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Economist: Social networking - Rules of Engagement

Social networking

Rules of engagement

May 25th 2011, 11:34 by G.F. | SEATTLE

A FRIEND has been toying with Twitter, and wonders how best to get her feet wet. Whom should she follow? What should she read? Here are some thoughts.

Viewed as a loudspeaker for others—celebrities, creative types, or just acquaintances, pronouncing on what are all too often fatuous banalities—Twitter does indeed resemble the empty medium derided by those outside its embrace; like sitting around an abandoned and empty pool in a solitary chaise longue, with TVs blaring nearby—an experience that is neither convivial nor informative.

Sticking to the bathing analogy, an alternative (though by no means the only one) would be to attend a crowded ocean beach, with swimmers constantly throwing themselves in and out of the water, some more expertly than others. The beach is likely to be lined with reclining observers listening to the water-borne banter, but they are not the ones having the most fun.

Twitter rewards engagement in a way that few other media do (the sea is such a medium, albeit only in a physical sense). The relationship between users is nearly always asymmetrical: following someone does not entail being followed by them. That leads to enormous mismatches: the glitziest twitterati amass hundreds of thousands, even millions of followers, and yet themselves follow just a few dozen people.

Babbage's friend had thrown her lot in some months ago, following a small number of people, and issuing a few tentative tweets. She was not impressed by the response. Her view of Twitter was of an unplugged toaster where the bread neither browns nor pops out.

Suffer as he does from logorrhoea, this Babbage blathers through the day. He also, like his departed mother, knows no shame in striking up conversations with complete strangers—she, in public; he, on Twitter—that he finds interesting. As a child, he complained of her habit. Now, the grudging inheritor of it, he finds easy sociability indispensable in the digital world.

Enter what is perhaps Twitter's greatest, and inadvertent, innovation: the goad in the form of an at-sign (@) followed by a Twitter handle, known as a mention. Twitter did not invent this referral, which was picked up from older chat-system conventions. But the firm adopted it and uses it to create threaded conversations. The mention is distinct from a direct message (DM), which Twitter created intentionally, and which allows a private bit of text to pass between two parties, so long as the recipient follows the sender. The DM is reserved for those who have established a relationship; the mention, meanwhile, works for anyone.

Mentions may easily be ignored—@stephenfry, say, with 2,647,917 followers as this sentence is being written (likely to rise by the time Babbage is done with the post), would be physically incapable of responding to all. To make life a little bit more manageable, most Twitter software, whether from the company itself or innumerable third parties, can be set either to list all mentions in a main chronological stream mixed in with tweets by those the user follows, or only to include the mentions by the latter.

Your correspondent, with 4,000 or so followers, is small fry, as it were, and has the time to engage with nearly everyone who mentions him. ( @EconSciTech, Babbage's official feed, currently nudges 10,000 and engages a little less fully.) He has made many acquaintances, and even some new friends. Over time, he has ditched nearly all those who, whether with ten followers or 10m, never reply to anyone, or reply to just a small coterie. Such tweeters are listening to the sound of their own typing.

Twitter users who are not household names tend to start by following loved ones, colleagues, favourite writers, etc. Replying to those you do not know personally is no faux pas, whether or not they are extremely well known. And if a popular tweeter retweets you—ie, redistributes the tweet to his followers—that can do wonders to your tally.

What should Babbage's friend make of all this? She is a writer, filmmaker and former television presenter, yet Twitter makes her strangely shy. Your correspondent's advice: the only way to go is to take the plunge and start talking, loudly and often. Well, not too often.

Bloomberg Businessweek: In Brazil, the Bikini Wax Is a Harbinger of Inflation

Indicators May 26, 2011, 5:00PM EST text size: TT

In Brazil, the Bikini Wax Is a Harbinger of Inflation

The cosmetic procedure is one of the services used to gauge prices, and it's costing more

By Iuri Dantas

If you're getting a bikini wax in Brazil, you'll likely find that the cost is rising. And if you're an economic policy maker, you'll likely see that as a problem, since the bikini wax is one of the items the Brazilians track to figure out inflation.

As with services ranging from car repair to dentistry, the price of waxing is going up in one of the world's most important emerging markets. Inflation is moving above the government's target and may force Alexandre Tombini, the central bank president, to prolong his policy of interest-rate hikes.

Price increases for services, which make up 24.1 percent of Brazil's benchmark inflation index, outpaced all other categories in the past two months, according to data released on May 11 by the central bank. They rose 8.57 percent in the year through April, the fastest pace in at least 15 years. "Services will continue to be the main villain of inflation," says Fernando Fix, chief economist at Votorantim Wealth Management in São Paulo. "Domestic demand is too strong."

That includes demand for bikini waxes, which are often considered a necessity, says Elzimar Siqueira, former owner of a beauty shop and now head of administrative affairs at the Syndicate of Women's Beauty and Hairdressing Institutes of Rio de Janeiro. "We have summer all year, we're always wearing bikinis and miniskirts," she says. At the Imaculada Hair and Makeup shop in Brasilia, owner Alessandra Rita de Arruda Lopes says she's raised the price to 35 reais ($21.63) from 30 reais. The average price of the depilation procedure rose 12.4 percent in the year through April, the national statistics agency says. A bikini wax at J. Sisters in Manhattan costs $75.

Consumer price increases in Latin America's biggest economy breached the government's 6.5 percent target ceiling in the year through April for the first time since June 2005. The benchmark interest rate has now reached 12 percent, and economists expect the central bank to boost it to 12.5 percent by year-end, a recent survey showed.

Gross domestic product per capita reached a record $10,813 last year, after the economy grew 7.5 percent, the fastest pace in more than two decades. Such growth boosts demand for services. Also contributing to higher prices is a tight labor market, which drives wages up. Wages may be bumped up again after collective bargaining late this year and next, says Constantin Jancso, an economic analyst at São Paulo-based HSBC Bank Brasil. "Negotiations with metalworkers and bankers begin in the third quarter," he says. "I wouldn't be surprised to see increases of 10 percent."

Prices of 20 of 41 services monitored by the central bank accelerated in April from March. Oil changes and car cleaning prices rose 18.25 percent in the year through April. Hotels increased prices by 14.03 percent.

Price hikes in Brazil are also spurred by indexation, in which past inflation is used as a benchmark for raising prices. The minimum wage, for example, is computed annually by adding the previous year's inflation to economic growth from two years back. In 2012 the minimum wage will likely go up more than 13 percent.

Higher wages are one reason beauty shop owner Lopes is raising prices. Meal vouchers, cosmetics, and the cost of "depi rolls," which are used to spread the wax for depilation, are also rising, she says. "Some clients are coming less frequently for haircuts because of the higher price," she says. "But not for waxing. Brazilian women will never stop getting waxed."

The bottom line: Services from bikini waxes to car repairs are getting pricier in Brazil, prompting fears of higher inflation and higher wages.

Dantas is a reporter for Bloomberg News.

Media: Why you can't lie to me

Why You Can't Lie to Me

Douglas Quenqua, Apr 13, 2011 05:24 PM

You've seen the TV show but there's some real science behind facial coding It's true: Advertisers lie. But here's another fact: so do consumers. Anyone who's ever monitored a focus group can tell you that. Maybe it's not lying of the shameless "It was like that when I got here" variety. It's more the "I base my grocery-buying decisions on nutrition, not packaging" kind of fibs. But either way, it's misleading and advertisers pay the price for it. Luckily, faces don't lie. Someone watching an offensive commercial is going to look disgusted, just as the lips of someone watching a poignant ad will quiver as he fights back tears. All the questionnaires in the world can't match what a trained professional (or now, software) can learn from watching someone's face. If only there were a way to harvest the facial expressions of consumers of all demographics from all over the world, then translate them into actionable marketing data. To be clear, there isn't...yet. But there are a handful of companies doing some clever things with facial coding and eye tracking and other whizbang technologies to help advertisers better gauge how their customers really feel about them. Or at least how they feel about their products, packaging, ads, store designs and Web sites. "Darwin realized that the face was the best place in the body where we reflect and communicate our emotions," says Dan Hill, president and founder of Sensory Logic, a market-research firm based in Minneapolis, Minn. "It's the only place in the body where muscles attach right to the skin." Darwin's insight was based on the observation that blind people make the same facial expressions, corresponding to the same emotions, as sighted people, suggesting that facial expressions are not learned but hardwired into our brains. Facial coding may owe a philosophical debt to Darwin. But the technology traces back to a psychologist named Paul Ekman, who in the late 1970s developed what's known as the Facial Access Coding System, or FACS. The system, which has so far been of greater use to animators than advertisers, reduces all facial movements to mathematical units. By measuring the movements of a person's face, one can interpret that person's emotions. Thirty years after the development of FACS, companies like Sensory Logic are helping advertisers apply that technology to market research. The primary way Sensory Logic does this is exposing test subjects to a commercial or a radio ad while a Logitech camera records the subject's face (the process is called "exposure"). Experts then decode the facial expressions and line them up with the content the subject was watching to determine, down to the second, how that person really felt about what he was watching. In the past few years, the company has even begun offering this service remotely. As long as a subject has a camera installed in his home computer, the company can record his facial expressions as he watches the content from home. Other companies are now working on bringing the technology to smartphones. The invention of the Flip camera has also allowed Sensory Logic to combine facial coding with traditional focus groups. Now market researchers can record the faces of focus-group subjects to see when their expressions betray their words. The company can also record the faces of subjects answering questionnaires to look for "any gaps or illumination between what they see and feel," says Hill. To appreciate the value of such tests, consider the example of a pharmaceutical company trying to determine what mattered most to doctors when prescribing medicines. When asked why they choose one drug over another, "of course the first thing the doctors say is efficacy of the drug," says Hill, "but when we looked at the emotional data they hardly emoted about that at all." What did capture the doctors' hearts, according to their faces? "Ease of filing for reimbursement and the payment schedules and so forth," says Hill. In other words, "things that were much more central to their own pocketbook. Those things were much more of interest to the doctors." This kind of research has also helped quantify the shortcomings of traditional focus groups. Most advertisers already know that people in a focus-group setting will sometimes adjust their answers to make themselves look smart, or to cozy up to an alpha dog in the room. But Sensory Logic has taken this further by looking at how people of different ethnicities and demographic backgrounds behave differently. "Hispanics tend to respect authority, which means they might be a little less forthcoming to make a criticism," Hill says. "African-Americans are pretty straightforward. In our research they come closest to just saying how they feel. But whites and Hispanics and Asian-Americans - you're talking about a gap that's double digits between how much they're willing to admit they like something" and how much they really do. In an age when advertisers spend a lot of time and money crafting discrete messages for different ethnic groups, such lapses in insight can add up to significant waste. Sensory Logic is also eager to take facial coding outside the research room and is looking to partner with companies that provide eye-tracking technology. Such companies - EyeTracking, located in San Diego, and Tobii, in Sweden, are two - use special glasses worn by the consumer to determine where his eyes settle as he walks through a retail environment. Combine that with facial-coding technology and you can tell not just where people are looking, but how they feel about what they're seeing. The application has exciting implications for retailers, who could use it when designing their store layouts. Of course, it wouldn't be an emerging technology if there weren't disagreements over how best to apply it. Gallup & Robinson, a market research firm in Pennington, N.J., practices a different brand of consumer face reading. "Our focus is on what we call emotional valence," says G&R president Scott Purvis. "Most of the other systems are on what we would call arousal." To the layperson, the difference between what Sensory Logic and Gallup & Robinson do may seem tiny. But it's significant. Put simply, emotional valence is the measurement of all human reactions on a scale of negative to positive. So Gallup & Robinson is less concerned with whether you're smiling or frowning than how intensely you're doing one or the other. "The idea is that people have a positive and a negative rewards-type system in their brain," says Purvis, "and these things operate both at the same time, so you can feel both very positive and negative toward a stimulus at the same time. It's not ends of a scale, it's two different systems, so that's why people are often ambivalent about many of the things they're seeing. We're trying to get at that relationship, rather than whether somebody is disgusted or happy." Purvis uses the example of a typical pharmaceutical commercial, the kind that begins with patients suffering from an ailment, then features a (frequently animated) illustration of the treatment working, followed by scenes of a healthy, happy patient. The intensity with which a viewer follows those phases of emotion "can be very important in terms of overall effectiveness of the commercial," he says. "And I don't know that we understand it as well when looking at it from the point of view of, 'Did you like it?'" Not surprisingly, Hill doesn't put much stock in emotional valence. He points out that there is a wide range of emotions that can be considered "negative," not all of which are the ones you may want your commercial to inspire. "Sadness versus anger versus fear are all quote-unquote negative emotions," he says. "But those emotions can not only be vastly different in their meanings, but also in their implications for your creative." Hill, too, uses the example of a pharmaceutical commercial to illustrate his point. "You're trying to create a problem-solution commercial, so you're supposed to make your viewer feel sadness at first because they're disappointed with the status quo," he says. "But what if you're actually making them angry because they're confused? Then you've lost them." Hill even has a term for it. He calls it being "off-emotion," as in being off-message. Measuring emotional valence comes with some other trade-offs. Rather than making video of a subject, Gallup & Robinson attaches electrodes to his or her face, specifically at the frown and smile muscles. The process, known as electromyography, or EMG, may do a more accurate job of measuring the intensity of muscular reaction - but it doesn't travel well. "There's some work being done now to use the camera to distribute it over the Internet so Webcams would be able to get an EMG-type response," says Purvis. "But so far it hasn't gotten to the point where I think people have a lot of confidence in it." Regardless of which method you put your faith in, there's a good reason that both remain little more than a theoretical threat to traditional market research: They have a serious scalability problem. Both approaches require trained professionals to translate the results. Training such professionals is said to take up to 100 hours; of course the process of watching the videos and drawing conclusions takes many hours more. So while face reading makes a nice complement to focus groups or questionnaires, they've never really been scalable enough to replace them. Enter ThirdSight. This 11-person firm in the Netherlands may be the newest thing in face-reading market research, having been spun off from the University of Amsterdam on January 1, 2011. ThirdSight's signature technology is software that reads and interprets video of test subjects' facial expressions, eliminating the need for a pricey, highly trained researcher to wade through hours of slow-motion video. "The software detects the face of the subject, then localizes landmarks like mouth corners, cheeks and eyebrows and tracks these facial features over time with a grid like a spire," says Theo Gevers, scientific advisor at ThirdSight and an associate professor of computer science at the University of Amsterdam. The software is taught to recognize facial configurations that correspond to six different emotions, so it can tell instantly how a test subject is reacting to content. ThirdSight has even created a smartphone app that can read and interpret a user's facial expressions. "It's not yet real time," says Gevers, "so it will record your face and then process it." But that will change quickly as smartphone CPUs become faster and more powerful. The drawback to ThirdSight's process is an admitted lack of accuracy. "We might have some disadvantages in the sense that people who have been trained for 100 hours might be a little bit better" than the software is at reading the subtleties of facial expressions, Gevers notes. "We have a fairly accurate system, but it's not as good as a human operator." Still, the potential effect of scalable facial coding on the world of market research is huge. Imagine a world in which consumers anywhere could download an iPhone app that records their faces as they watch a commercial - which also plays on their phones, incidentally - then instantly beams back that person's emotions to a waiting database. Today, companies like Sensory Logic and Gallup & Robinson are limited to running sessions with about 40 people; more than that would simply be untenable given the man-hours that go into interpreting the results. But a smartphone app equipped with software that can read faces in real-time has the potential to make facial coding an easy, inexpensive mass-market research tool with a higher level of reliability than anything available today. "The conservative estimation is that 95 percent of people's thought activity isn't fully conscious - that we're mostly intuitive, subconscious decision makers," says Hill. That, more than any other reason, is why simply asking consumers how they feel about a product or campaign is bound to come up short. No matter how much they want to tell the truth, people just might not be able to. Bypassing the consumer to go directly to his brain, courtesy of his expressions, may be the market research industry's best chance to save face.

FT: The long and the short of coffee

The long and the short of coffee

By Harry Eyres

Published: May 21 2011 00:05 | Last updated: May 21 2011 00:05

On a recent trip to Italy I heard a man order an espresso “un po’ lungo” (a little bit long). I was expecting he would receive the Italian version of a caffè Americano; a strongish coffee but served in a decent-sized cup and long enough to provide a few minutes of meditative sipping. Not a bit of it: when the coffee arrived, it was to my eyes indistinguishable from a normal espresso or even what in London coffee houses is called a ristretto (not a term I have ever heard anyone use in Italy). In other words, it consisted of about a teaspoon and a half of incredibly strong black coffee, concentrated to the point of viscousness, topped with that tawny foam that is the good espresso’s equivalent of the creamy head on a pint of Guinness.

Perhaps it took him 45, rather than 30 seconds, to knock it back. That, for him, was un po’ lungo.

Back in London, I attended the opening of the Southbank Centre’s 60th anniversary celebrations of the Festival of Britain (on which more later). Trying to wake myself up, I had one cup of so-called coffee and then another. Each contained at least five times the liquid volume of the espresso un po’ lungo but nothing of that beverage’s intensity, flavour or drama. Eventually, arriving back home, I had to make myself a proper cup. By this time I had had far too much coffee, yet not enough.

All this prompted wider-ranging reflections on length and shortness, not just as they affect coffee. Although many chains of coffee bars in the UK and in the US claim to be Italian either in origin or inspiration – Caffè Nero promises “the best espresso this side of Milan” – in fact, the coffee experience and philosophy they offer is a pale shadow of the Italian one. The fact is that English and American people, on the whole, cannot and do not want to drink coffee in the way Italians do. For Italians, coffee is something very short, very intense and done standing up – a sort of gastronomic knee-trembler. Even an Italian cappuccino is not much longer than an espresso – it is beautiful, served in a small cup, and designed to be dispatched swiftly. Hardly anyone sits down at a table to drink one; not least because they know they will be charged three times as much.

The success of Starbucks is based on an entirely opposing philosophy. Everything is predicated on size. Even the smallest Starbucks coffee is called “Tall”, and if it consisted of coffee as Italians understand it, it would be enough to send three human beings into orbit. Thank goodness it consists mostly of water, or some watery perversion of milk.

Many Starbucks customers like to sit on their own, often with a computer, less frequently, alas, with a book or notebook, slowly sipping their hot coffee-based beverage while dealing with e-mails. Italians, on the other hand, intensely social creatures, nearly always drink their coffees in company, conversing with someone, a friend, colleague or the barista (who is never called a barista).

Length as opposed to intensity, volume rather than flavour: here we have not just two ways of making coffee but two philosophies of life. Is it better to draw something out as long as possible, or, as the poet Andrew Marvell put it in another, erotic, context, to “roll all [its] strength and all [its] sweetness up into one ball” so that we can “tear our pleasures ... thorough the iron gates of life”?

While these reflections on the length of a cup of coffee were unfolding, I was reading and listening to the news from government statisticians that one in four of today’s under-16s “can expect to live to be 100 years old”. Apart from the fact that extreme longevity sounds like something to appeal more to the Starbucks habitué than the espresso drinker, I wondered about both the claim and the use of “expect” and “expectancy”, which have become normal parlance in discussions of lifespan.

The fact that, statistically, the mean of lifespan is 80 or 82 or 102 does not mean that any individual can expect to live that long, in the way that a Starbucks customer can expect to receive a cup with 12 or 20 fluid ounces of coffee. For a single individual, for all sorts of obvious reasons, there is absolutely no way of knowing how long he or she will live.

Presumably, “life expectancy” depends to some extent on how one chooses to live one’s life. Someone as brave as Tim Hetherington, the photojournalist and documentary-maker killed recently in Misrata in Libya, was less likely to comb grey hair than an employee of the Inland Revenue living in suburbia. But then, as the great cartoon by HM Bateman shows, and as Italian coffee drinkers instinctively know, the roof can fall on the head of the most cautious and risk-averse of human mice.

harry.eyres@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

NY Times: Can Recipe Search Engines Make You a Better Cook

 

 

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May 17, 2011

Can Recipe Search Engines Make You a Better Cook?

By JULIA MOSKIN

LET’S say you have invited four people for dinner on Saturday. It’s now Wednesday morning, and reality is setting in. On the guest list: two pescatarians, a “Top Chef” fanboy and a gluten avoider. Also, spring is in the air; local asparagus, arriving now. The challenge, as always: how to find dishes that are reliable, delicious and gastronomically correct?

The year has brought a rush of new recipe search engines designed to solve such quandaries. In February, Google introduced a tool called Recipe Search that lets you specify ingredients you do or do not want to use. (For example, a general search for “chili” can be refined — by, say, a Texas-chili purist in Austin — to exclude any recipe that calls for beans.) Microsoft’s Bing browser has had its own recipe function for more than a year, and allows you to search within a single source, like a blog.

A few weeks before Google’s new tool was introduced, Foodily went live, with all results integrated with Facebook so that you can see which recipes your friends say they like. A new, photo-heavy site, Cookzillas, the brainchild of a passionate cook in Bucharest, Romania, who happens to be a multimedia programmer, has more global recommendations than the United States-based engines, with English, Australian and Canadian sites in its scope.

With 10 million recipe searches a day on Google alone, the results surely influence what Americans eat. But when you idly type in “cookies” — the most common recipe search, according to Google — do these systems evaluate recipes the way a good cook would, by the clarity of their directions, the helpfulness of their warnings, the tastiness of the results? Probably not, based on extensive test-runs of the new tools.

“Their challenge is to translate ‘yummy’ into digital fingerprints,” said Paul Kennard, an expert in building Web traffic.

Search engines used to rank recipes largely by popularity, according to the number of times they had been clicked and linked to from other sites. The newer models try to evaluate recipes and rank them by quality according to ever-changing, supposedly highly nuanced criteria, including the number of reviews, links and photographs each recipe has, as well as its popularity.

Jack Benzell, a designer of Google’s algorithm, said in an interview that although the company’s search will never be able to decide whether Thomas Keller’s brownies or Ina Garten’s are inherently better, the results are as nuanced and valuable as any others performed by Google, say, for new tires or Florida weather.

But in query after query that I made in Google and in Bing, recipes from large sites like allrecipes.com and foodnetwork.com often occupied all top 10 results slots. Longer recipes with more detailed content, like the ones at popular food blogs like 101 Cookbooks or Chez Pim, rarely appeared on the first page of results. And results that are not found in the first two pages rarely are seen at all, according to experts.

Andrea Cutright of Foodily says that Google and Bing searches give preference to big sites because the algorithms are designed by programmers who are not cooks.

“You need people who understand ingredients, not just keywords and coding,” she said. “Knowing that an aubergine is the same as an eggplant, or that drumsticks equal chicken legs, simply gives better results.”

With my friend the chili purist in mind, I ran a search for bean-free chili through all four engines. Over all, they were only intermittently successful at providing recipes that matched what I was looking for.

At Foodily, the No. 1 recipe from “chili no beans” was a winner — Tex-Mex Chili from Fine Cooking, an excellent recipe that I’ve made many times. But the next two results, one from nomeatathlete.com and the other from allrecipes.com — were packed with beans. On Cookzillas, once I subtracted beans from the search, the engine abandoned beef as well, leaving me with a venison chili, a green chili with pork and a turkey chili as the top three.

At Google Recipe Search, I searched for chili and then unchecked the box for beans, and the No. 1 recipe was for chili powder, not what I’d wanted. The second was a poorly rated recipe from Guy Fieri at foodnetwork.com, and the third was a highly rated one from Bobby Flay at the same site; there was no clue as to why the lower-rated recipe did better in the results.

AT Bing, the No. 1 recipe, “My Chili” by Michelle at allrecipes.com, has 413 enthusiastic reviews, most of them dotted with exclamation points. But it also has ground beef and canned tomato sauce, which would give that chili purist fits. The second and third recipes that popped up were from delish.com, a recipe site owned by Microsoft, Bing’s parent company. They seemed solid enough, but results from delish.com did not turn up in the other search engines, which made me wonder if Bing was weighted in that direction.

Not surprisingly, Web-fluent cooks have come up with their own search strategies.

Soraya Darabi, who is a founder of foodspotting.com and a digital strategist for ABC, said, surprisingly, that she still leans toward recipes from solid, old-media sources like Bon Appétit magazine except when it comes to desserts.

“Niche blogs are the best, because the people who write them really know their stuff,” she said, citing Sugar Plum as a specialist in all-American desserts like shoofly pie.

Adriana Guillen, a therapist in Brooklyn who often rates recipes online, said that she looks for longer recipes. “It doesn’t mean that the recipe takes longer to make,” she said, “it means that the recipe is more helpful.”

A lovely photograph can signal a solid, tested recipe or something else entirely. “If the photo doesn’t match the recipe, or looks like it was done by a food stylist when the recipe clearly is by a home cook, that should be a red flag,” said Michael Chu, a software engineer who also writes about food at Cooking for Engineers.

So what are recipe search results based on? According to Mr. Benzell, search engines love the taste of data: chunks called “rich snippets” that sound like an appetizer but hold information like cooking time, nutrition information, yield and author. So recipes with long headnotes, hilarious prose or detailed instructions may be ignored in favor of recipes with starred ratings, specific cooking times or nutritional information coded in a specific way. Providing such content is a prime element in search-engine optimization, the sometimes shadowy business of trying to loft one’s site to the top of a heap of results.

Duane Forrester, a product manager for Bing, said that it looks at more than recipe formatting. “There are roughly a thousand factors that we look at in any given search,” he said, including how long the average user stays on a recipe page and the number of links it has, where they come from, where they lead to.

The dominance of behemoth cooking sites in search results enrages many food bloggers.

“I think we all believe that there should be something fair and democratic about search,” said Deb Perelman, a blogger whose recipes at Smitten Kitchen — smittenkitchen.com — still turn up fairly often using the new engines. “If a team of developers can push any recipe up top, how good can that recipe search be?”

In a methodical post on her Web site food52.com, the former New York Times writer Amanda Hesser carved up Google’s Recipe Search, saying that many recipes it favored contained information that was coded in ways that boosted them in the rankings, even if that information was obviously inaccurate. (With help from Google, she found a cassoulet recipe that was supposed to weigh in at just 77 calories a serving, although a serving included a lamb shank and one whole sausage. Another cassoulet’s cooking time was given as one minute.)

According to Andrea Cutright of Foodily, the demand for nutrition information as a priority comes from users. Many people use recipe search tools to avoid certain foods — like milk, flour or sugar — for health reasons, she said, not as a path to transcendent cuisine.

The Paris-based food blogger David Lebovitz said that, since the introduction of Recipe Search, traffic to davidlebovitz.com has dropped noticeably. A regular Google search for “dulce de leche brownies” used to bring up his recipe in the first few pages.

In the new Recipe Search, he said, as many as 3,000 other sites come up first, many of which have simply copied his recipe into their own archive: a common practice that, he said, is now rewarded by Google’s programming.

“Everyone is just trying to scramble to the top of the list,” he said. “I write recipes for readers, not for search engines, and I am being penalized for it.”

Meg Hourihan, who was one of the first serious food bloggers, said that she no longer trusts the crowd-sourced recipe ratings that Google and Bing rely on.

Unless she already knows and likes the source of the recipe and the reviews, she keeps scrolling.

“I don’t necessarily even trust my friends to recommend recipes,” she said. “I mean, which friends are we talking about? The ones who order in six nights a week?”

Ultimately, searching for the “best” recipe online is still like Internet dating — you might well stumble upon a great match, but if you do, it won’t be because the search engine knows what you like.

Finally, desperately seeking a great asparagus recipe for my imaginary dinner party, I tried out one last new search engine, this one independent and, in its way, radical. Eat Your Books does not publish any recipes at all. Instead, the founder, Jane Kelly, is indexing the recipes in thousands of cookbooks.

Eat Your Books does charge for this service; $2.50 a month or $25 a year. So far, it has built up around 80,000 searchable titles, with authors from Édouard de Pomiane to Rachael Ray to Heston Blumenthal. I found thousands of recipes for asparagus contained in books I already own, including one for asparagus vinaigrette with tarragon from “The Anatomy of a Dish,” by the chef Diane Forley. I’d made it years ago, loved it, dog-eared it and promptly lost track of it: the book is in my basement.

Google couldn’t find it — but that’s what I would serve on Saturday night.

FT: The dull names of those who rose

The dull names of those who rose

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: May 1 2011 19:17 | Last updated: May 1 2011 19:17

Whenever I used to hear that someone had saddled a son with a name like Tarquin, Apollo or Silas, I always feared that the child would be teased at school. I now find I’ve been worrying about the wrong thing. The real damage done by an outlandish name doesn’t happen in the playground but in the boardroom.

LinkedIn has just consulted its database of 100m professionals and found that chief executives overwhelmingly have boring first names. When it comes to the corner office, Ed will do nicely but Tarquin will not do at all: the most popular CEO names are Peter, Bob, Jack, Bruce and Fred.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Must I remember my kids’ ages just to log on? - May-08

Lucy Kellaway: Drivel is in the detail on pay - Apr-17

Lucy Kellaway: You might be a genius, but I won’t tell you - Apr-10

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’ - Mar-27

Lucy Kellaway: China conniptions - Mar-20

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

I wonder that I have never noticed this before. If I trawl my mind for the names of the most remarkable corporate titans, they all have unremarkable, monosyllabic first names – Bill (Gates), Paul (Allen), Jack (Welch), John (Chambers). If they were born with longer names, they make them shorter: Jeffrey becomes Jeff (Immelt); Robert becomes Bob (Nardelli, Horton); and Christopher becomes Chris (Gent).

Two syllables are only really acceptable when they are a cute version of a more formal name. There is Jamie (Dimon), Sandy (Weill), Larry (Bossidy). But three syllables are not acceptable at all. I can’t think of a single famous boss in the US or UK with a long first name. Even less can I think of one with a flamboyant or weird one. The only mad name that sticks in my mind is Loïk Le Floch-Prigent, the disgraced former head of Elf. But he doesn’t really count as he is a) French and b) has spent rather a long time in prison.

The LinkedIn research suggests different sorts of corporate jobs attract people with different names. If you have a cheery-chappy name such as Budd or Troy or Chip, then you will do well in sales, while a longer, straighter name such as Andrew will make you a perfect engineer. If, however, your name has seven or more letters, corporate life isn’t right for you at all. You should open a restaurant instead.

This idea – that your name shapes your career – passes under the name of “nominative determinism”. One of its supporters is the journalist David Brooks, who has dredged up the peculiar fact that people called Dennis are more likely than most to end up as dentists, while people called Lawrence are more likely to become lawyers. We want, he says, to do things that sound like us. I’ve often marvelled at how this idea works negatively: financial villains tend to have dodgy names – think of Madoff or Fuld, for example.

When I was at school, I thought such things a tremendous joke. “Have you read Great Falls by Eileen Dover?” I’d ask, and then scream with laughter. But real life turns out to be funnier than childish jokes: there was an article written on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology (vol 49, pp173-176, 1977) by J.W.  Splatt and D. Weedon.

Though the statistical evidence for nominative determinism may be a bit flaky, it figures. If we accept that the way people look affects their careers, then it isn’t unreasonable to think their names do too.

However, in the case of CEOs, what the Bob-Bill-Jack ascendancy tells us about corporate life is rather depressing. It says that diversity is bunkum: B-B-J puts foreigners at a clear disadvantage. Indeed, if you are born Gróf András István, but fancy running a big semiconductor company in the US, then you would be well advised to change your name to Andy Grove instead.

Indeed, the standard management guff tells us that the people who get ahead are the ones that are “unique” and “authentic”. Yet B-B-J shows this to be nonsense – if you want to get on, you need to sound and seem as unremarkable as everyone else.

B-B-J is evidence of a pervasive corporate lie. We are led to think that CEOs are friendly, when in fact it is their job to make people do things they don’t want to do and then fire them if they are not up to scratch. The matey little names – that seem to say “let’s have a couple of beers” – hoodwink us into thinking otherwise.

Finally, B-B-J tells us that it’s different for girls. The women CEOs on LinkedIn aren’t called Sue and Jill and Beth. They are Cynthia, Deborah and Carolyn; like my own CEO, Marjorie Scardino, they choose to use all three glorious syllables. Their names aren’t saying “let’s have a beer” but something more honest, if a bit more desperate: “Take me seriously.”

People often say that there will only be equality at the top when there are as many incompetent women CEOs as there are incompetent men. I’ve got another measure. Equality will be with us only when our female leaders ask to be called Debs and Marge.

lucy.kellaway@ft.com

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT: Architect of modern Singapore steps down

Architect of modern Singapore steps down

By Kevin Brown in Singapore

Published: May 15 2011 12:34 | Last updated: May 15 2011 12:34

Lee Kuan Yew, former Singapore prime minister, has resigned his cabinet seat after 52 years

Singaporeans woke up on Sunday to the prospect of a government without the country’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew – a dominating political figure who unexpectedly resigned from the cabinet after more than half a century in service.

Mr Lee, 87, quit along with Goh Chok Tong, prime minister from 1990 to 2004, exactly a week after the ruling People’s Action party suffered its worst election result since independence in 1965.

In a joint statement, the two former prime ministers said they wanted to provide “a fresh clean slate” for Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, who has promised to respond positively to voters’ concerns.

Mr Lee, who has been prime minister or a senior cabinet minister since the beginning of colonial self government in 1959, told state media his resignation was “the right thing to do, to give PM (sic) and his team the room to break from the past.”

He added: “We want to make it clear that the PAP has never been averse to change.”

As a founder member of the PAP in 1954, Mr Lee is regarded as the architect of modern Singapore, setting it on a free market course designed to attract foreign investment that has given the tiny island state the second highest living standards in Asia, after Japan.

He successfully fought far left opponents in the 1960s, locking up many without trial for years, and became associated with a tough approach to dissent that many dismissed as authoritarian. However, the PAP was repeatedly re-elected in general elections, usually winning between two-thirds and three quarters of the popular vote.

In a joint statement, the two former prime ministers said they wanted to provide “a fresh clean slate” for Lee Hsien Loong, the current prime minister, who has promised to respond positively to voters¨concerns.

The PAP won 81 of 87 elected parliamentary seats with 60.1 per cent of the popular vote in the last election on May 7, but was clearly shaken by an increase in the total opposition vote to 39.9 per cent from a third in 2006.

The retirement of the two former prime ministers has few implications for policy, since the government has already undertaken to address election issues such as high immigration, income disparity and the price of government-subsidised housing.

However, political analysts said it was not purely symbolic, and speculated that the prime minister, who is the son of Lee Kuan Yew, might take the opportunity to replace a number of other senior ministers with younger faces.

Eugene Tan, a politics specialist at Singapore Management University, said the changing of the guard suggested the PAP was serious about promises to reconnect with younger voters, many of whom dislike the governing party’s authoritarian style.

“Government policy is seen as bearing the imprint of [Lee Kuan Yew], and the fact is that the announcement comes a week after the general election and that voters did not take kindly to what some might say was negative campaigning by [the elder Mr Lee],” he said.

“We are transitioning towards a post-Lee Kuan Yew era, and many did not expect it to come so soon. But it is not a revolution. That is not the way government is conducted in Singapore.”

The elder Mr Lee will remain a powerful figure in Singapore, as a leading member of the governing party with the ear of the prime minister, untrammelled access to the state supervised media and significant moral authority, especially over older Singaporeans.

However, his standing has been tarnished in recent years by controversial statements such as a claim that the country’s Malay muslim minority had failed to integrate, and an appearance of being out of step with Singaporeans born after independence, who now make up a majority of voters.

Mr Lee caused controversy during the election by appearing to threaten that the government would discriminate against constituencies that elected opposition MPs. His comments were in sharp contrast to the emollient tone adopted by the prime minister, who offered an unprecedented apology for any mistake the PAP might have made.

He became the first prime minister of independent Singapore in 1965, after the union broke up amid acrimony over Malay political rights. He stepped down in 1990, and has since served as a cabinet minister without portfolio, latterly with the title Minister Mentor.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

NY Times: In Singapore, Political Campaigning Goes Viral

 

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May 5, 2011

In Singapore, Political Campaigning Goes Viral

By SETH MYDANS

SINGAPORE — This tightly controlled city-state has taken a step into the unknown in advance of its parliamentary elections on Saturday, loosening its grip on political discourse in the unruly world of the Internet, where Facebook, Twitter and other social media have amplified a clamor of voices and points of view.

In a nation where government opponents are often sued over defamation and where carefully vetted public speech has been permitted only in a little park called Speakers’ Corner (which has been shut down during the campaign), experts say the new opening, if only in the virtual world, appears to be a redefinition of what are known here as “out-of-bounds markers.”

Following recent changes to the Constitution and election laws, Internet election advertising is now permitted throughout cyberspace — on podcasts, videocasts, blogs, instant messaging, photo-sharing platforms like Flickr, social networking sites and electronic media applications like those found on mobile phones.

For the first time, election campaign recordings can be posted as long as they are not “dramatized” or published “out of context.” Video taken at an election rally can be uploaded onto the Web without being submitted to the Board of Film Censors.

“Social media have lowered the barriers of entry into political discourse everywhere,” said Mark Cenite, an assistant professor of communication and information at Nanyang Technological University. “But that’s particularly significant in Singapore because here the barriers to entry into political discourse and the accompanying risks have been so high.”

Despite the changes to Internet regulations, demonstrations and public speech still require permits in Singapore. Political speech is restricted to candidates. Opposition politicians and news media face the possibility of defamation suits. The mainstream news media are tightly controlled and have not acted as a check on the government, experts say.

During the last parliamentary campaign, in 2006, a small number of current events blogs were the main forum for online citizen participation. Political speech was technically illegal and demanded a greater level of risk and commitment.

“Now that the barriers to entry to political dialogue have fallen, the effect has been electric,” Mr. Cenite said. “Government critics are able to easily identify and support one another without making a headlong commitment to politics and take the accompanying risks.”

All of this has contributed to an intense campaign in which opposition parties — which now hold just 2 of 84 elected seats — are drawing bigger crowds to rallies, fielding more candidates and, in contrast to the past, contesting all but one constituency. In the last election, opposition parties contested just half the constituencies.

Analysts say it is impossible to know whether this enthusiasm will translate into votes against the People’s Action Party, or P.A.P., which has governed Singapore since 1959.

But the campaign itself has been transformed as social media give smaller, poorer parties a wider audience, bringing greater inclusiveness and competitiveness to political debate.

Rather than trying to suppress online political organizing, as China and Vietnam have done, Singapore is taking a gamble on making it part of the legal campaign system.

“I don’t think they had a choice,” said Kin Mun Lee, known on his blog as Mr. Brown, who said he skirted the law in the last campaign by avoiding explicitly political comments. “Before, it was a very limited kind of provision for online speech. Definitely they had to change the rules because of the proliferation and availability of options.”

Opposition Web sites and Twitter accounts are being used to urge people to attend election rallies. They also send out streams of comments from rallies, hugely increasing their audience. The site Gothere Maps plots out the locations of rallies on a map.

The site Party Time aggregates conversations about the elections and graphically represents who is getting the most buzz online.

Facebook is estimated to have up to three million members in Singapore, whose population is more than five million. All seven competing parties have their own sites, as do many of the candidates.

By one estimate, there are 900,000 local users of Twitter.

Online coverage has pushed the main pro-government newspaper, The Straits Times, to publish fuller and not always critical news and photographs of opposition campaigns, said Alex Au, a prominent blogger.

“In the present era, with the ubiquitous cellphone camera and rapid distribution channels that are well beyond blogs, the old editorial policy is no longer viable,” he said on his blog. “If the newspaper does not publish such pictures, others will, and its credibility can only suffer.”

The Straits Times has dedicated a portal on its Web site to extensive electronic election coverage, and it is now aggregating online comments from the social media on a page it calls Buzz, which gives a flavor of some of the newly energized online commentary:

“The opposition can make ferocious speeches, but can they deliver?”

“Is it true that civil servants will be ostracized if they vote for the opposition?”

“If the opposition is sincere in serving the people, it would have been on the ground in the last 4 years, not starting their engines only when the whistle is blown.”

“Why must we be so dogmatic about democracy and stability being mutually exclusive?”

WSJ: Dear Book Lover: Books that Get Better With Maturity

Excerpt:

Paradoxically, reading experts say the best way to read a difficult book for the first time, at whatever age, is to race through it. "Pay attention to what you can understand, and don't be stopped by what you can't immediately grasp on the way," wrote Mortimer Adler, an educator and co-founder of the Great Books Foundation. "Read the book through undeterred by the paragraphs, footnotes, arguments and references that escape you. If you stop at any of these stumbling blocks, if you let yourself get stalled, you are lost."

===

DEAR BOOK LOVER
MAY 9, 2011

Dear Book Lover: Books that Get Better With Maturity

• By CYNTHIA CROSSEN

Many years ago when I was in college, I took a course on the modern European novel. We read Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," which many of us liked so much that we asked our instructor if we should read some other books by Mann such as "Buddenbrooks" or "The Magic Mountain." He told us that neither of those books should be read by anyone under the age of 40. Can you think of books that will not reveal themselves fully to the reader until one has reached, say, the age of 60? Or books that one may have read at an early age that ought to be reread once one has the experience of having spent six decades or so on the planet?

—Tom Ulen, Champaign, Ill.

"Age-appropriate" is a useful adjective in the world of children's books, but there are no such handy ratings for adult books. Yet unquestionably, some books are more adult than others. What would a 20-year-old make of Marcus Aurelius's "Meditations" or G.B. Edwards's "The Book of Ebenezer Le Page," whose 80-year-old narrator disliked using even a telephone? Conversely, don't "The Catcher in the Rye" and "Little Women" have greater charms for young adults than for their grandparents?

Everett Collection

Approach classics like "Moby Dick" with an open mind.

The danger in reading far ahead of your stage in life is that you might conclude the book is bad (stuffy, rambling pretentious) and dismiss it forever. This happened to me with Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady," forced on me in a college literature class. For many years after, it was a novel I loved to hate. When a book club I belonged to chose it, I kicked and screamed, until I fell under its spell. I was too young for James when I was 21.

Paradoxically, reading experts say the best way to read a difficult book for the first time, at whatever age, is to race through it. "Pay attention to what you can understand, and don't be stopped by what you can't immediately grasp on the way," wrote Mortimer Adler, an educator and co-founder of the Great Books Foundation. "Read the book through undeterred by the paragraphs, footnotes, arguments and references that escape you. If you stop at any of these stumbling blocks, if you let yourself get stalled, you are lost."

Speaking for teenagers through the ages, Mr. Adler continued, "Shakespeare was spoiled for generations of high-school students who were forced to go through 'Julius Caesar,' 'Hamlet' or 'Macbeth' scene by scene, to look up all the words that were new to them, and to study all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they never actually read the play. Instead they were dragged through it, bit by bit, over a period of many weeks…. They should have been encouraged to read the play in one sitting. Only then would they have understood enough of it to make it possible for them to understand more."

It's said that you never step into the same river twice, and that's also true of reading. You are a different person from the impatient adolescent or the college procrastinator who had to grind out a term paper in a weekend. So pick up that classic you hated in your youth, and take advantage of your maturity: You now know that it doesn't matter if you understand every word.

Five years ago, O (Oprah's magazine) published some essays about reading hard books. One of them, by Geoffrey Sanborn, who teaches literature at Bard College, was about "Moby-Dick," a book that has always terrified me. "These days most people think of 'Moby-Dick' not as a strange, wild, sad story," Mr. Sanborn wrote, "but as a Hard Book, full of boring whaling talk and hypersubtle symbolism…. As a result, most readers begin the book with their guard up.

"But 'Moby-Dick' wasn't meant to be a rigorous, depleting experience…. It was meant to be a stimulant to thought and feeling; it was meant to make your mind a more interesting and enjoyable place. So if the prospect of reading 'Moby-Dick' makes you feel even a little bit daunted…get an unannotated edition with no introduction and no essays in the back. Clear your mind of expectations and open it to chapter one. Listen with nothing more than ordinary human curiosity to the voice that begins speaking to you."

—Send your questions about books and reading to Cynthia Crossen at booklover@wsj.com.

Copyright 2011 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

FT: Must I remember my kids' ages just to log on?

This is oh so familiar.... having to remember multiple passwords :P

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Must I remember my kids’ ages just to log on?

By Lucy Kellaway

Published: May 8 2011 17:00 | Last updated: May 8 2011 17:00

Returning to the office last Tuesday after a long weekend, I couldn’t start work as I’d forgotten my computer password. Perhaps it was the combined excitement of a spectacular wedding followed by a spectacular death, but my brain was no longer able to retrieve a simple sequence of seven characters.

In the early days of computers I never forgot my password. But that’s because the top secret word I’d chosen was “Kellaway”, which I found could be effortlessly recalled even in the most fraught moments. Things only started to go awry when the computer security experts told me this password would no longer do. Reluctantly, I went for something a bit more elaborate and, to make sure I didn’t forget it, I wrote the word on a Post-it note and stuck it to my screen.

EDITOR’S CHOICE

Lucy Kellaway: Dull monikers - May-01

Lucy Kellaway: Drivel is in the detail on pay - Apr-17

Lucy Kellaway: You might be a genius, but I won’t tell you - Apr-10

Writing is on the wall for ‘customer care’ - Mar-27

Lucy Kellaway: China conniptions - Mar-20

Lucy Kellaway: Business leaders are worse than they think - Mar-13

But now Post-it notes are frowned on and the computer insists that my new password must contain a confusing mixture of cases, numbers and squiggles and be endlessly changed. To help me cope, I have devised a system: I rotate people in my family, with capital letters, punctuation and ages. Yet, as I found on Tuesday, this system is not foolproof. I daresay it is simple enough for any hacker to crack in a nanosecond, but it is complicated enough to foil me. I can’t remember which family member’s turn it is, whether it’s a full-stop or a comma, or how old they are.

It would be bad enough if there was just one password to remember. But I have passwords for my bank, e-mail, Amazon and for everything else I’ve ever bought online. Most of these are variations on a theme, some longer than others, but which is which?

I take some comfort from the fact that my remedial performance is better than that of some. A recent study of 23m passwords showed that by far the most popular password is still 123456. Of words, “Password” is in first place, followed by “Iloveyou” and then – bafflingly – by “princess” and “rockyou”.

There is a new App that will shortly be available on iPhones offering a series of pictures to help us remember random passwords, but it looks a bit complicated to me. Instead, I can think of a simpler mnemonic based on the only thing I can ever remember perfectly – Beatles’ lyrics. Thus a splendid password could be H!Ins, H!Nja – (“Help! I need somebody, Help! Not just anybody”). But there are two problems with this. First, I’m not sure I have the punctuation right, and, according to a recent academic study, mnemonic passwords may be no more difficult to hack than your kid’s names.

Many sites try to make things more secure by asking supposedly memorable questions. But I find the answers to these tend not to be memorable at all. Indeed, I often have to invent answers and then write them in my diary so that I don’t forget them. Which zip code were you born in? Er, no idea. What was your father’s middle name? He didn’t have one.

Even worse are the websites that think preferences are more secure than facts. Whenever I want to check how much money I have in my account, my bank asks me: What is your favourite food? As I don’t really have a favourite food, I found myself writing: Maltesers, but this didn’t feel quite right. Worse still is being asked to name your best friend. Like most adults I’ve advanced beyond the stage of having one. So do I write down my best friend from primary school? And should I still write her down even though we’ve had a bit of a falling out?

In the end, however obscure your password, we now know that it isn’t safe. Whoever hacked into the PlayStation network last month now has access to 100m passwords, and even though these are apparently “hashed” – ie scrambled – with a bit of further hacking they can presumably be unhashed. And given that most of the users probably use the same passwords for everything, the hackers could well have a high old time dipping into bank accounts and spending other people’s money online.

The few real techies I know have tried to protect themselves by buying software that generates an endless stream of random passwords and remembers the lot of them. There is a problem with this, too. You have to remember a master password to get into the system.

In the end, I can’t help wondering why it’s all so complicated. In order to do the most sensitive thing of all – get my hands on my own cash – all I need is a plastic card and a simple PIN code of four numbers. I don’t need to know my favourite food or remember how old my children are. Why is it that we still can’t do the same thing on a computer?

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.