Yesterday I ran across this short article about a beluga whale saving a diver who had become paralyzed (it was in an aquarium tank). Anyway, I didn’t think much of it until today, when I was reading The Selfish Gene
and ran across this explanation:
Whales and dolphins drown if they are not allowed to breathe air. Baby whales, and injured individuals who cannot swim to the surface have been seen to be rescued and held up by companions in the school. It is not known whether whales have ways of knowing who their close relatives are, but it is possible that it does not matter. It may be that the overall probability that a random member of the school is a relation is so high that the altruism is worth the cost.
Apparently there are quite a few stories of dolphins and whales saving drowning people.
July 30, 2009
Last week I pointed to a thought experiment over at Marginal Revolution that asked “A freak solar event ‘sterilizes’ the half of the planet (people, animals, etc) facing the sun. What happens?”.
You’d never guess who picked up the ball: David Brooks in his New York Times editorial. I’m not sure I’m super keen on Brooks’ take, though: “If people knew that their nation, group and family were doomed to perish, they would build no lasting buildings. They would not strive to start new companies. They wouldn’t concern themselves with the preservation of the environment. They wouldn’t save or invest.”
As I was reading I got to thinking about something in particular: There is a lot of research on aging at the moment and I wonder if all resources wouldn’t move to that. All of a sudden The Methuselah Foundation (they’re working on extending human life) would have people knocking down it’s doors. It’s possible, even, that incentivized by the possibility of extended life indefinitely people from around the world would move and join the fight. It’s a sort of weird thought, but hey, it’s a sort of weird question.
July 28, 2009
This intrigues me: NASCAR has decided to give media credentials to 28 blogs. They’re doing it because there are less newspapers and newspaper writers around to cover the sport. “The attrition of both space and writers at newspapers around the country has meant a growing number of empty seats at Nascar media centers and press boxes, and less mainstream media coverage for the sport,” the article explains.
While they’re not paying for it (yet), this seems like a sort of subsidy, which is a very interesting possible future for the media business. There are entirely too many industries and brands that are completely reliant on coverage to drum up awareness and interest. It would cost them entirely too much to do it on their own and this must be a cheaper way. Very interesting.
July 27, 2009
The Economist Free Exchange blog has a really interesting interview with Felix Salmon, who blogs on finance and economics fro Reuters. Amongst his answers are the following two pieces of wisdom:
As for a clearly useful piece of recent financial engineering, I have to say I’m having difficulty with that one. The stuff I’m most excited about right now is decidedly low-tech: peer-to-peer lending, community development credit unions, opt-out pension contributions, that sort of thing. The whizz-bang stuff tends to be much less valuable.
I have to say I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately ever since having a conversation about the state of finance a few weeks ago and reading Liar’s Poker
for the first time. The reality of the situation seems to be something like this: People need capital and in response to that the banking system has been built for tons of players to take little pieces of that capital as it gets from lender to borrower. The question that was presented me during my conversation (and I’ve been pondering since) is, “if you were to rebuild the financial system from scratch with only the knowledge that there are people who need capital, what would you do?”
Obviously I don’t know the answer, but one of the innovations Salmon mentions, peer-to-peer lending, seems like a pretty good place to start. Along those lines I’m pretty fascinated to think of where you could go with a site like Kickstarter, which essentially lets a bunch of folks “invest” in a project. Or look at celebrities and their ability to reach their audience directly and now raise money for their own projects rather than having to find financing. Interesting things are afoot. (Though certainly some more things will need to be thought through as we move from $5 “donations” to $5,000 “investments”.)
As for the second piece of insight, Salmon offers this up on regulation and the Fed:
As far as preventing a re-run of this crisis is concerned, that’s probably going to be the remit of the Fed, which is a better idea than giving that mandate to anybody else. But whether the Fed will be successful I don’t know: it’s hard to tell banks to stop making money, just because you don’t really understand how they’re making money.
I’d say that sounds about right. (I don’t have anything to add to this one other than it struck me as a very good point.)
July 27, 2009
What can Jay-Z teach us about Foreign Policy and International Relations? Quite a bit apparently:
As Jay-Z got older and more powerful, the marginal benefits of such battles declined and the costs increased even as the number of would-be rivals escalated. Just as the U.S. attracts resentment and rhetorical anti-Americanism simply by virtue of being on top, so did Jay-Z attract a disproportionate number of attackers. “I got beefs with like a hundred children” he bragged/complained on one track.
It’s a really interesting piece from Marc Lynch who blogs at Foreign Policy. (It’s sort of funny to me to be linking to a blog entry at Foreign Policy. Growing up it’s the only magazine I every remember seeing at my grandparent’s house and it was endlessly intimidating. Nevermind, as my mom pointed out in the comments, they subscribed to Foreign Affairs, not Foreign Policy.)
July 27, 2009
An interesting link from Enjoymentland, Track Your Happiness is part of a doctoral project out of Daniel Gilbert’s lab. Essentially you give the site a bunch of demographic data and then you recieve a few iPhone formatted surveys everyday asking you how you’re feeling about life, etc.
I’m super curious how this will work out as it’s the sort of thing I’ve had on my mind lately. As part of GE Adventure I’ve had a lot of conversations about how bad a game health is currently and while this isn’t quite a game, it does encourage you to track your healthiness/happiness and then provides shows you your answers in the form of charts and graphs (check out some screenshots).
Will let you know how things progress, just took my first survey. (There are definitely some potential privacy issues with this thing … but hey, what are you going to do?)
July 25, 2009
[I posted this over at GE Adventure, but I was originally going to post it here and figured a cross-post was in order.]
As part of the GE Adventure project and my new interest in healthcare, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about how I believe health is essentially a marketing problem: An attempt to change consumer behavior through communication. With that in mind I was intrigued by this New Scientist editorial that suggests climate change has a positioning problem. Specifically the editorial suggests that science’s hard line that it’s not about belief, but rather fact, misses the point of how culture actually works:
People’s attitudes towards climate change, even Pope’s, are belief systems constructed through social interactions within peer groups. People then select the storylines that accord best with their personal world view. In Pope’s case and in my own this is a world view that respects scientists and empirical evidence.
Supporting the argument are a few examples (certainly not scientific) of people involved with reform around climate change ignoring the dangers of their own behaviors (something that seems common with doctors as well).
July 23, 2009
I’m not entirely sure I believe this story, but apparently at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference this year COO Kevin Turner told a story of someone from Apple asking Microsoft to stop running their laptop hunter ads:
And you know why I know they’re working? Because two weeks ago we got a call from the Apple legal department saying, hey — this is a true story — saying, “Hey, you need to stop running those ads, we lowered our prices.” They took like $100 off or something. It was the greatest single phone call in the history that I’ve ever taken in business. (Applause.)
While I do generally really like Apple products, I take some joy in watching them wriggle a bit (especially because they’re the darling of the marketing industry). Those laptop hunter ads hit Apple where it hurts, which is a whole lot better than the “I’m a PC” ones, which I’m guessing just helped raise awareness on Apple’s “I’m a Mac” ads.
July 16, 2009
[Editor's Note: Inspired by Google's announcment of a Chrome OS and this Jeff Jarvis post in response to it I decided to publish one of my half-written blog posts (I have a folder labeled that on my desktop). This particular post was actually more like 80 percent finished, I just added on a last paragraph.]
Back in October of last year, Nick Carr had a great breakdown of the different network strategies. His point was that everything is often lumped under “network effect” when the reality of the situation is that it’s seldom that pure. (His network effect definition: “It exists when the value of a product or service to an individual user increases as the overall number of users increases.”) He breaks the strategies down to data mining, digital sharecropping, two-sided markets, economies of scale and complements.
While the whole post is worth a read, it’s the latter that I want to focus on. Google, as Carr points out, is the ultimate complement company. After all, as he points out “Google makes more money as all forms of Internet use increase.” In fact, Carr expanded on this idea back in September in a post specifically about Google:
Google’s protean appearance is not a reflection of its core business. Rather, it stems from the vast number of complements to its core business. Complements are, to put it simply, any products or services that tend be consumed together. Think hot dogs and mustard, or houses and mortgages. For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks — entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions — Google’s range of complements expands into ever more industry sectors. That’s why cute little Google has morphed into The Omnigoogle.
This is a point I’ve been trying to make to people (and clients) for a long time. Google has a few very unique things going for itself as a business, but it also has some not so unique things that it just seems to understand better than the other businesses out there. The most important of these is the role of a market leader.
Put simply, when you’ve got the kind of market share that Google has (72 percent in the US as of February) its cheaper for you to acquire new internet users than it is to steal share. This works pretty much across the board, but very few companies are willing to accept it because it means that some of the money you spend on acquiring customers is actually going to the other guy.
What that means is everything Google does is about getting more people to use the internet more. Use Android as an example: It is absolutely in Google’s best interest to release a mobile OS that makes it easy to browse the web because that means more people using the internet more which means more searches on Google (because of that market dominance) which means more clicks on the paid ads. Voila, you’re rich.
So, turning attention back to the Chrome operating system, basically it doesn’t matter to Google how things turn out with it. It’s a win-win for them: If they get huge pickup on it, awesome. If this causes Microsoft to build an OS for netbooks, awesome (as that would mean more people using the web). Just look at the story of Chrome, all of a sudden Microsoft and Firefox are working harder than ever to get new and improved versions of their browser out, all of which will just mean more people using the web more and therefore using Google more which will lead to more clicks on those damn ads. Not a bad deal.
July 9, 2009
For anyone that lives in New York City, this is the perfect explanation for having it both ways:
The delivery guys have been given the right at any time to regard themselves as either cyclists or a pedestrians. When the traffic light is green, they regard themselves as vehicles and ride. When the light is red they define themselves as a pedestrian who just happens to have wheels. They can choose whatever is advantageous at any time. Who can blame them? Life is short and they need the money.
July 7, 2009
This made me laugh (a lot). Jack Handey imagines the perfect bank robbery … which relies on just a few dependencies:
- “Most of the customers in the bank must happen to be wearing Nixon masks, so when we come in wearing our Nixon masks it doesn’t alarm anyone.”
- “The bank alarm must have mistakenly been set to ‘Quiet.’ Or ‘Ebb tide.’”
- “Any fingerprints we leave must be erased by the monkeys.”
Check out the full plan.
July 7, 2009
Highlighting some recent conversation and research The New York Times Economix Blog asks an awesome questions: “Could economic theory, historically dominated by men, possibly overstate the benefits of risk-taking and competition?”
They follow that up with the acknowledgment that it would be really tough to figure out an easy experiment to get at the answer, but it still seems worth thinking about. I admittedly don’t know much about economics (whatever you can learn from reading some blogs for about six months and a few books that are tangentially related at best), but it’s interesting to think about the role of economic education in the market. What if everyone who is trained in economics and managing massive amounts of money in the market is working off the same flawed view of risk? Crazy to think about a major inefficiency existing in the education system and therefore spreading itself like a virus through the industry.
July 6, 2009
[Editor's Note: I didn't mean to weigh in on this Gladwell/Anderson Free debate. I swear that this isn't really about their arguments (except the first two paragraphs). But if you're sick of reading people talking about this stuff feel free to skip it, I'll understand.]
I haven’t read Chris Anderson’s new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price
, but I’ve now read Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker review and Anderson’s rebuttal and have three things to say.
First, Gladwell’s argument is nowhere near as strong as I thought it would be. Second, Anderson’s chooses what was most obviously the weakest argument in the piece (“If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write?”), which seems like a little bit of a cop out. Third (though it’s the first interesting point I’ve made), Gladwell hits on something that I’ve been puzzling over lately as it relates to the online advertising world: Why everyone is so focused on more cheaper things instead of fewer expensive ones.
As Gladwell puts it:
In the pharmaceutical world, what’s more, companies have chosen to use the potential of new technology to do something very different from their counterparts in Silicon Valley. They’ve been trying to find a way to serve smaller and smaller markets–to create medicines tailored to very specific subpopulations and strains of diseases–and smaller markets often mean higher prices. The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property–information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.
This is a hugely important point and, in my mind, the ultimate promise of the web. We have other media that is excellent at being mass (TV, for instance), yet everyone is obsessed with recreating that. The reasoning is that the advertising market (which, for better or for worse, still supports the web) isn’t efficient enough yet to serve up ads to small segments of the population, no matter how desirable that segment may be (that’s not entirely true, but close enough that I’ll let it slide for now).
It’s interesting to imagine what the web would look like if it could manage that efficiency. The laws of advertising work something like this (apologies to all those who are already comfortable with this): The more targeted your audience, the more you pay. Now there is certainly a premium charged for scale (tons of people), but outside that the fundamentals operate roughly according to plan. As I mentioned before, this doesn’t work on the web because there are too many players and an outdated system of purchasing that, more or less, carries costs with each additional site. Basically it’s incredibly inefficient.
None of this is to dispute Gladwell’s point, though, rather to try to understand why Silicon Valley has generally moved against the logic of more targeted and expensive content.
July 6, 2009
Over at Slate Chris Wilson runs the numbers on your video getting its big break on YouTube:
On Friday, May 22, I used Web-crawling software to capture the URLs of more than 10,000 YouTube videos as soon as they were uploaded. Over the next month, I checked in regularly to see how many views each video had gotten. After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views–that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That’s the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.
Yup, I’ll buy that.
July 2, 2009
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