Letters Remain

  • Reporting Company Results

    I don’t know if this is common knowledge or not (which in my case usually means it is), but Rowan Simpson gives a concise lesson detailing the three ways companies report their results, and how misleading each can be.

    • Size “We made a net profit of $15 million.”
    • Growth “Revenues increased by 9%.”
    • Acceleration “We added 100,000 new customers in the last year, 70,000 of these in the last two months.”

    To further illustrate this point, Rowan looks at other ways to interpret Skype’s Q1 2008 results than GigaOm’s acceleration-based interpretation of “Skype’s growth starts to slow“.

    • Size “Skype reports record revenue of $145m.”
    • Growth “Skype increases revenue by 26% compared to the same period last year.”

    via @zambonini

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Iconic Logo Designers

    Last year logo designer David Airey launched Iconic Logo Designers. As he describes it from his post announcing the launch:

    On the iconic logo designers website, you’ll find biographical info and resources on more than 35 of the world’s most outstanding creatives.

    Seeing this I was reminded of how much I love the elegant simplicity of the V&A logo (created by Alan Fletcher in 1989 for the Victoria & Albert Museum).

    Airey’s other logo design site, Logo Design Love, is also worthy of your perusal.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Declining and Thriving News Magazines

    While Time and Newsweek saw double digit falls in revenue last year, The Economist saw similar sized gains—despite increasing subscription rates (previously).

    The Atlantic discusses this phenomenon, looking in detail at why The Economist is thriving in a market seemingly in decline.

    The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact survey. Another word for this is blogging, or at least what blogging might be after it matures—meaning, after it transcends its current status as a free-fire zone and settles into a more comprehensive system of gathering and presenting information. As a result, although its self-marketing subtly sells a kind of sleek, mid-last-century Concorde-flying sangfroid, The Economist has reached its current level of influence and importance because it is, in every sense of the word, a true global digest for an age when the amount of undigested, undigestible information online continues to metastasize. And that’s a very good place to be in 2009.

    True, The Economist virtually never gets scoops, and the information it does provide is available elsewhere … if you care to spend 20 hours Googling. But now that information is infinitely replicable and pervasive, original reporting will never again receive its due. The real value of The Economist lies in its smart analysis of everything it deems worth knowing—and smart packaging, which may be the last truly unique attribute in the digital age.

    It’s worth noting that The Atlantic is being quite modest with this piece—it too has reinvented itself recently, no doubt increasing its readership greatly.

    The article’s not perfect, though; it states that “almost no one links to The Economist” and that “it sits primly apart from the orgy of link love elsewhere on the Web” while “[remaining] primarily a print product”. I disagree on all these points.

    I did, however, like this insight:

    Newsweeklies were intended to be counterprogramming to newspapers, back when we were drowning in newsprint and needed a digest to redact that vast inflow of dead-tree objectivity.

    I’m asking myself, could the success of The Economist be attributed to its evolution from newspaper counterprogramming to counterprogramming for the “undigested, undigestible information online”?

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Microsoft, Google and Startups Compared

    After visiting both the Microsoft and Google campuses to discuss Stack Overflow (Google Tech Talk: Learning from StackOverflow.com), Joel Spolsky discusses the similarities and differences between the two corporations and his own small company.

    What I’ll probably remember most about the trip is what I learned about company culture and how it’s affected by scale. Giant corporations such as Google and Microsoft are like cities full of relatively anonymous people: You don’t actually expect to see anyone you know as you walk around. Going to lunch on either campus is like going to the cafeteria at a huge university. The other 2,000 students seem nice, but you don’t know most of them well enough to sit with them. Meanwhile, a typical lunchtime at my company is like Thanksgiving dinner: There’s a big meal you get to share with a bunch of people you know and like.

    I particularly liked Spolsky’s reaction to his discovery that while Microsoft’s campus-wide Wi-Fi network is closed-access and requires registration, Google’s was free and open: “I had to wonder: What might we be doing at our company that is similarly a waste of time?”.

    It made me think: What might I be doing that is similarly a waste of time?

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Most Important Century

    The next 50 years will bring technological, social and geopolitical change greater than we can imagine, says Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, but the emerging problems of population growth and climate change make this century arguably the most important in Earth’s 4.5 billion year history, even from the perspective of an astronomer.

    It’s sometimes wrongly imagined that astronomers, contemplating timespans measured in billions, must be serenely unconcerned about next year, next week and tomorrow. But a “cosmic perspective” actually strengthens my own concerns about the here and now.

    Ever since Darwin, we’ve been familiar with the stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past. But most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. No astronomer could believe this.

    Our sun formed 4.5bn years ago, but it’s got 6bn more before the fuel runs out. And the expanding universe will continue – perhaps for ever – becoming ever colder, ever emptier. As Woody Allen said, “Eternity is very long, especially towards the end”. Any creatures who witness the sun’s demise, here on Earth or far beyond, won’t be human. They will be entities as different from us as we are from a bug.

    But even in this “concertinaed” timeline – extending millions of centuries into the future, as well as into the past – this century is special. It’s the first in our planet’s history where one species – ours – has Earth’s future in its hands, and could jeopardise not only itself, but life’s immense potential.

    As Richard says (via), the article “seems to be a truncated version of his book Our Final Century“.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Body Language Mimicry

    It is said that mimicking a person’s body language helps to create false camaraderie–a manufacturing of attraction, if you will. Conventional wisdom holds that this is because it helps you, the mimicker, empathise. This is false, recent research shows, but not far off; face and body motion mimicry actually “helps you to see them as they want to be seen, rather than as they really are”*.

    In interactions, targets either lied or told the truth [about donating to a charity], while observers mimicked or did not mimic the targets’ facial and behavioral movements. Detection of deception was measured directly by observers’ judgments of the extent to which they thought the targets were telling the truth and indirectly by observers’ assessment of targets’ emotions. The results demonstrated that nonmimickers were more accurate than mimickers in their estimations of targets’ truthfulness and of targets’ experienced emotions. […] In the case of deceptive messages, mimicry hinders emotional understanding.

    As Hanson says, this manufactured attraction may exist because we are signalling that we are not judging and that we are accepting what is said at face value.

    This talk of body language mimicry reminded me of an article in Intelligent Life profiling Simon Lovell–the prolific con man/card shark who evidently uses the technique quite extensively/purposefully in his cons.

    “You have to figure out someone’s wants and needs and convince them what you have will fill their emotional void.” A con man is essentially a salesman–a remarkably good one–who excels at making people feel special and understood. A con man validates the victim’s desire to believe he has an edge on other people. […]

    Mr Lovell draws people in by mirroring their body language. He breaks their defences by entering their physical space.

    *The published article in question is behind a pay wall, hence the link to Overcoming Bias.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Realistic Threat of Terrorism

    To think rationally about risk is to think probabilistically / statistically about the dangers we face.

    Noting that “the most dangerous person you’re ever likely to encounter – by several orders of magnitude – is the one you see in the mirror every morning”, John Goekler offers some perspective on what risks we really should be more concerned about than terrorism.

    A significant majority of Americans, polls repeatedly tell us, list terrorism as one of their greatest fears. Like most of our media-inspired interests and worries, however, this one has little basis in reality. […]

    As the data clearly shows, the things that genuinely threaten us are the ones we are most likely to ignore or simply accept. (We’re statistically far more likely to be killed by a lightning strike than by an action of Al Qaeda, for example.) The ones that we’re scared witless of – and spend trillions of increasingly scarce dollars to avert in our boundless paranoia – are less likely to harm us than a bag of peanuts. (Deaths in America due to peanut allergies average 50 – 100 per year. Deaths of Americans due to terrorist activities […] have averaged less than 15 per year since 2002.)

    via Schneier

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Mars Bar Unit of Account

    The fluctuating weight of the Mars Bar is quite a contentious issue here in the UK. Answering a query as to whether economists take this into account (and not just price fluctuations) when calculating inflation using the Retail Prices Index, economist Tim Harford offers some entertaining information regarding the Mars Bar unit of account.

    The Mars Bar has been worthy of scrutiny ever since the late Nico Colchester noted in the Financial Times back in 1981 that it was a very stable unit of account. It is a veritable ingot of basic commodities (sugar, milk, cocoa) that has kept its value relative to the price of other goods such as small cars, which have cost about 20,000 Mars Bars for the past 70 years.

    As Colchester wrote,

    The Mars Bar […] is a long-established basket of staple commodities (cocoa, vegetable fats, milk solids, sugar) packaged with great consistency. […] As such it is a reliable unit of account certainly more reliable than gold, which is prone to speculation and it preserves a remarkably constant real value.

    No mention of deep-fried Mars Bars, however.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Evolutionary Grounds for Depression

    Depression is an emotional response that has evolved to prevent us from experiencing mentally damaging events, a number of recent studies are starting to suggest.

    As pain stops you doing damaging physical things, so low mood stops you doing damaging mental ones—in particular, pursuing unreachable goals. Pursuing such goals is a waste of energy and resources. Therefore […] there is likely to be an evolved mechanism that identifies certain goals as unattainable and inhibits their pursuit.

    This ‘evolved mechanism’, it appears, is depression.

    As one study showed, mild depression is actually a somewhat healthy response:

    Those who experienced mild depressive symptoms could […] disengage more easily from unreachable goals. […] Those who could disengage from the unattainable proved less likely to suffer more serious depression in the long run.

    It’s an interesting theory and the negative correlation between mild depression and serious depression later in life is a telling sign that there may be some truth in the theories.

    Oh, and the image Intelligent Life is using on the article? A self-portrait of yours truly looking slightly dejected. So head on over and read the article/look at my ugly mug.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • How To Be Happy in Business

    ‘What we do well’, ‘What we can be paid to do’ and ‘What we want to do’ are the sets in Bud Caddell’s ‘How To Be Happy in Business’ Venn diagram.

    Reminding me of the love–growth–cash triangle (previously posted), this Venn diagram is an infographic worth looking at on an annual or semi-annual basis to quickly get a feel for the direction your professional life is heading.

    via Link Banana

    (From another Undercurrent strategist, Mike Arauz: the “I’d Rather Be Watching Porn” Test: “because your competition on the Internet is everything else on the Internet“.

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    Lloyd Morgan