April 2009 Archives
Interesting insight into group dynamics from a book called Risk by Dan Gardner (who I hadn't heard of, but his blog looks pretty good).
Decades of research has proved that groups usually come to conclusions that are more extreme than the average view of the individuals who make up the group. When opponents of a hazardous waste site gather to talk about it, they will become convinced the site is more dangerous than originally believed. When a woman who believes breast implants are a threat gets together with women who feel the same way, she and all the women in the meeting are likely to leave believing they had previously underestimated the danger. The dynamic is always the same.
Groups rile themselves up. Makes sense in the face of angry mobs, but hadn't thought about it in this context before.
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Tags: culture, psychology
I think Rob is onto to something here. He's collecting the default icon for a whole bunch of sites. Would be amazing to see the collection expand and analyze the data (male/female, non-human/human, face/full body, etc.)
As a side note, last month one of my favorite new blogs, Sociological Images, wrote about the default representations in Facebook which appears as a white male for individual users and yellow men and women when they're showing the whole globe.
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Tags: profiles, socialmedia
How Google's paid link policy treads perilously close to evil.
Sorry to bring this up again, but I think Google's paid link policy is anti-competitive (this Forrester post brought it up for me again). Essentially Google has made it clear that if a blogger receives anything for a post, then the link accompanying it should be "nofollow" (something else I've talked about in the past). Now I understand the reasoning behind this (Google is a database of trust and a paid link shouldn't carry the same weigh as an unpaid one), however, asking people to go through the process of adding "nofollow" feels to me like they're putting the onus on individuals to do their job (or at least a job their algorithm should be able to do). (Ted Murphy also makes this point.)
The big issue is summed up nicely over at the Forrester blog: "How do they identify what is paid and what is not? And where do they draw the line? Is it any type of sponsorship within the editorial stream? is it strictly a cash transaction? What about those who receive product samples which could range from a $2 bag of chips to a $30,000 car? What about writers who get all expense paid trips and free meals? What about a celebrity blogging about an endorsement deal? At one point can they determine compensation was exchanged or are they just guessing? And finally what is the punishment for bloggers? It seems as though this type of policy rewards those who don't disclose their compensation and those who do." Not a simple issue, certainly, but Google's approach seems especially wrong on this one.
At the end of the day it just seems like the market has spoken and they like paid links. Now that's not necessarily a good thing (as Matt points out, sometimes the results that are being rearranged are as serious as cancer), but irregardless it's a thing. Everywhere else in the Google world the answer is that the responsibility lies on the shoulders of the algorithm, not the user, so why are things different in this case? The bottom line to me is that this feels like Google trying to stifle competition to Adsense. Paid links and blogger outreach are ways for small publishers to make money without the help of their ad servers and they are trying to strangle it.
To be honest I don't think the nofollow thing is that big of a deal or a burden and in most cases wouldn't have a huge effect on the goals of the campaign, but there's a principle thing here that bugs me. It feels like the big guy, Google, threatening a bunch of little guys with loss of PageRank if they don't play by their rules. While I understand that there is none of us have to be listed in the engine, and if we weren't we would not be subject to any of these rules, however, everyone knows that's not really a viable option with one major player in the category.
I guess I'm just saying it feels a little evil.
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I remember when someone first said this to me, I was in college and DJing and the bartender was giving me financial advice. His argument was that if you pay your balance every month in full then you never build any credit. I remember thinking it was absurd at the time (and told him that), but it's stuck with me. Anyway, after having the conversation again a few weeks ago and remembering it this morning I decided to check the internet for the answer.
Not surprisingly (to me), the answer appears to be no. Paying off your bill every month in full does build credit since the company is floating you whatever amount you spent for around thirty days (until your statement and due date arrive). Anyway, this is neither here nor there, but just thought it was a useful piece of knowledge (that miraculously doesn't seem to be on Snopes.
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Tags: creditcards, finance
They never had a shot.
Time announces the result of their most influential person poll and not surprisingly, moot from 4chan (follow at your own risk) is the big winner. The magazine claims no funny business with the poll ("Moot denies knowing about any concerted plan by his followers to influence the poll, though TIME.com's technical team did detect and extinguish several attempts to hack the vote.") though the winners spell out "marblecake also the game" and much has been written about anonymous folks gaming the system. Sometimes I just love the internet.
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Tags: 4chan, hacks, magazine
Last year This American Life covered the topic of retired chimpanzees. Chimps, it turns out, are the only animals we don't euthanize when we're done experimenting or keeping them as pets (because they seem so much like humans). What that means is that we need place for all the retired research, actor and pet chimps of this country.
So, in 2000 the US passed the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance and Protection (CHIMP) Act. As the Humane Society explains, "The CHIMP Act establishes a national sanctuary system for those chimpanzees who have provided long service in laboratories, enduring sometimes painful and distressing experimental procedures." What came out of that act was a retirement home called Chimp Haven, located about 20 miles away from Shreveport, Louisiana where the chimps are treated somewhere between animals and human retirees.
Just thought you should know.
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Tags: monkey, politics, retirement
File this under, "I'm not quite sure why this is interesting but I know it is."
A few days ago Hunch, Caterina Fake's new startup that tries to help you make better decisions by showing you data from others trying to decide the same thing, launched an "academic version" of their API. As you can see in their example, this version allows you to search their database of more than 4 million answered questions and not only see the answer, but also see the answers that most highly correlate with the answer you chose. (Users who prefer laptops are most closely correlated with users used a Polaroid camera and users who would cook burgers on the grill are most closely correlated with users that think casual Fridays are awesome.)
Not sure what to do or think about it, but seems kind of awesome. Also kind of reminds me of some of what I've been doing with Brand Tags (and Battle Mode). The idea of making research fun and using the data it spits out to better understand how the world works makes me happy.
Oh, and if you want a Hunch invite, I have a few. Just leave a comment. First left, first served. Unfortunately have none left, you can still leave a comment if you'd like and I'll hook it up when/if my invites get replenished. I'm also pretty sure you can just leave your email on their homepage and you'll get one soon.
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Tags: api, research
Jackie Mason on the internet:
All the geniuses with computers love to tell you you can talk to people all over the world if you're on line. Who wants to? You want to talk to people all over the world? People don't talk to the guy next door. . . . People are standing in an elevator -- do you talk to anybody? A guy calls you up and he's got the wrong number -- do you start a conversation? Do you ever say, "Sure glad you got the wrong number!" You're gonna holler, "You got the wrong number!" And God forbid he calls you again: you think he's a stalker, you call the police.
Reminds me of a quote from Thoreau's Walden that I read in Amusing Ourselves to Death
:
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.
I'll leave these without comment.
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Tags: communication, internet
There's something endlessly interesting about abandoned locations (see: abandoned detroit). This round comes from Vice who explore an abandoned island in Japan:
An hour or so's sail from the port of Nagasaki, the abandoned island silently crumbles. A former coal mining facility owned by Mitsubishi Motors, it was once the most densely populated place on earth, packing over 13,000 people into each square kilometre of its residential high-risers. It operated from 1887 until 1974, after which the coal industry fell into decline and the mines were shut for good. With their jobs gone and no other reason to stay in this mini urban nightmare, almost overnight the entire population fled back to the mainland, leaving most of their stuff behind to rot.
And here are some more photos.
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Tags: abandoned, japan, photography
Kottke points to an article in the New York Times about magazines raising their subscription costs to try to soften the advertising fallout. As the article acknowledges, "Publishers have long set low subscription prices and have even lost money doing so, assuming that the real money came from ads. Subscription revenue was gravy."
Funny enough, I mentioned just this last week in my exchange with Johnny: "I think there's something funny about the newspaper industry crying about their product being undervalued when they've been the one undervaluing it for years (ahem 12 issues of a $5 magazine for $12)." The media industry set the value of news at free, meaning it's really hard to blame consumers for not giving it much value.
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Tags: business, media, news
Gerald the Dog asks humans to stop anthropomorphizing his kind:
While portraying dogs as humans may bring you satisfaction, consider that this satisfaction is, in actuality, rooted in extreme egoism, borne out of a deeper and more extreme insecurity: To see a lesser creature acting and speaking as you speak is at once validating and entertaining, for along with the silly laugh comes the calming reassurance that no other mammal on Earth can possesses advanced thought. You laugh because your place in the world remains unthreatened.
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Tags: culture, funny
Jonah Lerer breaks down the neuroscience of magic with Penn & Teller. Turns out those guys, or Teller at least, are super interested in why people experience magic in the way they do and really enjoy playing with those perceptions. Plus, Teller has a bronze bear at his house that can tell you what card you're thinking of (I wante one).
Also see: Neuroscience of Bubbles and Google search for "neuroscience of" which looks like a treasure trove of interesting stuff to read today.
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Tags: brain, magic, science
Four things that have taken up some of my headspace over the last few weeks.
Some of these might turn into full posts later, but this is just a quick rundown of some things I've been thinking about lately.
Counterintuitive
This morning I was thinking about two things I've posted lately, about anti-drug messages and spammers building better artificial intelligence, and realized that as a category the things I find the most interesting are the counterintuitive. Not sure why this is important, but I figured I'd share it anyway.
Remind Me
I think I'm going to write an article/entry about this, but I've been thinking a lot lately about the how everything you can buy that's not out yet should have an easy email reminder service. For instance, today I heard about a new St. Vincent album coming out in like two weeks. I went over to the site to see if I could pre-order (which I couldn't find) and I also couldn't find a giant box to put my email in so they could remind me when it's actually released. All I got was the regular mailing list (which I signed up for). Just out of curiosity, I checked to see if the album was available for download on file sharing sites, and of course it was. It should not be easier to download an album for free two weeks before it comes out than to get reminded the day it comes out (and hopefully have a link in the email to go direct to the place to buy it). It's simple and I think you can apply the principle across the board. (As a side note, NPR is streaming the album, but it's still not easy enough!)
Trolls
Alan wrote a piece about trolls in the advertising industry and specifically mentioned some comments in a piece I was interviewed for in Adweek. While I appreciate the support, I generally think that there are trolls everywhere and the very worst thing to do about them is to let them bother you (especially if they don't even comment with their real name). I also thought a bit about the way this frames the problem of trolls. The fact is for me, the vast majority of the comments I receive are good and thoughtful (thanks guys) and I don't really like the idea of the world thinking otherwise. Just like telling kids to not do drugs by making them think all their peers are doing it, talking about people being nicer to one another by making them think all their peers are going around making terrible comments anonymously is probably the wrong way to go. (Just as a side note, I haven't discussed this with Alan and don't mean to single him out, it's just been top of mind. Hope I cause no offense Alan, I appreciate what you were doing.)
Disappeared
I was having a conversation over beers the other night with Ryan and we started talking about the amount of stuff that actually disappears on the web. While the popular trope is that "everything on the internet lives forever" the reality of the situation is probably the opposite: Since we're creating more data today than at any other time in history it would make sense that we're also losing more data than ever before. Now most of this stuff doesn't matter (I wrote about this a little in a post over at GE Adventure), but still, The Internet Archive can't possibly save everything.
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I heart this story from The New Scientist about spammers applying some of the most advanced AI to beat CAPTCHAs (especially reCAPTCHA, which is the most widely used and actually harnesses the power of the millions of people solving these simple tests to digitize otherwise unrecognizable words). Well, turns out the incentive to break these systems are some of the biggest around for artificial intelligence:
He has seen bounties as high as $500,000 offered for software to break it [reCAPTCHA] - enough to attract people with the skills to the task and five times more than the Loebner Grand Prize offers to the programmer who designs a computer that can truly pass the Turing test.
How great is that? Of course the author of the article comes to the logical conclusion: "Perhaps it is time to start designing CAPTCHAs in a different way - pick problems that need solving and make them into targets to be solved by resourceful criminals."
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Tags: ai, spam
Call this a followup. In February I asked if people are getting better at search: "In 2008 the average query length jumped from three to four words-per-search. Also, 25% of queries are unique to the last month (which seems like it would favor more specific searches)."
Well, looks like the trend is continuing. Hitwise reports that over 34% of search queries contain four-plus words and even better, eight-plus word queries are up 20% year-on-year (one-, two- and three-word queries all saw flat to declining growth year-on-year). Guess people are getting better at searching.
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Tags: culture, search
Sure Ashton Kutcher got to a million first, but his method was less than optimal (the real incentive was to wait until 999,999 people were following and then hit the button ... which could have been forever). So what would have worked better? Cheap Talk has some thoughts:
A better mechanism is the following. Set a deadline, say midnight. If at midnight there are fewer than 1,000,000 followers then each of the existing followers wins a prize and the prize that the nth follower wins is decreasing in n. Thus, the 1st follower gets a larger prize than the 2nd which is larger than the 3rd, etc. On the other hand, if before midnight the number of followers reaches 1,000,000, then give only the 1,000,000th follower a prize. And it can be a very small prize.
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Tags: economics, gametheory
The Freakonomics blog has some interesting points about how to best change behavior. Specifically they point out that trying to get kids to stop doing something by making them think all their peers are doing it (read: all drug commercials) are exactly the wrong approach. As they explain in the post:
These commercials implicitly suggest that most of your peers are going to be using drugs and that you have to gird yourself to be above their influence. They are too close to the signs in the Petrified Forest. Instead of saying "Don't do what most kids your age do," they might say "Do what most kids your age do: just say no."
Huh. Very interesting.
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Tags: culture, marketing, psychology
Volume 3 of a conversation between myself and Johnny Vulkan about business, data and the future of the universe.
[Editor's Note: As I explained yesterday in volume 2 and the day before in volume 1, this is an email exchange between myself and Johnny Vulkan. This is the third and final installment of a conversation that could have easily gone on for about 40 more. It started on March 10, 2009 and ended last week. This is an experiment, let me know if you like it.]
From: Johnny
To: Noah
Date: March 30, 2009
Ahhh... the Google public offering... that takes me back. I wonder how history will record the last two decades from 1990-2010. They witnessed the dot com boom, a dot com crash and now the worst recession most of us have ever experienced. Luckily we'll have lots of tweets to look back on for the latter part so that will help clear things up for future generations....hmmm.
The apprentice anarchist in me feels that Jack Welch, while belatedly coming to the defence of the 'long term view' when it comes to results, doesn't go far enough. We maybe need a more radical reappraisal of business and the 'rules'.
We've collectively created business as a game with its own scoring system of highs and lows. Games get played, and games need winners and losers. That is what business has become. Someone wins. Someone has to lose. We have dehumanized business into a televised sporting franchise with a scoreboard. But lets look at what a business really is. It's simply a group of people organized to make a good or service that those people would like to be paid for delivering. They are you and me, the guy next door. People with families, dogs, cats and occasionally a collection of Swarovski crystal ornaments. They're just people.
If you stop playing the game of business and let go of the notion that you have to win and your competitor has to lose then you stop fixating on scoring systems and start thinking about the people and communities involved. This was easy when 'business' meant the baker and butcher in your town who knew you and your family. You'd care about them and you felt that they cared about you. The only games being played involved the weekend and a ball (of varying diameters and materials depending on your continent).
I don't think we'll return to having a swathe of high street bakers anytime soon - and a nostalgic longing for a falsely remembered past shouldn't be our our aim - but we may get to a point where business redefines its role away from delivering a focus on "shareholder" value and towards the wider concept of "stakeholder" value. "Shareholder" is a increasingly bankrupt term (pun intended) as it encompasses the guy who founded the company, to the tea lady who has worked there twenty years but more omniously the fund that shorted your stock last week, will pump and dump a week later and buy low again the week after that. These volume players have all the information and abused it to play on the margins while the tea lady had her stock locked into her 401K/pension. It's simply a shambles.
If we can get businesses to truly think in terms of stakeholders you start including customers (remember them?), the local town and community you work in, your employees and yes... people that genuinely invested in your business because they believed in it. A romantic notion maybe, but one I'd like to aim for.
So, how do we do it? Simple really. Legal reform. Financial reform. A new market that allows businesses to get funding for development - not one designed on lose 'principles' of gambling. Oh yeah, we may need to reinvent the concept of capitalism too. Shouldn't take long, we just need to decided to begin.
JV
Read all three: Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3.
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There's a great poster over at The Long Now Blog that claims to be all you'll need to know should you find yourself transported to the far-distant past. Nuggets include: "Germs spread disease and can live anywhere" and "Heat milk to just below its boiling point: It wont curdle and 99.999% of the bugs in it will be killed. Congratulations! You just invented pasteurization."
Kind of reminds me of a short story idea I came up with over coffee with Russell Davies: All the famous science fiction writers were actually time travelers with big plans to go back and get rich by inventing things before the person who was actually responsible. Problem is, when they get back they realize they don't actually know how to make anything, so they're stuck just writing about stuff instead.
Maybe I'll get around to writing it one day.
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Tags: history, science, technology
Volume 2 of a conversation between myself and Johnny Vulkan about business, data and the future of the universe.
[Editor's Note: As I explained yesterday in volume 1, this is an email exchange between myself and Johnny Vulkan. Tomorrow I will post volume 3 (the last). It started on March 10, 2009 and ended last week (it didn't have to end, but for the sake of this series of posts it did). This is an experiment, let me know if you like it.]
From: Noah
To: Johnny
Date: March 25, 2009
Wowza, that was an awesome reply and I'm not quite sure I can top it ... I also don't think it's worth cutting it up at all and am thinking the best way to swing this is to maybe do one more volley and then a post.
So ...
I generally am with you in everything you said. I was realizing recently what a mistake it seems like that the New York Times didn't charge for it's iPhone app. What would $5 be for an app that delivers the news to you daily/hourly/secondly (is that last one actually a word). And, as I may or may not have said to you when we had breakfast which actually started this whole conversation, I think there's something funny about the newspaper industry crying about their product being undervalued when they've been the one undervaluing it for years (ahem 12 issues of a $5 magazine for $12). With all that said, I'll leave your comments alone other than to say that the big issue seems to sit in this phase of the equation you laid out: "has eyeballs and advertisers love eyeballs" ... I'm certainly not the first person to lament the media industry's addiction to ads, but it's a sad state of affairs.
Now, onto the other piece. I had actually run across this a few weeks ago and loved it. As someone without a ton of knowledge about finance, I'd always wondered how we got to a place where quarterly profits became more important than long-term strategy. How can anyone ever be successful if all that matters is whether you show year-on-year growth (I like to remind people that success is actually a relative, not absolute measure, most often calculated by looking at how much you put into something and how much you got out). Now my big question for Welch (and I guess you'll have to stand in for him) is how do you fix this problem? He's coming out and saying, "Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy," but I don't see the prevailing mindset of the market changing overnight. So what needs to happen? Do a whole lot more companies chose not to go public in the future? What does fundraising look like in that case?
I'm also not surprisingly reminded of the Google prospectus:
As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same. In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long-term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to "make their quarter." In Warren Buffett's words, "We won't 'smooth' quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you."
If opportunities arise that might cause us to sacrifice short term results but are in the best long term interest of our shareholders, we will take those opportunities. We will have the fortitude to do this. We would request that our shareholders take the long term view.
Many companies are under pressure to keep their earnings in line with analysts' forecasts. Therefore, they often accept smaller, but predictable, earnings rather than larger and more unpredictable returns. Sergey and I feel this is harmful, and we intend to steer in the opposite direction.
Those dudes were smart, but I even feel like they're cracking a bit ...
Thanks for playing along.
- Noah
Read all three: Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3.
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In response to articles by Scott Karp and Nick Carr about Google and the news business, Terry Heaton makes a point I've been trying to articulate for years: "The problem is that the distribution of content isn't the real problem for media companies; it's the growing ability of advertisers to reach people without media companies."
Or, put another way, it's the ability of brands to be their own media companies. If the Official Google Blog was a newspaper, it's subscriber numbers would put it in the top 10 for daily circulation. Not only does that mean Google has less need for advertising, but it also means they have less need for media coverage generally. And it's not just brands, it's celebrities too. Shaq has 621,000 folowers on Twitter (and counting). As Kanye explained on his blog, "I told the media you can't make up lies about me because I have a media outlet myself. Oh and sidebar I don't know if everyone has realized this yet but I don't do interviews if there's anything I wanna say I'll say right here on my own blog."
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Tags: culture, ineternet, media
A conversation between myself and Johnny Vulkan about business, data and the future of the universe.
[Editor's Note: Okay, so I've been working on this idea for awhile where I would post a back-and-forth conversation on the blog, but hadn't really found any takers. Then a few weeks ago I was having breakfast with Johnny Vulkan from Anomaly and we were talking about lots of interesting stuff. Afterwards I wrote Johnny an email, asking him if he'd be down for doing something like this and he said yes. So basically, over the next three days I am going to post our back and forth. It started on March 10, 2009 and ended last week (it didn't have to end, but for the sake of this series of posts it did). This is an experiment, let me know if you like it.]
From: Noah
To: Johnny
Date: March 10, 2009
Hey dude, so I've been playing around with this idea for awhile to do a post (or series of posts) where I just email back and forth with interesting folks about whatever. So I was about to send you links to the Guardian Open Platform announcement to see what you thought and I figured maybe we could give it a try?
Guardian Open Platform
Guardian Datablog
Guardian Data Store
Either way, really curious to know what you think. And if you're down for the post, just respond and then I'll respond back and at whatever point the conversation begins to peter out we'll cut it and I'll post it.
Thanks dude,
Noah
From: Johnny
To: Noah
Date: March 19, 2009
Hi Noah - belatedly...yes, I'd love to play... :)
So... to The Guardian and the Open Platform... My instant response is great! At this moment in time 'open' is the defining qualifier for popular success. Few things are launched in a closed environment and while there are some restrictions there is nothing surprising about those. Now we have to sit back and see what people will do with it.
In particular I'm in love with the Data Blog and have lost a reasonably obscene amount of time over the past few days getting lost in chart lust. I fear I've gained a new addiction and suspect the 127 people following their posts on twitter as I'm writing this will be a fair bit more before too long (http://twitter.com/datastore)
But there is something that has me conflicted (and excited in equal measure) and by voicing it I fear I'll open a huge can of virtual worms, but it's a can of worms worth opening.
It's free.
And 'free' is a business model that isn't working for a lot of people right now. Free, of course isn't really free because it's based on an equation that says 'free' brings an audience, an audience has eyeballs and advertisers love eyeballs.
The social media technology media boom was and still is based on this equation but a couple of things are getting clearer. Firstly, advertisers - some may be surprised to hear - also read blogs and increasingly buy into 'free' as well. Why should they pay for media space when if they've got a great product or service it's going to get talked about anyway. Secondly as they reduce their expenditure it means there's simply less to go round. The equation doesn't work.
Now, if you're The Guardian that isn't a problem - the publication is run at a loss and has been for years, supported by other publications in their publishing family (a bit like Google funding YouTube) and until very recently support from a foundation.
From a personal individual level I absolutely love what The Guardian has done with this experiment into Open Platform but we must realize that very few can follow and the bar has just been raised that much higher for everyone else. Media publications are folding at a daily rate. Some may call it natural selection, but it does mean we're losing many great local and regional voices in the fallout.
But, lets back track. I said I'm excited as well as conflicted. The conflict comes from my desire to see businesses work. If they do then it means people keep their jobs, their kids get fed and educated and have a chance to grow up to write long emails about social media. Most of that is a very good thing. My excitement comes from the impetus that 'failure' creates. We are at huge inflection point for the classic capitalist model, the next great evolution in our personal equation on what we need to live and thrive as a society. I hope (and think) that what emerges is not a rebuilding of what was and is not a 'return' to the good old days but rather it's something new, shiny and maybe very little to do with what business was in the past... but lets save that for another email... maybe one which starts with this gentle shift in opinion as a talking point....
JV
Read all three: Volume 1, Volume 2 and Volume 3.
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Great article over at Seed about some of the current shortcomings in the data visualization craze. Three things I learned:
- A guy named William Playfair invested the pie chart: "In 1801 he represented the relative proportions of African, Asiatic, and European dominions of the Ottoman Empire with a clever diagram, a sectored circle that showed the whole and its parts simultaneously."
- There's a hierarchy of visual calculations humans are good at: Good at linear distance, pretty bad at angles and terrible at area and volume.
- Some people are combining human pattern recognition with computer data visualization: "an effective way of detecting patterns in massive data sets is to make a simple chart for each subset and view the hundreds of charts in quick succession. The human perceptual system is phenomenally good at spotting patterns."
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Tags: data, psychology, visualization
In an article about those click-to-give sites like FreeRice, Slate used the word "slacktivisim," which they defined as: "easy and painless acts that allow us to feel we are doing our part to make the world a better place with the least possible mental, physical, or financial exertion."
Let's call the the word of the day, shall we? Also, slacktivist has a nice ring.
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Tags: activism, language, vocabulary
This morning I found out that Kevin Johnson of Phoenix Suns fame is mayor of Sacremento, California (I was reading the Times). He was part of a pretty awesome 93 Suns team that included Dan Majerle, Charles Barkley, Danny Ainge and Tom Chambers. I started trying to figure out what they were all up to (NBA.com actually caught up with them all in 2003, on their ten year anniversary).
Danny Ainge has obviously been super successful as the Executive Director of Basketball Operations and General Manager of the Boston Celtics (he put together the team that won the championship last season). Charles Barkley is still talking lots for TNT. Dan Majerle is an assistant coach for the Suns and I couldn't find more information on Tom Chambers (I didn't look that hard), but it did make me go back and look at his sweet dunk against the Knicks (which also made me go back and watch the Vince Carter olympics dunk ... which still leaves me in awe).
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Tags: politics, sports
Roughly about an article I read in the New Yorker, but more about writing and living in a city.
Every week the New Yorker seems to leave my very favorite article from their issue off the site for everyone but subscribers (which is fine for me, as a subscriber, but annoying when I want to link to it). Last week it was most definitely the piece by Rachel Mead on twin poets Matthew and Michael Dickman. Generally the piece goes through their history and discusses how interesting it is that they've developed styles that are almost polar opposites of each other.
While reading I ended up underlining two small sections, not because of their poetry, but rather their general insight into the world. The first is a comment on good writing and avoiding cliche. Michael and Matthew are critiquing each other's work and Matthew points out that the phrase "beat the shit" and specifically the word "shit", "Has too much resonance with other poems of yours."
In the next paragraph Michael is working through a poem of Matthew's that describes "a late-night encounter with a pretty idiotic girl." It's described like this, "The woman sitting next to me calls her Summer / and keeps touching her lips / and scratching her thigh / and ordering a martini / and talking about history."
Michael responds:
"'The hem of her dress' -- that's sort of like the 'beat the shit out of' in my poem. I was just reading this interview with Mark Strand, and he says you should be very suspect of clusters of words. If a cluster of words comes at you, it was probably written by someone else, and if it wasn't written by someone else it was probably already written by you."
Which immediately took me back to some writing tips I try to adhere to. First, avoid cliche whenever possible. This is roughly the same thing as Michael was saying to Matthew, just put a little more bluntly. Rather than relying on another writer's words to explain your idea, try using your own. I'm not always successful with this one, but I at least try to keep it in mind. The other comes from The Elements of Style
and is about getting to the point. Under the heading of "Omit needless words." Strunk explains:
Vigourous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
I'm pretty sure this is the biggest issue in writing: People get so precious with their own words that they're not willing to throw them away and try again (or just trust that the rest of the writing gets the point across).
Okay, now onto the other quote from the article which has nothing to do with writing at all. In talking about the neighborhood Matthew and Michael grew up in, Wendy, their mother, explains, "I didn't know the changes were going to happen. We had these wonderful neighbors, but I didn't realize what was there if you went outside our block. I would drive to work, come back, and park my car in the driveway, and I rarely walked anywhere. The boys did a lot of walking, and they were exposed to things that I wasn't."
So clearly this one has little to do with writing, but it has lots to do with noticing. I haven't read any serious amount of Jane Jacobs myself, though I expect she wouldn't be overly surprised by this quote. Much of life happens from at the street level and your mode of transportation has a huge effect on the way you experience that world.
I always like going to London for this reason (well, sort of this reason). While I walk around New York all the time, much of life happens above you, out of sight. In London, on the other hand, much of business is conducted on the ground level (at least in the Soho area). Getting a peek into businesses is a treat you rarely get to experience around Manhattan, where not much more than lobbies and elevators occupy the ground floor.
Anyway, that's about it. Really just wanted to share those quotes. Hope you enjoyed.
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I never really considered how Israel gets around the no bread thing for passover, turns out a Muslim hotel manager ends up buying it all from the Chief Rabbis (who have been given power of attorney by the people of Israel). Ownership is turned back over to the people of Israel after the holiday.
Tomorrow, Mr Hussein will put down a cash deposit of $4,800 (some 20,000 shekels or £3,245) for the $150m worth of leavened products he acquires from state companies, the prison service and the national stock of emergency supplies. The deposit will be returned at the end of the holiday, unless he decides to come up with the full value of the products. In that case he could, in theory, keep them all.
Good to know.
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Tags: israel, passover
Time for another round of Noah's favorite iPhone apps of the week.
First off, Eliss is amazing, it's a really odd game that involves keeping planet type things from colliding (it's much more fun than it sounds, I swear). Next up is Edge which kind of reminds me of Marble Madness with a cube instead of a sphere. Of course, there's foursquare, which has been officially out for a few weeks now and let's you keep track of where your friends are at.
In the non-app world, it's totally worth adding the Newswer mobile site icon to one of your home screens. It's the best news site/app I've found yet. They boil stories down to about two paragraphs and you're always guaranteed to find something interesting, even if you only have about twenty seconds while you're waiting for someone.
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Tags: apps, iphone
Pardon the interruption, but this is too odd not to share. In the last two days I've learned that both fish and bees can count. Odd.
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Tags: animals, counting, numbers
While things may look rosy and diverse, under the surface the web's functionality might not actually support diversity.
A few months ago I was having an email back and forth with Chandler from The Barbarian Group about my postmodernism/economics post. One point he made in particular has been sticking around in my head ever since. I wrote, "As the site [brand tags] 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."
His response to the whole post was great, but this part in particular stuck out for me:
I disagree that what brand tags shows is that "everyone has a different idea of what a brand is", but rather that most people have the same idea of what a brand is (at least to the extent to which they hired a good agency), despite the fact that there is no authority for what a brand means, you can't look these things up in a dictionary. This is why folksonomy works, because it leverages the discursive nature of concepts, or if you will "reality". Maybe this is an easier pill to swallow when thinking about something amorphous like a brand, but again the crux of postmodern thought is that this is how all "truth" works, even the truth about planets and air.
His point is a good one, the easy way to explain these things is that everyone has a different take on them, but the reality is that most people have the same take. In fact, it kind of reminds me of something my friend Abe wrote a few years ago about the long tail:
But the long tail, is not a neutral description, rather much like the stances of both sides in the abortion debate it is a deep ideological one. Much the way the abortion warriors are fighting to control the terms of the debate, the long tail is about controlling what the power law distribution is about. "Pay no mind to the 20% with all the power, what's really interesting is what's happening over here under this long tail..."
I think both Chandler and Abe's response include two important similarities. First, they both point to the importance of the way a concept is framed to your understanding and reaction. But secondly, and maybe more importantly, they point to the way we've been trained to assume the power of diversity on the web, when in fact what we're experiencing is actually a lack thereof.
Just recently Michael pointed to a super interesting piece of research highlighting the actual diversity of products offered up by recommendation systems like those at Amazon and Netflix. These systems, of course, have been made famous by the likes of Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail which pointed to their ability to drive individuals to super obscure titles (this is what Abe was referring to in the quote above). When comparing the actual diversity customers experience in an offline and online shop, you'll be surprised to find out that the offline actually wins out. Here's the gist of it:
While each customer on average experiences more unique products in Internet World, the recommender system generates a correlation among the customers. To use a geographical analogy, in Internet World the customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop.
In other words, the web is actually working against the diversity with it's networked functionality. The ability to quickly generate massive amounts of attention in a single direction means that while we're seeing more, we're also moving far more in lock-step since we're dependent on the decisions of others.
So, what does this have anything to do with anything? Well, to be honest I'm not entirely sure. I was having lunch a few weeks ago with Tim from Roflcon and we were talking about a bunch of stuff, including the idea of success and failure on the web. Tim made an awesome point, which was that everyone always uses the same few examples for every question about successful internet companies (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Netflix at the moment). This happens in every industry, actually, just ask someone to name the best brands and I'll give you $1 if Nike and Apple aren't on the list. But let's put brands aside for a second and focus on the web. The number of successful large scale communities out there is quite small. Now there's nothing wrong with that, but it's the reality of the situation. So maybe, just maybe, that's not what the web is built for. Maybe it's built for small scale communities. Maybe we need to reframe the way we think about this stuff and worry less about "scalability." (I would guess that there really isn't any such thing as scalability within a community since culture is bound to change as the size increases, meaning you are left with a totally different community which you hope is only somewhat less good than the original.)
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Remember the hubbub around Tropicana redesigning it's packaging? Well, looks like it really was a pretty bad thing:
According to Information Resources Inc., unit sales dropped 20%, while dollar sales decreased 19%, or roughly $33 million, to $137 million between Jan. 1 and Feb. 22. Moreover, several of Tropicana's competitors appear to have benefited from the misstep, notably Minute Maid, Florida's Natural and Tree Ripe. Varieties within each of those brands posted double-digit unit sales increases during the period. Private-label products also saw an increase during the period, in keeping with broader trends in the food and beverage space.
That compares flat unit sales and a 5% drop in dollar sales for the entire category. That's really not good at all. Not surprisingly, Tropicana denies any connection, telling AdAge, "No dots to connect here." Ha.
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Tags: branding, business, marketing
I don't talk about a ton of work projects here, but I'm pretty intimately involved on this one (read: writing half the content on the site). So, with that caveat out of the way, a few months ago we were talking to GE about how to tell better stories on the web. In the midst of hearing about all the awesome stuff going on, we realized before we could figure out how to tell better stories we'd have to decide which story to tell.
Then we realized that should be our first story.
So we set up this site, GEadventure.com to log our trips. So far I've gotten to go up to their global research center (where we saw stuff like superhydrophic nano coatings and heard about a new engine technology that they stuck a horn on the end of for cleaning really dirty stuff) and we've climbed a 260-foot 1.5 megawatt wind turbine (which also happened to be on the top of a mountain). It's all incredibly fun and we've been coming up with tons of idea that we're logging over at the site. Let me know what you think.
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Tags: marketing, me
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