SLOW Movement

WSJ: Japan's Philanderers Stay Faithful to Their 'Infidelity Phones'

THE A-HED

January 11, 2013, 2:21 a.m. ET

Japan's Philanderers Stay Faithful to Their 'Infidelity Phones'

Cads Attracted to How Outdated Device Hides Calls, Texts; Juggling Three Girlfriends

By DAISUKE WAKABAYASHI

Philanderers in Japan prefer one particular model of mobile phone, as WSJ's Daisuke Wakabayashi reports. He runs down how the phone works.

TOKYO—Over the past few years, as many people rushed to trade in their old phones for smartphones, Japan's philanderers have remained faithful to one particular brand: Fujitsu Ltd.'s older "F-Series" phones, which feature some attractive stealth privacy features.

The aging flip-phone—nicknamed the "uwaki keitai" or "infidelity phone"—owes its enduring popularity to customers who don't believe newer smartphones are as discreet at hiding their illicit romances.

Bloomberg News

Older DoCoMo phones, shown 2009, are still popular because of privacy features.

A Japanese blogger who goes by the name Bakanabe and writes anonymously about picking up women, said he looked into buying a new device but found the privacy settings fell short of his current phone. Instead, he opted to refurbish his battered, three-year-old Fujitsu flip-phone with a new casing and a new battery.

"Women may want to check my phone for strange emails or calls when I'm not around. With Fujitsu's 'privacy mode,' they can't see that information at all," he said in an email. "The key is to give off the impression that you're not locking your phone at all."

Fujitsu's "privacy mode" is a layer of nearly invisible security that hides missed calls, emails and text messages from contacts designated as private. If one of those acquaintances gets in touch, the only signal of that communication is a subtle change in the color or shape of how the battery sign or antenna bars are displayed. If ignored, the call doesn't appear in the phone log.

The changes are so subtle that it would be impossible to spot for an untrained eye. When the privacy mode is turned off through a secret combination of keys, the concealed calls and messages appear, and voice mail becomes accessible.

This comes in handy to another blogger who calls himself "Poza." He claims to have various romances on dating sites while juggling three girlfriends. He said he was introduced to the Fujitsu phone nearly five years ago and uses the privacy features to keep from getting caught. He says he recently bought an iPhone, but giving up his Fujitsu phone to carry just a smartphone is "unthinkable."

"In terms of keeping my cheating hidden, this does more than enough," he wrote in an email. Poza, who says he works for a design company in western Japan, declined to provide his real name.

The older Japanese phones also run on software created for the domestic market. For years, this gave the manufacturers significant control over new features but limited their international reach. With smartphones running Google Inc.'s Android operating system—the main software option for today's handsets—the Japanese makers don't have as much control to develop new features.

Fujitsu started offering the privacy mode in 2002 as part of more stringent security requirements for all phones offered by NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's largest carrier. Takeshi Natsuno, a senior DoCoMo executive at the time, said he insisted on tougher security after hearing too many stories of couples splitting or workers landing in hot water because they left their phones out and unguarded.

FUJITSU F-03 PHONE

"If Tiger Woods had this Japanese feature in his phone, he wouldn't have gotten in trouble," said Mr. Natsuno, now a professor at Keio University's Graduate School of Media and Governance.

The phones, though, aren't available outside Japan.

With emails, phone calls and text messages all coming into the phone, it is also where many affairs are carried out. Toshiyuki Makiguchi, who runs Uwaki Rescue SOS, a Tokyo-based consulting company to help people find out if their partners are cheating, said more than half of his 600 customers a year find some evidence of cheating on their partner's mobile phone.

Fujitsu promotes the strong security of its phones, but does so without acknowledging its subset of loyal cheater fans. Fujitsu spokesman Naoki Mishiro said tight security is critical these days with so much sensitive information on handsets. He declined to comment on the infidelity phone nickname.

These days, the devotion of infidelity phone users is being tested. Both Japanese carriers and Fujitsu are starting to phase out the older phones for an all-smartphone lineup. And a growing number of so-called cheater apps are looking to bring similar functions to smartphones.

As a result, Fujitsu has added some of the privacy features to its smartphone lineup. The company's new models conceal calls and emails from contacts marked private. Like its older cousin, it alerts the users with a subtle change in the battery or antenna mark. However, the privacy mode requires a separate mail and address book app designed by Fujitsu, rather than the default email program and address book provided by the carrier.

"It's totally useless," said blogger Bakanabe, who researched the Fujitsu smartphone before sticking with his existing phone. "I hold out hope that Fujitsu adds the real privacy mode with its next smartphone."

Fujitsu said it aims to roll out more convenient and secure features in the future.

The world appears to be catching up with the infidelity phone.

Delaware-based CATE, or Call and Text Eraser, has been offering a similar level of security since last year. It is an app for Android-based smartphones that intercepts and hides text messages and phone calls from people on a selected "blacklist." Those texts and calls, as well as the app itself, remain hidden until the user punches in a code.

"I believe most cheaters use text and get caught by the text," said Neal Desai, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Austin, Texas, who raised $70,000 for the $4.99 app on ABC's reality TV show "Shark Tank."

At $4.99 per download, CATE has been downloaded more than 10,000 times, and an iPhone version will be available soon, said Mr. Desai.

When told about Fujitsu's privacy features that have been available in Japan for several years, Mr. Desai was impressed: "That's more genius than my app."

—Miho Inada contributed to this article.

Write to Daisuke Wakabayashi at [email protected]

NY Times: Where Apps Become Child's Play

 

July 7, 2012

Where Apps Become Child’s Play

By NICOLE LaPORTE

AN iPad case that doubles as a teething toy? Yes, such a product exists. It’s known as the Fisher-Price Laugh & Learn Apptivity Case (also available for iPods and iPhones) and it sells for $35.

It’s well known that children are quick to learn new technology. But 6-month-olds? How did the idea arise for a toy that allows its user to gnaw on its brightly colored handles and drool on its protective screen, while also manipulating apps for counting and singing?

At Fisher-Price, such products result from a process known as spelunking, which in its literal sense means to explore caves. But in the realm of toy making, it refers to the simple act of watching children play.

A similar process is alive and well at other companies, like LeapFrog, maker of the LeapPad, a touchscreen tablet for children as young as 3; and at Hasbro and Crayola, which have partnered with digital media companies to create apps for very young children.

At Fisher-Price, “we bring babies in with their moms and watch them at play with different types of apps, different types of products,” said Deborah Weber, senior manager of infant research. Her job, she said, is to “understand the ages and stages of babies — what they can and can’t do, what their interests are, and the growing needs of families today.”

Spelunking has been around since the Fisher-Price PlayLab was formed in 1961, the same year that bricks made by a Danish company called Lego made their American debut. In its earlier days, the lab was filled with toys like a googly-eyed rotary phone known as the Chatter Phone, and the Corn Popper, a kind of mini-lottery machine on wheels.

Today, the lab, located at the Fisher-Price headquarters in East Aurora, N.Y., looks more like an Apple store. But instead of adults and teenagers, there are infants staring into computer screens, and parents and toddlers are passing iPads back and forth.

The setting is similar at LeapFrog’s Kid Lab in Emeryville, Calif., where digital devices and apps are tested by children who both have and haven’t had regular exposure to computers.

“Two years ago, it was harder to find kids who had used an iPhone or an iPad at home,” said Alissa McLean, a senior researcher in LeapFrog’s user experience group, which examines how children interact with online content and computers. “Now it’s not hard at all.”

“We used to talk about kids being the first generation of digital natives,” said Jason Root, chief content officer at the Ruckus Media Group, which has partnered with companies like Hasbro to create storybook apps. “Now we have a generation of newborns who are going to be weaned on touch devices.” 

At Fisher-Price, Ms. Weber said, “We see 6-month-olds batting at the screen, 9-month-olds swiping, and 12-month-olds pointing out objects to see.” Observations like these are passed along to toy producers and industrial designers, resulting in products like the iPad case and the Laugh & Learn Apptivity Monkey, which comes out in August.

The Apptivity Monkey would pass for just another stuffed animal if it didn’t have a thick, plastic iPhone case attached to its belly; the front of the case is made of see-through plastic. An iPhone can be placed inside, and a child can play apps on it, either by pressing on the iPhone directly or on the monkey’s paws, which interact with an array of alphabet and singing apps.

The monkey is big enough and soft enough so that the iPhone can sustain even major tumbles, Fisher-Price asserts. But the iPhone is not included. So doesn’t that make for a pretty expensive toy?

Maybe not. When Kathleen Kremer, another spelunker who is the company’s senior manager of user experience, was observing how preschool-aged children played with their parents’ iPhones and iPods, she stumbled on the “pass-back factor.”

“People are now on their second-generation iPad or second iPhone, so what they typically do with the old one is give it to their child, so the kids actually have ownership of these devices,” she said. She has also studied diaries and scrapbooks that parents were asked to keep, documenting their children’s behavior.

Because of the pass-back factor, the new Kid Tough Apptivity Case — similar to the Laugh & Learn product, but designed for older children — is made to fit all generations of the gadgets, Ms. Kremer said.  

Innovations like this are fueling the digital toy trend, according to Lisa Harnisch, senior vice president and general merchandising manager at Toys “R” Us. Last year, she said, the trend in children’s apps and app-related products “really started to heighten and explode.” Indeed, in the last year, there have been nearly three million downloads of Fisher-Price’s Laugh & Learn apps. By year-end, LeapFrog expects to have 325 apps at its online App Center, double the number at the end of 2011.

Not everyone sees this as a justification to ply infants with computers. “Infants learn best from real people and playing with real toys,” said Dr. Ari Brown, a pediatrician in Austin, Tex., and the author of “Baby 411.” “They learn how to communicate, how to engage with others and how to problem-solve using their five senses. While technology can offer a virtual way to learn some of these skills, they will never replace the value of interacting with humans or being able to manipulate and play with toys in one’s hands.”

In any case, it might be too late to stop an 18-month-old from discovering the joys of Netflix — selecting a movie or TV show to watch, or rewinding and replaying a favorite scene — something that Ms. Kremer has come across in her field research.

“It was pretty remarkable that she could master all those different steps,” she said of the tech-savvy toddler. “The motivation was there.”

E-mail: [email protected].

 

WSJ: Is the iPhone the Only Camera You Need?

TECHNOLOGY
Updated April 5, 2012, 8:27 a.m. ET

Is the iPhone the Only Camera You Need?

If you're armed with the right photo apps, editing tricks and shooting know-how, it just might be

By KEVIN SINTUMUANG

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal (cameras, phone); Lisa Corson/The Wall Street Journal (sunset)

The iPhone simplifies the photographic process—you can shoot, edit, share and order prints using one device.

I, POINT-AND-SHOOT, hereby call to order the inaugural meeting of the Secret Society of Digital Cameras That Are Sick and Tired of the iPhone. Ultra Zoom. Micro Four Thirds. Budget Digi Camera that takes AA batteries. Thanks for coming.

Photos: iPhoneography

Lisa Corson/The Wall Street Journal

A photo taken with the Hipstamatic app

I, POINT-AND-SHOOT, hereby call to order the inaugural meeting of the Secret Society of Digital Cameras That Are Sick and Tired of the iPhone. Ultra Zoom. Micro Four Thirds. Budget Digi Camera that takes AA batteries. Thanks for coming.

I think everyone knows why we're here in the basement of this abandoned Circuit City in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J. I mean, it's in the name of our club: the iPhone. A lot of you have been sitting in junk drawers, so I'll bring you up to speed. It ain't just a phone. It has a camera. And not one of those 1.3-megapixel numbers from a decade ago. This is the real deal. People have already started documenting their breakfasts with it. We're in trouble.

Have you checked out Flickr lately? The iPhone is the site's most-used camera. Instagram, an app that let's people share photos, reached 27 million users to become one of the world's biggest social networks. It hit that milestone purely with the iPhone. Last time I checked, we took photos. Where is our piece of the zeitgeist pie?

There was a time when we were renegades ushering in a new era of photography. Mavericks, really. We kicked those old film cameras into flea-market stalls. Now only pros and artsy types use them. Guess what? We're the ones starting to collect dust. And don't think anyone's going to revisit us. Film cameras occupy the same hip space as vinyl. Where are we going to fall on the technological nostalgia spectrum? Next to the LaserDisc.

The digital photography revolution was a promise to streamline things for the everyman. To let him shoot as many sunsets and cats wearing bread (seriously, Google it) as he wanted without having to worry about film. Anyone with a laptop could edit like a pro. Like the Brownie and Polaroid before us, we were democratizers of photography.

Not any more. The iPhone hijacked our vision for the future—our legacy!—while we were busy fooling people that more megapixels meant better pictures. (Sorry, Budget Digi Cam, it doesn't.) Talk about simplifying the photographic process—you can shoot, edit, share and order prints without taking your mitts off an iPhone. We're on our way to becoming a footnote on its Wikipedia page.

I know what you're all thinking. Some of us can edit photos. Some of us can post to Facebook. But not like the iPhone. It's quick, intuitive. We're not. Great-looking pictures are so fun and easy to produce that it makes anyone with an Instagram account feel like Terry Richardson and Ansel Adams rolled into one. Camera Awesome might be the device's best photo app. And it's free! And downloadable in minutes! You know how people refresh their user experience with us? They wait two years and spend hundreds on a new camera.

OK, there's a bright side. The DSLR will always be king for serious photographers. All of us take better photos in low-light situations. Android phones may be getting Instagram soon, but they aren't a huge threat—yet. And, uh, we come in more than two colors. Look at Ultra Zoom. He's chartreuse!

If we lose to one of our own, that's one thing. This crazy Lytro camera that lets you choose a focal point after you've taken a picture? Innovative stuff. Maybe we'll invite her to the next meeting. But a phone? Not cool. That's not progress. It's game-changing. And we're in the wrong stadium.

Tara Howard/The Wall Street Journal

A Hipstamatic shot

I forget who, but a wise man once said, "A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them." Let's show it to them. First camera to figure out how to beat the iPhone wins an 8-gig SD card. And I'll throw in this lime-green neoprene case. Except for Micro Four Thirds. You're too bulky for it. Meeting adjourned—see you next year in the parking lot of the old Crazy Eddie headquarters.

 

HOW TO MAKE YOUR CAMERA PHONE EXTRA-SNAPPY

Illustration by Jason Lee for The Wall Street Journal, WSJ Studio, Tara Howard (photo)

Several iPhone apps can take your photo-taking to the next level.

1. Download These Essential Camera Apps

Wait, doesn't my iPhone already have a Camera app? Yes. And it's good—the latest one can automatically focus on faces, take crisp HDR shots and be launched quickly from the unlock screen. (Just swipe up.) Why limit yourself to one arrow in your quiver, though? You may have heard of these three Camera replacements before, but they're popular for a reason—out of dozens in the App Store, they're the best.

Camera+

Camera+

The Effects Master

Tara Howard/The Wall Street Journal

The original picture, above, isn't bad.

Tara Howard/The Wall Street Journal

With Camera+'s Clarity filter and Lo-Fi effect, it's infinitely better.

The Camera+ app has long been a popular iPhone camera replacement because it can do complex things in a very streamlined way. You can set exposure independent of focus, use image stabilization—it'll automatically take a shot when your hand is steady—and has a burst mode for capturing fast-moving objects or the fleeting smiles of toddlers. But the real reason Camera+ has a permanent place on many a home screen is its editing tools. The Clarity filter is iPhone photography's secret sauce—it adds pro-camera crispness to almost any shot. And the app's 36 FX Effects (Polarize and Magic Hour are two favorites) have adjustable intensities. Snappily adjusting just how much processing you want is what sets this app apart from the countless other camera-and-editing solutions. $1.99, campl.us

 

Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic

The Analog Spirit

Lisa Corson/The Wall Street Journal

Light leaks, vignetting and distorted colors are Hipstamatic trademarks.

Tara Howard/The Wall Street Journal

Even your accidental shots will look like high art.

This app helped launch the iPhone photo revolution when it debuted in 2009, not with bleeding-edge tech, but with a geeky love for the analog. Swap out lenses, films and flashes to create different retro-inspired photographs or simply shake the camera to randomize the configuration. As with real film photography, you have to wait for your image to "develop"—pictures take a few seconds to show up. No matter. The results are so cool you'll start thinking instant gratification is overrated. A tip: In the spirit of serendipity, the default framing is random. To take control, double-click the viewfinder. $1.99, hipstamatic.com

 

Camera Awesome

Camera Awesome

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

The camera of Camera Awesome, is, well, awesome: It has a lens stabilizer similar to that of Camera+; a Big Button feature that lets you snap a photo by touching any spot on the screen; and in camcorder mode, the app magically captures video seconds before you press record. Its editing tools are even more awe-inspiring: There are almost 300 sophisticated effects, filters, textures and frames at your disposal including the adjustable Awesomize feature, which automatically fixes things you might not have even known were wrong with your photo. Many effects are free. You can buy sets of effects a la carte, or all of them in one fell swoop for $9.99. It's worth it. The app was developed by photo site SmugMug—pictures taken with the program can be automatically uploaded to the site in full resolution if you're a member. Free, awesomize.com

Tara Howard/The Wall Street Journal

If you love a particular effect (this is Romany Holiday), you can opt to have all shots automatically processed that way.

 

2. Take the Fun Factor of Your Photos to the Next Level

Instagram

The Social Network

Instagram

You could just use this as a Hipstamatic alternative, but it's really all about the photo-centric social network that is Instagram. If you've ever doubted the quality of iPhone photography, browsing the "Popular" shots will change your mind and inspire you to always have your camera at the ready to take more artful pictures of the world, or, you know, your cat. Free, instagram.com

 

Cinemagram

The New Art Form

Cinemagram

Here's how it works: Shoot a few seconds of video with movement, like a dog's tail wagging. Then trace your finger over the area of the video that you want to keep in motion—the surrounding area remains a still image. The result is a Cinemagram, a cool mashup of video and photography. At their best, they look like the quirky special effects of a Georges Méliès film. Free, cinemagr.am

 

Incredibooth

The Party Pleaser

Incredibooth

An addictive pocket-size photo booth from the makers of Hipstamatic. You can use the rear camera to take shots of party people and the front-facing one for self portraits, which—because the photos appear in an old-school, vertical strip of four pictures—are disarmingly charming rather than vain. $0.99, incredibooth.com

 

DMD Panorama

The Landscape Sweeper

DMD Panorama

The easiest-to-use panoramic picture app on the iPhone. Just launch, take a picture, steadily move the camera to the left or right to slide an on-screen Ying symbol into a Yang symbol—How clever! How Zen!—and the program will automatically stitch together a slick panoramic photo.$1.99, dermandar.com

 

PicFrame

The Framer

PicFrame

Instead of asking graphic-designer friends to create triptychs of your vacation photos in Photoshop, easily crank images out on your own with PicFrame and share them on Facebook and Twitter. An additional $0.99 lets you overlay text on photos in tons of refined fonts. It's the most fun way to create holiday cards, make party invites and add ironic captions to snapshots. $0.99, picframeapp.com

 

3. Kit Up for Serious Shooting

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

Belkin LiveAction Camera Remote

Forget about snapping a group shot with an outstretched arm and friends cramming their heads next to yours. Use the Belkin LiveAction Camera Remote with its accompanying app and shoot from afar. A detachable stand is included for easy iPhone propping. $35, belkin.com

 

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

Try a lens attachment for your iPhone.

Lens attachments on iPhones look a bit gimmicky, but they really work and are a great way to change up your shots. The Ollo Clip comes with fisheye, macro and wide-angle lenses and can be stashed easily in a pocket when not in use. $70, olloclip.com

 

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal, Styling by Anne Cardenas

Hipstacase

The iPhone is slick, which means it can get a little slippery. Keep the device strapped and secured to your wrist with the Hipstacase. It's amazing how much a little lanyard add can add to your confidence. $40, hipstamart.com

 

Can You Handle It?

Three esoteric grips for the aspiring camera phone Avedon

Jason Lee for The Wall Street Journal

The Covert Ops grip

The Covert Ops

Hold phone vertically as if checking texts or stocks. Advanced variant: Use headphones and singing to obfuscate your rule-bending shutterbugging.

Jason Lee for The Wall Street Journal

The Statue of Liberty grip

The Statue of Liberty

Most commonly used at concerts by short people. High angle is also effective in making pets appear antlike in photos.

Jason Lee for The Wall Street Journal

The Steady Poke grip

The Steady Poke

Apply death-grip to iPhone with one hand. Tap screen with other to reduce "lens shake" commonly caused by one-handed operation. Advisable to use free hand to pull 'chute at 2,600 feet.

 

No iPhone? No Problem. The best photo apps for other phones

While the iPhone has become the center of the camera-phone universe, Android and Windows Phone 7 devices have been diligently catching up. Instagram will be available to Android users soon, but meanwhile you can get your retro fix using the editing tools of PicSay Pro ($3.99). Also worth a download is Paper Camera ($1.99), which gives your photos a scratchy, cartoony look like that A-ha video.

If you like the idea of sending postcards, but always thought their photos were cheese-tastic, get Postagram (Free). Snap that perfect sunset shot and the app will send a postcard print of the photo with a personal message anywhere in the U.S. ($0.99) or internationally ($1.99). (It's available for the iPhone, too.)

If you own a device that's running the latest version of Windows Phone 7 then you know it has an excellent out-of-the box camera—they come with dedicated physical shutter buttons, scene modes and the ability to tweak everything from white balance to saturation—but you will still need a good photo editor. The filter-rich Thumba Cam ($0.99) is the simplest to use.

Corrections & Amplifications 
The PicFrame app is available at picframeapp.com. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it was from i4software.com. The Cinemagram app is free. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it cost $1.99.

A version of this article appeared March 31, 2012, on page D1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Is the iPhone the Only Camera You Need?.

NY Times: The Age of Big Data

February 11, 2012

The Age of Big Data

By STEVE LOHR

GOOD with numbers? Fascinated by data? The sound you hear is opportunity knocking.

Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills.

To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.

The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. A 28-year-old assistant professor at Stanford, he combined math with political science in his undergraduate and graduate studies, seeing “an opportunity because the discipline is becoming increasingly data-intensive.” His research involves the computer-automated analysis of blog postings, Congressional speeches and press releases, and news articles, looking for insights into how political ideas spread.

The story is similar in fields as varied as science and sports, advertising and public health — a drift toward data-driven discovery and decision-making. “It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched.”

Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class of economic asset, like currency or gold.

Rick Smolan, creator of the “Day in the Life” photography series, is planning a project later this year, “The Human Face of Big Data,” documenting the collection and uses of data. Mr. Smolan is an enthusiast, saying that Big Data has the potential to be “humanity’s dashboard,” an intelligent tool that can help combat poverty, crime and pollution. Privacy advocates take a dim view, warning that Big Data is Big Brother, in corporate clothing.

What is Big Data? A meme and a marketing term, for sure, but also shorthand for advancing trends in technology that open the door to a new approach to understanding the world and making decisions. There is a lot more data, all the time, growing at 50 percent a year, or more than doubling every two years, estimates IDC, a technology research firm. It’s not just more streams of data, but entirely new ones. For example, there are now countless digital sensors worldwide in industrial equipment, automobiles, electrical meters and shipping crates. They can measure and communicate location, movement, vibration, temperature, humidity, even chemical changes in the air.

Link these communicating sensors to computing intelligence and you see the rise of what is called the Internet of Things or the Industrial Internet. Improved access to information is also fueling the Big Data trend. For example, government data — employment figures and other information — has been steadily migrating onto the Web. In 2009, Washington opened the data doors further by starting Data.gov, a Web site that makes all kinds of government data accessible to the public.

Data is not only becoming more available but also more understandable to computers. Most of the Big Data surge is data in the wild — unruly stuff like words, images and video on the Web and those streams of sensor data. It is called unstructured data and is not typically grist for traditional databases.

But the computer tools for gleaning knowledge and insights from the Internet era’s vast trove of unstructured data are fast gaining ground. At the forefront are the rapidly advancing techniques of artificial intelligence like natural-language processing, pattern recognition and machine learning.

Those artificial-intelligence technologies can be applied in many fields. For example, Google’s search and ad business and its experimental robot cars, which have navigated thousands of miles of California roads, both use a bundle of artificial-intelligence tricks. Both are daunting Big Data challenges, parsing vast quantities of data and making decisions instantaneously.

The wealth of new data, in turn, accelerates advances in computing — a virtuous circle of Big Data. Machine-learning algorithms, for example, learn on data, and the more data, the more the machines learn. Take Siri, the talking, question-answering application in iPhones, which Apple introduced last fall. Its origins go back to a Pentagon research project that was then spun off as a Silicon Valley start-up. Apple bought Siri in 2010, and kept feeding it more data. Now, with people supplying millions of questions, Siri is becoming an increasingly adept personal assistant, offering reminders, weather reports, restaurant suggestions and answers to an expanding universe of questions.

To grasp the potential impact of Big Data, look to the microscope, says Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. The microscope, invented four centuries ago, allowed people to see and measure things as never before — at the cellular level. It was a revolution in measurement.

Data measurement, Professor Brynjolfsson explains, is the modern equivalent of the microscope. Google searches, Facebook posts and Twitter messages, for example, make it possible to measure behavior and sentiment in fine detail and as it happens.

In business, economics and other fields, Professor Brynjolfsson says, decisions will increasingly be based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition. “We can start being a lot more scientific,” he observes.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of the payoff from data-first thinking. The best-known is still “Moneyball,” the 2003 book by Michael Lewis, chronicling how the low-budget Oakland A’s massaged data and arcane baseball statistics to spot undervalued players. Heavy data analysis had become standard not only in baseball but also in other sports, including English soccer, well before last year’s movie version of “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt.

Retailers, like Walmart and Kohl’s, analyze sales, pricing and economic, demographic and weather data to tailor product selections at particular stores and determine the timing of price markdowns. Shipping companies, like U.P.S., mine data on truck delivery times and traffic patterns to fine-tune routing.

Online dating services, like Match.com, constantly sift through their Web listings of personal characteristics, reactions and communications to improve the algorithms for matching men and women on dates. Police departments across the country, led by New York’s, use computerized mapping and analysis of variables like historical arrest patterns, paydays, sporting events, rainfall and holidays to try to predict likely crime “hot spots” and deploy officers there in advance.

Research by Professor Brynjolfsson and two other colleagues, published last year, suggests that data-guided management is spreading across corporate America and starting to pay off. They studied 179 large companies and found that those adopting “data-driven decision making” achieved productivity gains that were 5 percent to 6 percent higher than other factors could explain.

The predictive power of Big Data is being explored — and shows promise — in fields like public health, economic development and economic forecasting. Researchers have found a spike in Google search requests for terms like “flu symptoms” and “flu treatments” a couple of weeks before there is an increase in flu patients coming to hospital emergency rooms in a region (and emergency room reports usually lag behind visits by two weeks or so).

Global Pulse, a new initiative by the United Nations, wants to leverage Big Data for global development. The group will conduct so-called sentiment analysis of messages in social networks and text messages — using natural-language deciphering software — to help predict job losses, spending reductions or disease outbreaks in a given region. The goal is to use digital early-warning signals to guide assistance programs in advance to, for example, prevent a region from slipping back into poverty.

In economic forecasting, research has shown that trends in increasing or decreasing volumes of housing-related search queries in Google are a more accurate predictor of house sales in the next quarter than the forecasts of real estate economists. The Federal Reserve, among others, has taken notice. In July, the National Bureau of Economic Research is holding a workshop on “Opportunities in Big Data” and its implications for the economics profession.

Big Data is already transforming the study of how social networks function. In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram of Harvard used packages as his research medium in a famous experiment in social connections. He sent packages to volunteers in the Midwest, instructing them to get the packages to strangers in Boston, but not directly; participants could mail a package only to someone they knew. The average number of times a package changed hands was remarkably few, about six. It was a classic demonstration of the “small-world phenomenon,” captured in the popular phrase “six degrees of separation.”

Today, social-network research involves mining huge digital data sets of collective behavior online. Among the findings: people whom you know but don’t communicate with often — “weak ties,” in sociology — are the best sources of tips about job openings. They travel in slightly different social worlds than close friends, so they see opportunities you and your best friends do not.

Researchers can see patterns of influence and peaks in communication on a subject — by following trending hashtags on Twitter, for example. The online fishbowl is a window into the real-time behavior of huge numbers of people. “I look for hot spots in the data, an outbreak of activity that I need to understand,” says Jon Kleinberg, a professor at Cornell. “It’s something you can only do with Big Data.”

Big Data has its perils, to be sure. With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of “false discoveries.” The trouble with seeking a meaningful needle in massive haystacks of data, says Trevor Hastie, a statistics professor at Stanford, is that “many bits of straw look like needles.”

Big Data also supplies more raw material for statistical shenanigans and biased fact-finding excursions. It offers a high-tech twist on an old trick: I know the facts, now let’s find ’em. That is, says Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician at George Mason University, “one of the most pernicious uses of data.”

Data is tamed and understood using computer and mathematical models. These models, like metaphors in literature, are explanatory simplifications. They are useful for understanding, but they have their limits. A model might spot a correlation and draw a statistical inference that is unfair or discriminatory, based on online searches, affecting the products, bank loans and health insurance a person is offered, privacy advocates warn.

Despite the caveats, there seems to be no turning back. Data is in the driver’s seat. It’s there, it’s useful and it’s valuable, even hip.

Veteran data analysts tell of friends who were long bored by discussions of their work but now are suddenly curious. “Moneyball” helped, they say, but things have gone way beyond that. “The culture has changed,” says Andrew Gelman, a statistician and political scientist at Columbia University. “There is this idea that numbers and statistics are interesting and fun. It’s cool now.”

Steve Lohr is a technology reporter for The New York Times.

NY Times: Using Google's Data to Reach Consumers

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December 22, 2011

Using Google’s Data to Reach Consumers

By ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

THE viruses that Google researchers usually focus on are those that strike computers, but in recent years, they have studied those that infect people, too.

Google correlated billions of flu-related Web searches from 2003 to 2008 with actual Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data over the same period. Then, because Web searchers’ Internet addresses indicated location, Google devised a formula to estimate regional flu activity based solely on searches, with a reporting lag of only about a day, outdoing C.D.C. flu reports, which typically are published a week or two after outbreaks.

In 2009, researchers from Google and the C.D.C. wrote an article summarizing their findings in the journal Nature, and stated that the new predictive model — now called Google Flu Trends and accessible in an interactive format online — could be a boon to public health. “Up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics,” they wrote.

What the researchers probably did not predict was that the Google flu data would end up being the cornerstone of an advertising campaign.

For the Vicks Behind Ear Thermometer, a new product that determines temperature when placed in the soft area behind the ear, marketers wanted to reach mothers, the primary purchasers of thermometers.

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A mobile campaign by Blue Chip Marketing Worldwide, which is based in Chicago, places the ads for the thermometer within popular apps like Pandora that collect basic details about users, including their sex and whether they are parents, and can pinpoint specific demographics to receive ads.

But not all mothers will see the ad on their smartphones. Rather, the ads will be sent only to devices that, according to Google, are in regions experiencing a high incidence of flu. Also, the ads will only be delivered to mothers within two miles of retailers that carry the thermometer, including Walmart, Target and Babies “R” Us.

“Flu levels in your area are high,” says the banner ad within an app. “Be prepared with Vicks revolutionary Behind Ear Thermometer.”

Tapping the ad, which also notes the nearest store that sells the thermometer (“Buy at Rite Aid .3 miles away.”), brings users to a product page with items including an informational video and a list of nearby retailers. Tapping a retailer reveals directions there.

Also handling the campaign, which was introduced in a limited way early in December and will be at full throttle when flu season peaks in January and February, is Where, the location-based mobile advertising network that is a division of PayPal, a unit of eBay.

“It understands how this mom lives and shops, and she receives the message in the most relevant manner,” said Stanton Kawer, chief executive of Blue Chip, about the campaign. “It is so fantastically targeted that it’s really amazing.”

The new thermometer is made by Kaz, which through licensing agreements markets thermometers under the Vicks and Braun brands (both owned by Procter & Gamble), and which also makes Vicks humidifiers.

Sales for thermometers follow flu season, picking up in October, peaking in January and February, and tapering off in March and April, according to Lara Peterson, a vice president for marketing at Kaz, a subsidiary of Helen of Troy Limited.

Smartphones are used by 53 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 and 64 percent of those 25 to 34, according to Nielsen. Google reports that 79 percent of owners use them for shopping purposes like comparing prices and locating a retailer.

Organizations including the American Academy of Pediatrics now recommend against mercury thermometers (citing the danger of both mercury and glass). Sales of digital thermometers are up, growing about 17 percent from 2005 to 2010, according to a report from Mintel, a market research firm.

The American Academy of Pediatrics still recommends taking temperature rectally for newborns under 3 months, and not taking it orally until children are at least 4 years old. The newest generation of digital thermometers measure parts of the body including the underarm, forehead and inside the ear.

The new Vicks thermometer, with a suggested retail price of $40 to $50, is the first in the category made specifically to measure behind the ear, according to Ms. Peterson, of Kaz.

“It measures fever in a very noninvasive way,” said Ms. Peterson, adding that the location’s proximity to the carotid artery, which carries blood to the brain, ensures accurate readings.

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Because feverish children can be particularly fidgety, the ease of use strikes a chord with parents. Kaz recently commissioned a study where the device was used to take the temperature of napping babies at a day care center, and 95 percent slept through it.

In addition to print and online advertising, also by Blue Chip, commercials for the thermometer will be shown in more than 2,600 pediatricians’ offices for two months beginning Jan. 15, through a deal with KidCare TV, which provides informational programming to waiting rooms.

As for the mobile campaign aimed at mothers in high-flu areas, Brian Morrissey, editor in chief of Digiday, an online publication that covers digital marketing and media, said being tracked by advertisers had a “creepy factor” for some consumers.

Many Facebook users, for example, balked when in 2007 it introduced Beacon, a program that shared their online purchases with their social network. “Creepiness comes in when consumers are surprised,” Mr. Morrissey said.

But he predicted consumers would actually like the thermometer campaign.

“It seems like they’ll pull it off, because they’re using the data in a smart way, for advertising that’s more relevant and useful,” Mr. Morrissey said.

WSJ: Why You Didn't Hit 'Reply'

HEAD CASE
DECEMBER 10, 2011

Why You Didn't Hit 'Reply'

Online, friends still get premium treatment

• By JONAH LEHRER

It's hard to imagine a world without email. It's now the dominant form of exchange, with the typical American adult spending more than an hour a day managing the inbox. (People under 25 now spend more time texting from their cellphones than talking on them.) The shift has been most dramatic for "knowledge workers" like computer programmers and lawyers, who devote nearly half their workdays to email.

Email has also profoundly influenced the kinds of people we interact with. According to a new study by Stefan Wuchty and Brian Uzzi at Northwestern University, we exchange the highest volume of email with those people we know the least. Perhaps it's a new colleague, or a friend of a friend, or a total stranger writing out of the blue: Email makes these exchanges possible.

Getty Images

'An easy way to see how you feel about a person: How long does it take you to return their email?'

"These are folks you almost certainly wouldn't talk to on the phone," Mr. Uzzi says. "You also probably wouldn't bump into them on the street. But email allows us to communicate with them all day long."

What makes this study noteworthy is that the researchers had access not only to the complete email records of a midsize company—nearly 1.5 million messages sent by 1,052 employees over a six-month time span—but also to a detailed map of social relationships. (The employees were asked to list all of their personal contacts.)

By comparing these two data sets, Messrs. Wuchty and Uzzi developed an algorithm that let them predict the nature of a given relationship based solely on the details of an email exchange. "We didn't need to read the messages or anything like that," Mr. Uzzi says. "Just looking at the speed of a reply was more than enough."

People reply to their close friends, on average, within seven hours of getting the email, the data show. Professional contacts take a bit more time: We don't hit send for nearly 11 hours. But the biggest difference came when the scientists looked at those people we barely know. On average, it took us 50 hours to reply. In other words, there's a surprisingly easy way to figure out how you feel about someone—just count the hours before you hit the "reply" button.

"Although these messages [from people we don't know well] account for the majority of messages, people replied much more slowly to them," Mr. Uzzi says. "We clearly give email priority to our close friends, just as we do in real life."

The researchers imagine many practical applications for this algorithm, at least once the obvious privacy issues are settled. Companies, for instance, could use it to more effectively assign people to teams, searching for the optimal mixture of close friends and total strangers. Email programs might use it to sort our messages automatically into various folders, while social networking sites could use the algorithm to construct more accurate maps of online connections, thus allowing companies to precisely target their advertising.

This research is also reassuring. Like all new technologies, the Internet has provoked a tremendous amount of anxiety, as people worry about the decay of our attention spans and the dissolution of authentic human contact. We are sometimes so busy texting that we forget to talk, and it seems to some that our online "friending" has ruined real friendship.

But this study is a reminder that even in a world transformed by digital devices, the most important things remain constant. Although we can interact with anyone, we still respond most quickly to our closest friends. We now know many more people, but we haven't forgotten which members of our circle really matter.

The same constancy also applies to social networking sites. The average Facebook user has more than 130 online "friends," but the site hasn't fundamentally changed the nature of real-world friendship. When surveyed, those with the most Facebook contacts still have roughly the same number of close relationships as everyone else. The only difference is that they seem to get more emotional support from these friends.

We always fret over new things, but so far, it's hard to see a social downside to the Internet. Online interaction has allowed us to meet many new people, but it has not diminished our yearning to maintain older relationships. As the song about new and old friends goes, one is silver and the other is gold.

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

 

FT: Far-sighted but no visionary

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/90804618-f8b0-11e0-ad8f-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1cEY0I254

October 21, 2011 10:19 pm

Far-sighted but no visionary

By Harry Eyres

Steve Jobs was an undoubtedly impressive human being, but I am still not convinced that it qualifies him to be called a visionary

Claudio Abbado rehearsing at the Royal Festival Hall

It would have been too easy (reader, I was tempted) to write a column dismissing all the hype about the late Steve Jobs. I must say for a non-Apple user – I have never owned a Mac, an iPod or an iPad – the effusiveness of the tributes, and in some cases the grief, was hard to fathom. The last time I remembered anything comparable was after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Whatever his other achievements, it appeared that Steve Jobs had arranged a posthumous coup: he had made sure his obituaries were written by his own PR department.

President Obama mourned him as a “visionary” who “changed the way each of us sees the world”. With still less restraint, the philosopher Alain de Botton gushed: “there are businesses that redraw the landscape entirely, creating needs we never knew we had, and remoulding our sense of what we have to have in order to be happy.” Goodness, was I only dreaming when I thought I still recognised those blue remembered hills? Might it be an advantage to remain unaware of needs I do not know I have?

You can imagine a Slow Lane line on all this: that, after all, the man had only been a creator, or refiner, of gadgets, which I for one have managed to get along quite happily without. Maybe Jobs “transformed our lives” (Obama again) somewhat, making them even more full of annoying electronic gizmos that render living in public spaces progressively less bearable. Perhaps I am missing something, but we seem to be just as fractious and addicted to short-termism as we have ever been.

But this was all just knee-jerk stuff. Not only was I not an initiate of the Apple cult but, frankly, I had little idea who Steve Jobs was. Reading his famous Stanford address was a sobering experience. Here was an undoubtedly impressive human being, a man of substance and originality.

Jobs was unusual in many ways, and not least in his approach to education. In contrast to the ever more streamlined, synchromeshed idea of expensive university degrees leading seamlessly into jobs (the normal kind), Jobs needed to drop out of university to find his way. More precisely, he dropped out of the required classes he found boring, in order to drop in to classes which inspired him. One of them was a calligraphy class which influenced all his subsequent thinking, and ensured, as he said with no false modesty, that personal computers would have “the wonderful typography they do”.

That was a very considerable achievement. I am still not convinced that it qualifies Jobs to be called a visionary. One of the qualities of visionaries is that they see far ahead; not just 10 years ahead but maybe a century or two. Often visionaries are little appreciated in their own time, dismissed as oddballs or madmen. Jobs might have been a maverick but was hardly an unappreciated one – and he became one of the richest people in America.

Might it be an advantage to remain unaware of needs I do not know I have?

A week after Jobs died I was in the Royal Festival Hall listening to Claudio Abbado conducting Anton Bruckner’s towering Fifth Symphony. If there was a Jobs connection, it might have been that Abbado has fought life-threatening illness; he made a remarkable recovery from cancer and, though he now looks gaunt, skin stretched tight over his long bony face, he stood spry and upright as he conducted the immense symphony from memory.

I am not sure Abbado would consider himself a visionary. I see him more as a supreme facilitator, a great clarifier of textures. He looked humble, not full of ego, as he took waves of applause and a standing ovation at the end of the symphony, and eventually stood to one side of the podium, as if to direct the applause away from him, towards his hand-picked Lucerne Festival Orchestra(I have never heard more hushed and precise pianissimo playing from a string section), and ultimately towards Bruckner himself.

I have a feeling that Bruckner and this symphony in particular are finally coming into their own 135 years after the Fifth was completed (amazingly, Bruckner never heard the work performed by an orchestra). For the composer Arnold Bax, hearing the corrupt Schalk-conducted version in 1906, it was a monumentally boring piece of Austro-German pedantry.

I didn’t find it boring when I first heard it, as a teenager at the Proms. It was certainly extreme; extremely long, extremely slow, extremely desolate, extremely unruly and extremely loud, especially at its thrilling ending, one of the grandest perorations in music. I found the extremes exciting (as teenagers tend to). It was like being taken on a tour of the Arctic, or Patagonia, a landscape of arresting splendour and strangeness.

Yes, Bruckner did change the way I saw the world, and myself within it. It felt vaster and more thrilling; and, if it also felt frightening, the fear was tempered by the fact that a brave soul had been there before me and charted the territory.

[email protected]

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

NY Times: The Power of Taking the Big Chance

October 8, 2011

The Power of Taking the Big Chance

By STEVE LOHR

STEVE JOBS, technologist and tastemaker of modern digital culture, described himself as a captain of product design, inspiring his teams of workers, as he once said, to go “beyond what anyone thought possible” and to do “some great work, really great work that will go down in history.”

And he did, time and again. Mr. Jobs did not make the technology himself; he led the teams that did, prodding, cajoling and inspiring. His track record as a business team leader is unique — as Apple’s Macintosh, iPod, iPhone and iPad testify. In two stints at Apple, he made computers into coveted consumer goods and transformed not only product categories, like music players and cellphones, but also entire industries, like music and mobile communications.

Mr. Jobs even failed well. NeXT, a computer company he founded during his years in exile from Apple, was never a commercial success. But it was a technology pioneer. The World Wide Web was created on a NeXT computer, and NeXT software is the core of Apple’s operating systems today.

Part of Mr. Jobs’s legacy will be the lessons learned by those who worked closely with him over the years. Here are just a few:

DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO DELIGHT CUSTOMERS Six weeks before the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, Mr. Jobs ordered a crucial design change. Until then, the planning for supplies, manufacturing and engineering had been based on the assumption that the smartphone’s face would be plastic, recalls Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who led iPod and iPhone development from 2001 to 2009. Plastic is less fragile than glass, and easier to make.

But the plastic touch screen had a drawback. It was prone to developing scratches. Those scratches, Mr. Jobs insisted, would irritate users and be seen as a design flaw. “All the logical facts told us to go with plastic, and Steve’s instinct went the other way,” Mr. Fadell says. “It was Steve’s call — his gut.”

The glass choice was a challenge that seemed “nearly impossible” at the time, he says — a last-minute scramble to get supplies of specialized glass and tweak the design of the phone’s casing to reduce the chances the glass would crack when an iPhone was dropped. But with extra investment and a frenetic work regimen, the switch proved doable, despite the tight deadline.

The episode, Mr. Fadell says, points to a principle he took away from his years working with Mr. Jobs. “You do not cut corners and you make sure the customer gets an experience that is an absolute delight,” observes Mr. Fadell, who heads a Silicon Valley start-up company whose product has not yet been disclosed and will not compete with Apple.

GOOD IDEAS TAKE TIME After he was ousted from Apple, Mr. Jobs founded NeXT in 1985. It produced a powerful desktop computer, a stylish black cube, and its initial market was going to be in education. The idea was that the machine would be more than hardware and software; it would also offer content, “a universe of wisdom,” recalls Michael Hawley, a computer scientist who worked closely with Mr. Jobs at NeXT and lived part time in Mr. Jobs’s house, as Mr. Hawley shuttled between California and his post at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

NeXT computers, in Mr. Jobs’s vision, would marry technology and the liberal arts by including digital books, music and art. Mr. Jobs began pursuing the rights to works that could be converted to digital form. He persuaded a few publishers that because they would save the expense of paper, printing and distribution, NeXT should pay a royalty that was a fraction of the cost of a printed book. Mr. Jobs, Mr. Hawley recalled, struck a deal with the Oxford University Press for the complete works of Shakespeare for a royalty of $1 a digital copy.

NeXT’s foray into education fizzled; its machines were too expensive for that market. But Mr. Jobs’s concept and business model for digital media were “the instinct that was translated to Apple with the iTunes store, 99-cents-a-song pricing and all the media offerings that have followed,” Mr. Hawley says.

“When Steve believed in an idea, he was both passionate and patient, scratching away over the years until he got it right,” says Mr. Hawley, a scientist, concert pianist and host of the EG Conference, an annual gathering for technologists, educators and people in media and entertainment.

DON’T DWELL ON MISTAKES Steve Capps, a computer scientist, describes creating the Macintosh, which shipped in 1984, as a constant process of making decisions — part experiment and part product development, with steps ahead mixed with many setbacks. “Steve kind of knew what he wanted, but he didn’t precisely,” says Mr. Capps, who designed software for Macintosh.

Mr. Jobs, Mr. Capps remembers, was the arbiter on countless hardware, software and design choices. “His combination of incisiveness and decisiveness, I think, really explained his success,” Mr. Capps says.

Mr. Jobs was also decisive in recognizing mistakes, even when they were his own. For example, he favored one model of a disk drive — for reading computer programs stored on small, removable so-called floppy disks — while other members of the team championed another design. They kept their disk project going surreptitiously. When they showed him the result, he embraced it. “He turned on a dime,” Mr. Capps says. “Don’t dwell on your mistakes. It’s a great lesson.”

PASSION COUNTS FOR A LOT The relentless intensity and total commitment that Mr. Jobs brought to his work, former colleagues and friends agree, had a simple explanation: he genuinely enjoyed what he did and found it worthwhile.

Andy Hertzfeld, a member of original Macintosh team who is now an engineer at Google, says: “The most important thing that I learned from Steve is to always follow your heart. He believed that the only way to do truly great work is to adore what you are doing.”

Mr. Jobs made a lot of money over the years, for himself and for Apple shareholders. But money never seemed to be his principal motivation. One day in the late 1990s, Mr. Jobs and I were walking near his home in Palo Alto. Internet stocks were getting bubbly at the time, and Mr. Jobs spoke of the proliferation of start-ups, with so many young entrepreneurs focused on an “exit strategy,” selling their companies for a quick and hefty profit.

“It’s such a small ambition and sad really,” Mr. Jobs said. “They should want to build something, something that lasts.”

NY Times: You Love Your iPhone. Literally.

September 30, 2011

You Love Your iPhone. Literally.

By MARTIN LINDSTROM

WITH Apple widely expected to release its iPhone 5 on Tuesday, Apple addicts across the world are getting ready for their latest fix.

But should we really characterize the intense consumer devotion to the iPhone as an addiction? A recent experiment that I carried out using neuroimaging technology suggests that drug-related terms like “addiction” and “fix” aren’t as scientifically accurate as a word we use to describe our most cherished personal relationships. That word is “love.”

As a branding consultant, I have followed Apple from its early days as a cult brand to its position today as one of the most valuable, widely admired companies on earth. A few years back, I conducted an experiment to examine the similarities between some the world’s strongest brands and the world’s greatest religions. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests, my team looked at subjects’ brain activity as they viewed consumer images involving brands like Apple and Harley-Davidson and religious images like rosary beads and a photo of the pope. We found that the brain activity was uncannily similar when viewing both types of imagery.

This past summer, I gathered a group of 20 babies between the ages of 14 and 20 months. I handed each one a BlackBerry. No sooner had the babies grasped the phones than they swiped their little fingers across the screens as if they were iPhones, seemingly expecting the screens to come to life. It appears that a whole new generation is being primed to navigate the world of electronics in a ritualized, Apple-approved way.

Friends who have accidentally left home without their iPhones tell me they feel stressed-out, cut off and somehow un-whole. That sounds a lot like separation anxiety to me. Not long ago, I headed an effort to identify the 10 most powerful, affecting sounds in the world: I found that a vibrating phone came in third, behind only the Intel chime and the sound of a baby giggling. Phantom vibration syndrome is the term I use to describe our habit of scrambling for a cellphone we feel rippling in our pocket, only to find out we are mistaken. Similar to pressing an elevator button repeatedly in the belief that the elevator will descend sooner, we check our phones for e-mails and texts countless times a day, almost as if we can will others to text, call, e-mail or Skype us.

So are our smartphones addictive, medically speaking? Some psychologists suggest that using our iPhones and BlackBerrys may tap into the same associative learning pathways in the brain that make other compulsive behaviors — like gambling — so addictive. As with addiction to drugs or cigarettes or food, the chemical driver of this process is the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine.

Earlier this year, I carried out an fMRI experiment to find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games. In conjunction with the San Diego-based firm MindSign Neuromarketing, I enlisted eight men and eight women between the ages of 18 and 25. Our 16 subjects were exposed separately to audio and to video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone.

In each instance, the results showed activation in both the audio and visual cortices of the subjects’ brains. In other words, when they were exposed to the video, our subjects’ brains didn’t just see the vibrating iPhone, they “heard” it, too; and when they were exposed to the audio, they also “saw” it. This powerful cross-sensory phenomenon is known as synesthesia.

But most striking of all was the flurry of activation in the insular cortex of the brain, which is associated with feelings of love and compassion. The subjects’ brains responded to the sound of their phones as they would respond to the presence or proximity of a girlfriend, boyfriend or family member.

In short, the subjects didn’t demonstrate the classic brain-based signs of addiction. Instead, they loved their iPhones.

As we embrace new technology that does everything but kiss us on the mouth, we risk cutting ourselves off from human interaction. For many, the iPhone has become a best friend, partner, lifeline, companion and, yes, even a Valentine. The man or woman we love most may be seated across from us in a romantic Paris bistro, but his or her 8GB, 16GB or 32GB rival lies in wait inside our pockets and purses.

My best advice? Shut off your iPhone, order some good Champagne and find love and compassion the old-fashioned way.

Martin Lindstrom is the author of “Brandwashed: Tricks Companies Use to Manipulate Our Minds and Persuade Us to Buy.”

FT: My shallow affair with Twitter

Source - http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db87a0e2-a401-11e0-8b4f-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1VXkE736U

July 8, 2011 10:10 pm

My shallow affair with Twitter

By Harry Eyres

Tweets are the perfect mode of (pseudo) communication for the age of narcissism

Readers, I have to confess to a foolish dalliance. Perhaps it was her sheer youthfulness that seduced me. Surely it was not the fact that she couldn’t string more than two sentences together. Or was it just that I, a middle-aged man, wanted confirmation that I could still attract – followers?

If you asked me what induced me to sign up to Twitter, I would say it was a vague desire to connect, combined with a fair dose of feline curiosity. Like the proverbial cat, I should have been wiser: what was I to expect from a medium designed (by its founder Jack Dorsey) to deliver “short burst[s] of inconsequential information”, 40.55 per cent of whose content was found in a survey in August 2009 by Pear Analytics to consist of “pointless babble”. Now that I am no longer under its spell, Twitter seems to me one of the greatest time-wasters ever conceived.

Pear Analytics classified 37.55 per cent of tweets in its survey as “conversational” but there is quite a difference between having the vague characteristics of a conversation and consisting of a true conversation. A conversation requires that you know whom you are addressing; it is predicated on a certain courtesy. People who simply shout, scream or throw comments into the air are not conversing; they may well be mad.

The lack of a sense of address is the problem with many or most political tweets. I haven’t yet received any from Barack Obama, but some of the most leaden-footed on my Twitter page have emanated from the new British Labour leader Ed Miliband. Comedians rightly made fun of a message he sent out on the eve of the big union demonstration on March 26 against the cuts: “See some of you there”, it went, provoking unfavourable comparison with some of the more stirring rallying-cries in history (“Once more unto the breach, dear friends”, “We shall fight on the beaches” etc). Another recent Miliband tweet ran as follows: “I’m looking forward to setting out some important changes ahead for Labour in my speech to the national policy forum on Saturday.” If anyone can imagine a less appetising taster for anything, let me know.

Fleetingly I had a notion that Twitter might be a medium for poetry – in particular for the haiku. One distinguished musician I followed approached this level in some of his tweets – aperçus of delicate beauty. But I fear I am too selfish; if I wrote what I thought was a good haiku I would not post it on Twitter.

The other literary form to which a tweet might aspire is the aphorism. I was impressed that the author Alain de Botton bothered to post aphorisms on Twitter but disappointed by examples such as, “The world is hardly short of good ideas – the challenge is how to make them take hold and stick.” This seemed more of a truism than an aphorism. Good aphorisms have a quality that is both distilled and poignant, the ability to pierce through the veils of ordinary perception to a bitter truth. This example verged on the vapid, like so much else on Twitter. But then, if you coined a really good aphorism, surely you would put it in a book.

No doubt I was foolish to expect conversation, or poetry, or philosophy from Twitter. Apart from being an amplifying chamber for rumour and gossip, it is the perfect mode of (pseudo) communication for the age of narcissism. I read tweets from perfectly intelligent people that informed me that they still had a sniffly cold or were making their third cup of tea of the morning; one went something like this: “I.REALLY.MUST.GET.DOWN.TO.WORK.” A psychoanalyst might have something to say about that: a displacement of a displacement?

The fundamental thing about tweets is they are nearly always about “me”; in fact, many might as well read, “Me! Me! Me!” If they do not describe some irrelevant detail of everyday life, their aim, whether confessed or covert, tends to be self-promotion. They are the product of what historian Christopher Lasch called the “the new narcissist ... who doubts even the reality of his own existence.”

Twitter is not just a phoney form of conversation, it is a deceptive medium for discussion. Because of the limit on characters, tweets move towards closure, and this is where the aesthetics and the politics of Twitter combine in a sort of negative synergy. Haikus and aphorisms are tight, terse forms achieved under intense pressure; they justify their brevity because of their concentration, like a reduced sauce. But Tweets are just short; they give the impression of decisiveness without having said anything decisive. After “Me! Me! Me!” they say “I’m right”.

God help anyone who appealed to Twitter as a court of justice. Good arguments or exchanges need the long, slow haul, not the addictive jabber of Twitter. But, for all that, Twitter did perform one service for me, helping me to survive the recent royal wedding as I read irreverent tweets about the choice of music and the archbishop’s mad hair.

[email protected]

More columns at www.ft.com/eyres

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

WSJ: The insidious Evils of 'Like' Culture

LIFE & CULTURE
JULY 2, 2011

The Insidious Evils of 'Like' Culture

In our age of online view counts and retweets, conformity is becoming the rule

By NEIL STRAUSS

If you happen to be reading this article online, you'll notice that right above it, there is a button labeled "like." Please stop reading and click on "like" right now.

Thank you. I feel much better. It's good to be liked.

There's a growing cultural obsession with being blogged, digged, tweeted and liked. Now add Google's +1 to the mix and it's just like being in high school all over again, says author Neil Strauss.

Don't forget to comment on, tweet, blog about and StumbleUpon this article. And be sure to "+1" it if you're on the newly launched Google+ social network. In fact, if you don't want to read the rest of this article, at least stay on the page for a few minutes before clicking elsewhere. That way, it will appear to the site analytics as if you've read the whole thing.

Once, there was something called a point of view. And, after much strife and conflict, it eventually became a commonly held idea in some parts of the world that people were entitled to their own points of view.

Unfortunately, this idea is becoming an anachronism. When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. When it was hijacked first by advertising and then by commerce, it seemed like it had been fully co-opted and brought into line with human greed and ambition.

But there was one other element of human nature that the Internet still needed to conquer: the need to belong. The "like" button began on the website FriendFeed in 2007, appeared on Facebook in 2009, began spreading everywhere from YouTube to Amazon to most major news sites last year, and has now been officially embraced by Google as the agreeable, supportive and more status-conscious "+1." As a result, we can now search not just for information, merchandise and kitten videos on the Internet, but for approval.

Masterfile

You 'like' me! Even rock stars agonize over their Facebook and Twitter stats.

Just as stand-up comedians are trained to be funny by observing which of their lines and expressions are greeted with laughter, so too are our thoughts online molded to conform to popular opinion by these buttons. A status update that is met with no likes (or a clever tweet that isn't retweeted) becomes the equivalent of a joke met with silence. It must be rethought and rewritten. And so we don't show our true selves online, but a mask designed to conform to the opinions of those around us.

Conversely, when we're looking at someone else's content—whether a video or a news story—we are able to see first how many people liked it and, often, whether our friends liked it. And so we are encouraged not to form our own opinion but to look to others for cues on how to feel.

"Like" culture is antithetical to the concept of self-esteem, which a healthy individual should be developing from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Instead, we are shaped by our stats, which include not just "likes" but the number of comments generated in response to what we write and the number of friends or followers we have. I've seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook "likes" and Twitter followers than they do.

Because it's so easy to medicate our need for self-worth by pandering to win followers, "likes" and view counts, social media have become the métier of choice for many people who might otherwise channel that energy into books, music or art—or even into their own Web ventures.

The same is true of the productivity of already established writers and artists. I was recently on a radio show with an author who, the interviewer said, had tweeted, on average, every 20 minutes for the past two years. Yet, despite all the time and effort spent amassing and catering to followers, as soon as a social network falls out of use, like MySpace, all that work collapses like a castle built of sand.

The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm presciently wrote over 60 years ago that man has "constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine he built…. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and has lost ownership of himself."

So let's rise up against the tyranny of the "like" button. Share what makes you different from everyone else, not what makes you exactly the same. Write about what's important to you, not what you think everyone else wants to hear. Form your own opinions of something you're reading, rather than looking at the feedback for cues about what to think. And, unless you truly believe that microblogging is your art form, don't waste your time in pursuit of a quick fix of self-esteem and start focusing on your true passions.

And please, despite what I said earlier, do not +1, tweet, StumbleUpon, like or comment on this article. You'll only be making it worse.

—Mr. Strauss is the author of seven best-selling books. His latest book is "Everyone Loves You When You're Dead: Journeys Into Fame and Madness."

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

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.

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.

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.

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?”

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

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

===

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.

WSJ: The Really Smart Phone

WHAT THEY KNOW
APRIL 23, 2011

The Really Smart Phone

Researchers are harvesting a wealth of intimate detail from our cellphone data, uncovering the hidden patterns of our social lives, travels, risk of disease—even our political views.

By ROBERT LEE HOTZ

Photo-illustration by Adam Magyar

'Phones can know,' says an MIT researcher. 'People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior.'

Apple and Google may be intensifying privacy concerns by tracking where and when people use their mobile phones—but the true future of consumer surveillance is taking shape inside the cellphones at a weather-stained apartment complex in Cambridge, Mass.

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.

Through these and other cellphone research projects, scientists are able to pinpoint "influencers," the people most likely to make others change their minds. The data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future. Cellphone companies are already using these techniques to predict—based on a customer's social circle of friends—which people are most likely to defect to other carriers.

A wave of ambitious social-network experiments is underway in the U.S. and Europe to track our movements, probe our relationships and, ultimately, affect the individual choices we all make. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports.

The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows. In Belgium, researchers say, cellphone data exposed a cultural split that is driving a historic political crisis there.

And back at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers didn't know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick.

"Phones can know," said Dr. Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, who helped pioneer the research. "People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior."

So far, these studies only scratch the surface of human complexity. Researchers are already exploring ways that the information gleaned from mobile phones can improve public health, urban planning and marketing. At the same time, researchers believe their findings hint at basic rules of human interaction, and that poses new challenges to notions of privacy.

"We have always thought of individuals as being unpredictable," said Johan Bollen, an expert in complex networks at Indiana University. "These regularities [in behavior] allow systems to learn much more about us as individuals than we would care for."

Today, almost three-quarters of the world's people carry a wireless phone. That activity generates immense commercial databases that reveal the ways we arrange ourselves into networks of power, money, love and trust. The patterns allow researchers to see past our individual differences to forms of behavior that shape us in common.

As a tool for field research, the cellphone is unique. Unlike a conventional land-line telephone, a mobile phone usually is used by only one person, and it stays with that person everywhere, throughout the day. Phone companies routinely track a handset's location (in part to connect it to the nearest cellphone tower) along with the timing and duration of phone calls and the user's billing address.

Typically, the handset logs calling data, messaging activity, search requests and online activities. Many smartphones also come equipped with sensors to record movements, sense its proximity to other people with phones, detect light levels, and take pictures or video. It usually also has a compass, a gyroscope and an accelerometer to sense rotation and direction.

What They Know

A Wall Street Journal investigation into the world of digital privacy.

• The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets
• Sites Feed Personal Details To New Tracking Industry
• On Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only

Advances in statistics, psychology and the science of social networks are giving researchers the tools to find patterns of human dynamics too subtle to detect by other means. At Northeastern University in Boston, network physicists discovered just how predictable people could be by studying the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users.

After analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position, the researchers determined that, taken together, people's movements appeared to follow a mathematical pattern. The scientists said that, with enough information about past movements, they could forecast someone's future whereabouts with 93.6% accuracy.

The pattern held true whether people stayed close to home or traveled widely, and wasn't affected by the phone user's age or gender.

"For us, people look like little particles that move in space and that occasionally communicate with each other," said Northeastern physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who led the experiment. "We have turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be objectively followed."

Only recently have academics had the opportunity to study commercial cellphone data. Until recently, most cellphone providers saw little value in mining their own data for social relationships, researchers say. That's now changing, although privacy laws restrict how the companies can share their records.

Several cellphone companies in Europe and Africa lately have donated large blocks of calling records for research use, with people's names and personal details stripped out.

"For the scientific purpose, we don't care who the people are," said medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis at Harvard University, who is using phone data to study how diseases, behavior and ideas spread through social networks, and how companies can use these webs of relationships to influence drug marketing and health-care decisions.

His work focuses on "social contagion"—the idea that our relationships with people around us, which are readily mapped through cellphone usage, shape our behavior in sometimes unexpected ways. By his calculation, for instance, obesity is contagious. So is loneliness.

Even though the cellphone databases are described as anonymous, they can contain revealing personal details when paired with other data. A recent lawsuit in Germany offered a rare glimpse of routine phone tracking. Malte Spitz, a Green party politician, sued Deutsche Telekom to see his own records as part of an effort by Mr. Spitz to highlight privacy issues.

In a six-month period, the phone company had recorded Mr. Spitz's location more than 35,000 times, according to data Mr. Spitz released in March. By combining the phone data with public records, the news site Zeit Online reconstructed his daily travels for months.

Read More

• Our Social Networks, Ourselves
• Google Defends Way It Gets Phone Data
• Avoiding Mobile Trackers

In recent days, Apple Inc. triggered privacy alarms with the news that its iPhones automatically keep a database of the phone's location stretching back for months. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that both Apple and Google Inc. (maker of the Android phone operating system) go further than that and in fact collect location information from their smartphones. A test of one Android phone showed that it recorded location data every few seconds and transmitted it back to Google several times an hour.

Google and Apple have said the data transmitted by their phones is anonymous and users can turn off location sharing.

"We can quantify human movement on a scale that wasn't possible before," said Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico who works with 220 mobile-phone companies in 80 countries. "I don't think anyone has a handle on all the ramifications." His largest single research data set encompasses 500 million people in Latin America, Africa and Europe.

Among other things, Mr. Eagle has used the data to determine how slums can be a catalyst for a city's economic vitality. In short, slums provide more opportunities for entrepreneurial activity than previously thought. Slums "are economic springboards," he said.

Cellphone providers are openly exploring other possibilities. By mining their calling records for social relationships among customers, several European telephone companies discovered that people were five times more likely to switch carriers if a friend had already switched, said Mr. Eagle, who works with the firms. The companies now selectively target people for special advertising based on friendships with people who dropped the service.

At AT&T, a research team led by Ramon Caceres recently amassed millions of anonymous call records from hundreds of thousands of mobile-phone subscribers in New York and Los Angeles to compare commuting habits in the two metropolitan areas.

Dr. Caceres, a lead scientist at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J., wanted to gauge the potential for energy conservation and urban planning. "If we can prove the worth of this work, you can think of doing it for all the world's billions of phones," he said.

Thousands of smartphone applications, or "apps," already take advantage of a user's location data to forecast traffic congestion, rate restaurants, share experiences and pictures, or localize radio channels. Atlanta-based AirSage Inc. routinely tracks the movements of millions of cellphones to generate live traffic reports in 127 U.S. cities, processing billions of anonymous data points about location every day.

View Full Image

M. Scott Brauer for The Wall Street Journal

Alex Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, above. Using location data, he said, 'I can say a lot about the music you like...your financial risks.'

What Phones Know

• One study found that the U.K.'s happiest time is 8 p.m. Saturday; its unhappiest day is Tuesday.
• European phone companies discovered their customers were five times more likely to switch carriers if friends had switched, allowing the companies to target their ads.
• Another study was able to determine that two people were talking about politics—without the researchers hearing the call

As more people access the Internet through their phones, the digital universe of personal detail funneled through these handsets is expanding rapidly, and so are ways researchers can use the information to gauge behavior. Dr. Bollen and his colleagues, for example, found that the millions of Twitter messages sent via mobile phones and computers every day captured swings in national mood that presaged changes in the Dow Jones index up to six days in advance with 87.6% accuracy.

The researchers analyzed the emotional content of words used in 9.7 million of the terse 140-character text messages posted by 2.7 million tweeters between March and December 2008. As Twitter goes, so goes the stock market, the scientists found.

"It is not just about observing what is happening; it is about shaping what is happening," said Dr. Bollen. "The patterns are allowing us to learn how to better manipulate trends, opinions and mass psychology."

Some scientists are taking advantage of the smartphone's expanding capabilities to design Android and iPhone apps, which they give away, to gather personal data. In this way, environmental economist George MacKerron at the London School of Economics recruited 40,000 volunteers through an iPhone app he designed, called Mappiness, to measure emotions in the U.K.

At random moments every day, his iPhone app prompts the users to report their moods, activities, and surroundings. The phone also automatically relays the GPS coordinates of the user's location and rates nearby noise levels by using the unit's microphone. It asks permission to photograph the locale.

By early April, volunteers had filed over two million mood reports and 200,000 photographs.

Publicly, Mr. MacKerron uses their data to chart the hour-by-hour happiness level of London and other U.K. cities on his website. By his measure, the U.K.'s happiest time is 8 p.m. Saturday; its unhappiest day is Tuesday.

Perhaps less surprisingly, people are happiest when they are making love and most miserable when sick in bed. The most despondent place in the U.K. is an hour or so west of London, in a town called Slough.

On a more scholarly level, Mr. MacKerron is collecting the information to study the relationship between moods, communities and the places people spend time. To that end, Mr. MacKerron expects to link the information to weather reports, online mapping systems and demographics databases.

Several marketing companies have contacted him to learn whether his cellphone software could help them find out how people feel when they are, for instance, near advertising billboards or listening to commercial radio, he said.

Mr. MacKerron said he's tempted—but has promised his users that their personal information will be used only for scholarly research. "There is a phenomenal amount of data we can collect with very little effort," he said.

Some university researchers have begun trolling anonymous billing records encompassing entire countries. When mathematician Vincent Blondel studied the location and billing data from one billion cellphone calls in Belgium, he found himself documenting a divide that has threatened his country's ability to govern itself.

Split by linguistic differences between a Flemish-speaking north and a French-speaking south, voters in Belgium set a world record this year, by being unable to agree on a formal government since holding elections last June. Belgium's political deadlock broke a record previously held by Iraq.

The calling patterns from 600 towns revealed that the two groups almost never talked to each other, even when they were neighbors.

This social impasse, as reflected in relationships documented by calling records, "had an impact on the political life and the discussions about forming a government," said Dr. Blondel at the Catholic University of Louvain near Brussels, who led the research effort.

The MIT smartphone experiment is designed to delve as deeply as possible into daily life. For his work, Dr. Pentland gave volunteers free Android smartphones equipped with software that automatically logged their activities and their proximity to other people. The participants also filed reports on their health, weight, eating habits, opinions, purchases and other personal information, so the researchers could match the phone data to relationships and behavior.

The current work builds on his earlier experiments, beginning in 2004, conducted in an MIT dormitory that explored how relationships influence behavior, health, eating habits and political views. Dr. Pentland and his colleagues used smartphones equipped with research software and sensors to track face-to-face encounters among 78 college students in a dorm during the final three months of the 2008 presidential election.

Every six minutes, each student's phone scanned for any other phone within 10 feet, as a way to identify face-to-face meetings. Among other things, each phone also reported its location and compiled an anonymous log of calls and text messages every 20 minutes. All told, the researchers compiled 320,000 hours of data about the students' behavior and relationships, buttressed by detailed surveys.

"Just by watching where you spend time, I can say a lot about the music you like, the car you drive, your financial risk, your risk for diabetes. If you add financial data, you get an even greater insight," said Dr. Pentland. "We are trying to understand the molecules of behavior in this really complete way."

Almost a third of the students changed their political opinions during the three months. Their changing political ideas were related to face-to-face contact with project participants of differing views, rather than to friends or traditional campaign advertising, the analysis showed.

"We can measure their daily exposure to political opinions," said project scientist Anmol Madan at MIT's Media Lab. "Maybe one day, you would be able to download a phone app to measure how much Republican or Democratic exposure you are getting and, depending on what side you're on, give you a warning."

As a reward when the experiment was done, the students were allowed to keep the smartphones used to monitor them.

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at [email protected]

WSJ: Tapping Into Social-Media Smarts

APRIL 25, 2011

Tapping Into Social-Media Smarts

Employees share information in their personal lives. Companies can use those skills to improve workplace collaboration.

By TERRI L. GRIFFITH

To recognize the huge potential social networking offers for companies looking to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration among their employees, consider these two facts:

• About half of company knowledge-management initiatives stagnate or fail.

• There are about 131 million U.S. Facebook users between the ages of 18 and 64, and more than 500 million world-wide.

Leadership in IT

See the complete Leadership: Information Technology Journal report.

That's more than half a billion people using the same kinds of tools so many companies have struggled to put to productive use. In their private lives, users of Facebook, Twitter and other social media are completely at ease forming communities of shared interests and keeping everyone up-to-date with messages, pictures and documents. Now they are ready to put those same tools to work at the office—to help everyone see who knows what, who needs what information, and how to coordinate their work.

In other words, employees already have the skills for more collaboration. It's up to companies to take advantage of them. Here's how to do just that:

Have employees identify areas that would benefit from greater collaboration.

View Full Image

Margaret Riegel

Be explicit. Raise the subject with a question like, "If we had something like Facebook [or Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.], what part of your work would be better?"

It's likely that many of your employees are already thinking about how they might apply these same tools to improve how they get their jobs done. In fact, they may already have started without you.

In some companies, teams have created Facebook groups around their projects to help them get to know their teammates and have a single place to store project documents. Other savvy teams have studied Facebook, and then asked their IT staff to create a similar online space for collaborative work.

In both cases, employees are taking action based on recognizing unmet needs for online collaboration and knowledge-management tools.

Don't say no to social networking because of concerns about public sites.

Many companies have valid concerns about security breaches, privacy issues, bandwidth hogging and loss of productivity when employees use social-networking sites like Facebook at the office. But social networking for a business doesn't have to involve public sites. There are many products that allow businesses to set up private systems with internal database, search and chat functionality. Socialtext Inc., Altus vSearch from Altus Inc., Yammer Inc., and Chatter from Salesforce.com Inc. are a few.

These tools support social networking but let the company stay in control and maintain security. Altus vSearch, for example, lets companies capture videos of formal presentations and their associated slides—or informal how-tos and any other video content—and make the material searchable. As on YouTube, viewers can choose to follow particular people or topics. The video files can also integrate personal-profile information about the employees involved. The result is a database of work-related video for training, informal learning, reuse of presentations, and a more-developed, work-focused social network. Material can be made available to employees only, to invited outsiders, or to the public.

Set clear guidelines for both external and internal social networking and collaboration.

Make it clear to employees that they are personally responsible for the information they post and that real names should be used. Instruct employees as to what information is confidential or proprietary to the company, and how they can get the most out of sharing without putting company secrets at risk. In choosing or creating a system, ask your IT department about their biggest concerns around social networking and how these concerns can be dealt with while still supporting collaboration.

Start with goals everyone can understand.

Communicate to everyone at the company what you want to achieve, such as better team collaboration or brainstorming for new product or service ideas. Send a clear message that social networking at work should be about work. And make sure everyone at the company is part of the network. Don't build barriers that might exclude people just because of their position in the organization. New ideas can come from unexpected places.

Make policies and procedures supportive.

Employees will need to make social networking part of their work routines—interacting and answering questions from one another. They'll also need incentives to collaborate. Raises and promotions based solely on individual performance won't encourage workers to share new ideas or possible solutions.

It's also important for employees to be able to track the results when they share an idea, suggest a solution or support a team working on the other side of the world.

Prepare for expectations of greater democracy.

Social networkers are accustomed to seeing what their friends are doing, expressing their opinions in polls and being welcomed into conversations. Not all companies wish to be as transparent and open to dialogue as the public social-networking environment is. But there will be pressure for greater transparency in the workplace as social networking is introduced.

"If social media can democratize a country, you had better believe it can democratize your company," Vijay Gurbaxani, a professor of information systems and computer science, said in a speech to chief information officers in February in New Delhi. Mr. Gurbaxani teaches at the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine.

You can sidestep tensions by being ready with clear and thoughtful responses as to where employees can expect transparency and open dialogue and where they cannot.

Be open to change.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are some of the first collaboration models your workers encountered, but they won't be the last. Some of your employees may now be experimenting with mobile video and location-aware applications. Always be willing to learn from employees about new technologies.

Dr. Griffith is a professor of management at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif. She can be reached at [email protected].

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

Boing Boing: Found Sign- Why the Internet is No Substitute for a Library

Chance upon this on Boing Boing. Interesting.

===

Found Sign: Why the Internet is No Substitute for a Library

Xeni Jardin at 11:59 AM Thursday, Apr 14, 2011 

 

Joe Sabia says, "This is a sign that hangs from the wall of my local public library in Milford, Connecticut. It's a large but quaint building occupied by maybe 6 or so people, and 3 elderly kind women at the check out desk." Click for larger size.

Update: Boing Boing pal Seth Godin writes,

Apparently, it comes from this book which is in itself quite an amusing read, as far as the reviews indicate...

Culture

Bloomberg Businessweek: The Games Companies Play

CEO Guide to Business Gamification April 4, 2011, 11:24PM EST text size: TT

The Games Companies Play

Siemens, Hilton, and Target are using games to train workers and improve how they design and market products

By Rachael King

 

Siemens (SI) is pinning high hopes on Pete. A cheery fellow, Pete wears a yellow hard hat with his name emblazoned across the front. He's polite and eager to lend a hand. He's also animated: Pete the Plant Manager stars in a new online video game from Siemens called Plantville that simulates what it's like to run a manufacturing facility. The aim is to take three dilapidated factories and make them more efficiently meet customer orders by hiring employees, redesigning layout, and buying and installing new Siemens equipment.

Germany's Siemens, which makes power plants, scanners, and trains, created the game to fuel equipment sales and foster greater employee knowledge of its products. "Employees are sometimes siloed in their business units and don't see the breadth and depth of our portfolio," says Tom Varney, head of marketing communications at Siemens Industry. The company joins a growing roster of enterprises as diverse as Hilton Worldwide's Embassy Suites hotel chain and German software maker SAP (SAP), which are using technologies that make games interesting in order to interact more effectively with customers and employees.

The trend, known as gamification, lets businesses weave elements of games into applications that otherwise have little to do with playing. The market for gamification will grow to $1.6 billion in 2015, from $100 million in 2011, according to Wanda Meloni, founder of M2 Research, a consulting firm that researches the gaming industry.

Companies such as Cold Stone Creamery and United Parcel Service (UPS) have for years used games for such tasks as training workers. Gamification is now letting managers push aspects of gaming into marketing, product design, and everyday work experience. It's also helping companies compensate for shortfalls in traditional forms of advertising and marketing, says Gabe Zichermann, chief executive officer of Gamification, a company that runs workshops for businesses that want to implement a gamification strategy. "What we have is a crisis of engagement," he says.

Nissan's "eco mode" dashboard service

Nissan Motor (NSANY) brought gamification to its new electric vehicle, the Nissan Leaf. The automaker uses the technology to help drivers conserve fuel. When the car is driven in so-called eco mode, its accelerator contains a counter push-back control mechanism that is activated when it detects excess pressure. The feature informs drivers that they're using more power than required. An online portal connected to the car's dashboard also lets drivers know how well they're conserving energy, compared with other drivers in the region. The most efficient drivers are given virtual bronze, silver, gold, and platinum medals.

Similarly, cashiers at Target (TGT) receive a score each time they check out a customer. The score is based on the the transaction's speed, with the checkout system also calculating the cashier's success rate over multiple transactions.

Companies need to guard against adding a superficial gaming gloss to applications—for instance, by creating meaningless leader boards that have little lasting impact on employee behavior, says Aaron Dignan, author of Game Frame, a book published in March that explores game mechanics in the workplace. "My hope is that it grows beyond that into a real discipline that's more rigorous than it is today," Dignan says. Managers also need to be alert to such possible unintended consequences as hacking or employees putting too much emphasis on the wrong aspects of play. "People could pay too much attention to things that don't matter or too little attention to things that do matter if the game is designed poorly," he says.

U.S. Companies Helped on Plantville

Siemens spent a year designing Plantville, working with such companies as Eugene (Ore.)-based game-design company Pipeworks Software, advertising and design firm Shaw Co. in St. Louis, and Fusion Performance Marketing in Plano, Tex. The game can be downloaded at Plantville.com and Siemens is using advertising, social media, and employee communications to get the word out. While the game hasn't been out long enough for Siemens to have amassed results, Varney says early feedback from employees has been positive.

Hilton's Embassy Suites is using game techniques in a customer loyalty campaign. Created with a marketing company called Maritz, the campaign targeted 50,000 of Embassy Suites' most loyal guests, then solicited their participation with 10 different approaches, including direct mail, e-mail, and asking customers to play a game. The game option proved most effective, says Christian Kuhn, director of brand marketing for Embassy Suites. The 5,000 people targeted by the game were most likely to open e-mails and later spent the most money, Kuhn says. That group accounted for about $200,000 of the additional $1 million in revenue generated by the campaign, he said.

Games may be more effective in marketing because they offer the gratification people experience when surprised and rewarded. An unexpected reward releases dopamine in the brain, giving beneficiaries a pleasurable feeling, says Barry Kirk, a vice-president at Maritz. "We don't think you can gamify something without understanding the human brain and neuroscience," Barry says.

Game designers are good at creating psychological hacks into how the human brain works to determine what motivates people, says author Dignan. That's why gamification can be a good fit for companies seeking to better engage workers. "It's about managing motivation and energy level and commitment," he says.

SAP's Games for Corporate Directors

Software maker SAP is turning to gamification to help corporate board members prepare for meetings. Directors typically must slog through thick binders full of documents or dashboards that feature key performance metrics. SAP is developing an application for Apple's iPad that boasts game elements such as progress bars and leader boards to get directors "more engaged in consuming various pieces of data," says Reuven Gorsht, senior director of strategy and global pre-sales at SAP. "We're dealing with very high-ranking executives that sit on six or seven boards and may have a full-time job running a company," he says. "Their time is precious and their attention span is fairly low." he says. The app should be ready in three to four months, he says. SAP is also looking at other ways to use game mechanics to make its software easier to use and more engaging for employees.

Traci Sitzmann, an assistant professor of management at the University of Colorado's business school, says games can make employees better at their jobs. She spent more than a year examining 65 studies and data from 6,476 trainees in a study due to be published in the journal Personnel Psychology. Those using video games had a 14 percent higher skill-based knowledge level, an 11 percent higher factual-knowledge level, and a 9 percent higher retention rate than trainees in comparison groups, Sitzmann says.

Siemens is looking to games, not only for retaining current employees but attracting future ones as well. "With Plantville, we think there's a big educational play with colleges and high schools," says Siemens' Varney. He says he hopes the game can help make manufacturing more attractive to young people. "We have about 3,000 jobs posted in the U.S. at Siemens, many in technology or manufacturing," he says. "We're hoping to inspire a new generation of plant managers."

King is a writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco.