Letters Remain

  • Privacy Salience and Social Networking Sites

    Privacy could become a competitive feature of social networking sites, suggests Bruce Schneier in an article that looks at the interesting topic of privacy salience: the suggestion that privacy reassurances make people more, not less, concerned.

    Privacy salience does a lot to explain social networking sites and their attitudes towards privacy. From a business perspective, social networking sites don’t want their members to exercise their privacy rights very much. They want members to be comfortable disclosing a lot of data about themselves.

    […] Users care about privacy, but don’t really think about it day to day. The social networking sites don’t want to remind users about privacy, even if they talk about it positively, because any reminder will result in users remembering their privacy fears and becoming more cautious about sharing personal data. But the sites also need to reassure those “privacy fundamentalists” for whom privacy is always salient, so they have very strong pro-privacy rhetoric for those who take the time to search them out. The two different marketing messages are for two different audiences.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Absolute and Relative Poverty

    I’ve already mentioned the World Bank’s startling definition of extreme poverty: $1.25, adjusted for PPP. This is what is known as absolute poverty and it is seldom used by politicians—who prefer to look at poverty in relative terms.

    Relative poverty is slightly more involved, and the BBC weighs in with the internationally accepted definition of relative poverty: 60% of the median income for a given country.

    This is not to comment on the experience of poverty or the rights and wrongs of who gets what, just to show how the system works. […]

    It’s the calculation the government uses to measure its success in reducing poverty, including child poverty, for which it sets targets. It’s also used for country comparisons. […]

    [The median is used] because calculating the mean would include everyone, including the Chelsea football team’s stellar earners. Would it make sense to say that one person’s poverty depends on what John Terry earns [£150,000 /week]? Using the mean would make it a measure of inequality.

    But then some have argued that relative poverty is so similar to income inequality that the latter term should be used instead.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Five Whys

    Five Whys is “a question-asking method used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Ultimately, the goal of applying the 5 Whys method is to determine a root cause of a defect or problem”. Developed by Taiichi Ohno–one of the inventors of the Toyota Production System–the oft-cited example is as follows:

    • My car will not start. (the problem)
    1. Why? – The battery is dead. (first why)
    2. Why? – The alternator is not functioning. (second why)
    3. Why? – The alternator belt has broken. (third why)
    4. Why? – The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and has never been replaced. (fourth why)
    5. Why? – I have not been maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule. (fifth why, root cause)

    I was introduced to Five Whys in a post by Joel Spolsky back in early 2008 detailing their post-mortem examination following a system outage (which also looks at the problems with SLAs).

    Entrepreneur Eric Ries recently wrote a comprehensive post detailing how to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis which I suppose acts as an update to this previous post of his where he introduces his readers to the Five Whys concept and adds this important caveat:

    The next step is this: you have to commit to make a proportional investment in corrective action at every level of the analysis.

    Five Whys is a concept I’ve attempted to–somewhat successfully–apply to myself and my development. When I make mistakes or when I don’t understand something I ask why until I find the root cause of my error, the misunderstanding, or the negative reaction. Similarly, GigaOM’s Mike Speiser recommends Five Ways as one of the four techniques you should embrace in order to become at ease with ideas that make you uncomfortable.

    You may find that your reaction is more about protecting existing orthodoxy or the source of the idea than it is about the merits of the particular approach at hand.

    And of course, to end in a joke, you don’t want to ask why too many times (via Kottke).

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Problem with Happiness Research

    Talking of happiness, University of California philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel discusses the problem with the self-reporting of happiness for research purposes.

    If the intervention is obviously intended to increase happiness, participants may well report more happiness post-intervention simply to conform to their own expectations, or because they endorse a theory on which the intervention should increase happiness, or because they’ve invested time in the intervention procedure and they’d prefer not to think of their time as wasted, or for any of a number of other reasons. Participants might think something like, “I reported a happiness level of 3 before, and now that I’ve done this intervention I should report 4” — not necessarily in so many words.

    […] The vast majority of the U.S. population describe themselves as happy (despite our high rate of depression and anger problems), and self-reports of happiness are probably driven less by accurate perception of one’s level of happiness than by factors like the need to see and to portray oneself as a happy person (otherwise, isn’t one something of a failure?). My own background assumption […] is that those reports are driven primarily by the need to perceive oneself a certain way, by image management, by contextual factors, by one’s own theories of happiness, and by pressure to conform to perceived experimenter expectations.

    Of course, reactivity isn’t a problem exclusively linked with this type of research, but it’s worth reiterating.

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Universality of Happiness

    Or not.

    Research looking at how different cultures (specifically, Americans and Japanese) perceive the concept of happiness has shown that it’s not a universal constant, at least in terms of how we define it.

    [The researchers] systematically analyzed American and Japanese participants’ spontaneously produced descriptions of [happiness and unhappiness] and observed, as predicted, that whereas Americans associated positive hedonic experience of happiness with personal achievement, Japanese associated it with social harmony.

    Furthermore, Japanese were more likely than Americans to mention both social disruption and transcendental reappraisal as features of happiness. As also predicted, unlike happiness, descriptions of unhappiness included various culture-specific coping actions: Whereas Americans focused on externalizing behavior (e.g., anger and aggression), Japanese highlighted transcendental reappraisal and self-improvement.

    Surely this has some implications that I’m not thinking of?

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Graduating into the Recession and What Next

    For recent graduates, those in their early 20’s and, well, almost everyone else, the job market at the moment is overwhelming bad. There’s hope, of course, and this interview between recent graduate and entrepreneur Alex J. Mann and Phila Lawyer discussing what it’s like graduating into one of the nastiest job markets in history is a good place to start in trying to understand what it’s like and where to go.

    If there is one upside to the economic downturn, it’s that suddenly we’ve been put in the position to creatively fend for ourselves. For instance, when all of the traditional career options that a business major typically approaches have gone thin, the desperation is followed by a wave of experimentation. […] In my opinion, this is how it should be. College, or any form of education, shouldn’t create a path or destiny. It should create options to choose our own.

    The few ambitious ones are going into entrepreneurial ventures. But, the majority of students are too scared to take that responsibility, because society tells us otherwise. A positive sign is there are plenty of students attempting to use the Internet to either market themselves, or to attempt to monetize their ideas. There are mini-movements of students realizing that they can leverage the Internet to do both what makes them happy and creates cash flow (yes, both!). It is uncommon though.

    […] There’s a strong sense of entrepreneurship with people my age now, even if they aren’t all acting on it. There’s an itch to go do something on your own.

    The interview touches on many topics—education, entrepreneurship, generational differences/expectations, the economy—and it’s also worth popping over to Alex’s site to read a couple of his after-thoughts.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Point of Economists

    Following Queen Elizabeth’s question to the economists—Why did no one see the crisis coming?—the Financial Times goes one further asking, What is the point of economists?

    If the economics profession could not warn the public about the credit crunch and the recession, what is the profession’s raison d’etre? Did this reflect, as some claim, that economics has gone astray with models that no longer help understand economic reality but rather distort it? Did such models even contribute to the crisis?

    Respondents include Samuel Brittan, the FT‘s economic commentator; George Magnus, senior economic adviser for UBS Investment Bank and author of The Age of Aging; and Robert Shrimsley, FT managing editor. This, from an FT editorial:

    No economic theory can perform the feats its users have come to expect of it. Economics is unlikely ever to be very good at predicting the future. Too much of what happens in an economy depends on what people expect to happen. Even state-of-the-art forecasts are therefore better guides to the present mood than the future. Though they may also be self-fulfilling prophecies.

    Dabbling in paradox limits the use of economics as a practical guide. Today the profession’s best advice must convince politicians and the public to combat a crisis born of insufficient thrift by a recourse to record borrowing. Those who saw danger had no easier task: even reminding people of gravity’s existence is a hard sell when everything is going up.

    If predictions of physics-like precision are in demand, they will be supplied. Collective delusion must therefore be blamed as much on the consumers of economics – companies, investors, the media – as its producers.

    (Free registration required, I believe.)

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Emails Predicting Organisational Collapse

    Regardless of content, the email patterns inside organisations may be able to predict approaching crises. This is the conclusion of a study looking at how the communication between Enron employees changed as the company approached its 2001 bankrupcy.

    [Researchers] expected communication networks to change during moments of crisis. Yet the researchers found that the biggest changes actually happened around a month before. For example, the number of active email cliques, defined as groups in which every member has had direct email contact with every other member, jumped from 100 to almost 800 around a month before [Enron’s] December 2001 collapse. Messages were also increasingly exchanged within these groups and not shared with other employees.

    [Ronaldo] Menezes thinks he and [Ben] Collingsworth may have identified a characteristic change that occurs as stress builds within a company: employees start talking directly to people they feel comfortable with, and stop sharing information more widely.

    As other researchers in this area have suggested, such shifts in communication patterns “could be used as an early warning sign of growing discontent within an organisation”.

    via Mind Hacks

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Agri-Intellectuals and the Omnivore’s Delusion

    Playing on the title of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Missouri farmer Blake Hurst pens an extremely well argued and reasoned response to the criticisms the ‘agri-intellectuals’ pile on industrial farmers and their production methods—particularly those rearing livestock.

    Farming has always been messy and painful, and bloody and dirty. It still is. This is something the critics of industrial farming never seem to understand.

    […] I deal in the real world, not superstitions, and unless the consumer absolutely forces my hand, I am about as likely to adopt organic methods as the Wall Street Journal is to publish their next edition by setting the type by hand. […] Farmers can raise food in different ways if that is what the market wants. It is important, though, that [non-experts and critics] know that there are environmental and food safety costs to whatever kind of farming we choose.

    Of course, this is not to say that Michael Pollan and his ilk are wrong; just misunderstood or wrong on certain subjects.

    For example, Pollan’s excellent 2007 article is a fantastic and learned piece, and is still worth reading today (Ben Casnocha has a great summation of the article). His mantra, too, is as valid as ever (Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.).

    It’s just worth remembering that there are two sides to every argument. More from The Omnivore’s Delusion:

    [Critics expect] me to farm like my grandfather, and not incidentally, I suppose, to live like him as well. [They think] farmers are too stupid to farm sustainably, too cruel to treat their animals well, and too careless to worry about their communities, their health, and their families.

    But farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural system. I use chemicals and diesel fuel to accomplish the tasks my grandfather used to do with sweat, and I use a computer instead of a lined notebook and a pencil, but I’m still farming the same land he did 80 years ago, and the fund of knowledge that our family has accumulated about our small part of Missouri is valuable. And everything I know and I have learned tells me this: we have to farm “industrially” to feed the world, and by using those “industrial” tools sensibly, we can accomplish that task and leave my grandchildren a prosperous and productive farm, while protecting the land, water, and air around us.

    via Arts and Letters Daily

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The ‘Benefits’ of Organic

    After analysing all available evidence from the past 50 years, a study commissioned by the UK government’s Food Standards Agency has come to the conclusion that organic food is no healthier (in terms of nutritional value and any extra health benefits) than ‘ordinary’ food.

    From the blog of the FSA’s Chief Scientist:

    The most comprehensive review in this area that has been carried out to date […] concluded that there are no important differences in nutrition content between organic and conventionally produced food.

    […] It’s a fact that conventional production methods permit the use of a wider range of pesticides than organic. That said, some pesticides can be used in organic production.

    […] To me, the main take-home message from this report is that in order to eat a healthy diet it doesn’t matter if it’s made up of organic or conventionally produced food. Surely that’s good news for all of us?

    From the FSA’s press release, which also links to the study itself (pdf):

    What [this study] shows is that there is little, if any, nutritional difference between organic and conventionally produced food and that there is no evidence of additional health benefits from eating organic food.

    The Soil Association (an independent body that certifies organic food) didn’t like the conclusions reached, but made a good point about the study:

    Without large-scale, longitudinal research it is difficult to come to far-reaching clear conclusions on this, which was acknowledged by the authors of the FSA review.

    It’s worth noting that there were a small number of nutritional differences found between organic and conventionally produced food but that these differences were “not large enough to be of any public health relevance”. It’s also useful to realise that people buy organic food for myriad other reasons.

    For a short summation of the argument between the various parties interested in this research (specifically, the FSA and Soil Organisation), the BBC has a well-balanced news item.

    Update: Seed Magazine‘s look at the issue is also worth a read.

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    Lloyd Morgan