Letters Remain

  • What Will Change Everything?

    The Edge annual question, 2009: What will change everything?

    Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news.

    As ever, the respondents cover every topic of science with answers that are as enlightening as they are wide-ranging.

    Now I just need to trawl through the previous questions at Edge’s World Question Center.

    via Richard Holden

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Interview with Obama’s Campaign Manager

    An interview with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign manager, David Plouffe:

    There are business analogies. One is, we’re a startup, we had to go from zero to 60 in a matter of weeks. Our company, if we were successful, would only last two years at the most. You have an end line. You don’t have quarter after quarter to succeed. You either win or lose on Election Day. It is a very accelerated environment. For us particularly, because we weren’t planning to run for president, he got into this very unconventionally. It’s like taking off while you’re fixing the wings on a plane. You’re up on the high wire, but by the end we raised over three quarters of a billion dollars, over $750 million dollars. We had over 5,000 employees, we had millions of active volunteers. So it was a big organization. The most important thing for me as a manager was the senior staff. If you don’t have strong senior staff, you’re going to struggle, and I was blessed to have a strong senior staff. And we were an organization about accountability. Down to the entry-level staffer, we measured their job performance based on metrics.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • For-Profit Charities

    Charities should embrace for-profit business models in order to drive fundraising, or so says Dan Pallotta, author of Uncharitable and founder of the now-defunct Pallotta TeamWorks company; a for-profit organisation that produced many successful fundraising events for nonprofits.

    In his column The Sin of Doing Good Deeds, The New York Times op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof said:

    There’s a broad recognition in much of the aid community that a major rethink is necessary, that groups would be more effective if they borrowed more tools from the business world, and that there is too much “gotcha” scrutiny on overhead rather than on what they actually accomplish. It’s notable that leaders of Oxfam and Save the Children have publicly endorsed the book, and it’s certainly becoming more socially acceptable to note that businesses can also play a powerful role in fighting poverty.

    I can think of no good reason why this shouldn’t be so, and no other way charities can attract top business school talent. As Pollotta said, making a difference and making money shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Science of Shopping

    The Economist has a fascinating and eye-opening article looking at the ‘science of shopping’. Mind Hacks reviews the article:

    The piece discusses the psychology of big store marketing, touching on three areas: store layout and environment design, ‘neuromarketing’ and customer tracking.

    It’s interesting that much of the fuss in the media has focused on ‘neuromarketing’ – the use of cognitive neuroscience to understand consumer behaviour – when it is clear from this article that it is really quite impotent in the face of the two other powerful techniques.

    Neuromarketing is largely the study of financial decision making and typically relies on correlating brain activity with simulated consumer purchasing.

    The idea is that it will explain how we make purchase decisions and will give us access to some of the unconscious process that are at work. Once we understand these, it could lead marketers to new techniques that we would never have discovered by studying behaviour or opinions alone.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Recession’s Influence on Working Habits

    During times of recession the way business is conducted changes drastically. Given the current economic climate, Lynda Gratton—a professor from the London Business School—wonders what working habits will emerge now?

    The 1981-82 recession heralded the end of the notion of a “job for life”. Jobs and careers would never be the same. The mantra following the 1980s recession was that of the “free agent”. The relationship between employees and employer was described as moving from “parent-child” to “adult-adult”; flexible working was increasingly seen as a viable option and only the deluded thought they had a job for life. This is increasingly seen as the norm, bringing despair to some and a sense of liberation to others.

    The recession of 1990-91 accelerated these changes while adding one more important dimension – that of globalisation. Costs were cut by moving work out of the developed countries into the labour markets of the emerging nations such as India and eastern Europe. What began as the exodus of low-cost work accelerated over the next 10 years into the globalisation of talent in sectors such as information technology and research.

    So what impact will the current recession have on work over the next decade? Of course, these trends are easy to spot in hindsight – more difficult when you are in the midst of the downturn. But there are enough clues for us to make a guess.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • International Year of Astronomy 2009

    2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, and to celebrate Seed Magazine has compiled some awe-inspiring images.

    For more incredible images, see The Big Picture’s Hubble Space Telescope Advent calendar.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Celebrating Neutrality

    On wondering why there are a lot fewer prediction markets than the topic’s popularity might suggest, Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias looks at neutral arbitrators and asks, Who Cheers the Referee?

    Similarly who cheers the officials who keep elections fair, or the teachers who grade fairly?  Inspiring stories are told of folks who win legal cases or music competitions, but what stories are told of fair neutral judges who make sure the right people win?  After all, competition stories are not nearly as inspiring with arbitrary or corrupt judges.  Oh judges are sometimes celebrated, but for supporting the “good” side, not for making a fair neutral evaluation.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Success During the Great Depression

    From Google Answers:

    “What industries fared relatively better and worse in terms of pricing and demand during the Great Depression of 1929? Do the industries reflect a hierarchy of demand from essential consumables to deferrable purchases to capital goods? What specific companies did well in any industry and what distinguishes those companies.”

    The answer provides an in-depth look at marketing and advertising during the depression.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Moving Past Conspicuous Consumption

    Rob Walker—New York Times columnist (Consumed) and author of Buying In—calls for an end to conspicuous consumption, the purchasing of lavish goods purely to project wealth, and a move towards the invisible badge:

    Thorstein Veblen introduced the idea of “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class, in 1899. And it’s still being recycled today. Veblen gave examples like the man who parades down Main Street in “stainless” linen, with a superfluous walking stick. These objects supposedly told a story—”evidence of leisure”—to an audience of strangers.

    Today’s consumer is supposed to be a little more sophisticated than that. So it’s puzzling how many marketers still talk about how a certain beer or sneaker or handbag functions as a so-called “badge.” Even hybrid cars are said to be eco-status markers that show “conspicuous concern” about the environment. More scholarly observers call this “signaling.” But in the end it’s all repackaged Veblen: The idea is that we buy stuff mostly to impress other people.

    Perhaps this was true in the past. But the time has come to retire the conspicuous consumption idea. Observers of consumer culture (marketers, to name an example) need to understand that as a concept, it’s inadequate. The rest of us (consumers, that is) need to understand that even if we wanted it to work, it just doesn’t anymore.

    There is a better idea—the invisible badge.

    More from Rob Walker’s own blog, Murketing.

    Lloyd Morgan

  • Journal Requires Authors to Submit to Wikipedia

    Despite the growth of open access, most scientific journals are still closed and the access debate rages on. Now, however, the closed access RNA Biology has chosen another option: it requires all scientists submitting an article for publication to also create a Wikipedia article outlining their findings.

    From the journal’s new submission guidelines:

    At least one stub article (essentially an extended abstract) for the paper should be added to either an author’s userspace at Wikipedia (preferred route) or added directly to the main Wikipedia space (be sure to add literature references to avoid speedy deletion). This article will be reviewed alongside the manuscript and may require revision before acceptance. Upon acceptance the former articles can easily be exported to the main Wikipedia space.

    via ReadWriteWeb

    Lloyd Morgan