Letters Remain

  • Blogs as Books and the ‘New’ Bias

    We are prejudiced against material that doesn’t identify itself as ‘New’ and this is a problem not just with the majority of online information consumers but also the websites that pander to this ‘old media’ bias.

    Whether something’s “new” or “breaking” is a concern for newspaper writers seeking scoops. There’s no reason on Earth a website […] should feel any obligation to flood its pages with constant new material. If what’s written in the site is written well, and timeless, the site should work like a book. The reader can click in, scan the volumes of text and read what he or she likes. The only reason website content producers feel the need to crank out “New! New! New!” shit every day is because they’ve decided, for reasons beyond me, to compete with the 90% of bloggers who do nothing but grab hot stories, comment on them and link other comments about it from people in their network of friends. That’s not an audience – that’s an echo chamber. […]

    So what’s the cure? […] Approach the content producing sites like books. When we find one we like, maybe stop, slow down, read the back catalog. Take it as a collection of essays, a running memoir or the written equivalent of stand-up comedy. […]

    Most of our lives are spent grappling with, fearing and resenting deadlines. Why limit the material we read for pleasure with artificial ‘freshness’ criteria? There are pages behind the face pages of websites, and all of the material’s free.

    This is how I find the majority of the items that I share here; this article is almost a year old.

    A compilation of the best things I posted in the site’s first year (and its second year, a compilation of which I’m creating now) is full of articles as relevant now as when they were initially published. (Irony? Plug? Me?)

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Influence of Sold-Out Products

    Sold-out products create “information cascades” where we infer that the next-best item must also be of a similar high quality and value for money: sold-out items ‘validate’ similar products, persuading us to purchase more readily.

    “Sold-out products create a sense of immediacy for customers; they feel that if one product is gone, the next item could also sell out. […] Research shows there’s also an information cascade, where people infer that if a product is sold out, it must have been good and therefore a similar available product will also be desirable.”

    The study […] found 61 per cent of shoppers would buy a particular five-hour ski pass for $20, but that figure rose to 91 per cent when they thought a 10-hour ski pass for the same mountain slope for $40 had sold out.

    A similar study of merlot wines found 49 per cent of consumers would buy a bottle if they had one choice, but when they thought a similar wine had sold out next to it on the shelf, nearly twice the number of shoppers would take home the available bottle.

    The researchers note that for common ‘stock’ items a sold-out status breeds contempt, whereas new and sold-out products signal an unanticipated demand for a quality product.

    It goes without saying that the sold-out items didn’t necessarily have to exist, right?

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Creativity Stages and ‘Flow’

    After intently studying people at work in a diverse range of fields, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi outlined what he determined to be the five stages of the creative process in his book Creativity:

    1. Preparation: Becoming immersed, consciously or not, in a set of problematic issues that are interesting and arouse curiosity.
    2. Incubation: A period whereby ideas churn around below the threshold of consciousness. (It is during this time that unusual connections are likely to be made.)
    3. Insight: When the pieces of the puzzle fall together.
    4. Evaluation: Deciding whether the insight is valuable and worth pursuing.
    5. Elaboration: The slow and often routine work of elaboration (the hardest and longest stage of the process).

    In this work, Csikszentmihalyi coined the word ‘flow‘ for the state when a person is totally absorbed in a creative exercise: “an almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness”. To achieve flow, one’s skills must match the challenge at hand (as you can see in Csikszentmihalyi’s TED talk, when these two don’t align optimally you can be confronted with anxiety, relaxtion or boredom, depending on what is lacking: skills or difficulty of the challenge).

    There are some fantastic notes on Csikszentmihalyi’s TED Talk at Lateral Action where they’ve provided his answer to the question, How does it feel to be in flow? Anyone who has a passion (be it painting, programming or writing) will surely recognise this:

    • Completely involved in what we are doing – focused, concentrated.
    • A sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality.
    • Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done, and how well we are doing.
    • Knowing that the activity is doable – that our skills are adequate to the task.
    • A sense of serenity – no worries about oneself, and a feeling of growing beyond the boundaries of the ego.
    • Timelessness – thoroughly focused on the present, hours seem to pass by in minutes.
    • Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces flow becomes its own reward.
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Development Strategy: Better Than Yesterday

    Excerpting from his book The Passionate Programmer, Chad Fowler reveals his philosophy on growth (in many contexts): small, incremental changes to reach long-term, seemingly unassailable goals. The idea is encapsulated in the question, Was today better than yesterday?

    Most important challenges in life manifest themselves as large, insurmountable amorphous blobs of potential failure. This is true of software development, career management, and even lifestyle and health. […]

    Because of this complexity, we easily become demotivated by the bigger issues and turn our attention instead to things that are easier to measure and easier to quickly fix. This is why we procrastinate. And the procrastination generates guilt, which makes us feel bad and therefore procrastinate some more. […]

    The secret is to focus on making whatever it is you’re trying to improve better today than it was yesterday. That’s it. It’s easy.

    I can’t help noting that this feels like the action required to counteract mesofacts.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • (Another) Interview With a Somali Pirate

    The second I’ve posted.

    I haven’t read the story this interview was conducted for (an article on the economics of Somali piracy) but this full, ‘uncut’ interview between Scott Carney from Wired and a Somali pirate offers a glimpse at their strategy and reasoning.

    How do you pirates decide on what ransom to ask for? What makes them negotiate downwards?

    Once you have a ship, it’s a win-win situation. We attack many ships everyday, but only a few are ever profitable. No one will come to the rescue of a third-world ship with an Indian or African crew, so we release them immediately. But if the ship is from Western country or with valuable cargo like oil, weapons or … then it’s like winning a lottery jackpot. We begin asking a high price and then go down until we agree on a price.

    The pirate answers questions on how ransoms are negotiated; how missions are financed, organised and executed; when they will kill hostages; and how they occasionally use public pressure as leverage in obtaining higher ransoms (by contacting the world media themselves).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Health and Alcohol Intake (Men, Women, Wine)

    A longitudinal study of almost 20,000 U.S. women is showing signs that moderate alcohol consumption (“one or two alcohol beverages a day”) can lower the risk for obesity and inhibit weight gain:

    Over the course of the study, 41 percent of the women became overweight or obese. Although alcohol is packed with calories (about 150 in a six-ounce glass of wine), the nondrinkers in the study actually gained more weight over time: nine pounds, on average, compared with an average gain of about three pounds among regular moderate drinkers. The risk of becoming overweight was almost 30 percent lower for women who consumed one or two alcohol beverages a day, compared with nondrinkers. […]

    The link between consumption of red wine and less weight gain was particularly pronounced. […] Some studies have suggested that resveratrol, a compound present in grapes and red wine, appears to inhibit the development of fat cells and to have other antiobesity properties.

    The article also notes that while moderate alcohol consumption has been associated with “better heart health”, it has also been associated with an increase in breast cancer risk.

    None of this is good news for men:

    Studies suggest that drinking alcohol has different effects on eating habits among men and women. Men typically add alcohol to their daily caloric intake, whereas women are more likely to substitute alcohol for food. […]

    In addition, there may be differences in how men and women metabolize alcohol. Metabolic studies show that after men drink alcohol, they experience little if any metabolic change. But alcohol appears to slightly speed up a woman’s metabolism.

    As before: this is still correlatory, but interesting nonetheless.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Licensing and Patents for Green Technology and Drugs

    The Seed Magazine ‘panel’ (who?) was asked How can intellectual property be adapted to spread green tech?

    Their short answer starts by looking at drug licensing (the last sentence is quite shocking):

    By World Trade Organization law, if a patented drug can improve public health in a developing country, it’s available for compulsory licensing. That means that developing countries can make generics of the drug while paying a small royalty instead of the full fee to the patent-holder—a practice that makes patent-holding companies deeply uncomfortable. To date, the only drugs so licensed have been antiretrovirals to fight AIDS in Africa.

    The panel then go on to look at the possibility of, and issues with, extending this form of licensing to also cover ‘green tech’:

    Strong patent laws have significant benefits. Should companies lose trust in patents—should they fear that their ideas will no longer be financially respected as theirs—they have an incentive to make the ideas corporate secrets instead of publicly available patents. The European Patent Office foresees the burgeoning of such legally protected secrets should patents be rendered less binding.

    Making technology patentable and thus profitable has indeed been a good way to encourage companies to invest in ideas that serve the public good. However, when billions in the developing world who could benefit from these ideas cannot afford the current system, we need to consider how it can evolve.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Denomination Effect: Banknotes vs. Coins

    The denomination effect is the phenomenon whereby people spend coins faster than banknotes: it shows that we are more willing (there are fewer psychological barriers) to spend the same sum of money in coins than in ‘bills’.

    It’s obvious, but I like having these things ‘confirmed’ and having a name to go with them.

    Another experiment involved [NYU and Berkeley Professor of Marketing Priya Raghubir] standing outside a gas station in Omaha. She would have people fill in a survey about gas usage and then thanked them with either a $5 bill, five $1 bills or five $1 coins. People went into the store, and when they came out Raghubir asked them for their receipts. The ones with coins spent the most, people with dollar bills a little less. And people with one $5 bill kept that one in their pockets.

    Raghubir wanted to see whether that effect was particular to American culture, so they ran the experiment overseas. Given a week’s salary in different denominations, housewives in China behaved the same way.

    The article suggests that there may be a way to exploit this in order to “get consumers going again”–I wonder how this can be exploited online?

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Case for Redemption

    In light of the recall into custody of Jon Venables–one of the ten-year-old boys who horrifically murdered the two-year-old James Bulger in Manchester, 1993–Brian Masters deliberates on the possibility of absolution for a heinous crime committed in one’s childhood.

    But I do know that [Jon Venables] cannot be the warped and skewed child who shared in that dreadful crime all those years ago. It is just not possible. He is somebody else now. We all of us change and develop as we pass into adulthood and beyond, and there is no reason to suppose that a child who murders should be exempt from this inevitability. […]

    Besides which, most of the religions that are professed in this country, and to which angry avengers pretend to adhere, give space to that precious possibility of redemption. Surely our society is mature enough to permit religious wisdom to prevail rather than let intelligent thought be swamped by quivering fascination with wickedness. […]

    Nobody would wish to belittle the ghastly fate that befell James Bulger. Letting his killers attempt to redeem themselves in peace does not do that. But we should be mindful of the fact that indignation is relatively easy to satisfy, and demands no sacrifice, no exposure to horrid experience, no damage to the soul. To continue feeding indignation against a 10-year-old boy who glimpsed Hell, and who knew it, is at best unworthy, and at worst is itself a manifestation of wickedness.

    I stand by a previous comment of mine stating that it’s the “Best & worst thing I’ve read in a very long time”. And as David said, it isn’t for the faint hearted, but is worthy nonetheless (I stole David’s headline, too–thanks!).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • How an Entertainment Medium Succeeds

    While looking at how piracy and online content has changed ‘traditional media’ (and is continuing to do so), Barrett Garese succinctly points out his vision for the direction online content needs to go to really differentiate itself and, thus, succeed (or any entertainment medium, in fact).

    Each medium has unique advantages and disadvantages, and the creator must craft an experience that accentuates the advantages and mitigates the disadvantages of the medium in which it lives.

    The most important question for the future of all online content is this: “What are those unique elements which allow content created primarily for online consumption to stand apart from its more ‘traditional’ or ‘mainstream’ rivals?” Film can tell an epic story over a period of 1.5-3 hours on a scale that’s unmatched in other media. Television can tell a story over a period of dozens or hundreds of hours with an intricacy and character development that’s as of yet untouched in other media. What is the “online experience” that makes telling a story in this medium so different the experience in any other?

    For online content to further expand, we must experiment to find and exploit those unique elements that enable the experience itself to stand as the draw. So long as we’re content to mimic other media, it will never grow into a viable “mainstream” entertainment medium. If all you’re doing is creating “TV-lite” or “Film-lite” in an attempt to mimic the experience, then there are already better competitors out there – they’re called “Film” and “TV,” and most people are already familiar.

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    Lloyd Morgan