Aug 6, 2009
How subliminals influence your ability
Exhibit
A: When a group of Stanford undergraduates took a standardized test and
were told that it was a measure of their intellectual ability, the white
students did much better than their black counterparts. But when the same
test was presented simply as an abstract laboratory tool, with no relevance
to ability, the scores of blacks and whites were virtually identical. This is
stereotype threat.
Exhibit
B: Students were asked a series of brain teaser questions. One group of
students was told that the questions were invented at their university; the
other group was told they were invented in a far away university. Thinking
that the test came from far away somehow raised the creativity of the
subjects. This is psychological distance.
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Jul 10, 2009
Cities and slums
Mike Davis: More than half
the human race now lives in cities. Mostly in the squalor of slums and
squatter cities.
Kevin
Kelly: The city is a wonderful technological invention which concentrates
the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively
small footprint it generates a maximum of ideas and inventions. Slums are the
skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. Discomfort
is an investment. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters
had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate.
Michael
Balter: In Anatolia nine thousand years ago, a stone-age civilization
lived in high density without cities or slums for three thousand
years. (via
Ken Macleod)
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Jul 6, 2009
Entrepreneurship as profitability vs entrepreneurship as growth
Chris O'Brien: Andreessen has never started or operated a profitable
business, except for one year with Netscape. LoudCloud/Opsware failed to turn
an annual profit in its six years as a publicly traded company.
Ben
Horowitz: First, with Loudcloud we saw the whole “cloud
computing” trend way before most. Second, when the dot-com bust hit, we took
radical steps to reboot, something a lot of founders might have been unable
to do.
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Jun 30, 2009
The hungry ocean
A month in the life of a swordboat captain, a glimpse into the
mindset needed from a leader.
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Jun 21, 2009
Bullfinch on Pythagoras
“The first lesson Pythagoras's disciples learned was silence. For a time
they were required to be only hearers. "He (Pythagoras) said so" (Ipse
dixit) was to be held by them to be sufficient without proof. It was only
advanced pupils, after years of patient submission, who were allowed to ask
questions and to state objections."
— Thomas
Bullfinch, The age of fable (1855). Do we paradoxically have less
critical thought today because we are free to ask questions from day one?
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Jun 15, 2009
Rethinking America's prisons is cheaper than rethinking incarceration
We punish people with architecture. The building is the method.
New prison construction is parceled out to a handful of large and
anonymous firms, discouraging innovation.
American prisons are built in the countryside. Rural prisons need no
public face. It need articulate no sense of communal pride or civic justice.
Convicts tend to come from cities; guards do not. Culture clashes
inevitably arise.
Convicts tend to come from cities; their families often can't afford to
travel to visit. Rehabilitation becomes difficult.
Guards serve "lifetime sentences 8 hours at a time." Guards and prisoners
often want the same improvements.
Prisons that look pleasing suffer less
vandalism.
— Jim Lewis
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Jun 9, 2009
“The publishing industry turns out to be a lousy place to
keep stuff
published."
—
Jon Udell
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Jun 6, 2009
Coping with friendfeed's time-ordered torrent
I've been increasingly using friendfeed, and the number of my subscriptions
has trended steadily down. The reason: ordering by time forces me to be strict
in who I let in.
Every new watering hole for conversation — facebook, google reader,
twitter, friendfeed — orders my reading by time to provide immediacy.
Ordering by time renders it susceptible to frequent posters. The
minute I subscribe to one, the diversity of my reading goes down. Other
voices become hard to find. My response to this: never subscribe to frequent
posters.
But this is a blunt heuristic. High-volume sources often have great posts. As
the need for other views grows, I find coping mechanisms. Sometimes I give up
and leave. Sometimes I build a replacement, and
sometimes I find others have
done so. Once I can get around pure time ordering, I heave a sigh of
relief and subscribe to the people I want to without feeling constrained by
volume.
So, friendfeed, please help me navigate this stage of my reading. Find ways to
keep my reading diverse, even if I subscribe to Robert Scoble.
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May 31, 2009
Designing for serendipity
Lu Liu:
How can we use serendipity to get out of homophily traps? I have a
serendipity friend list. But if I can define my serendipity friends, then I
guess they are not really serendipity friends by my expectation. In
reality, I seldom read articles from that list.
Me:
Yes, a serendipity list can't come from yourself. It must be an
external recommendation. Automated since that's my bias :)
Time is key. What is serendipitous today is not so tomorrow. That makes it
harder to 'define'. In practice, I suspect we must evaluate it like we
evaluate porn: not by defining it but by categorizing examples.
Perhaps it can't be a list either, just one recommendation, with pride of
place. I find I require time to appreciate something outside of my comfort
zone.
Since it must take prime real estate it must be high-confidence. If nothing
is good enough today, show me nothing.
Finally, it mustn't nag. Make it easy to dismiss, use the dismissal as a
signal to learn from.
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May 26, 2009
The dirty secret of social media: quantity trumps quality
That's an understatement.
The one thing common to feedreaders, Twitter and Friendfeed: they order
articles by time, and so incent people to post often. Keep posting, and your
stuff is more likely to show up on people's screens. They become more likely
to click on it, retweet it, share it on google reader, like it on friendfeed.
It can't be complete junk, of course; if you spam people they'll unsubscribe.
But keep posting mediocre stuff and they won't.
In fact, people grow more tolerant of mediocrity in their feedreaders.
Subscriptions have a way of getting out of control. Past half a dozen sources
people lose track of what they're reading, and of who they've subscribed to.
You can slip lots of crap by their eyeballs before they take the time to
reorganize.
Some of your readers will give up on the medium for a time. They'll jump to
the next great thing, somewhere
along the facebook-twitter-friendfeed trajectory, and they'll find it works
so much better! They'll think it's because of some shiny new feature
in the new tool. They'll never realize it's just that they're subscribed to
less crap. So they'll start subscribing to crap again, and the cycle will
repeat.
A cynical strategy to game this world: write one smashing post every week or
two, use it to get new readers. Interleave the smashing posts with hundreds of
short, simple, unique pieces. They will keep you in the eyes of your
readers once they've subscribed.
Even if you aren't this cynical, these are powerful and subtle forces. Most
of us aren't pushing a brand or an agenda, and may not think we care much
about clicks and links and shares. But we respond to social feedback. If more
frequent posts yield more feedback, we post more frequently. It's easy to see
the benefits, harder to see the ill-effects.
And ill-effects there are. When our reading is sorted by time, nobody reads.
A conversational medium requires that its participants be good listeners. The
alternative is monologuing, the realm of exhibitionists, clueless
advertisers, and spam. When we're incented to post more frequently, the
world gradually degrades to an advertising free-for-all. A garbage-in
garbage-out world; fewer people saying interesting things; less diversity in
what we read and who we read.
By shirking our reading we're poisoning the well for ourselves.
Things must improve.
Improvements
It's amazing how settled time-order has been in Web 2.0. Twitter is entirely
realtime. Facebook has lots of filtering options; it's unclear who uses them.
Friendfeed's 'best of day' view is a big improvement, but it is hamstrung in
two ways. First, it isn't the default, so most people never see it. Second,
it changes slowly and you can't page past the first page, so there isn't as
much to read. If you read a lot of stuff you will find yourself returning to
the time-ordered view.
Friendfeed has a second mechanism to manage volume: it allows you to organize
your subscriptions into 'lists'. Google Reader's folders are analogous.
Folders help manage the volume/value tradeoff; make sure you read the low
volume feeds, then dip your toes into the torrent to taste. They're still a
static organization, though. Removing a feed from a folder isn't easy to do
while reading, so we put it off, and our folders pile up cruft (if we ever
bother cleaning them up).
The cynical blogger gaming the system to stay in his reader's feedreaders
need change nothing when feedreaders get folders. For the reader, removing a
feed from a folder is as static and as hard as unsubscribing.
The good news is that things are easy to improve. When I built my own feedreader, it was amazing how quickly I
preferred it to Google reader. A simple policy of fairness—I never show
two stories from the same source—sufficed to compensate for nifty UI
features, search, and social recommendations. One can do much more.
Update May 19: Gabor Cselle's built an iPhone
app with a prioritized order for email! Leaving time order behind is not
just for web 2.0 social tools.
Update Jun 6: Fred Wilson's comment points out several twitter apps
to sort by popularity.
Thanks to Jonathan
Nelson, Simha
Sethumadhavan, Adrian Perez, and
Shawn O'Connor for reading drafts of this.
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