August 2009 Archives
Okay, I'll make this as quick and painless as possible. On the off chance you don't get enough of me from reading this site, I'm going to be speaking at a few things in the near(ish) future. Actually, I'm only definitely speaking here: The Brandhackers meetup on Monday, September 14th. I'm going to be talking about Brand Tags. It's in NYC and costs $10. If I suck I will buy you a beer. If I really suck, I will buy you two beers.* As for the other two (this is the painful part), I need some help. They're SXSW Interactive panels and I'm sure you've voted for one or two so far. Anyway, should you feel like voting for two more I've got one called Brands Don't Think Like You Think They Think with Benjamin Palmer and Future Pioneers: Innovators in Digital, which I'm wholly undeserving of, but will be fun. So yeah, that's the end of this message from our sponsors. Carry on.
* I can not be held responsible for buying the whole bar beers if I'm really terrible. I'll do my best.
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Tags: me, speaking
One of the things I respect most about what Denton does with Gawker is offloading things while they're still doing pretty well. If you ask me, it's precisely his willingness to cannibalize his own businesses that helps hims stay on top. I've had trouble articulating exactly how to describe that behavior until I ran across Vijay Govindarajan three box model. The three boxes are, "manage the present," "selectively abandon the past" and "create the future." It's a simple framework, and seems pretty obvious, but as Govindarajan most companies focus only on box one, a "tendency [that] has been particularly acute in the past two to three years, as most leaders have emphasized reducing costs and improving margins in their current businesses."
Anyway, I'll refer to Gawker Media's behavior as "selectively abandoning the past" from here on out. Though he catches some slack for it, I think many companies could learn quite a bit about being less precious with their products from Denton. Plus it sounds nicer than layoffs.
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Tags: blogs, business, gawker, media
Some thoughts (and quotes) about how the media deals with background information.
An interesting insight from Matthew Yglesias regarding the lack of explanation of what's really going on with healthcare (instead the media is covering the political manouvering) [via rc3.org]:
This is, of course, the media's characteristic flaw. The bulk of reporters and editors at major political media institutions have almost no understanding of substantive public policy issues. And they conjoin to their ignorance a kind of contempt for people who do understand them. Consequently, people who are interested in such matters tend to be driven out of the institutions in questions. Instead, you get a self-replicating cadre of self-congratulatory and shallow people who enjoy doing this kind of coverage while sneering at people who care about substance.
It struck me how this was in line with one of the key findings of the 2008 State of the News Media report from Pew:
Rush Limbaugh's reference to the mainstream press as the "drive-by" media may be an ideologically driven critique, but in the case of several major stories in 2007, including the Virginia Tech massacre, the media did reveal a tendency to flood the zone with instant coverage and then quickly drop the subject. The media in 2007 had a markedly short attention span.
The only way the media knows how to cover something is with "news." It's not entirely fair to blame the media for this, as I suspect that despite theoretically asking for the contrary, the public pays the most attention to those that are constantly feeding new information. The point was also summed up in the bullet right before the "drive-by" one in the report:
The media and the public often disagreed about which stories were important in 2007. For one thing, citizens suggested that the press failed to deliver sufficient coverage of some basic bread and butter issues, such as rising gas prices, toy recalls, and the legislative battle over children's health insurance. They also showed less interest than the media in the crisis in Pakistan and certain aspects of the Iraq debate, such as General David Petraeus' September appearance before Congress. To the extent the press covered distant parts of the world, people in some ways thought even that was too much.
How to deal with slow-moving stories is a real problem. Blogs do it quite well because they're niche and don't really need to worry about anything else. This comment from The Washington Post article Yglesias was commenting on is quite insightful:
Many have said that Post stories routinely assume a foundation of knowledge that they simply don't have. Some said that they don't understand basic terms like "public option" or "single payer." They want primers, not prognostications. And they're craving stories on what it means for ordinary folks and their families.
But how? The Post omsbudsman offers a guess, "I think they want more glossaries explaining basic terms, easily digestible Q&As, short sidebars that summarize complex concepts and graphics that decipher complicated data. And they want stories that say what health-care reform will mean to them." I'm not sure that's it though. I worry that this is one of those things the people say they really want, but then when it's there it turns out to not be so interesting. Generally, though, everything seems to come back to moving away from generalization in the media, which is alright by me.
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In going back and reading some old posts as part of this curriculum project (I may be launching a separate site for that soon, so stay tuned) I ran across this quote from The Economic Naturalist
that sums up the way I feel about the current methods for teaching people code:
Knowing about the pluperfect subjunctive is not a bad thing. But if learning to speak a new language is your goal, the time and effort required to learn the explicit technical details of this tense would be far better spent in other ways. Courses that focus most of their energy on such details are no fun for students, and they're also astonishingly ineffective.
That is precisely what I want to get around.
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Tags: code, education, language
Felix Salmon offers a take on the financial crisis I hadn't heard (or thought of) before:
One of the themes of my talk was that it wasn't an excess of greed and speculation which led to the financial crisis, but rather an excess of overcaution, with an attendant surge in demand for triple-A-rated bonds. Investors didn't want risk, and investment banks made billions of dollars, during the boom, by waving their magic securitization wands and seemingly making that risk disappear.
As usual, I don't really know enough about this stuff to comment with any sort of intelligence, but it's an interesting angle.
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Tags: economics, finance
Last month I wrote about an article outlining why old people think young people are spoiled. Well, the author has written a followup, this time outlining two more factors: Social mobility and increasing resource inequality. It's another great and simple explanation of some economics/sociology stuff.
The best part, though, might be in the footnotes where the author wonders aloud about something that has been bugging me lately:
Why is it that everyone is so dead-set on having their children exceed them? From a logical standpoint, doesn't it seem hard to understand how everyone's children are going to advance forward? Especially when there are an exponentially increasing number of children on the planet; and at the same time technology is exponentially decreasing the need for human intervention in the production of our goods and services? As we go each day into the future we have more people to do work, while at the same time we have less work to do. How are we all going to find our kids well-rewarded jobs, when we just don't need as many people working?
I hadn't thought of it in exactly these terms, but I've been wondering about why so many people think they're going to beat the odds. I mean I get why people think that way, but it's still sort of mysterious that everyone believes it. If everyone was beating the odds the odds would change.
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Tags: economics, sociology
I love this advice by economist Justin Wolfers on the Freakonomics blog about why it helps to be an economist when you're making decisions:
By sticking to economics, I make time for running. Rather than spend hundreds of dollars worth of time cleaning my house each Sunday, I hire a cleaner who does a better job at a better price. When a friend asks me to help them move, I write them a check to pay professional movers instead. It's just more efficient. And while it can be hard to forgo extra income for a long run, it is even harder to justify wasting that time on Facebook. And with the time that saves, I'm pulling on my shoes to head out for another run.
This is something I've been thinking about quite a bit lately, especially in relation to health: How does awareness of economics change your behavior? Personally I've been pretty focused on how people tend to be irrational about their health decisions and so every time I need to make my own health decision I question whether I'm making that same mistake. Obviously I have no long term data, but I seem to be flossing more as a result.
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Tags: economics, psychology
Interesting Wired article by Clive Thompson about how young people actually still know how to write (and are pretty good at it at that). This from a Stanford University study run by a professor there named Andrea Lunsford:
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom--life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
The article also goes on to explain that these students are actually good writers, as judged by their ability to adapt to their audience. I was actually thinking about this yesterday as I was drafting up a blog post for The Barbarian Group blog. I started off my career writing for a magazine and since I left the world of writing on a daily basis (at least for pay) I feel as though my skills have only increased. It's sort of a crazy thing. The other interesting epiphany I had while writing the post was that I actually do my best thinking while writing, which I'm not sure is actually a new thing. I find the act of explaining my thinking takes me much further than just going through things in my head.
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Tags: blogs, writing, youth
Joel Rubinson, chief research officer for The ARF (advertising research foundation) has an interesting post up about the value of path to purchase research and recency in marketing. First off, two points of background: One, at Naked we spent a lot of time thinking about consumer journeys and that has definitely shaped my thinking on the subject and two, if you're unfamiliar with path to purchase and why it's valuable you need to look no further than Google. Basically the money machine that is Google Adwords is one of the best purchase path targeting devices the marketing world has ever known. Think about it this way, when you're thinking about buying a TV you type in some vague keywords to aid your research, advertisers looking to reach you spend less, because they know you're not as far along on your path. Later on, as you zero in on the make and model, keyword price goes up, as they know you're close to purchase and they can extract some dough from you.
Anyway, Joel suggests that more brands should pay attention to their consumer's purchase paths as it will help them prioritize their marketing. If you know that people tend to make a decision before they walk into the store, then you want to be at that last place where they made that decision. Joel acknowledges that this needs to be balanced with brand goals, a point he illustrates nicely with cinema advertising: "Hypothetically, cinema advertising might have the highest LTS of all touchpoints (you're sitting in the theatre waiting for the movie to start) but a really low recency factor. However, the recency factor itself might be less important when marketing's main objective is "imparting brand meaning" (say during the launch of a brand)."
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Tags: marketing, media, research
A few weeks ago I wrote about how I'd been thinking of creating a curriculum to teach little kids to make stuff on the web. Over the course of a few emails Robin from Snarkmarket sent me a link to his essay from New Liberal Arts (which I must admit I own but have not read yet). Anyway, I posted this quote over at Tumblr and liked it so much that I felt like I had to post it here as well. (Ah the trials and tribulations of having multiple writing outlets.) Anyway ...
Making things is a circle. You start the arc with an idea about the world: an observation or hunch. Then you sprint around the track, getting to a prototype--a breadboard, a rough draft, a run-through--as fast as you can. Your goal isn't to finish the thing. It's to expose it, no matter how rough or ragged, to the real world. You do that, and you learn: Which of your ideas were right? Which were wrong? What surprised you? What did other people think? Then you plow those findings back into an improved prototype. Around the circle again. Run!
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Tags: creativity, internet, makingstuff
A few years ago I remember reading something about how we don't know our friends as well as we think we do and have been spouting off about it ever since despite being unable to find the article again. Thankfully the Boston Globe had an article with the same conclusion a few weeks ago:
A growing body of experimental evidence suggests that, on the whole, we know significantly less about our friends, colleagues, and even spouses than we think we do. This lack of knowledge extends far beyond embarrassing game-show fodder - we're often completely wrong about their likes and dislikes, their political beliefs, their tastes, their cherished values. We lowball the ethics of our co-workers; we overestimate how happy our husbands or wives are.
Also really interesting is this sentence: "Work by William B. Swann of the University of Texas and Michael J. Gill of Lehigh University has looked at dating couples and pairs of college roommates and found that, while their confidence in the accuracy of their knowledge of each other increased the longer the two had known each other, their actual accuracy didn't appreciably improve." Interesting.
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Tags: culture, psychology, relationships
This Kottke post about immaculate innings (where the pitcher strikes out all three batters with exactly 9 pitches) made me remember back to the 2001 American League Championship Series Game 4 between the Mariners and Yankees where Mariano Rivera threw a 3 pitch inning (one of the more amazing baseball feats I've seen). It was like every guy thought he could outsmart the cut fastball and none of the three got it out of the infield. I can't find video, but here's the box score which shows each batter had a 0-0 count when they made an out. After the game when they interviewed Rivera he just said something to the effect of, "well ... three pitches is three pitches."
If anyone can track down the video I'd really appreciate it. Oh, and here's the full list of three pitch innings, apparently Rivera did it again in 2003 against the Cardinals.
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Tags: baseball, sports, yankees
Just some thinking about how maybe we don't take enough credit for the path of technological innovation (or maybe we take too much).
Commenting on a Pitchfork article titled The Social History of the MP3 (which I know have as an open tab to read), Dan Visel had this to say over at if:book (via Snarkmarket):
I don't know that there's a direct analogue to the way the publishing industry is attempting to transform itself in the face of the digital, but Harvey gets it right by noting how the social use of digital media is more transformative than the move to the digital itself. Simply generating electronic versions of existing print books won't be enough: forward-thinking publishers need to think about how reading changes when it becomes networked.
This is a very interesting point. I, like most people I think, have been focused on the tool itself, the digitalness of digital and what that means for its use and societies growth as a result. The suggestion that the social use of digital technology is an innovation inline with the technology itself is a pretty interesting theory. Theoretically one could not exist without the other, but maybe it could. What if the technology is merely a means to better collaboration, a blip along the path of humans working together rather than one on the path of technology innovation.
Kevin Kelly has been invading my head lately, especially with his Technium posts Progression of the Inevitable and Expansion of Free Will (give yourself an hour to get through those two). In the former, Kelly writes:
"Inventions are culturally determined. Such a statement must not be given a mystical connotation. It does not mean, for instance, that it was predetermined from the beginning of time that type printing would be discovered in Germany about 1450, or the telephone in the United States in 1876," warns Kroeber. It means only that when all the required conditions generated by previous technologies are in place, the next technology can precipitate. "Discoveries become virtually inevitable when prerequisite kinds of knowledge and tools accumulate," says sociologist Robert Merton, who studied simultaneous inventions in history. The ever thickening mix of existing technologies in a society create a supersaturated matrix, charged with restless potential. When the right idea is seeded within, the inevitable invention practically explodes into existence, like an ice crystal freezing out of water. Yet, as convention and science have shown, even though water is destined to become ice crystals when it is cold enough, no two snowflakes are the same. The path of freezing water is predetermined, but there is great leeway, freedom and beauty in the individual expression of its predestined state. The actual pattern of each snowflake is unpredictable. For such a simple molecule, its variations upon a theme are endless. That's even truer for extremely complex inventions today. The crystalline form of the incandescent light bulb or the telephone, or the internet, will vary in a million possible formations, depending on the conditions evolving it. In practice, its appearance is unpredictable.
As usual, not sure I'm going with this (and to be honest I'm having trouble giving a conclusion the concentration it deserves), but it's definitely interesting.
Update (8/24/09): Russell Davies ponders some of the same stuff (or maybe I'm just reading into it and wishing I was as articulate as he is):
All of which makes me wonder if I/we've been over-egging this internet revolution pudding quite a bit. Is it that much of a revolution? It certainly has been for me, but not so much for my Mum and Dad, or my son. Or for most people outside the West. Is it that epochal or is it just part of 'gradual improvement'?
I sometimes suspect we're living though a media and communications revolution because the people chiefly effected by it are the people who get to decide if we're living through a revolution or not - the opionistas, the commenters, the thinkers and talkers.
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File this one under: Who knew?
A few weeks ago a woman attacked the Mona Lisa with a ceramic mug (it did no damage thanks to the two centimeter thick bulletproof glass). Anyway, after being taken into custody the woman was given a psychological screening to see if she was suffering from Stendhal Syndrome. Psychology Today explains:
Named for the French author Henri-Marie Beyle, who died in 1842 and is best known by his pseudonym, Stendhal, the syndrome is also known as hyperkulturemia and as Florence Syndrome. After visiting Florence, Italy -- a city distinctively replete with art -- Stendhal wrote in his 1817 book Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio: "I felt a pulsating in my heart. Life was draining out of me, while I walked fearing a fall."
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Tags: art, health, psychology
Reading about the Honda Insight's game-like interface design reminded me quite a bit of this article about the user experience of the Prius:
You quickly learn that fast acceleration is bad: the engine always comes on, and your MPG drops like a stone. But coasting to a gentle stop is good, because you can see the car reclaim almost all that energy. It's especially fun to climb hills: to watch the numbers drop and the engine kick on (red arrows) as you start climbing, and then to see the engine shut off, the regenerative braking start (green arrows), and the MPG go to 99.9 (whoo-hoo!) as you zoom down the hill. As an early hybrid owner put it, feedback screens turn ordinary driving into "an eternal battle between Red and Green. Red is bad, because you're burning fuel. Green is good. I encourage green."
Though the Insight seems to be embracing this, I'm curious when one of these companies will take it a step further, adding an online application that allows you to track and learn from your habits.
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Tags: cars, games, interface, ux
Peter and I have had this conversation many times and I'm glad he's written down his views on the relationship between print and the web for publications:
Still, the flaw in the print person's perspective is in thinking that there is any relation between your print audience and your web audience. There is none. You are not undercutting your print product by publishing a website because the people who you can reach online have almost no overlap with the people who you reach in print. Your print readers don't want your website, and your web audience doesn't. want. your. paper. (or magazine). (There's a small overlap for whom that's not true -- many of whom are the mediavores who read articles like this one.) Audiences are more stratified by media habits than they are united by common interests.
I don't totally understand the last bit (italics are his), but the rest rings very true for me. (Just to give some context/credentials: Peter worked in research for print publications for many years, so there's some rigor to his analysis.)
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Tags: internet, media
The otherwise boring profile of Tyler Brule/Monocle from The New York Times features this quote about the magazine's unconventional approach to advertising:
"Rather than some boozy lunch with editors and sponsored parties, we cut right to the chase. We have editorial integrity, we don't accept freebies and we make the final decision about what is worthy," he said. "But as publisher and editor, I'm part of the religious and secular worlds, and I make the decision. No offense, but I think the whole church-and-state thing is a very tired, U.S. concept."
As blasphemous as Brule's approach to magazines is, I think he's on to something (though I'm not entirely sure how it scales up). It's not new, however, Heavy.com did all their own creative from the beginning. With that said, I find it quite interesting that Brule took it out of just the media world and questioned the general American concept of church and state, I can't say I'd ever though of it quite that way (church and state being an American concept), but it is and it's something that bleeds through all culture for better (and occasionally worse). (Just to be clear, I'm in no way suggesting abolishing church and state when it comes to politics, I believe religion has no place there.)
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Tags: culture, media, politics
Though I feel a bit bad linking to it, my friend Scott's post outlining the mistakes he made with his startup, Lookery, really struck a nerve. Scott is a very smart dude who has been in the game for awhile, so getting a chance to get inside his head on something like this is quite valuable.
Anyway, he goes through what he sees as his three big mistakes: Exposing the company to a single point of failure (Facebook), failing to cut losses when the time was right and entering a market that wasn't quite ready yet. I can't imagine how many now-defunct companies could credit one of those three factors for their demise. Good advice for any entrepreneur (or hopeful-preneur).
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Tags: business, internet, startups
An interesting insight from Kevin Kelly about why today is actually different than yesterday:
We know from mathematics that systems containing very, very large numbers of parts behave significantly different from systems with fewer than a million parts. Zillionics is the state of supreme abundance, of parts in the many millions. The network economy promises zillions of parts, zillions of artifacts, zillions of documents, zillions of bots, zillions of network nodes, zillions of connections, and zillions of combinations. Zillionics is a realm much more at home in biology--where there have been zillions of genes and organisms for a long time--than in our recent manufactured world. Living systems know how to handle zillionics. Our own methods of dealing with zillionic plentitude will mimic biology.
I often get in arguments about how some new thing is actually not any different than some old thing. This seems like a major distinction and a good explanation for the extreme interest in networks and other biological systems.
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Tags: culture, innovation, technology
Remember a month ago when there were rumors that BusinessWeek was going to sell for a dollar and everyone had some brilliant idea of what they should do with it? Well, turns out things aren't quite so cut and dry (which I suspected, as I worked for a magazine in a similar position, albeit with far less liability). Anyway, the magazine has $40 million in subscription liabilities, which Felix Salmon was kind enough to define:
What's a subscription liability? It's basically all the money which BusinessWeek has already been paid, in subscription revenues, for magazines it has yet to deliver. It's a liability because if it can't deliver the magazines, BusinessWeek would have to refund its subscribers their money, or somehow try to fob them off with an equivalent product.
Yet another collision of business reality and media punditry.
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Tags: business, finance, magazines, media
The ultimatum games feels like the most overused example of behavioral economics at this point, but it's nonetheless interesting. (Basically it's a game where people are asked to split some monetary amount, say $10, between two parties. The first party makes an offer and the second either accepts, taking their share and giving the offerer theirs, or declines, in which case neither party gets any money. Though rational economic theory would predict a person offers the smallest non-zero amount -- $1 if we're going with offers of whole numbers -- and that the person on the other end would accept any non-zero amount. The thing is, it doesn't work that way and most people won't accept an offer they don't deem to be fair.)
Okay, so with that out of the way, it turns out that in this case chimps are actually more rational than we are:
Chimpanzees, however, go about the ultimatum game (which involves divisions of raisins in their case) without giving fairness any thought. In this experiment, the researchers found that the chimp responders tended to accept any nonzero offer, however unfair. And conversely, the chimp proposers rarely suggested a fair division, choosing instead to maximize their own share.
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Tags: chimps, economics, research
In response to yesterday's entry about the value of discussion my mom (who goes by Barbara to the rest of the world) left a comment with a link to a New York Times article by Kurt Andersen titled Pop Culture in the Age of Obama. The whole thing is well worth a read, but this paragraph is especially relevant for yesterday's discussion:
But irony of ironies, after literature was evicted from mass culture, pop culture itself began to fragment and lose its heretofore defining quality as the ubiqui tous stuff that everybody consumed. In a typical week nowadays, fewer than 6 percent of Americans see the most popular scripted series on television. So we have arrived at a strange new historical moment. Literature is just another (minor) sector of the culture industry, but now even the mandarins agree that certain pop artifacts -- "The Sopranos," "The Simpsons," Radiohead -- are cultural creations of the first rank. Meanwhile, popular culture and mass media are no longer very popular or mass. By and large, both entertainment and art appeal to niches, cultural tribes that range in size from tiny to smallish.
I like the idea of pop culture being about the ideas, not necessarily the content (which makes sense in a medium is the message sort of way). Whether or not the whole country watches American Idol, everyone knows the premise.
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Tags: culture, media
Buried in this article about Nike's digital strategy is an interesting tidbit about the company's culture:
Ekins are official company storytellers employed to evangelise about the Nike brand and its sports technology. Before being unleashed on the world, Ekins are required to undergo an almost military-like training regime comprising a nine-day rookie camp at Nike's headquarters in Oregon and a full day's running at the Hayward field track where Bill Bowerman worked as a track coach. Almost unbelievably, as a further sign of their devotion to the brand, each Ekin is then invited to have the Nike 'swoosh' tattooed on their ankle ahead of their 'graduation'.
I'm pretty fascinated by the ways different companies ensure their culture is passed on. It seems to be a pretty central part of the long-term success of an organization.
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Tags: business, culture, marketing, nike
Over at Tumblr I posted this quote from Rob Walker about Mad Men: "At this point I think the only interesting thing about Mad Men (to me) is the disconnect between the amount of attention it gets from the media and marketing crowd, and the number of people who actually watch it." I've stated publicly that I'm not crazy about the show and am always interested in places where media attention and actual popularity are misaligned.
The quote got a very interesting response that made me scratch my head a bit, "The interesting part is that so many people still cling to the broadcast paradigm assumption that media attention is directly related to popularity. The value of a creative product as a topic of discussion isn't necessarily attached to the value of the same product as entertainment."
It's really that second sentence that made me think. Most of us have been trained to think that there is little value in discussion that doesn't lead to action, and while I still think that's true in a broad sense, there are clearly softer measures and value to the publicity of the show in-and-of-itself that have nothing to do with whether people actually ever tune in. Ultimately attention needs to be connected to popularity for the show to continue to exist and AMC or any television station to stay in business (at least in a medium where eyeballs equal dollars). Now there are certainly longer term benefits to the attention and coverage, but these are just proxies for popularity like DVD sales down the road and viewers for AMC as a whole. Anyway, just thinking out loud, that's all.
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Tags: marketing, television
The Instapaper Kindle integration is giving me a chance to go back and read a bunch of stuff I've been meaning to get around to for awhile. One of those articles come from an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience and symbolic systems named Lera Broditsky. Back in June she wrote a piece for Edge called How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?. The article, is about exactly what the title says and includes this fascinating story from an Aboriginal community in northern Australia.
Rather than using relative values to talk about space like right and left, the Kuuk Thaayorre use absolute values like north and south. That means whenever they refer to the placement of anything they need to be oriented. (Broditsky uses the example of, "There's an ant on your southeast leg.") Anyway, she writes about an experiment where they asked people to organize a set of cards that featured a progression like a banana being eaten. When you ask people whose language moves left to right to arrange the cards, they arrange them left to right, Hebrew speakers went with right to left and so on. Check out how the Kuuk Thaayorre did it:
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on.
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Tags: culture, language, psychology
I'm generally intrigued with Y Combinator, an incubator for startups, but this new angle is especially interesting. Yesterday Paul Graham announced Request for Startups, which describes a specific idea they'd like to see startup teams address and apply to build. As he explained, "There are a lot of startup ideas we've been waiting for people to apply with, sometimes for years. Recently we tried hinting at some of them, and that has yielded results. So now we're going to try being more direct: we're going to issue numbered RFSes with more details about the idea, and suggestions about the sort of group that would be a good match for it. Groups applying to YC will be able to specify on the application form if they're responding to a particular RFS."
The first RFS is The Future of Journalism and asks, " What would a content site look like if you started from how to make money--as print media once did--instead of taking a particular form of journalism as a given and treating how to make money from it as an afterthought?"
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Tags: ideas, innovation, startup
A pretty interesting insight into weight loss from New Scientist, "Women shown the cake picture gave a higher priority to their healthy eating intentions than their counterparts shown the flower. They were also significantly more likely to pick the oatmeal cookie - which earlier tests showed was generally perceived as the healthier option."
I've been thinking a lot about this sort of stuff lately (as I mentioned in Marketing Health). Clearly compliance is a big issue in health, as is evidenced by the millions of people a year who jump on the latest diet fad only to fall off the wagon within weeks or even days. I've been interested how my awareness of this sort of behavior effects my own attempts to make myself more healthy (for what it's worth, I've been on a health kick for about a month that's stuck so far). This cake study seems to be a similar idea: A reminder of what's motivating you. Now the only question is how do you stop people from building up an immunity to this sort of reminder in the same way we (or I) ignore those emails from Basecamp after a week of a missed deadlines?
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Tags: diet, health, psychology, weight
I was going through some emails this evening and reading the comments on my disintermediating banking post. One comment in particular, by Jeremy, stuck with me: "Well, it'd be hard for the average consumer to evaluate default risk wouldn't it? Unless we want to go back to the rating agencies...and we all know how well that ended up..." Anyway, I was thinking about this and I wonder if that's not the sort of thing you could crowdsource? I mean basically, as I understand it, a rating is a subjective thing, so couldn't you just ask enough folks and average out their replies?
Again, this is an example of a subject I don't actually know anything about, so someone who does feel free to smack me down in the comments.
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Tags: crowdsourcing, finance
While I'm not sure where I stand on the thesis of the article, this is an insightful point about the "sharing" trend:
Sharing once seemed to me a simple, straightforward thing, but the way tech and social media companies have co-opted it recently have made me increasingly suspicious of it. In the usage that is starting to become prevalent, sharing isn't a matter of giving over a portion of a desirable thing to others. Instead it is a code word for what is in fact a mode of online production, for labor that we perform ostensibly for the benefit of friends we explicitly connect ourselves with in networks but ultimately for the benefit of the companies who hold the fruits of our effort on their servers. When we "share" via upload, we aren't sharing at all, we are working to move information and data into digital space where it can be manipulated and harvested for profit.
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Tags: culture, economics, internet, socialmedia
I've become pretty fascinated by the idea of disintermediating banking lately. It's clear that the current system is broken and it's also clear that the need for capital is not going away, so something's got to give. Felix Salmon, as I've mentioned in the past, clearly thinks a big part of it is disintermediation. He wrote this in a post today about his anger with community banks not lending money:
I wish these loans could be disintermediated somehow: I'm sure there are lots of Americans -- even Americans who know how to underwrite loans -- who would love to get 2 percentage points over prime on $35,000, spread over six years. (Prime is currently 3.25%, and almost certainly won't go any lower; that puts a floor of 5.25% on the interest that these loans throw off. Try getting that from a CD.)
Certainly sounds right to me. Clearly there is risk here, but with risk comes reward (in this example 2 percentage points over prime). The thing is, I don't understand the banking system well enough to know why something like this isn't happening. Can anyone fill me in?
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Tags: banking, community, finance
Simon Dumenco did a great interview with Bill Wasik about his new book And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture
. Wasik makes a few very insightful points that make me want to read the book (I started it, but I'm in the middle of three others at the moment).
My two favorite quotes from the article: "The Attention Economy is (mostly) a sorry excuse for a (predictable, rational) economy." I have been waiting for so long for someone to agree with me on this one. While I get the theory and used to subscribe to the attention ideology, at this point I don't understand how it's any different. Quote number two is under the heading "the model is what matters" and says, "Our meta-analyses of culture (tipping points, long tails, crossing the chasms, ideaviruses) have come to seem more relevant and vital than the content of culture itself." That one made my head spin a little. It's so true. As a culture we've become more obsessed with understanding how things spread than the things themselves. The model itself is the content. (Or, as McLuhan would say, the medium is the message.)
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Tags: culture, internet, viral
What happens when you help avoid a problem? You don't get any credit.
This morning Rick linked to what must be the first positive editorial about the economy I've read in a long time. Paul Krugman basically says we're still in bad shape, but we've "backed up several paces from the edge of the abyss."
At the end of Rick's short entry, he wrote this about the role of government and the lack of credit when something actually goes right:
Also, by the way, remember acid rain? The government totally got on that and fixed that. Someone mentioned that on the Daily Show last week and I thought "huh. oh yeah. that went away." We should like make holidays or something when the government fixes something, instead of, you know, forgetting completely about it, only to go on to bitch about the next problem.
Immediately I was reminded of a quote from The Black Swan
that I actually blogged about almost two years ago (seeing blog entries written from 2007 and realizing it was two years ago still surprises me). As I explained in the post, the quote is from "a thought experiment that imagines a politician who managed to get a law passed prior to September 11th, 2001 that required all airplanes to have bulletproof locked doors to the cockpit. Taleb goes on to explain:"
The person who imposed locks on cockpit doors gets no statuses in public squares, not so much as a quick mention of his contribution in his obituary. "Joe Smith, who helped avoid the disaster of 9/11, died of complications of liver disease." Seeing how superfluous his measure was, and how it squandered resources, the public, with great help from airline pilots, might well boot him out of office . . .
Now consider again the events of 9/11. In their aftermath, who got the recognition? Those you saw in the media, on television performing heroic acts, and those whom you saw trying to give you the impression that they were performing heroic acts.
No real point here other than to say when you act to avoid a problem it is incredibly unlikely you'll ever receive the credit you deserve since no one can ever know how much you really helped. It's an interesting conundrum.
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On the same day I wrote my post about Netflix and a the beauty of a companies business goals being aligned with customer desires, Adrian covered the same topic over at the Zeus Jones blog with more depth. He tells the story of a cheap cancer treatment that pharma isn't interested in, as well as credit card companies profiting off late fees (he had also covered late fees and the Netflix model earlier) and the electronics industry profiting off the lack of sustainability in its products.
Adrian sums up the issue nicely with this: "I think of this as a very fundamental contradiction in the system. A system structure that rewards companies for doing the wrong thing. A system that, in the case of the pharmaceutical industry, simultaneously forces companies to look for the most expensive way to solve a problem and that prevents them from solving the most pressing problems."
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Tags: business, culture, economics
This is another semi-cross-post from GE Adventure this one looking at the economics of going to the doctor. One of the theories we've been batting around is that health is a bad game. David Lee, a health economist at GE helped us understand just how bad a game the regular visit is:
As David explained, a regular doctor visit has a bad risk/reward situation: There is a low liklihood anything is wrong but good chance that if something is wrong that it's serious. On top of this, people have a tendency to overestimate small risks and devalue the future, all leading to a situation where it's hard to get people into a regular routine of visits.
He even offered some thoughts on solving it, mainly that you need to accurately communicate how unlikely it is for something to be wrong and "be prepared with a good explanation of how to approach the issue and the liklihood of success." Interesting.
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Tags: economics, healthcare
How Netflix pursues you use their service more not less.
Today at lunch with James I rattled off a story about Netflix that I have been telling lots of people lately for some reason. Basically the story is that even though it would seem like Netflix would rather you had a subscription and never rented anything, it's quite the opposite. After lunch I told James I would find that quote, and what do you know, I did. It's from that Napoleon Dynamite Netflix prize article from the New York Times last year. Here's the quote:
For Netflix, this is doubly important. Customers pay a flat monthly rate, generally $16.99 (although cheaper plans are available), to check out as many movies as they want. The problem with this business model is that new members often have a couple of dozen movies in mind that they want to see, but after that they're not sure what to check out next, and their requests slow. And a customer paying $17 a month for only one movie every month or two is at risk of canceling his subscription; the plan makes financial sense, from a user's point of view, only if you rent a lot of movies. (My wife and I once quit Netflix for precisely this reason.) Every time Hastings increases the quality of Cinematch even slightly, it keeps his customers active.
Even though logic would success Netflix could make more money if people rented less, the cost of it is increased turnover. At lunch we spent a bit of time thinking about other industries where you could make this case. Customer service is a really obvious one: In industries/categories where folks interact with customer service a lot (can't think of any right now), the benefit of investing there might overcome the cost of turnover.
I love this sort of business logic. It means that your best interests are aligned with your consumers best interests and everyone is happier (though, of course, Netflix would always rather you upgraded your plan and it's sort of interesting to think about how they promote the one DVD plan versus the one DVD plus streaming plan, where overall they want you to get your money's worth but they probably assume you wouldn't cancel the streaming option even if you didn't use it).
Hrm, lots to think about.
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Another bit of counterintuitiveness (kind of), this time from New Scientist about social networks. Turns out that the very networks that many folks are working on these days may actually be stifling innovation, "The problem, says social scientist Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of the National University of Singapore, is that today's software developers work in social networks in which everyone is closely linked to everyone else. 'The over-abundance of connections through which information travels reduces diversity and keeps radical ideas from taking hold,' he suggests."
I'd believe that. Though I wonder if the ever-expanding reach of these networks (I'm thinking Facebook) may help to solve that problem by taking away any of the intimacy that the connections offer. The article suggests that funding agencies who give money to those working on the next generation web force them to work in small disconnected groups. "To enable innovation it may be necessary to reduce the number of social ties between coders."
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Tags: innovation, networks
Well here's a counterintuitive bit of information for your: According to the Congressional Budget Office's blog (who knew they had one?) expanded preventative care raises healthcare costs, it doesn't lower them. From the blog:
But when analyzing the effects of preventive care on total spending for health care, it is important to recognize that doctors do not know beforehand which patients are going to develop costly illnesses. To avert one case of acute illness, it is usually necessary to provide preventive care to many patients, most of whom would not have suffered that illness anyway. Judging the overall effect on medical spending requires analysts to calculate not just the savings from the relatively few individuals who would avoid more expensive treatment later, but also the costs of the many who would make greater use of preventive care.
This seems like the sort of thing that can and must be fixed.
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Tags: economics, healthcare, prevention
Just ran across this new movie coming out from Chris Rock called Good Hair. As explained on the film's Sundance page, Rock was disturbed when his daughter, Lola, asked him why she didn't have good hair. "Celebrities such as Ice-T, Kerry Washington, Nia Long, Paul Mooney, Raven Symoné, Maya Angelou, and Reverend Al Sharpton all candidly offer their stories and observations to Rock while he struggles with the task of figuring out how to respond to his daughter's question. What he discovers is that black hair is a big business that doesn't always benefit the black community and little Lola's question might well be bigger than his ability to convince her that the stuff on top of her head is nowhere near as important as what is inside."
Sounds super interesting. Trailer is at the official site and YouTube of course.
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Tags: black, culture, movie, race
Bubbling up three fine comments from the last two months.
I've had this idea for awhile that I should feature some of the finer comments from this site in its own entry. Well, this afternoon I remembered the idea and went about digging through some old entries for the fine comments. I've decided to go with three so as not to make things overwhelming.
Whether or not you're featured below, I can't thank you enough for all the intelligent things you have to say around here. I am constantly amazed at the level of dialog on the site and that's entirely because of all of you. So pat yourself on the back and accept my sincere gratitude.
So, without any further ado, some recent comments (with responses by me).
On Pearls of Creativity, Robin had this to say about the idea of creating a curriculum for teaching kids to make things on the web:
Love this notion. Take one part LOGO, one part IDEO, one part Y Combinator, and make a fifth-grade class out of it.
For what it's worth, I actually think the technology angle is important. I could imagine some sort of problem-solving/design-thinking curriculum built around physical materials, or even simple hardware hacking or whatever, but pixels on the screen have two advantages:
1. Super gratifying. There's no set of tools anywhere that lets you get something working faster.
2. Easy to share. One of my beefs w/ school is that so much the work is intended for a tiny audience (too often an audience of one) and then never seen or heard from again.
So instead, imagine a website brimming over w/ all the little projects made by these kids -- a showcase of problems solved (or at least valiantly attempted).
826 Valencia for design, code & problem-solving!
ytmnd.com for good, not evil! (OK, maybe that's a stretch.)
I absolutely love the connection to 826 Valencia (for those that aren't familiar it's the writing center started by Dave Eggers that is "dedicated to supporting students ages 6 to 18 with their writing skills, and to helping teachers get their students excited about the writing"). I'm going to be writing a bit more about this idea in the coming weeks, I've put a lot of thought into it and have been casually trying to find some funding to help put it together for real. Stay tuned.
In response to the idea of a physical API, Sriram had this to say:
That sounds like an amazing idea. Optimizing between economies of scale, standardization on one side and individuality and local on the other. It is not very far from what franchises are today, but I think there'd be a world of difference pushing the toggle towards the individuality side for a balanced mix. With modern IT, CRM it is more possible now than ever before. For the same reason I like how "chapters" work for organizations.
I have SO MUCH to say about this (in fact before I started writing this comment post I was going to write a physical API post). Basically, and I will comment on this more fully in a longer post, I swear, this has exactly been on my mind since we started likemind. If I knew then what I know now I would have created a very specific infrastructure for the franchises to thrive. I think this is a big idea as more and more organizations go decentralized. To be honest I can't figure out why franchising isn't huge outside the fast food space. What gives? Why haven't other companies leant their brands to start new chapters in other places? Anyway, much more to think about here.
In response to economic insights from Felix Salmon (specifically on what caused the financial crisis), Taylor had this to say:
Perhaps the widespread notion that "markets failed" is mistaken, that the problem is that "communities failed". Perhaps our communities have failed to evolve as fast as networks and markets. Meaning, as people (individuals and groups) we have been unable to keep up with the pace of change in communicating and exchanging information.
Honestly I've been trying to unpack this one in my head since I read it and I haven't gotten there yet. It's a very interesting notion, but I don't know where to begin. Still pondering.
And, so as not to leave anyone out, thanks to everyone who has commented since June 1st (would have extended longer, but as it is this is a pretty big list): Maura, Alan Wolk, Diablo, mils, Arthur Perschino, Rob Day, Kimberly Crawford, Sriram Venkitachalam, Anjali, Scott Rafer, Eric, Ana Andjelic, Abe Burmeister, Marci Ikeler, Denise Lee Yohn, Taylor Davidson, Josh Klein, Eugene Lin, harris, Robin, Steven Kalifowitz, marie young, Joe Barry, Alex Baum, Dennis Demori, Tim Walker, barbara, Matt Daniels, Steve Ames, Benton, Burt, michael tabtabai, amber, Joey, Michael Critz, Wayne, Michal Migurski, Julie, Charles, Randall, kyle schafer, steve, Peter, Adam Nelsen, Marc, Kelly Eidson, @robotsoul, Steven Kalifowitz, Matt, eric pakurar, Jared Gruner, Mike, rikin, Bud Caddell, Max Kalehoff, Elenor, Kristal, Andy, Natasha Acres, lee, Joakim Vars Nilsen, Russel Adams, FOSTER, Gina, andy, Michael galpert, Will, Wesley Verhoeve, Mike Maddaloni - The Hot Iron, Janet S. Payne, Ian , Drew Weilage, Adam Crowe, Adam Singer, Camiel, Robert Auguste , @ryost, Brian Morrissey, faris, J. Nordberg
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This is sort of a good counterpoint to my everyone gets a fair shot post, explaining how the blog world can get out of control on one side of an issue. Anyway, a few weeks ago you may have seen a chart depicting the logo history of Pepsi vs Coke (I posted it over at Tumblr in July). Well, the branding blog Brand New is disputing the accuracy of the timeline and it's a pretty good argument:
Missing from the chart in the Coca-Cola evolution is the penchant for Coca-Cola to use the shape of its bottle as an icon, acting on and off as the logo or complementary logo or subsidized logo of the main script logo, sometimes to a confusing fault. Today's Coca-Cola logo is, of course, amazingly similar to what it was 124 years ago but it's not quite fair to idolize them for a flawless consistency that they haven't actually earned.
So yeah, sometimes it's good for there to be two sides to a story.
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Tags: branding, logos, marketing
Ever wonder how Netflix gets you your DVDs so fast? (Of course you have.) Well, they gave a journalist at the Chicago Tribune a sneak peak. Amongst the amazingness:
From there [manual sorting by employees, many of which are grandparents], action shifts to long machines that go ffft. This, right here, is how you get discs as fast as you do. Inspected discs are scanned into the inventory by a machine that reads 30,000 bar codes an hour -- ffft, ffft, ffft. The moment this machine reads the bar code, you receive an e-mail letting you know that your disc arrived. Then discs are scanned a second time -- if a title is requested, and around 95 percent of titles get rented at least once every 90 days, the machine separates it and sorts it out by ZIP code. (The entire inventory of the building is run through this daily, a process that alerts other warehouses of the location of every one of the 89 million discs owned by Netflix.) After that, separated discs are taken to a machine called a Stuffer -- which goes ssssht-click, ssssht-click -- and stuffed in an envelope, which is sealed and labeled by a laser that goes zzzt.
Oh, and every 65 minutes they do calisthenics.
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Tags: business, movies, netflix
Which is more motivating, a financial incentive or a tangible one? Over at Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely points to an experiment by Goodyear tires to find the answer. The company divided its sales team into two groups, giving one financial incentives and the other tangible incentives of equal value. I'll let Ariely (at least I assume it's Ariely writing) take it from here:
The results were very interesting; it turned out that the tangible-reward group increased sales by 46% more than the monetary-reward group. They also improved in terms of the mix of products sold by 37%. One explanation, and it seems to me a fairly good one, is that we can visualize tangible rewards (imagine yourself on a Hawaiian beach), which creates an emotional response. Money, on the other hand, is not accompanied by images as often (aside from maybe Scrooge McDuck swimming in piles of it), and lacks the emotional pull that tangible rewards have, so they're less effective in motivating employees. I guess it's called "cold, hard cash" rather than "future beach vacation cash" for a reason.
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Tags: behavioraleconomics, economics, research
Paul Krugman made a point about the media today that has long bugged me. A TV show he was supposed to be on (he doesn't mention which) was canceled when they couldn't find someone to argue the other side. As Krugman puts it, "In a way this goes beyond my original point ["if liberals said the Earth was round, while conservatives said it was flat, the news headlines would read 'Shape of the planet: both sides have a point.'"], which was the unwillingness of the news media to referee a controversy by actually reporting the facts. Now it seems that a fact isn't worth reporting unless someone is prepared to deny it."
It's popular to beat on Generation Y for being spoiled by a childhood of trophies for showing up, but I'd argue that the media is as much to blame for the problem as anyone. After all, no one makes more of a point of ensuring that both sides get an equal voice regardless of whether one side is completely insane or not. (For the record, I am not referring to democrat/republican conversation, I get that both sides should get equal voice. I'm talking about issues where there is no other side until the media digs one up and gives it airtime.)
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Tags: media
Over at Snarkmarket, Robin offers up an interesting take on the new unbranded Starbucks stores that are popping up:
What if Starbucks was offering up a Starbucks API--a set of hooks into a vast, efficient coffee shop support system with incredible economies of scale? You, the local coffee shop owner, simply plug in, and wham, your costs drop by thirty percent because you're leveraging Starbucks' insanely optimized supply chain. You can use as much or as little as you want.
It's funny, just this weekend a friend of mine was telling me a story about a chain restaurant not being able to open in his town because of a law against that sort of thing. So instead the restaurant just opened under a different name with some local flavor and did amazingly well, to this day many who go there (and sing its praises) have no idea it's part of a chain they'd likely avoid at all cost in any other city. Seriously, though, there's something really interesting about the idea of physical APIs. I've been thinking a lot about franchising lately, and the interesting ways that the web allows people to pick up ideas and bring them to new places (see: likemind). Need to think about this one more.
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Tags: api, branding, marketing, starbucks
I'm currently reading Complications
by Atul Gawande (the guy who wrote the New Yorker article about the cost of healthcare).
Anyway, I just started but I had to share this quote about doctor's and healthcare and the complexity of it all:
We look for medicine to be an orderly field of knowledge and procedure. But it is not. It is an imperfect science, an enterprise of constantly changing knowledge, uncertain information, fallible individuals, and at the same time lives on the line. There is science in what we do, yes, but also habit, intuition, and sometimes plain old guessing. The gap between what we know and what we aim for persists. And this gap complicates everything we do.
One consistent theme in the stuff I've read so far on healthcare (and more specifically doctors) is the need to accept not always knowing the correct answer while still taking the possible consequences very seriously. I guess in a profession where consequences are literally life and death you have no other option. (Though, as I understand it, many doctors do believe their own hype and forget sometimes that they make things up.)
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Tags: complexity, doctors, healthcare
The Times has an interesting interview with Wendy Koop, founder of Teach for America. While the whole thing is worth a read, her point about planning (or the lack thereof) really made me nod along:
At one point, I also had this revelation that we were no longer going to go through all this development of strategic plans. We would go through this massive process of creating these endless strategic plans and reviewing them. And I don't know how many years we did that until I said: "Forget it. We don't even need to do this anymore. Let's figure out our priorities and how we are going to measure our success. And then we're going to let people run after those goals." And that just freed up all the energy.
I have to admit I've been thinking about this lack-of-strategy strategy a lot lately. Sure you need some general direction to go in, but I'm less convinced it makes sense to spend a bunch of time and money constructing some sort of strategy on how to attack the problem. Rather, have a bunch of people run in different directions and measure, measure, measure. (As a side note, I often worry that the last part is left out. Without the feedback the strategy of just letting people go is pretty useless.)
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Tags: business, education, strategy
I've now run across two articles about The Philosophical Baby
and felt like it was worth sharing an interesting idea that shows up in both (the quote actually comes from an interview with the author, though she also wrote an essay that mentions the same idea in New Scientist).
Anyway, in response to the question of why evolution would have created a situation where human babies can do so little for so long, Gopnik responded:
The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine - which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species - and our ability to apply what we've learned and put it to use. So one of the ideas in the book is that children are like the R&D department of the human species. They're the ones who are always learning about the world. But if you're always learning, imagining, and finding out, you need a kind of freedom that you don't have if you're actually making things happen in the world. And when you're making things happen, it helps if those actions are based on all of the things you have learned and imagined. The way that evolution seems to have solved this problem is by giving us this period of childhood where we don't have to do anything, where we are completely useless. We're free to explore the physical world, as well as possible worlds through imaginative play. And when we're adults, we can use that information to actually change the world.
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Tags: babies, evolution
Doug Rushkoff makes an interesting point about economic indicator's over at his blog: "My point is not gloom and doom. Rather, it's that the "signs of economic growth" stimulating the speculative economy and DowJones average have little or nothing to do with the prospects for real people to make ends meet, find gainful employment, or - more importantly - create and exchange value back here on earth."
"In fact," he continues, "the vital signs of the speculative economy might better be understood as the health points of the monster whose very purpose is to extract value from the real, and inject it into the virtual, derivative economy." Now I'm not totally sure I agree with him (partly because I don't know enough about markets or economics to say for sure whether I believe it), but it does make sense and at the very least makes you think about what indicators are really indicating.
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Tags: economicindicators, economics, speculation
Turning irritants into beautiful ideas.
Since I taught myself PHP/MySQL last year, I've been thinking about how I'd like to teach kids to make stuff on the web. The idea has been sort of brewing in my head and I've written a few things/shared it with a few folks. Basically I want to create a curriculum not around teaching code, which is done and is boring, but around the interdisciplinary process of making stuff.
Anyway, the process would begin with teaching kids about where ideas come from. Basically I think that early on you can explain to children that rather than treating an irritant or inconvenience as something that annoys them, you can show them it's an opportunity to make something new: To fix a problem. That to me describes the entrepreneurial spirit. There, I Fixed It is more than just the ability to continue on with what you were doing, it is invention. (I'm certainly not the first person to make this point, Thoughtless Acts illustrates it nicely.)
Or, take this definition from the very long Atlantic article on happiness. (It's about the longest running longitudinal studies that has looked at the overall health and well-being of a select group of Harvard males over the last 70 years.) The quote is about one of the studies participants who had overcome lots of hardships:
In several vignettes in the book, Vaillant presents Merton [a participant] as an exemplar of how mature adaptations are a real-life alchemy, a way of turning the dross of emotional crises, pain, and deprivation into the gold of human connection, accomplishment, and creativity. "Such mechanisms are analogous to the involuntary grace by which an oyster, coping with an irritating grain of sand, creates a pearl," he writes. 'Humans, too, when confronted with irritants, engage in unconscious but often creative behavior."
It makes me smile to think of human ingenuity as comparable to an oyster making a pearl. And I think it's a pretty good recipe.
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