Clare Townhill

Lying or Crazy?

Skinner Inbox

 
“We’re polluting the pool, and we don’t see the cost,” said Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and author of the Predictably Irrational blog. “When you’re carbon-copying 30 people on an e-mail, you’ve just stolen 30 seconds of 30 people’s lives. If we had to pay 25 cents per e-mail, we’d think more carefully about what we wrote, and probably write fewer e-mails.”

I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about email recently, partly because of the projects I'm involved with at the moment for BlackBerry and partly becuase I'm developing a bit of an inbox/email checking compulsion. In the corporate world, e-mail overload has led to concerns about diminishing productivity, prompting a group of technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel and Google, to band together to devise solutions. Intel has experimented with e-mail free Fridays, (in the UK Nestle has also started doing this too) and Google unveiled a Gmail feature that locks users out of e-mail for short periods of time. E-mail motivates humans the same way random schedules of reinforcement motivated rats in experiments conducted by behaviorist researcher B.F. Skinner. People check inboxes obsessively in the small but irresistible hope of reward: an important e-mail that requires immediate response.

'Hello voicemail my old friend'

'Hello voicemail, my old friend. I've called for tech support again. I ignored my boss' warning. I called on a Monday morning. Now it's evening, and my dinner first grew cold -- and then grew mold. I'm still on hold. I'm listening to the sounds of silence. I don't think you understand. I think your phone lines are unmanned. I punched every touch tone I was told, but I still spent 18 hours on hold. It's not enough your software crashed my Mac and it constantly hangs and bombs -- it erased my ROMS! Now the Mac makes the sounds of silence. In my dreams I fantasize of wreaking vengeance on you guys. Say your motorcycle crashes. Blood comes gushing from your gashes. With your fading strength, you call 9-1-1 and you pray for a trained MD. But you get me. And you listen to the sounds of silence.'

A Tweet Philosophy

If a man has a Twitter blog but never tweets does it really exist? Philosopher Alain de Botton has 2,877 followers but never says a word. Is he like the rest of us for whom signing up was more than enough to sate and kill our interest, or is the silence a comment on the moral emptiness of the universe? Yeah, I reckon.

Where Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets

Twitter for the stuff that happens between email. Hmmm. Very interesting piece in the Harvard Business Review. Here's a skimmed top line overview. Full fat here.

Cocks and Hens
Splitting the tweeters and followers by gender reveals some very interesting things:

Men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%. To get this figure, we cross-referenced users' "real names" against a database of 40,000 strongly gendered names.

Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity - both men and women tweet at the same rate.

These results are stunning given what previous research has found in the context of online social networks. On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they knowⁱ. Generally, men receive comparatively little attention from other men or from women. We wonder to what extent this pattern of results arises because men and women find the content produced by other men on Twitter more compelling than on a typical social network, and men find the content produced by women less compelling (because of a lack of photo sharing, detailed biographies, etc.).

Twitter's Usage Patterns

Twitter's usage patterns are also very different from a typical on-line social network. A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

At the same time there is a small contingent of users who are very active. Specifically, the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue - Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia's edits ⁱⁱ. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter's resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

Counting Down to the End of Moore's Law

 The capacity of flash chips has doubled 14 times in 19 years. That’s faster than Moore’s Law — the observation by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, that the capacity of semiconductors doubles roughly every two years.

“We’re looking at a brick wall five years down the road,” says Eli Harari, the chief executive of SanDisk,

In 1990, when SanDisk shipped its first generation of flash memory — the sort that can remember information even after you turn off the power — each chip stored four million bits of information. Today, the biggest chip SanDisk makes holds 64 billion bits.

SanDisk and other flash memory makers have figured out how to cram even more information into that tiny cell. Until a few years ago, each of those cells worked the way most computer memory does — it represented either a zero or a one. Now the chip can actually count how many electrons are in a cell, and depending on the number it can write and read up to 16 states (recording a number between zero and 15, or four bits to a computer).

Let’s stop for a second to take stock of the wonder of all this. The last flash memory card I bought for my camera held two gigabytes (16 billion bits). It cost me $6. And somewhere inside it is something that is counting electrons 40 at a time. An electron has a radius of 2.8179 × 10⁻¹⁵ meters. In layman’s terms it is pretty much the smallest thing you could ever count.

BITS: Counting Down to Moore's Law

Organizing Lightning

George Carlin - "Electricity is really just organized lightning."

Is TV the new Radio?

I've been reading and enjoying Carrie Brownstein's blog "Monitor Mix" for a while now. Here's an excerpt from today's post 'Radio on the TV':

I don't watch a lot television. But I am aware, and have been for at least a decade, that when I tune in, it's very likely that I'll discover a band, listen to the premier of a new single, or hear an old song that I love. This phenomenon is one that I now take for granted. But when exactly did my television turn into a jukebox?

General consensus is that The OC transformed the musical television landscape, though that probably had a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time. As mainstream radio support for indie bands waned, The OC picked up the torch, becoming a stand alone albeit surreal context to discover up and coming bands. And while other shows had merely played a few seconds of a song to bolster or foment emotion in a scene, The OC acted in a more curatorial and intentional fashion. The music was part of the characters' lives, which further cemented the identification that the audience felt with the show. The OC gave boosts to bands like Phantom Planet, Modest Mouse, and Sufjan Stevens, releasing CD "mixes" in the style of CMJ music samplers instead of soundtracks.

But let's be honest. Most of us didn't watch The OC, and if we did, we certainly wouldn't credit them with anything more than having a shrewd and perspicacious music supervisor. Additionally, they weren't first in marrying the two mediums. But who was and who was actually good at it? 

The rest

Children's Films, Adult Problems

Hugely anticipated and vastly over budget Spike Jonze's adaptation of 'Where the Wild Things Are'. Whilst drawing praise from fans and critics Warner are worried about the adapt and more acutely the marketing department are concerned about the breadth of the films appeal. A film with so bloated a budget needs big audiences;Warner's 'private' concern has surfaced very publicly in Adage:

"It doesn't look like a family movie," said the head of creative advertising at a rival studio familiar with Warner's angst. "Are they going for the cineastes or are they going to convince kids to go? It's the most interesting marketing problem in town right now."

Adage: Marketing 'Where the Wild Things Are' won't be child's play'

Which brings me to the other kidult film dilemma: the woeful Coraline. Billed as a 3D spectacular, today's darling format. Sadly, even in 3D this would be a disappointment unless those specs have acquired the magical property of being able to add a dimension to the characters. Two hours of deeply unnerving if beautifully crafted animation. Largely devoid of charm and bizarrely passed as PG. Coraline is very scary: at one point I grabbed the arm of the male friend who I was with for comfort, something I haven't done since I watched the Omen for the first (and last) time. Despite all this reviewers can't seem to get enough of Coraline and her nasty button-eyed friends. Five stars all round. Odd. Very odd indeed.

Who says romance is dead?

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If this ad appeals to you then you may well find your spiritual home at seekingarrangement.com. Brutally honest 'Babies' (who join for free) and 'Daddys' twang each others unattached strings to their hearts/wallets content.