcity and therefore the advertising is what allows you to receive your entertainment without paying for it. The internet, on the other hand, is digital and has an unlimited spectrum, therefore the traditional value exchange where attention is exchanged for content doesn't apply quite as cleanly. What's interesting to me is that while the web is infinite, any specific site is limited by what it can create (unless, of course, it is aggregating other content). The reality of the situation for the New York Times or other large media sites, is that what they've done online for the past 10 years is not really any different than what they've done offline. While the actual publishing/printing is now free, the cost of producing content is costly and scarce. That is, until they start to tap into their audience/the rest of the web. This is happening on a limited basis now with some citizen journalism sites and comments on mainstream media sites, but is interesting to consider (not that I think the current model works particularly well). (Wow, I went off track there ... sorry.)
- The internet is not a channel. The internet is a series of channels. What's more, Facebook is not a channel. When a client asks, "should we be on Facebook?" at this point it's a bit asking like, "should we be on the internet?" in that there are hundreds of ways to "be on Facebook" ranging from free to expensive and some may make more sense than others.
That's what I can remember for now. I guess I mostly remember what I talked about. Maybe Faris and Hashem can fill in a bit more.
Update (10/25/08): Another thing I've been thinking a lot about and mentioned on the panel is the idea that the web is an awesome giant social experiment and that we need to stop worrying about whether we like things or not and start thinking about why it's interesting. Twitter, I think, is a great example of this. Whether or not you like the service, you have to be fascinated by the behavior that comes out of it, right?
Leave a Comment
There is a nice New York Times Sunday Styles piece on likemind (its already on the web). No matter how much people talk about the decline of newspapers, it's kind of awesome to see something you've created under the heading of the New York Times. The article has some nice quotes from attendees around the world and is generally pretty balanced (the gist of the story is that it's networking but not networking).
I particularly liked this part with quotes from Ethan Watters: "These workers need new ways to connect, said Ethan Watters, who studied young urban professionals in his book, 'Urban Tribes.' They live far from their families, he said, and work in highly fluid industries where co-workers change continuously. Unlike professionals from an earlier generation, they marry later and have weak ties to organized religious or community groups ... 'They have no old family, no new family, so there’s a vacuum there, and since we’re social creatures, the vacuum gets filled with things like this,' he said."
Leave a Comment
Tags: likemind, me
One of the nice things about traveling as much as I have been is getting to read entire issues of the New Yorker (pretty much only possible if you're going to be sitting in one place for a number of hours). Last weeks politics issue was my favorite in quite some time. Beyond the endorsement of Obama which was hardly a surprise and just okay, there were three articles I liked quite a bit: "The Hardest Vote" looks at Ohio undecideds and is the best overview on the subject I've read. I have gotten quite annoyed at reading all the stuff that talks about the problems with the polls, because most articles only touch on one issue of polling and use that to suggest that it must be off. My big issue is that there are a million issues with polls and the article goes back and forth with them using real people as anecdotes. "World's Apart" compares McCain and Obama's stance on foreign policy, adding a nice amount of meat to each. Finally, my favorite article in the issue examined the history of voting, explaining that the secret ballot (and the ballot itself) is actually a relatively new invention.
Leave a Comment
Tags: politics
Some thoughts on how we understand the world, make decisions and keep patching things until they're unrecognizable.
I recently watched Kevin Kelly's great TED video on the next 5,000 days of the web and two things in it really struck me. First was Kelly's assertion that man is an extension of technology, not vice versa. This was especially interesting having just read a paper that theorized man's evolution to walk upright was a direct result of tool (aka technology) use (essentially it suggests that once tools were in play we could no longer afford to walk around on four limbs and required that we develop a larger brain to deal with the complexity of wielding these things).
That, however, wasn't what struck me most. Rather it was Kelly talking about what everyone thought the web was going to become just five thousand days ago (that's roughly when the web came to be). People generally thought (and many still generally think) that the web is, to quote Kelly, "TV only better." In the rest of the video he explains his vision for the next 5,000 days of the web, specifically around what he calls "one machine" which more and more of our world will interface with. That topic, however, is for another entry, rather I want to focus on predictions.
Predictions
People frequently tout a knowledge of history as the best way to avoid its repetition, but I can't help but think about how often we've been wrong. Mostly we are pretty terrible at predicting the future. That's because we are predicting it based on what exists today and as soon as something new rolls around tomorrow, everything we considered "normal" is thrown all out of whack and our predictions no longer apply.
One way to think about this is in terms of punctuated equilibrium, which is essentially the idea that we evolve in spurts. Of course technological change is not evolutionary in the purest sense of the word, but much change happens in this kind of pattern. Think about sports, for instance, you hear stories all the time of no one believing something could be done (four-minute miles or lifting some ungodly amount of weight) and all of a sudden when one person breaks the barrier everyone else follows along. Basically we can't do what we can't imagine until we can do it or imagine it. (How's that for a bit of circular logic?)
Put another way, as Kevin Kelly explains in his entry "The Maes-Garreau Point", "it has become very hard to imagine what life will be like after we are dead. The rate of change appears to accelerate, and so the next lifetime promises to be unlike our time, maybe even unimaginable. Naturally, then, when we forecast the future, we will picture something we can personally imagine, and that will thus tend to cast it within range of our own lives." He is referring specifically to predictions far in the future, but I think this is the fallacy of predictions generally: We can't predict that which we can't predict. (Got you again.) Or, as Kelly opens the entry with, "Forecasts of future events are heavily influenced by present circumstances. That’s why predictions are usually wrong. It’s hard to transcend current assumptions. Over time, these assumptions erode, which leads to surprise."
So what's the point of all this? Well, to be quite honest I'm not sure. I'm sitting on a plane feeling a bit restless and I figured writing might do the trick. But there's more, I promise, and I will try to connect these ideas to a few other themes that have been floating around lately.
First off, there were a ton of amazing responses to my last post on the economy and postmodernism, but I want to point specifically to something that Charles wrote which struck me (partly because I read it while thinking about this topic). In his response to my entry he wrote, "I don't concur that events are as random as you assert. I've pointed out that attendants of the World Economic Forum at Davos were raising the flag of an impending crisis quite some time back, and that on page 225 in Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Black Swan the footnote could not be clearer of the statistical backflips performed by J.P. Morgan's 'Riskmetrics' and the dangerous situation Fanny Mae was in." Which got me thinking, how many people predicted this financial meltdown? The reality of the situation is that there were probably tons of people who did, but we had no reason to listen. People predict demise all the time (how many Nostradamus end of the world predictions can we listen to before the guy ceases to get front-page billing in the supermarket tabloids?). The problem is, until we are in the situation it's hard to see the clues. Or, as I said before, we can't predict that which we can't predict.
Sure, in retrospect there were any number of clues pointing to the situation at hand, but if they had been strong enough clues wouldn't we have acted upon them? A clue is only a clue if it helps solve a mystery, afterwards it becomes explanation, equally important (for our psyche) but a very different beast. This isn't to say we shouldn't look for clues or explanations, just to say that they are different things and that they're increasingly obscured when we're dealing with something that we never imagined. Or, as Vinod Khosla explained in an interview I just happen to have run across (which is specifically about energy consumption -- and written prior to the current crisis -- but is nonetheless valid):
We have to shift from extrapolating past assumptions, ignore what economists and econometrics tells us about how much oil we need and when we'll run out and what consumptions will be. Because they are based on the false assumptions. Once those assumption change and technology will drive that change, the world will be different. Our assumption was long distance calls cost money. And then the internet came along, changed that assumption, and it didn't matter what AT&T wanted, they disappeared essentially, got sold for a song.
Cruft
[Editor's Note: I thought maybe I could connect these two ideas, but I gave that idea up.]
I just got done reading Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line", which has a very nice little section on just that subject. In relation to operating systems and specifically BeOS, Stephenson explains:
All of the fixing and patching that engineers must do in order to give us the benefits of new technology without forcing us to think about it, or to change our ways, produces a lot of code that, over time, turns into a giant clot of bubble gum, spackle, bailing wire, and duct tape surrounding every operating system. In the jargon of hackers it is called "cruft." An operating system that has many, many layers of cruft is described as "crufty." Hackers hate to do things twice, but when they see something crufty, their first impulse is to rip it out, throw it away and start anew.
That description, to me, sounds a lot like our economic system. In fact, I made the connection when I got this email from my mom about an interview she had watched with John Mack, Chairman and CEO of Morgan Stanley. Based on what he said, she wrote:
The old rule of thumb was that a country that didn't have economic dominance couldn't dominate in power (military) and influence (philosophy). That's why the 20th century was "The American Century." Now we're seeing an insistence, at least on the part of the United States, that the world financial markets adhere to common rules and regulations. This is going to force an alliance between the European, Asian and American communities that has heretofore been voluntary. This is Thomas Paine's, "If we do not hang together we will surely hang separately" writ large -- Larger than it ever has been.
Which made me feel good and excited. Ultimately I think the opportunity with all this stuff is to get rid of the cruft and get closer to a system that makes sense for a new age. I'm not suggesting that we don't learn from the past, but rather acknowledge the present when we consider how to rebuild a clearly broken system.
I think where things get extra confusing with all this stuff (and maybe it'd actually be answered if I made it through Black Swan instead of just talking about my understanding of the first few chapters and things I've read about) is how do you make decisions without relying on the past to guide you? (If this is answered in Black Swan and someone who's finished it wants to fill me in, that'd be awesome.) I don't know the answer to this question. Clearly it's going to take some leaps (and likely a few mistakes) to get us there, but its exciting to think about. As Rick wrote in reply to my last post:
I think, ultimately, we're witnessing a re-thinking of what capitalism is. I still think the core philosophy of capitalism aligns with Bataille and is a useful guide for us still – that people operate out of self interest, and if you set the rules up right around that, everyone can benefit. But I think most of the windowdressing around that – how we regulate, why, and whether wealth can really be defined only in terms of currency – are going out the window. Our very notion of Currency is insufficient as the measure of wealth, as it fails to capture so much, most notably happiness. We’ll need a new benchmark that can handle it. That, I think, will take another 100 years but is ultimately where it’s all heading.
Sweet.
Leave a Comment
Getting all postmodern on the economic crisis.
Economics, it seems, is all around us. With banks in trouble and bailouts passing, America's financial future is the new Sarah Palin. With that in mind I'm going to try and articulate something I've been trying to articulate for quite some time (mostly unsuccessfully): The idea that everything is imaginary.
I know that sounds a bit odd, so please bear with me as I try to explain. Mostly I started thinking about this around the time of brand tags, when I was spending a lot of time talking about how brands all exist in people's heads. As the site illustrates, everyone has a different idea of what a brand is, shaped by an infinite number of factors (when they were introduced, how they were introduced, whether they've actually experience it, etc.) and every single person, no matter how different their perception is, is equally right.
This starts to send one's head into a bit of a tailspin: How can everyone be right about something with completely different answers? In the case of brands it's slightly easier to understand (I think), but then when it comes to the economy it's slightly more difficult but equally relevant. While there's lots of stuff that makes up the economy, ultimately it's mostly a bunch of people's perceptions about how the economy is doing that drives it. In a state of perceived crisis (such as now), we all react by following the leads of others, even though the vast majority of us don't actually understand what is going on and how it threatens us as individuals. Or, as Paul Zak of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in California explains, "I am not a financial genius. I do know that when you see millions of people in the market essentially freaking out, that spills over into your brain and you get this impulse to do what everyone else is doing." Which is freak out.
So, we all hear about people freaking out about something that we don't really understand so we all start freaking out and some of us start taking our money out of the bank and then all of a sudden there isn't enough money to give the rest of the people who want to take their money out of the bank and we've gotten ourselves into a giant mess (luckily we aren't in this giant mess at the moment).
What makes this financial crisis especially interesting is that it's built on top of more "imaginary" stuff, mainly pools of mortgages that have been combined and recombined (and recombined) so that the original bears no resemblance to the final product. As The Deal explains, "The rationale for such complexities is credit-risk transfer. The realities: securities and leverage so much bigger, more complicated and detached from actual assets that value itself became an abstraction."
And now, all of a sudden, economics is starting to sound a whole lot like postmodern philosophy. Jean Baudrillard, a French postmodern philosopher is most famous for writing about what he called the simulacrum. Like most things in postmodernism, it can't be easily defined, however, it's roughly the point where the simulation becomes reality. Put more simply, "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." A quote from Ecclesiastes that Baudrillard opened his essay, Simulacra and Simulations with.
Turning back to the economy for a minute, thinking of it as a simulacrum actually works out quite well. In the essay, Baudrillard walks through the four phases of image transformation:
- It is the reflection of a basic reality.
- It masks and perverts a basic reality.
- It masks the absence of a basic reality.
- It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Now mapped against my simple understanding of economic history:
- Trade: It is the reflection (or formalization) of a basic reality (give something, get something).
- Money: It masks and perverts a basic reality (trade).
- Credit: It masks the absence of a basic reality (money).
- Collatorized Debt Obligations (or any similar complex financial products): It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum.
Part of the reason we have lost control, I would argue, is that we've entered a new age. Again in my very limited knowledge/understanding of economics, we reached a point where the financial products ceased to reflect any of their underlying realities. They became something completely new. Just take a look at this chart from The Deal to get a sense of just how many steps removed from a basic reality we were/are.
Now part of the reason I think people are having so much trouble dealing with this is because they've got to accept two very difficult things: First, things are random. Or, as Baudrillard explains:
When the real is no longer what it used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. And there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production. This is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us: a strategy of the real, neo-real and hyperreal, whose universal double is a strategy of deterrence.
Or, more simply put, "in situations in which a person is not in control, they're more likely to spot patterns where none exist, see illusions, and believe in conspiracy theories." When things move beyond our realm we try to find patterns even when none exist. This is how we cope. We're no good at accepting that sometimes randomness happens because with it a lot of other institutions are thrown into wack. As a simple example, anyone who works in marketing can attest to post-rationalizing the success of a campaign and the failure of another when in reality you really have no clue what happened. (Duncan Watts has written about the reality of this as it relates to musical stars.)
As for the second thing we're really bad at: Lack of moral clarity. To illustrate, I was having a conversation the other day about the bailout. The argument was that we were bailing out a bunch of people who didn't deserve it. My answer was yes, and we were doing it because not bailing them out may have meant digging our own grave. The answer, in this case, exists in a moral netherworld: There is no right or wrong, just the reality (or hyperreality) of the situation at hand. Luckily, Baudrillard just happened to have written about this as well:
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof- indeed the objectivity of the fact- does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts and an order of reasons.
Facts and logic cease to matter in the simulacrum because it's no longer governed by the rules of reality. We have to abandon these things and only deal with what's in front of us, which may in fact be a perfect way to think about the future we now face.
Or not: Maybe I'm just assigning order to something inherently chaotic.
Leave a Comment
The other morning I was having a conversation about how I thought the bailout was essentially a marketing failure. All in favor of the bailout failed to help regular folks understand what it was all about, which created the backlash that in part caused the first house vote. What's more, after the first vote the house did an abysmal job in explaining why they had voted the way they had or offering up another path and the market responded by dropping 700 points.
That same day, my mom sent me over this article which discusses the marketing of the bailout in another light: The name itself. "A bailout makes us all smaller for having participated in it," the article suggests. "'Bailout' connotates failure and Americans hate failure - unless there is the promise of a second act where the hero finds redemption."
All in all I think we can agree that it was poorly handled.
Leave a Comment
Tags: economics, politics
Rick wrote an amazing email that he sent to the company outlining the current state of the economy and how we got here. I've read a ton of articles on what's going on and of course followed the bailout votes, but to be honest I had very little understanding of what was really going on (except there was a big problem with mortgages and the very real possibility of people not paying them off). Rick was kind enough to sum everything up in layman's terms and it really just makes me want to read more in that tone. How come this stuff is so hard to find? Why aren't more people writing simple explanations of these complex topics?
I actually think there are two reasons (not that this has anything to do with economics): First, most people just don't understand it that well. There are probably lots of people who say they understand it, but when it comes time to write it, they focus on the one bit they understand. Second, there are a lot of bad writers, especially in academia. The whole idea that writing for complexity instead of simplicity was always something that drove me nuts. Sure you can have good complex writing, but most of the stuff that comes out of the academic world is anything but good (sure the ideas are good, but the explanations suck).
Anyway, that's a really long winded way to say, stop what you're doing and take 15 minutes to read Rick's explanation of how we got into our current economic mess.
Leave a Comment
Tags: economics
Lots of links before I get on the plane.
I'm working on a longer entry on simulacrum and the current status of the world, which I hope to finish on my plane ride home from Germany. Until then, though, I figured I'd throw some links up on the good old interweb for your enjoyment. I'm going for a quote edition this time to switch things up a bit, hope you all enjoy.
What I found most striking, though, were the stats on email. About 180,000 emails are received each day at the school (which has around 1,600 students), and 94% of those emails are spam. The storage required for the emails received last year equaled the total storage required for all the emails received in the preceding five years combined. And 95% of email storage now goes to holding email attachments rather than the messages themselves. Email has become everyone's personal data warehouse. [Nicholas Carr]
Nicholas concludes the entry saying that it's no surprise more institutions are handing email duties over to Google and the cloud. Mostly, though, I just find this astounding. The amount of money being wasted on spam must be extraordinary. Is there any other communications medium that deals with 95% waste?
It turns out that in real life there's a reason you should repeat, or at least there used to be. In the 1950s, when shampoos began to be mass-marketed, we didn't wash our hair all that often--once or twice a week, as opposed to five times a week as most of us do now. Also, we used a lot more goop in our hair. [Fortune Magazine]
As I was showering this morning I got to wondering, how did the whole "later, rinse, repeat" thing come about. Mostly I was curious to know if it was some tricky marketer who figured if you repeated you'd use your shampoo up twice as fast (and therefore need to buy twice as many). Turns out, though, that there was actually a real reason (or so the story goes).
In honor of our 10th birthday, we've brought back our oldest available index. Take a look back at Google in January 2001. [Google]
For a month only, Google is allowing people to search it's 2001 index. It's good fun. I, like most geeks, went first to see if there were any results for my name. Only two turned up: One for an old web development company I had called Nextworx (now long defunct) and some student thing. Any results are show in the Wayback Machine when available. Anyway, it's good fun.
Our economy and putting it back on the world. No, I've worked all my life. In fact, I usually had two jobs all my life until I had kids. I was able to go back and forth. We we do about it. No way, not Americans. We do not have to second-guess what their efforts would be if they believe that it is about doing a lot of other senators and representatives did for us. I can help the ticket, if you go back and forth. We we do it's very important when you consider even national security issues Let me speak specifically about a credential that I have the confidence in that Washington establishment, where, yeah, they've had opportunity to do this with you. [Interview Palin]
Amazing site that puts together Palin-esque answers to political questions. It's funny, the first thing I thought of when I saw it was the Turing Test which pits computers against humans and asks the human to decide whether he is speaking to a silicon or flesh. Also, in case you missed it, this is in reference to Palin's answer to a question on the economy which was equally brutal and inspired this editorial from Fareed Zakaria suggesting this is no time for games and pushing McCain to drop Palin. (The original quote is in the Zakaria article.) Oh, and in case you prefer video, here's Zakaria making his point on CNN.
David Brooks is right that the failure to pass the bailout represents a massive failure of American governance and leadership, most of all at the Congressional level. That's true even if you think, for other reasons, that the bailout was a bad idea. (Can any hero be cited in this debacle?) Andrew Sullivan (and others, including myself) was right that early versions of the Paulson plan bypassed checks and balances and gave far too much power to the Executive Branch. So Congressional oversight was needed. [Marginal Revolution]
That's in reference to David Brooks' scathing Times editorial where he said, "This generation of political leaders is confronting a similar situation, and, so far, they have failed utterly and catastrophically to project any sense of authority, to give the world any reason to believe that this country is being governed," amongst other things. Wherever you fall on the bailout, it is fairly amazing that they let a bill like that fail without more thought/plan around how to deal with the fallout.
Awesome. [Me]
That's in reference to seeing this extraordinary demoscene video called Texas by Keyboarders. The whole thing is a 4k executable. Holy crap.
With influence-tracking, Google could follow this group of fans' shared interests more closely, see which other fan communities they interact with, and—most important—learn which members get the most attention when they update profiles or post pictures. [BusinessWeek]
Apparently Google is working on a system that follows groups interests so that advertisers can better target their ads. While this sounds interesting (and potentially problematic from a privacy perspective), I wonder how effective it will be. For the most part, I think that kind of socializing that happens on social networks, specifically Facebook, is more around friends of shared context/space than interest. This is the opposite, of course, to blogs, where there is a shared interest. The thing about the friends you make in college, for instance, is that you often have completely different interests. Anyway, I'm sure it will cause a big hubbub, but I don't know that it will be all that effective in the end.
I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you. [The Nation]
Pretty self explanatory.
Okay, that's it, time for my plane. See you soon.
Leave a Comment
Hi, I'm 