Rituals of defilement and purification.

The New York Times:

“[The Gulf of Mexico] has been the nation’s sacrifice zone, and has been for 50-plus years.”

Mother Jones:

Last week, the emcee that accompanies the [female] oil wrestlers yelled into the microphone, “Let that oil gush! Let that money flow!” The workers—part of the new Grand Isle scenery of helicopters, Hummers, and National Guardsmen, serious people in uniforms and coveralls and work boots—the workers around the wrestling ring, drunk and blowing cash from jobs that might kill them, cheered.

ideas

Can online reviews reveal anything new about popular restaurants?

I recently came across a restaurant on Yelp.com, Mitchell’s Ice Cream in San Francisco, with nearly two thousand reviews.

I guess the average number of reviews for a restaurant in San Francisco — or in that neighborhood, at least — is more like 20. So nearly 2,000 reviews is something else.

This business has been line-out-the-door popular for decades. Is some secret of its success hidden inside its customer reviews on Yelp?

Would analysis of these reviews tell us anything about the vendor or, more likely, what its customers have in common?

Can those consumer insights shed any light on how that business has excelled?

To be clear: the best way to investigate a business’ success is to patronize it: to go to it, observe its service and sample its product. Over time. But if you also wanted to survey its customers, a service like Yelp could be data rich. For a low research cost.

Related
Previously on Yelp.

ideas/people

Tracing urban migrations from Census and city records.

Can the price of homes tell you anything about who will gravitate to a neighborhood; will they be young or old? With or without children? Double or single income?

Perhaps if home prices over time are combined with Census data you could peg the movements of families to price changes and see what prices stimulate what migrations.

Maybe.

ideas/people

When all you have is a Twitter stream, everyone starts to look like a twit.

Dave Pell:

When confronted with the realtime web’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a full set of facts? We each take a few seconds to consider a one hundred forty character blurb and then hammer out our reactions by way of a Tweet or status update.

That model works for some incoming data. I only need a few seconds to come up with my official response to much of what is shared by way of the realtime web: Farmville update (hide), Foursquare Check-in (ignore), Mel Gibson tape (email link to Rabbi), Kid in a watermelon (retweet).

Other news and information doesn’t necessarily fit into the new instant-response model. But as everything merges into a single stream, it’s getting more difficult to turn off the reflex and the sense of urgency long enough to identify the data that requires a little more consideration.

via Jon Gruber.

people

art: automatic summaries of books.

AutoSummarize by Jason Huff: “The top 100 most downloaded copyright free books summarized using Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function and organized alphabetically.”

Remission by Katja Mater: “…I take a picture of the complete content of a book, shooting all pages on one negative…A summary, ending up in a book shaped blur.”

art/ideas/language

Brisk read on agents, asymmetric information and the financial meltdown.

A few weeks ago I wrote that market crashes are a form of feedback, but also a very inefficient one. I suggested that a more transparent financial marketplace where consumers could use technologies like the web to become more informed and involved would allow for less painful adjustments in asset prices, expectations, etc.

I’m now reading an essay by Paul Woolley titled “Why are financial markets so inefficient and exploitative – and a suggested remedy” which makes a similar case but, of course, does a much, much better job as its author actually knows a great deal about the topic:

The principals in this case are the end-investors and customers who subcontract financial tasks to agents such as banks, fund managers, brokers and other specialists. Delegation creates an incentive problem insofar as the agents have more and better information than their principals and because the interests of the two are rarely aligned…Since bubbles, crashes and rent capture are caused by principal/agent problems, the solution lies in having the principals change the way they contract and deal with agents.

(Or, as was said earlier by Bill Stensrud, it’s not the investment banks’ fault, it’s the investment bankers.)

Woolley’s essay is available for free and is part of the new anthology The Future of Finance and the theory that underpins it.

ideas

The “got it” rule for passing and AI chess.

My friend Matisse E. taught me a great trick: when you’re carrying something heavy and you are going to hand it over to someone else, you don’t let go until you hear the recipient say “got it.”

Like other great techniques, it seems like an obvious thing to do but isn’t. (Groups of people drop things all the time.)

It reminds me of the difference between technique and technology. I was recently reading an entry by Ben Wheeler about the late 90’s when master chess players not only played against computers but also with them, in “cyborg doubles” matches against other human-computer pairs.

It turns out the team with decent players but the best human-computer relationship (i.e., the best teamwork) beat the teams with the best individual human and computer players. Technology requires technique. Or, relationships matter.

ideas/people/play/technology

Paging Cato Fong: on interacting with a doppelgänger.

I’m being tailed by a Google AdSense agent. Everywhere I go, the agent is there, hiding behind a billboard or a kiosk poster, reminding me of questions I’ve recently asked.

What if I get bored by this slow-moving game of cat and mouse? What if I want to be surprised?

Maybe most of us won’t mind the loss of anonymity in this augmented future world, a Mall of America by way of Monaco where there’s an electronic eye on everyone.

But surely many will rebel against the constant drag of interacting with dumb if obsequious agents; interlocutors who address us personally but can’t respond when confronted directly. A politeness bordering on inanity.

If we’re going to spend most of our time online, with an electronic shadow, couldn’t we have a shadow that, from time to time, entertains us? A Cato to our Inspector Clouseau?

Update
The wonderful Google Alarm plug-in; don’t miss the video!

ideas/things

Bald men of the world unite, you have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Hairstyles don’t just frame faces, they frame facial gestures. I wonder if having a shaved head – as I often do – doesn’t have a subtle but lasting effect on my social interactions?

We tend to read faces very quickly. It’s a handy skill (or weakness) from more chaotic days when human society was, well, savage.

A face without hair probably invites more focus on its gestures. I suppose this could be tested by having an actor, disguised with and then without hair, deliver the same lines and make the same facial gestures for test subjects.

Do clearer facial gestures simply amplify the signal or shift it?

ideas/people

The last mile: the human answer.

In retail, the last mile, the human touch, is the most important. Especially when you’re trying to launch a new kind of product, one that requires consumers to change their habits:

This isn’t the first time we could have made [this coffee], but this is the first time we could sell it. We finally have the places that not only have the technical expertise and make good shots, but that have the staff who can make it accessible to the man on the street.”

The best way to share information is still the personal exchange. Could Apple have launched two new kinds of computers without its Apple stores and their well trained staff?

Which is not to say that the human touch is inherently a physical one – though eye contact helps. Social networks, abstract and mediated, also yield the benefits of one-on-one, personalized interactions. (The prized “customer service.”)

Both the iPad and the iPhone, the two devices which have done the most to revolutionize the popular use of computers in the last decade, were shipped with only one universally popular tool: the App Store.

The App Store is not just computer code, it’s also a system of business decisions (legal, financial, marketing) that allow Apple to shift to third parties the burden of making its platform relevant to the widest possible spectrum of consumers, while retaining for itself enough leverage to make sure these third parties are competitive and focused on the consumer.

By insisting on a more transparent marketplace where innovations can rise quickly to the top through popular feedback, Apple keeps vendors in check and consumers satisfied – having fulfilled the promise of a distinctly personal computer.

From a corporate standpoint, the App Store is an ingenious organization of resources: a massive outsourcing or crowd-sourcing project whereby Apple can tap into the marketplace of ideas to address what is likely the greatest challenge any consumer-oriented company faces today: diversity.

Here’s the Wikipedia definition of a killer app:

any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology, such as computer hardware, gaming console, software, or an operating system. A killer app can substantially increase sales of the platform on which it runs.

If Apple’s goal was to sell computers to designers, it could rely on a company like Adobe to make the killer app. But Apple’s goal is to sell computers to everyone: designers, doctors, Dads, dance instructors, etc. It has confronted the challenge of providing an endless variety of killer apps to a diverse marketplace by creating a massive, decentralized factory of ideas.

Already it appears this market is diverse enough to support dozens of calculators, not only because personal software is becoming increasingly tied to personal style but also because mobile computing requires a greater diversity in applications.

As the space of human-computer interactions becomes almost anywhere (from club to Church, from bank to beach), the need for context-aware and context-specific applications ensures there will be more such diversity in the future, not less.

ideas/people/things/work

Should Haiti exist?

Nation-states are important, even necessary fictions. But they are fictions. (For example, the U.S.A. is nearly a century older than Italy.)

David Rothkopf asks should the nation state of Haiti exist?

But what if the concept of Haiti is the problem? Haitians speak French and Creole as a vestige of a colonial era that began its decline over two centuries ago. That the island is divided between French and Spanish speaking halves is yet another consequence of European historical caprice. The country’s people are descendants of slaves who were torn from Africa and subjected to inhumane treatment as a consequence of a despicable and fundamentally immoral economic model that was recognized as intolerable and unsustainable also decades before the country’s founding.

In other words, the country has been shaped in many important ways by conditions that are virtually irrelevant to the modern world. Which raises the question: When does the statute of limitations run out on the idea behind a country’s existence?

ideas/people

How little we know about our bodies, our understanding of self.

I’d bet my house that if more Americans knew and accepted this fact, we’d have more rational identity politics:

“We have over 10 times more microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Washington University in St. Louis. But the microbiome, as it’s known, remains mostly a mystery. “It’s as if we have these other organs, and yet these are parts of our bodies we know nothing about.”

So much of our politics is a defense of a mistaken definition of self, an ignorance about the systems we inhabit and a tendency to “dumb down” what is always, inherently a complex web of relationships that are seldom apparent or what we believe them to be.

people

Why there are no more geese in Prospect Park, NYC.

Unintended Consequence #824,357 of humans “filtering” nature (aka, how evolution happens), from KingEdRa, a commenter at MetaFilter:

First there’s a few geeses and everyone’s all “Awww, how cute!” Many children, old people and young lovers on old-timey dates have magical moments interacting with nature by feeding them. Soon, the word gets out to other geeses, and those geeses tell even MORE geeses, “Hey man, free food!” Soon, you have a couple hundred geese milling about Prosopect Park, pooping all over everything and acting like TOTAL jerks to other birds, people and small, useless dogs. Next thing you know, the geeses are flying around over the skies in NYC, not migrating and shit because of all the AWESOME free food and BANG! a plane flies right into a whole flock of geeses and next thing you know, you’re making emergency landings on the Hudson River and Sully Sullenburger is all over my TV, writing books and shit. Now they’re dead, and everyone’s all “BOO! Parks Dept. BOO!”

In short, nothing good ever comes of feeding geese.

Earlier in the same thread, another commenter, effugas, writes:

In a hundred year’s time, I am convinced all life on Earth will be:

1) Too cute to kill
2) Too delicious to allow to go extinct
3) Too numerous to be threatened with extinction

These are the things we evolutionarily select for.

With the important qualification that “we” is not a uniform bunch. What’s cute but not delicious to someone in one economy may be the opposite to someone elsewhere. So the selections – and survivors – may seem that much more capricious or “autochthonous”.

If life on Earth has a purpose, we are certainly carrying it out. History is a sculpture of matter and energy wrought in the fourth dimension.

recently: more geese.

ideas/nature/people/things

Runaways and refugees.

Teens crossing the border for survival. To China.

North Korea, perhaps because of its proximity, physically and culturally, to more successful nations, has got to be an instance of some of the worst we humans can do to ourselves.

people

Cursing as an art form.

Most everyone curses but some people do it really well. For example, we all know how to liken someone we don’t like to a specific body part but only some people know exactly which body part to cite in order to describe a personality to a “t”.

I can think of cursers who are famous for their timing, and/or the creativity of their epithets but I can’t remember someone whose insults proved them a wise judge of character. And, yet, I’m sure such experts exist.

people