Letters Remain

  • The Statistics of Wikipedia’s Fundraising Campaign

    Yesterday, 15th January 2011, Wikipedia celebrated its tenth birthday. Just over two weeks before, Wikipedia was also celebrating the close of its 2010 fundraising campaign where over sixteen million dollars was raised from over half a million donors in just fifty days.

    The 2010 campaign was billed as being data-driven, with the Wikipedia volunteers “testing messages, banners, and landing pages & doing it all with an eye on integrity in data analysis”.

    Naturally, all of the test data, analyses and findings are available, providing a fascinating overview of Wikipedia’s large-scale and effective campaign. Of particular interest:

    If you’re ever involved in any form of fundraising (online or off), this dataset is essential reading–as will the planned “Fundraising Style Guide” that I hope will be released soon.

    My favourite banner, which got eliminated toward the beginning of the campaign has to be:

    One day people will look back and wonder what it was like not to know.

    And if you’re interested in what Jimmy Wales had to say about his face been featured on almost every Wikipedia page for the duration of the campaign, BBC’s recent profile on the Wikipedia founder will satisfy your interest.

    via @zambonini

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Science Behind Good Presentations

    We know that cluttered presentations and those with paragraphs of text per slide aren’t good and that the 10/20/30 rule is a guideline generally worth adhering to, but why? Could there be a scientific basis for why some presentations are better than others?

    Chris Atherton, an applied cognitive psychologist at the UK’s University of Central Lancashire, studied the influence of different presentation styles on learning and retention by conducting the following experiment:

    Students were randomly assigned to two groups. One group attended a presentation with traditional bullet-point slides (with the occasional diagram) and the second group attended a presentation with what Chris calls “sparse slides”, which contained the same diagrams, but minimized the amount of text, and broke up the information over several different slides. Both presentations were accompanied by the same spoken narrative.

    When both groups were later tested on the presentation’s themes, it was the group shown the sparse slides that performed “much better”. Atherton suggests that well-designed presentations are superior teaching tools and improve recall and learning for a number of reasons:

    • The limitations of working memory: even the students who did well in recalling themes, remembered only 6-7 themes out of a possible 30.
    • The visual and auditory cortexes are not being used as effectively as they could: the cluttered slides overload the auditory cortex as it is used for written and spoken language processing.
    • Extraneous cognitive load is minimised: the sparse slides may minimise extraneous cognitive load by creating fewer competing demands on attention
    • Better encoding of information (into memory): having to work a little bit harder to integrate the speaker’s narrative with the pictures might actually improve our storage of the information (up to a point).

    via @finiteattention

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • The Basic Plots of All Stories

    That there are a finite number of basic plots from which all other stories are formed is accepted as fact by many literary theorists: Georges Polti, for instance, believes that there are thirty-six dramatic situations, while Ronald Tobias believes there to be only twenty.

    The Internet Public Library has compiled together the most commonly accepted lists of “basic” plots: one, three, seven, twenty or thirty-seven different plots, depending on which definition you subscribe to.

    In contrast to the seven selected by the IPL, there are also these additional seven “basic” plots, as described by Christopher Booker in his appropriately titled book, The Seven Basic Plots:

    • Overcoming the Monster
    • Rags to Riches
    • The Quest
    • Voyage and Return
    • Comedy
    • Tragedy
    • Rebirth
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    Lloyd Morgan

  • News’ Reliance on PR and Wire Services

    News organisations and journalists are becoming less “active gatherers of news” and more “processors of […] second-hand materials”, suggests a surprising study conducted by researchers at Cardiff University.

    Nick Davies, author of Flat Earth News, commissioned the research and provides a brief overview of this study on the state of current media reporting:

    Specialists at Cardiff University […] surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their “facts”, they discovered that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn’t be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these “facts” had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12% of the stories. […]

    And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling. They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985. In other words, as a crude average, they have only one-third of the time that they used to have to do their jobs. Generally, they don’t find their own stories, or check their content, because they simply don’t have the time.

    The study (subscription required) didn’t just look at the reporting of newspapers, however: radio and television news (BBC Radio 4, BBC News, ITV News and SkyNews) provided similar results, with the researchers concluding that this reliance “seems set to continue, if not increase, in the near future”.

    The Quality and Independence of British Journalism (pdf)–another of the output reports from the study–is freely available and offers more detail if you need it (and will most likely answer any questions).

    A similar study was conducted in Australia with similar findings.

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • An Evolutionary Hierarchy of Needs

    Parts of Abraham Maslow‘s famous 1940s hierarchy of needs are outdated and thought of as quaint by the scientific community, according to a team who have revised the hierarchy to take into consideration scientific findings from the last 60+ years.

    Maslow’s pyramid is used to represent the hierarchy of basic human motivations, from basic physical needs up to self-actualisation. Now, addressing many of the criticisms of the original, the updated hierarchy of needs (which isn’t really a hierarchy at all) places evolutionary motivations toward the top:

    The revamp of Maslow’s pyramid reflects new findings and theory from fields like neuroscience, developmental psychology and evolutionary psychology […]

    The research team […] restructured the famous pyramid after observing how psychological processes radically change in response to evolutionarily fundamental motives, such as self-protection, mating or status concerns.

    The bottom four levels of the new pyramid are highly compatible with Maslow’s, but big changes are at the top. Perhaps the most controversial modification is that self-actualization no longer appears on the pyramid at all. At the top of the new pyramid are three evolutionarily critical motives that Maslow overlooked — mate acquisition, mate retention and parenting.

    The researchers state in the article that while self-actualization is interesting and important, it isn’t an evolutionarily fundamental need. Instead, many of the activities that Maslow labeled as self-actualizing (artistic creativity, for example) reflect more biologically basic drives to gain status, which in turn serves the goal of attracting mates. […]

    For humans reproduction is not just about sex and producing children. It’s also about raising those children to the age at which they can reproduce as well. Consequently, parenting sits atop the revamped pyramid.

    There are other distinctions as well. For Maslow, once a need was met, it disappeared as the individual moved on to the next level. In the reworked pyramid, needs overlap one another and coexist, instead of completely replacing each other. For example, certain environmental cues can make them come back. If you are walking down the street thinking about love, art or the meaning of life, you will revert quickly to the self-protection level if you see an ominous-looking gang of young men headed your way.

    via @sandygautam

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Dark Patterns: Evil Design Patterns

    I’ve looked at design patterns many times before: persuasive patterns, anti-patterns and interaction patterns. The missing link: dark patterns.

    According to Harry Brignull–the designer who really started the discussion on this topic–dark patterns can succinctly be described as “user interfaces designed to trick people” or “dirty tricks designers use to make people do stuff”.

    Brignull first wrote about this type of design pattern back in July 2010, followed shortly by a dark patterns presentation for designers and researchers (29m 27s) and, more recently, a presentation aimed at brand owners and marketers (25m 29s).

    All of this leads to the Dark Patterns wiki: a listing of the most popular methods companies use to trick people through their user interfaces, including:

    via Kottke

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Preventable Startup Mistakes (That Caused the Downfall of Seven Startups)

    Verifiable, Wesabe, Storytlr, TwitApps, Vox, Swivel and EventVue: All companies or products that no longer exist after preventable problems caused their downfall.

    37signals collects their stories so that we don’t repeat the same mistakes, presenting a set of brief post-mortems on failed startups.

    The recurring issues seem to be: solving problems that the world isn’t asking for, not having a feasible revenue model (specifically, the difficulty in moving from a free to a paid service), the complexity in scaling an idea from a prototype to a functional product, failing to articulate clearly the benefits the product will bring and failing to focus on the most important product/feature.

    In addition, there’s the issue Wesabe encountered: competent competition in the form of Mint:

    Mint focused on making the user do almost no work at all, by automatically editing and categorizing their data, reducing the number of fields in their signup form, and giving them immediate gratification as soon as they possibly could; we completely sucked at all of that… I was focused on trying to make the usability of editing data as easy and functional as it could be; Mint was focused on making it so you never had to do that at all. Their approach completely kicked our approach’s ass.

    You’ll hear a lot about why company A won and company B lost in any market, and in my experience, a lot of the theories thrown about — even or especially by the participants — are utter crap. A domain name doesn’t win you a market; launching second or fifth or tenth doesn’t lose you a market. You can’t blame your competitors or your board or the lack of or excess of investment. Focus on what really matters: making users happy with your product as quickly as you can, and helping them as much as you can after that. If you do those better than anyone else out there you’ll win.

    via @zambonini

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Douglas Coupland’s Thoughts on the Future

    Throughout his most popular novels, Douglas Coupland defines terms that come to define generations and also manages to create stories that perfectly describe and connect with a certain culture at a certain time.

    In a series of recent articles, Coupland has done this once more, but looks toward the future, instead.

    One, an article covering Coupland’s prophecies for the coming ten years:

    Try to live near a subway entrance: In a world of crazy-expensive oil, it’s the only real estate that will hold its value, if not increase.

    In the same way you can never go backward to a slower computer, you can never go backward to a lessened state of connectedness.

    It is going to become much easier to explain why you are the way you are: Much of what we now consider “personality” will be explained away as structural and chemical functions of the brain.

    And two that together form an extensive glossary of terms for this coming period:

    Ikeasis: The desire in daily life and consumer life to cling to “generically” designed objects. This need for clear, unconfusing forms is a means of simplifying life amid an onslaught of information.

    Omniscience Fatigue: The burnout that comes with being able to find out the answer to almost anything online, usually on your phone.

    Pseudoalienation: The inability of humans to create genuinely alienating situations. Anything made by humans is a de facto expression of humanity. Technology cannot be alienating because humans created it. Genuinely alien technologies can be created only by aliens. Technically, a situation one might describe as alienating is, in fact, “humanating”.

    Situational Disinhibition: Social contrivances within which one is allowed to become disinhibited, that is, moments of culturally approved disinhibition.

    via @vaughanbell and Kottke

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Irrelevant Neuroscience Jargon Increases Persuasiveness

    The addition of “irrelevant talk about neuroscience” makes a previously bad psychological explanation much more persuasive and acceptable.

    Luckily experts are not fooled by this addition of spurious neuroscience, but as an in-depth look at the study shows, almost all non-experts (including neuroscience students) are fooled and persuaded by the addition of logically irrelevant neuroscience jargon to an argument:

    Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naïve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four types of explanation, according to a 2 (good explanation vs. bad explanation) x 2 (without neuroscience vs. with neuroscience) design. Crucially, the neuroscience information was irrelevant to the logic of the explanation, as confirmed by the expert subjects. Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two non-expert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without.

    I first heard of this four-year-old study in Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science; a book I mention often, and for good reason.

    via @finiteattention

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    Lloyd Morgan

  • Outliers, Regression and the Sports Illustrated Myth

    By appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, sportsmen and women become jinxed and shortly thereafter experience bouts of bad luck, goes the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx myth.

    ‘Evidence’ of the myth comes in the form of many individuals and teams who have died or, more commonly, simply experienced bad luck in their chosen vocation shortly after appearing on the cover of the magazine.

    The Wikipedia entry for the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx has a thorough list of some “notable incidences” and also provides a concise, scientific explanation of the phenomenon:

    The most common explanation for the perceived effect is that athletes are generally featured on the cover after an outlier performance; their future performance is likely to display regression toward the mean and be less impressive by comparison. This decline in performance would then be misperceived as being related to, or even possibly caused by, the appearance on the magazine cover.

    Related: The Madden NFL Curse.

    via Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science

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    Lloyd Morgan