They set up the straw man:that it is an error to suggest people are a function of a “simple model for the metabolic, neural and Internet networks, and the same model is applied to human beings — that all parts of the network are identical and interchangeable”.
They never knock it down but extrapolate beyond the data with innuendo of their own PR.One can only imagine that Christakis and cronies will be doing collaborative work with Steven Pinker soon on the topology of the mind, call it science and write another book on the mind’s influences in support of Pinker’s postulate that the reason the Chief justice misquoted the oath of President Obama was a “blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling”Or was it a Freudian slip?Hmmm… Science, huh... How very canny for the Language Don Dr. Pinker to point that out as he knows so much about both people’s histories, relevant factors and ‘mindful’ homunculi like those “inherent characteristics that govern where we [as individuals] gravitate to in the social network.”
“A second implication is that the [current] study suggests that if we really want to understand how things [?what ‘things’?] diffuse in social networks, we need to take into account people’s locations in the social networks, which are due in part to their genes,” Christakis pontificated while showing no data or peer reviewed research.
Please see the Baloney Detection Kit submitted for consideration for those reading content from any media channel, including Buzz Creation or Mythinformation efforts by mainstream print media to get more subscribers and kooks to buy their fading printed words.
I am looking forward to more “sharper predictions” from the Christakis Mythinformation crew.
“If we want humanoid robots to teach or have other social functions, we need them to trigger mirror neurons,” Oberman told New Scientist.
This logic doesn’t necessarily hold.
Having the biology of humans is not required to produce behavior (we likely just haven’t developed complex enough alternative “biology” to match the human biology)
There is a very big ambiguity with the phrases “humanoid” and “social functions”. That ambiguity makes it difficult to test assumptions and theories
AI != Human Ability
Is the goal of AI and robotics to produce humanlike abilities? I think many AI, robotics and computational complexity folks abandoned that goal a long time ago. Perhaps it’s attainable, but why would we want to attain humanness in things non human?
Besides, unless something IS human it’s always going to seem to some degree non-human to us. That statement doesn’t mean that non-human intelligence/complexity/robotics is incapable of complex behavior, learning, socializing, etc. etc. It means that those behaviors will play out in a way that seems different to us than they do in humans.
Failure to understand how users and money flow through the Internet costs media and etailers a lot of money every day. There are huge misconceptions about where the “value” actually lives for user data, advertising performance and profit margins on all this high tech.
The following figures attempt to disambiguate some of the confusion. The summarized conclusions come from a variety of data sources and real life experiences analyzing financial statements, traffic reports, advertiser analysis and experimentation. Specifically one could get someone exact figures by combining comScore, Quantcast, Compete, Google Analytics, TNS, @Plan, SEC Filings, internal reports, revenue statements and DART forecasting as I have done several times.
This post is meant to be a demonstration of the core concepts, not a statistical treatise on the topic.
If you hate reading too much, skip to the end for a somewhat realistic example of how traffic flows.
Traffic on the Internet roughly splits 7 segments. (as shown in the figures below). These segments are defined by where the sit in the user experience by amount of consumptive behavior (clicks, reading, sharing, watching). How the user gets from segment to segment is not completely linear in actuality, but when you coagulate a users behavior you’ll roughly see a funnel in terms of time spent, pageviews and ad impressions.
Traffic Funnel
The segments can be characterized also by their ad performance, ad targeting (how specific is the user in their activity), and their audience coverage (how much of the particular audience segment does a type of site/service reach)
Funnel Traffic Segments
Each segment has a different cost profile. Here I look at labor costs to maintain and capital expenses to build and power.
Where's the Cost?
As you can guess, each traffic segment has a different profit profile too. This is largely the result of combining the advertising/revenue performance with the cost profile. Certain Internet services simply do not have a strong profit opportunity because they borrow old models and/or cost more than the market is willing to pay. (Perhaps that will stabilize one day, but I think software tools and low cost hardware disrupt the demand curve A LOT because users can often supply their own demands once the cost gets too high, hence why TOOLS are the most profitable segment.)
Profit Margins by Segment
Make no mistake about what I’m presenting here. The profit online is all in retailing, portals/search and tools/utilities. The stuff in the middle of the funnel is highly susceptible to competitive displacement and has very little intellectual property protection. You can verify this conclusion by reviewing revenue statements and SEC filings for the big tech and internet companies.
The advent of citizen journalism and self publishing flattened the media market. Owning a printing press was once “high tech” and a capital investment barrier. Owning the right location on the main street was once a logistical barrier. High speed computers and difficult programming languages was once a technical barrier. Those 3 feature are gone. Media is now, well, almost purely a creative barrier. There’s a huge pool of creative talent constantly struggling against each other. Creativity is worth a lot once it rises above everything else. That happens so rarely to make it a bad investment. Every minute more and more people enter the creative market (how many blog posts per hour? how many videos go up each day?… a lot.)
organizing, sifting, filtering, distributing, aggregating… that’s the sweet spot. There is a technical hurdle, but the investment is worth it as there will never be less of a need to filter, sift, find, distribute.
This week we had a beautiful illustration of these concepts with the Presdential Inauguration.
Most of the US users watched the Inauguration, most on TV, a lot with online video streams and 2 million in person. During and Immediately following the inauguration the Internet lit up with content creation and massive usage. The portals and search engines featured as many new links and breaking stories to the news coverage.
The social networks shot pictures, tweets and status updates around, occassionally referencing links to the confirmation gaff, benediction speech text, and satelite pictures from DC.
Micro bloggers summarized everything as fast as they could, while the search engines and utilities sucked in that content. The original content creators probably released a previously composed story and put that live.
Mainstream users shut down their video streams and took to the portals and search engine, seeking more info on what just happened or insight into a specific moment. Most times they ended up at CNN or NYTimes. Many times, but less frequently, they hit a blog that had some recent content. Most users probably ran into a wikipedia reference link or youtube video.
Some users ended up on amazon to buy Obama’s books or some inauguration swag. Finally as the day concluded and original content creators finally had enough time to craft something, users might find themselves falling asleep to a good OpEd on the history of the day or an interview with the Michelle Obama dress designers.
By 3 days later the amount of content available on the inauguration is 1000x greater than within the first 10 minutes. Original content creators are hopelessly buried amongst the blog posts, tweets, continuosly AP feed CNN articles and YouTube embeds. The bloggers are buried by other bloggers. The news stories give way to other news stories.
The utilities that sort, sift, filter and monetize on it all just got a 1000x better experience and continue to catch the huge volume of user investigation and digging. The own the head, the trunk and that dreaded long tail and collect user targeting data all along the way.
Can there be any mystery why the sophisticated symbolism of words binds people to…
Others
Ideals
Fear
Anger
Dogma
Superstition
Loss
Hope?
This learned set of symbols… these words… in whatever language they form… are powerful. Words have a value that connects people reading and hearing them as well as separates those not understanding those words.
Based on past histories and current contexts words rouse unforgettable warmth or irreconcilable anger which, in term, become learned by those experiencing them and watching others experience them. It is a reciprocal relationship; words represent traditions and traditions represent words (as we witnessed with the second swearing in of President Obama). When repeated over and over words morph oh so slowly while becoming ingrained in the fabric of civilization.Traditions, including those of religion, bigotry, superstition, inaugurations and funerals are indelible links between people all represented by words.
Sam Harris in “The End of Faith,” has many logical points concerning traditions, superstition and cultures as do so many others including this author. However, at one time or another we all miss another point that gets lost in emotional [ratio strain] self-righteousness; being right is a relative target and is not what everyone values. One thing for sure is that we all value some words organized in some order representing some experiences.
The changes Sam Harris and others search for will come only through a process of selection by consequences.The things that will replace bigotry and fear and traditions of hate must be learned just as the superstitions and belief systems they were based on were learned. If that is the case, and it most assuredly is, Sam and some of the others will not be here to celebrate a new form of enlightenment where understanding the elemental basis of how behavior works is a primary requirement of primary school graduation.
While we work for all those words describing the elements of understanding behavior in our culture we can appreciate Dr. Lowery’s words for what they represent: a plea to figure out what the heck is going on out there.
And the 2009 Oscar Nominees are…. (see last years review last years nominees)
Best Picture:
Benjamin Button
Frost Nixon
MILK
The Reader
SlumDog Millionaire
Main points of note: Heath Ledger gets a nod, Slumdog Millionaire is still the darling, Meryl Streep is up yet again, Dark Knight didn’t get a nomination. get the rest of today’s nomineeshere.
blah blah blah
The Academy Awards are such a funny thing. Like blogs, it’s content about content. It’s not really “content unto itself”. Content about content is bound to the quality and audience sway of that underlying content it makes commentary on. In that way, the Academy Awards have a difficult situation in trying to seem legit in honoring truly remarkable films while attending to the facts that a diminished awards show audience doesn’t want to see a show all about indie films and no names.
Either way, the Oscars could probably use the ratings help a box office success can bring to its broadcast. In recent years, the Academy has nominated several independent or low-budget films for top awards, many of which didn’t crack the $100 million mark at the box office. Oscar ratings have tumbled; last year’s numbers for “the Super Bowl for women” — as the Oscar broadcast is known by advertisers — were the lowest on record and a far cry from 1998, when more than 55 million people watched all-time box office king “Titanic” take home the top prize.
Again, very similar to blogs and web traffic. If I don’t blog about the oscars or post pictures and stories from the ceremony, my blog will get buried. Any website that doesn’t talk about the Oscars will get slightly less traffic today than those that do. Perhaps that doesn’t seem like such a big deal, except when you consider what a dog fight it is in the publishing and media industry to get advertisers right now. And getting those ad dollars is directly correlated to daily traffic numbers (ratings!).
Perhaps more blogs and media outlets should try to create original content and develop first party audience. Unfortunately, it’s too expensive and has a very low probability for success. The data demonstrates this.
There’s a fine line to ride here and more often than not it’s crossed on blogs, in newspapers, and the Oscars. Some purists and critics will cry fowl, but in the end, money talks.
Mysticism returns to prime time TV with this inane crime stopper series “LIE to ME*” heralding the star (Tim Roth) and his team’s ability to read people’s faces to tell when they are lying about what. Crimes are just the medium for the law enforcement to clean up with all that legal mumbo jumbo.
Forget the advance science of real life CSI groups who offer empirical data as evidence supporting suspicion of involvement or not that is shown or implied in other TV dramas.Too many big words and too much emphasis on logic over folklore. That was wayyyyyy to tough to understand.
So, I guess the Vietnam war injury from a concussion grenade will not get mentioned in the villain’s arraignment.We’ll be able to tell if President Obama really is going to address the issues of the day and, most importantly, whether or not he is embarrassed to have a middle name of “Hussain” after all.
Working with this fantasy, think of where it could all lead:you are successful based on not being able to terse your lips or raise an eyebrow due to Botox. No more need for matters as suspect as a ‘Twinkie defense.’ It was a facial tick that sealed the doom that the Olympian was using banned substances… Or, your movie is given the green light because you looked the producers in the eye and your nose didn’t flare at the same time…
If only we knew what to look for before Columbine and West Virginia events…And all along those media mongrels were leading down the path of science, contingency management and stem cell hope.But no more…
Enter the latest version of phrenology** and voodoo*** for prime consumption.
I am so disappointed.
*Not the absolute blues-grunt-rock of Jonny Lang’s live version of “Lie to Me”
**Phrenology: a defunct and debunked field of study, once considered a science, in which a person’s personality was first implied and then determined by experts “reading” bumps and fissures in the subjects skull.
***Voodoo: religion based on mix of Roman Catholic teachings and West African beliefs that there are numerous deities subordinate to a greater god spirit (who does not traffic in matters or events of mere humans). Prayers and incantations to lower gods who show their work by symbolism in everything from tea leafs to smoke – only coincidently related to the smoke from a sacred chimney announcing a new Pope.
Based on their graph of searches per hour and assuming at $5-7 eCPM on searches and an estimate of 500,000,000-1,000,000,000 searches per day (or 21,000,000 to 42,000,000 searches per hour)* ….
Google lost over 20,000,000 queries during the inauguration or $100,000-140,000 on search.
Assuming a similar loss of general traffic across the web it cost Google an additional $40,000-60,000 in AdWords revenue.
Wow. that’s a lot of ad revenue to lose for about a 1 hour interuption. I suppose CNN, Facebook, and other news outlets picked up that extra ad traffic.
*Based on 2008 comscore reports and UU estimates from quantcast.
* My estimates for revenue per hour roughly equate to the quarterly earnings after you do all the math to roll it up. So the eCPM and searchs per hour seem to be solid assumptions.
In yet another confounding of the same sitatuion we see played out over and over in thousands of published studies, Seed gives us a report on how moral decisions are contextual.
“No, the results did not surprise us,” says Lindenberg. “What surprised us was the size of the effect.”
This is not unlike the findings from last week’s feature on social conformity we found on CNN. What’s different is the more sound conclusions from these researchers.
It’s not that good people turned bad, either. One goal simply surpassed another in importance. In the case of the mailbox, the desire for cash superceded the desire to behave appropriately, because others already hadn’t. “People are not bad. People are just subject to social influence,” Lindenberg says. An effective tip for crime prevention is to be aware of norm violations on all fronts. After all, says Lindenberg, “Even old grandmothers would do this.”
Values are contingent and contextual. Ain’t no good and evil, bad and good. Only situations and consequences.
This type of statement found in a profile of 8 young economists: “Economics is now defined neither by its subject matter nor by its method.”
Someone pointed out to me that I hold this view that economists might not know as much as they claim to because I don’t really know that much about economic theory. That’s true.
However, it is highly unlikely that the current situation is understood by anyone, much less was it accurately predicted. Worse, no one really has a defensible plan of action – economicly speaking.
I posit that there is no way to predict the economy in a far reaching/come up with a national plan kinda way. Like much of what we study, we can understand isolated systems and behaviors. With that useful knowledge we can proceed adjusting our courses in a million ways as we go along. In the end, we just need to make something happen. We need to CREATE and SHAPE what happens next, not predict it.
In that way, it seems very freeing to not be under the constant pressure of the Down Jones average or the Fed rate cuts. The world has always been more complex than that and we’re swimming in that complexity.
Social Mode 