Robert Shiller on Behavioral Economics

In the past twenty years there has been a revolution in economics with the study not of how people would behave if they were perfectly rational, but of how they actually behave. At the vanguard of this movement is Robert Shiller of Yale University. He sits down with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast. Social Science Bites is made in association with SAGE.

David Edmonds: Okay you’ve got a choice, buy this plastic alarm clock right next to where you are standing for $28 or walk ten blocks and buy it in another shop for half price; $14. Now try this one, buy a laptop for $1995 in the shop next to you or walk ten blocks and get it for $1981. Well chances are you are more likely to walk to save money on the cheap clock then the expensive laptop, which is odd because in either case you could save exactly the same amount of money. In the past twenty years there has been a revolution in economics with the study not of how people would behave if they were perfectly rational, but of how they actually behave. At the vanguard of this movement is Robert Shiller of Yale University.

Nigel Warburton: Robert Shiller welcome to Social Science Bites.

Robert Shiller: My pleasure.

Nigel Warburton: The topic we are going to focus on is behavioural economics. Now we know roughly what economics is, but what’s behavioural economics?

Robert Shiller: Well the word ‘behavioural’ refers to the introduction of other social sciences into economics: psychology, sociology, and political science. It’s a revolution in economics that has taken place over the past twenty years or so. I think it’s bringing economics into a broader appreciation of reality. Economics was actually more behavioural fifty or a hundred years ago. At Yale University where I work, 1927 was the year where the department of economics, sociology and government was split into three separate departments and they moved us all apart.

Nigel Warburton: Why would it matter if they just split the departments up, I mean there’s an argument that specialisation actually allows people to progress further in their field – rather then knowing a little bit about everything.

Robert Shiller: Absolutely. There are both advantages and disadvantages of this structure. The advantage is that we develop mathematical economics and mathematical finance to a very advanced level – and it’s useful: we have option pricing theory that is very subtle and allows complex calculations that have some relevance to understanding these markets. But it loses perspective on why we have these options anyway. It offers a justification typically that involves rational behaviour. You can get into the swim of that, thinking ‘I want to know why smart people use options’ And it’s instructive to go through the exercise of thinking ‘is it really ever right to buy these investment products?’ But that doesn’t mean that you’re answering the question why people really do buy options and why this market exists and why other markets that sound equally plausible don’t exist.

Nigel Warburton: So what you’re saying is that traditional economics has focused on a kind of ideally rational individual: what would they do if they behaved in their own best interests based on the information available? But behavioural economics brings in the fact that we don’t always behave in our own best interests.  (...)

Robert Shiller: There’s a lot going on. It turns out that the human mind is very complicated. Economic theory likes to reduce human behaviour to a canonical form, the structure has been, ever since Samuelson wrote this a half century ago, that people want to maximise their consumption. All they want to do is consume goods; they don’t care about anyone else. There’s neither benevolence nor malevolence. All they care about is eating or getting goods and they want to smooth it, they described it in terms of so-called utility functions through their lifetime and that’s it. That is such an elegant simple model, but it’s too simple and if you look at what psychology shows, the mind is the product of human evolution and it has lots of different patterns of behaviour. The discoveries that psychologists make to economics are manifold.

Nigel Warburton: One that I know you’ve discussed is this notion of fairness that might trump the economic rationality.

Robert Shiller: A sense of fairness is a fundamental human universal. It’s been found in some recent studies that it even goes beyond humans, that higher primates do have some vestigial or limited understanding of fairness and equity. In terms of how the market responds to crises, economists assume that everything is done purely out of self-interest. And yet non-economists when we ask them about how things work, they have a totally different view. In one of my questionnaire surveys we asked something like this: if the economy were to improve what would your employer do?

a) nothing – why should he help me just because the economy goes up?

b) well the economy improves means the market for my services improves so my employer would realise out of self-interest that he would have to raise my wage in order to keep me.

c) my employer is a nice person and he would recognise that he should share the benefits with his employees.

I gave this question to both economists and non-economists. The economists all picked B, or most of them picked B! They think that market forces dominate. Whereas very few of the non-economists did: they thought either their employer was a bad guy which is A, or their employer is a nice guy, that’s C. So there’s a different worldview and I think that if people think that fairness is such an important thing in labour contracts then modelling the world as if it’s of total insignificance is wrong.

Nigel Warburton: So doesn’t this just make everything much, much more complicated because you can’t reduce individuals then to some kind of cipher where they are simply maximising their self-interest in terms of economic benefits?

Robert Shiller: That’s why a lot of economists don’t like this. Maybe with some justification they’ll say that there’s too many details in this theory, you can explain anything with it. But I’m un-persuaded by that criticism because, first of all, we can work on this and study people more and understand what psychological principle is relevant. And secondly, it doesn’t help to have a theory based on wrong assumptions.

by Social Science Bites |  Read more:

The Egg

You were on your way home when you died.

It was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.

And that’s when you met me.

“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?”

“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words.

“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…”

“Yup,” I said.

“I… I died?”

“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said.

You looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?”

“More or less,” I said.

“Are you god?” You asked.

“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.”

“My kids… my wife,” you said.

“What about them?”

“Will they be all right?”

“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.”

You looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.”

“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?”

“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.”

“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,”

“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.”

You followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?”

“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.”

by Andy Wier |  Read more:

h/t GS

On Her Majesty's secret service
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A Brief History of Money

In the 13th century, the Chinese emperor Kublai Khan embarked on a bold experiment. China at the time was divided into different regions, many of which issued their own coins, discouraging trade within the empire. So Kublai Khan decreed that henceforth money would take the form of paper.


It was not an entirely original idea. Earlier rulers had sanctioned paper money, but always alongside coins, which had been around for centuries. Kublai’s daring notion was to make paper money (the chao) the dominant form of currency. And when the Italian merchant Marco Polo visited China not long after, he marveled at the spectacle of people exchanging their labor and goods for mere pieces of paper. It was as if value were being created out of thin air. 


Kublai Khan was ahead of his time: He recognized that what matters about money is not what it looks like, or even what it’s backed by, but whether people believe in it enough to use it. Today, that concept is the foundation of all modern monetary systems, which are built on nothing more than governments’ support of and people’s faith in them. Money is, in other words, a complete abstraction—one that we are all intimately familiar with but whose growing complexity defies our comprehension.


Today, many people long for simpler times. It’s a natural reaction to a world in which money is becoming not just more abstract but more digital and virtual as well, in which sophisticated computer algorithms execute microsecond market transactions with no human intervention at all, in which below-the-radar economies are springing up around their own alternative currencies, and in which global financial crises are brought on for reasons difficult to parse without a Ph.D. Back in the day, the thinking goes, money stood for something: Gold doubloons and cowrie shells had real value, and so they didn’t need a government to stand behind them. 


In fact, though, money has never been that simple. And while its uses and meanings have shifted and evolved throughout history, the fact that it is no longer anchored to any one substance is actually a good thing. Here’s why.


Let's start with what money is used for. Modern economists typically define it by the three roles it plays in an economy: 


It’s a store of value, meaning that money allows you to defer consumption until a later date. 
 

It’s a unit of account, meaning that it allows you to assign a value to different goods without having to compare them. So instead of saying that a Rolex watch is worth six cows, you can just say it (or the cows) cost $10 000.
 

And it’s a medium of exchange—an easy and efficient way for you and me and others to trade goods and services with one another.


All of these roles have to do with buying and selling, and that’s how the modern world thinks of money—so much so that it seems peculiar to conceive of money in any other way. 


Yet in tribal and other “primitive” economies, money served a very different purpose—less a store of value or medium of exchange, much more a social lubricant. As the anthropologist David Graeber puts it in his recent book Debt: The First 5000 Years (Melville House, 2011), money in those societies was a way “to arrange marriages, establish the paternity of children, head off feuds, console mourners at funerals, seek forgiveness in the case of crimes, negotiate treaties, acquire followers.” Money, then, was not for buying and selling stuff but for helping to define the structure of social relations. 


How, then, did money become the basis of trade? By the time money makes its first appearance in written records, in Mesopotamia during the third millennium B.C.E., that society already had a sophisticated financial structure in place, and merchants were using silver as a standard of value to balance their accounts. But cash was still not widely used.


It’s really in the seventh century B.C.E., when the small kingdom of Lydia introduced the world’s first standardized metal coins, that you start to see money being used in a recognizable way. Located in what is now Turkey, Lydia sat on the cusp between the Mediterranean and the Near East, and commerce with foreign travelers was common. And that, it turns out, is just the kind of situation in which money is quite useful. 


To understand why, imagine doing a trade in the absence of money—that is, through barter. (Let’s leave aside the fact that no society has ever relied solely or even largely on barter; it’s still an instructive concept.) The chief problem with barter is what economist William Stanley Jevons called the “double coincidence of wants.” Say you have a bunch of bananas and would like a pair of shoes; it’s not enough to find someone who has some shoes or someone who wants some bananas. To make the trade, you need to find someone who has shoes he’s willing to trade and wants bananas. That’s a tough task. 


by James Suroweck, IEEE Spectrum |  Read more:

Photo: Levi Brown; Prop Stylist: Ariana Salvato

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A Day Job Waiting for a Kill Shot a World Away

From his computer console here in the Syracuse suburbs, Col. D. Scott Brenton remotely flies a Reaper drone that beams back hundreds of hours of live video of insurgents, his intended targets, going about their daily lives 7,000 miles away in Afghanistan. Sometimes he and his team watch the same family compound for weeks.

“I see mothers with children, I see fathers with children, I see fathers with mothers, I see kids playing soccer,” Colonel Brenton said.

When the call comes for him to fire a missile and kill a militant — and only, Colonel Brenton said, when the women and children are not around — the hair on the back of his neck stands up, just as it did when he used to line up targets in his F-16 fighter jet.

Afterward, just like the old days, he compartmentalizes. “I feel no emotional attachment to the enemy,” he said. “I have a duty, and I execute the duty.”

Drones are not only revolutionizing American warfare but are also changing in profound ways the lives of the people who fly them.

Colonel Brenton acknowledges the peculiar new disconnect of fighting a telewar with a joystick and a throttle from his padded seat in American suburbia.

When he was deployed in Iraq, “you land and there’s no more weapons on your F-16, people have an idea of what you were just involved with.” Now he steps out of a dark room of video screens, his adrenaline still surging after squeezing the trigger, and commutes home past fast-food restaurants and convenience stores to help with homework — but always alone with what he has done. (...)

Among the toughest psychological tasks is the close surveillance for aerial sniper missions, reminiscent of the East German Stasi officer absorbed by the people he spies on in the movie “The Lives of Others.” A drone pilot and his partner, a sensor operator who manipulates the aircraft’s camera, observe the habits of a militant as he plays with his children, talks to his wife and visits his neighbors. They then try to time their strike when, for example, his family is out at the market.

“They watch this guy do bad things and then his regular old life things,” said Col. Hernando Ortega, the chief of aerospace medicine for the Air Education Training Command, who helped conduct a study last year on the stresses on drone pilots. “At some point, some of the stuff might remind you of stuff you did yourself. You might gain a level of familiarity that makes it a little difficult to pull the trigger.”

Of a dozen pilots, sensor operators and supporting intelligence analysts recently interviewed from three American military bases, none acknowledged the kind of personal feelings for Afghans that would keep them awake at night after seeing the bloodshed left by missiles and bombs. But all spoke of a certain intimacy with Afghan family life that traditional pilots never see from 20,000 feet, and that even ground troops seldom experience.

“You see them wake up in the morning, do their work, go to sleep at night,” said Dave, an Air Force major who flew drones from 2007 to 2009 at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and now trains drone pilots at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico. 

by Elisabeth Bumiller, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Heather Ainsworth

Jonah Lehrer and the Tyranny of the Big Idea

Jonah Lehrer, wunderkind science writer (just google "jonah lehrer wunderkind"), resigned as Staff Writer at The New Yorker yesterday after finally admitting to making stuff up. He had only just started his new, high-profile gig.

The sad saga began about a month ago, on June 19, when Jim Romenesko discovered that one of Jonah Lehrer's first pieces for The New Yorker began with three paragraphs that were nearly identical to a section of an October 2011 article Lehrer wrote for The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, Lehrer had plagiarized himself. The internet's amateur research machine kicked into gear, and many, many other instances of "self-plagiarism" surfaced.

The powers that be at The New Yorker decided that self-plagiarism wasn't a grave enough crime to merit firing Lehrer, but it didn't feel like the story was over. His blog, Frontal Cortex, went eerily silent, as did his Twitter feed.

The other shoe has dropped. After weeks of investigation into suspicious Bob Dylan quotations in Lehrer's new book, Imagine, journalist Michael Moynihan finally got Lehrer to admit to lying. Here's his mea culpa:

Three weeks ago, I received an email from journalist Michael Moynihan asking about Bob Dylan quotes in my book ‘Imagine,’ The quotes in question either did not exist, were unintentional misquotations, or represented improper combinations of previously existing quotes. But I told Mr. Moynihan that they were from archival interview footage provided to me by Dylan’s representatives. This was a lie spoken in a moment of panic. When Mr. Moynihan followed up, I continued to lie, and say things I should not have said. The lies are over now. I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers. I also owe a sincere apology to Mr. Moynihan. I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed. I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.

Whatever you think about Jonah Lehrer's transgressions, his treatment in the media, and his plummet from what is arguably the highest perch in American journalism, it's helpful to bear in mind that there's a demand side of this equation.

What made Lehrer so successful—with his books, at Wired, and then, for a time, at The New Yorker—was his ability to mold the results of hard science into tidy, consumer-friendly, and often unexpected insights. That's exactly what smart, curious, and busy readers like you and I want: surprising, Fun-Size ideas with just enough academic heft.

Jonah Lehrer isn't the only one capitalizing on this demand for Wow! stories. There's a whole industry. Malcolm Gladwell, the Freakonomicsguys, certain TED Talks, Slate—they all trade, to some extent, on the snappy, mind-blowing idea you didn't see coming but totally seems kind of true.

The problem is that it's unreasonable to expect that every new piece of media should upend conventional wisdom or deliver a profound new insight. To think that Jonah Lehrer could expose an amazing new facet of human psychology every week, in 1,000-odd words no less, is ludicrous. There are only so many compelling, counterintuitive, true ideas out there.

But the demand for them doesn't abate. That's why you see so many science writers talking about the same handful of studies (the Stanford prison experiment, the rubber hand illusion, Dunbar's number, the marshmallow test) over and over. That's why you see pop economists who should know better creating flimsy and irresponsible contrarian arguments about climate change for shock value. That's why you get influential bloggers confessing they're only 30 percent convinced of their own arguments but "you gotta write something." That's why the#slatepitches meme hits home.

I liked Jonah Lehrer. I still like him. I won't defend his fabrications, but I've learned a lot—most of it true, I'm pretty sure—from his writing. And don't get me wrong: I certainly wouldn't wish TED away. The conference has done an admirable job getting important ideas, sources of inspiration, and truly world-changing work in front of large audiences.

My appeal is just this: Media creators, don't let the mandate for a novel Big Idea supersede your responsibility to treat your subjects honestly and with the nuance they deserve. If reality doesn't match your tidy argument, don't force it. And readers, if we expect that a writer like Jonah Lehrer dazzle us with a brand new paradigm-shifting profundity every week, maybe we're setting ourselves up for disappointment.

by Andrew Price, Good

mohamed somji
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Little Free Library Movement

Jonathan Beggs wanted an easy way for his neighbors to share books.

Using odds and ends of fiberboard and Douglas fir, the retired building contractor fashioned a hutch the size of a dollhouse. He gave it a pitched cedar-shingle roof capped with copper. The door, trimmed in bright red, opens to three shelves filled with books by Joyce Carol Oates, Tony Hillerman, James Michener and others. Below hangs a sign: "Take a book or bring a book or both."

In the half a year that Beggs' Little Free Library has perched on a post in front of his Sherman Oaks home, it has evolved into much more than a book exchange. It has turned strangers into friends and a sometimes impersonal neighborhood into a community. It has become a mini-town square, where people gather to discuss Sherlock Holmes,sustainability and genealogy.

"I met more neighbors in the first three weeks than in the previous 30 years," said Beggs, 76. (...)

His Little Free Library is part of a movement that started in Wisconsin and has begun to catch on in Southern California.In large cities and small towns, suburbs and rural communities, advocates see the libraries as a way to keep the printed word in the hands of seasoned and budding bibliophiles.

The concept of passing along a favorite book speaks to people's desire to connect in person at a time when much communication takes place via texts and Facebook, said Dana Cuff, a UCLA professor and director of cityLAB, a think tank.

"The small-scale sharing of something that was special to you seems like a great version of borrowing sugar and bringing tomatoes to your neighbor," Cuff said. "It helps you make connections to people who live around you."  (...)

Little Free Library was the inspiration of Todd Bol, who in the fall of 2009 landed on a way to honor his late mother, a book-loving teacher. He built a miniature wooden one-room schoolhouse, mounted it outside his Hudson, Wis., home and stocked it with books. Even on rainy days, friends and neighbors would happen by to make selections, drop off books and remark on the library's cuteness.

Bol, an entrepreneur in international business development, enlisted Rick Brooks, a community outreach specialist in Madison, Wis., to help spread the word. In the last two years, nearly 1,800 library stewards, as Bol calls them, have registered cabinet-size athenaeums in about 45 states and dozens of countries, including Ghana, England and Germany.

Each owner pays $25 to the Little Free Library, a nonprofit organization, for a sign and a number. The group's website features a locater map and photos of people attending grand openings for libraries.

Bol anticipates nearly 3,000 registered libraries by the end of July.

by Martha Groves, LA Times |  Read more:

Photo: Michael Robinson Chavez

Lin Decai（林 德才 Chinese, b.1948）
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How Speedo Created A Record-Breaking Swimsuit

In 2009, Speedo’s research team began to brainstorm innovative ways to help swimmers go faster. The polyurethane bodysuits that contributed to an astonishing number of swimming world records over the previous 18 months had been banned. To think outside the box, the Speedo representatives met outside the lab, joining academics, coaches and research consultants at hotels, conference centers and even an English country house to spawn ideas, ideas inspired more by Captain Avengerthan Mark Spitz.

“Lots of conversation was had around wild and wacky ideas,” says Joe Santry, the research manager for Speedo’s Aqualab in Nottingham, England. “Some of the initial sketch concepts brought to the table looked like a superhero suit with a sleek cap, goggle, and suit combination that wouldn’t look out of place in a Marvel comic.”

They were trying to replace the now infamous full-body LZR suit. Dubbed “the rubber suit,” it compressed a swimmer’s body into a streamlined tube and trapped air, adding buoyancy and reducing drag. Speedo says 98 percent of the medals at the 2008 Olympics were won by swimmers wearing the LZR. Michael Phelps set world marks in seven of his eight events at Beijing wearing the suit, but applauded its ban.

The new rules, in effect since 2010, permit only “jammers,” suits from the kneecap to navel for men, and from the knee to shoulder for women. The fabric must be air permeable, and a suit may not have any fastening devices such as a zipper, a response to companies that began creating wetsuit-like neoprene suits after the 2008 Olympics.

Ultimately, Speedo decided to rebuild not only the suit, but create a “racing system” that it claims combines the suit and the goggles and cap working in synergy to reduce drag and improve performance.  (...)

For the suit, the team spent a year inventing a new fabric that creates compression changes across its surface where more lycra is knitted into some areas. In the end, Fastskin is Spanx on steroids, compressing a body three times more than the LZR. The suit constricts the stomach the least and the chest, buttocks and hips the most, attempting to mold swimmers into an unblemished tube.

Speedo has applied for nine patents for the Fastskin-3. The company says only six machines in the world are capable of producing the compression fabric; it owns all of them.  (...)

“It’s like miles per gallon in a car,” Santry says. “You can swim at the same speed, but use less fuel. It allows a swimmer to go harder for longer.”

Speedo scanned its key athletes to create a 3-D avatar to size the suit. Just wearing the Fastskin requires athleticism. Some female swimmers, who step into the suit through an armhole, reported it took them as much as an hour to wriggle into it on their first attempt. Santry says it can be done in 10 to 15 minutes with practice. “The first time you do it, it’s daunting,” he adds. “There’s quite a bit of compression in the suit. It can feel a bit alien.”

by Jim Morrison, The Smithsonian via Sports Illustrated |  Read more:
Photo courtesy: Speedo

Can an Algorithm be Wrong?

[ed. For example, from today's NY Times, see: Social Media Are Giving a Voice to Taste Buds.]

Throughout the Occupy Wall Street protests, participants and supporters used Twitter (among other tools) to coordinate, debate, and publicize their efforts. But amidst the enthusiasm a concern surfaced: even as the protests were gaining strength and media coverage, and talk of the movement on Twitter was surging, the term was not “Trending.” A simple list of ten terms provided by Twitter on their homepage, Twitter Trends digests the 250 million tweets sent every day and indexes the most vigorously discussed terms at that moment, either globally or for a user’s chosen country or city. Yet, even in the cities where protests were happening, including New York, when tweets using the term #occupywallstreet seem to spike, the term did not Trend. Some suggested that Twitter was deliberately dropping the term from its list, and in doing so, preventing it from reaching a wider audience.

The charge of censorship is a revealing one. It suggests, first, that many are deeply invested in the Twitter network as a political tool, and that some worry that Twitter’s interests might be aligned with the financial and political status quo they hope to challenge. But it reveals something else about the importance and the opacity of the algorithm that drives the identification of Trends. To suggest that the best or only explanation of #occupywallstreet’s absence is that Twitter “censored” it implies that Trends is otherwise an accurate barometer of the public discussion. For some, this glitch could only mean deliberate human intervention into what should be a smoothly-running machine.

The workings of these algorithms are political, an important terrain upon which political battles about visibility are being fought (Grimmelmann 2009). Much like taking over the privately owned Zuccotti Park in Manhattan in order to stage a public protest, more and more of our online public discourse is taking place on private communication platforms like Twitter. These providers offer complex algorithms to manage, curate, and organize these massive networks. But there is a tension between what we understand these algorithms to be, what we need them to be, and what they in fact are. We do not have a sufficient vocabulary for assessing the intervention of these algorithms. We’re not adept at appreciating what it takes to design a tool like Trends – one that appears to effortlessly identify what’s going on, yet also makes distinct and motivated choices. We don’t have a language for the unexpected associations algorithms make, beyond the intention (or even comprehension) of their designers (Ananny 2011). Most importantly, we have not fully recognized how these algorithms attempt to produce representations of the wants or concerns of the public, and as such, run into the classic problem of political representation: who claims to know the mind of the public, and how do they claim to know it?  (...)

Twitter explains that Trends is designed to identify topics that are enjoying a surge, not just rising above the normal chatter, but doing so in a particular way. Part of the evaluation includes: Is the use of the term spiking, i.e. accelerating rapidly, or is its growth more gradual? Are the users densely interconnected into a single cluster, or does the term span multiple clusters? Are the tweets unique content, or mostly retweets of the same post? Is this the first time the term has Trended? (If not, the threshold to Trend again is higher.) So this list, though automatically calculated in real time, is also the result of the careful implementation of Twitter’s judgments as to what should count as a “trend.” (...)

Twitter Trends is only one such tool. Search engines, while promising to provide a logical set of results in response to a query, are in fact algorithms designed to take a range of criteria into account so as to serve up results that satisfy not just the user, but the aims of the provider, their understanding of relevance or newsworthiness or public import, and the particular demands of their business model (Granka 2010). When users of Apple’s Siri iPhone tool begin to speculate that its cool, measured voice is withholding information about abortion clinics, or worse, sending users towards alternatives preferred by conservatives, they are in fact questioning the algorithmic product of the various search mechanisms that Siri consults. [link]

Beyond search, we are surrounded by algorithmic tools that offer to help us navigate online platforms and social networks, based not on what we want, but on what all of their users do. When Facebook, YouTube, or Digg offer to mathematically and in real time report what is “most popular” or “liked” or “most viewed” or “best selling” or “most commented” or “highest rated,” they are curating a list whose legitimacy is built on the promise that it has not been curated, that it is the product of aggregate user activity itself. When Amazon recommends a book based on matching your purchases to those of its other customers, or Demand Media commissions news based on aggregate search queries (Anderson 2011), their accuracy and relevance depend on the promise of an algorithmic calculation paired with the massive, even exhaustive, corpus of the traces we all leave.

We might, then, pursue the question of the algorithm’s politics further. The Trends algorithm does have criteria built in: criteria that help produce the particular Trends results we see, criteria that are more complex and opaque than some users take them to be, criteria that could have produced the absence of the term #occupywallstreet that critics noted. But further, the criteria that animate the Trends algorithm also presume a shape and character to the public they intend to measure, and in doing so, help to construct publics in that image.

by Tarelton Gillespie, LIMN |  Read more:

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" is an adage which began as the caption of a cartoon by Peter Steiner published by The New Yorker on July 5, 1993. The cartoon features two dogs: one sitting on a chair in front of a computer, speaking the caption to a second dog sitting on the floor. As of 2000, the panel was the most reproduced cartoon from The New Yorker, and Steiner has earned over $50,000 from its reprinting

Peter Steiner, a cartoonist and contributor to The New Yorker since 1979, said the cartoon initially did not get a lot of attention, but later took on a life of its own, and that he felt similar to the person who created the "smiley face". In fact, Steiner was not that interested in the Internet when he drew the cartoon, and although he did have an online account, he recalled attaching no "profound" meaning to the cartoon; it was just something he drew in the manner of a "make-up-a-caption" cartoon.

In response to the comic's popularity, he stated, "I can't quite fathom that it's that widely known and recognized.

The cartoon marks a notable moment in the history of the Internet. Once the exclusive domain of government engineers and academics, the Internet was now a subject of discussion in general interest magazines like The New Yorker. Lotus 1-2-3 founder and early Internet activist Mitch Kapor commented in a Time magazine article in 1993 that "the true sign that popular interest has reached critical mass came this summer when the New Yorker printed a cartoon showing two computer-savvy canines".

The cartoon symbolizes an understanding of Internet privacy that stresses the ability of users to send and receive messages in general anonymity. Lawrence Lessig suggests "no one knows" because Internet protocols do not force users to identify themselves, although local access points such as a user's university may; but this information is privately held by the local access point and not part of the Internet transaction itself.

via: Wikipedia

From the Library of Your Soul-Mate: The Unique Social Bond of Literature

Could geeking out over a mutually beloved novel surpass even alcohol as the ultimate social ice-breaker? In my three months of solo travel in India, shared literary interests have opened the doors to several new friendships. Quite like the bond formed between travelers on similar journeys, the bond formed around a favorite novel is one of shared immersive experience, usually open to impossibly wide interpretations. When we meet someone else who’s “been there,” there’s a biting urge to know exactly what the other person saw, what scenes remain strongest in her memory, what crucial knowledge or insight was retrieved, and what her experience reveals or changes about our own?

If we try to extend this “traveler’s comparison” to other narrative mediums — television programs, movies, plays — it can often lose some of its steam. Why is this? Relative limitlessness in physical and emotional sensory potential is the privilege and burden of the reader. The book, more so than any other form of narrative media, rings true, more synonymous, with the limitlessness and loneliness to be found while facing the open road or holding a one-way airline ticket to Azerbaijan. In my hypotheses, it is the loneliness quality in particular, physically and intellectually inherent to the act of reading, that lays the bedrock for the powerful social bonding achieved through literature. The limitlessness is critical too, as it promises a bounty of fertile avenues for conversation, but it’s the loneliness of the reader — or, as Rainer Maria Rilke might say, it’s how “two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other” — that assigns to a very special category those friendships formed over books.

Enjoying a good work of literature entails getting lost. Vast and foreign is the journey, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. If the book is good, then the intelligence that guides us through the story will appear many degrees superior to our own. Even in the case of a child narrator like Harper Lee’s Scout Finch, or an impaired one, like Christopher John Francis Boone — the autistic 15-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident Of the Dog in the Night-Time — the narrative intelligences of our books should leave us feeling a bit pressed intellectually, a bit outmatched, amazed ultimately by the talent of the author who brought such an exquisite intelligence to life. It should be our expectation as readers to be transported into a compellingly drawn, but very foreign and unique reality. Our guide, the local aficionado, attempts to help us understand everything we’re taking in, though we’ll inevitably overlook and misunderstand things from time to time, sometimes big, important things. ReadingPynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, for me, was an experience similar to that of using one’s brain; I was able to intellectually command perhaps 10 percent of the content at hand. If this was part of Pynchon’s intent for his novel, I commend him for crafting an impressive and very odd reflection of the human condition. Yes, reading is both a richly gratifying and lonely act, at both intellectual and sensory levels, which is why meeting someone with whom we share a favorite book has a way of jump-starting our social batteries, even on our more quiet nights.

Maya Dorn, a 41-year-old copywriter, musician, and avid reader from San Francisco, uses shared literary interests as a litmus test for social compatibility. “Liking the same books is like having the same sense of humor — if you don’t have it in common, it’s going to be hard to bond with someone. You risk ending up with nothing to talk about.” Maya specifically cites Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, as popping up again and again on the fringes of her social circles. Funny she mentioned that title; though I’ve not read The Master and Margarita, it was recommended to me a month prior to meeting Maya, at a café in Goa, where a vacationing Russian day-spa owner — stoned to a point of spare, clear English and silky slow hand gestures — explained to me the premise of Bulgakov’s post-modern “Silver Age” classic. “It’s about different type of prison, a prison of the mind!” The Russian pointed meaningfully at his own head. Sharing such intensely themed, café-table book-talk with a strange Russian proved quite an adventure in itself, with our caffeine jitters occasionally morphing into anachronistic, Cold War-era paranoias of Pynchonesque mirth. He was the first Russian I’d met abroad.

by Bryan Basamanowicz, The Millions |  Read more:

Image Credit: Flickr/nSeika

Mayer Hawthorne, Daryl Hall

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Illustrations by Jarek Puczel
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Desperate Living by Dan Halen, 2012

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The Most Important Trade Agreement That We Know Nothing About

Imagine being invited to formally offer input on a huge piece of legislation, a proposed international agreement that could cover everything from intellectual property rights on the Internet to access to medicine to investment rights in the agreement’s signatory countries. For 10 minutes, you’d be able to say whatever you’d like about the proposed law—good, bad, or indifferent—to everyone involved in the negotiations. But there’s a caveat: All of your questions, all of your input, on what may be the most controversial part of the package, would have to be based on a version of the proposed international agreement that was 16 months old. And in that 16-month period, there were eight rounds of negotiations that could have changed any and all of the text to which you had access, but no one could tell you if that version was still accurate.

Would you still take the deal? This is not a hypothetical question; rather, this is the take-it-or-leave-it offer made to the public in May by the United States Trade Representative regarding the intellectual property rights chapter of the massively important but little-known Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). Unfortunately, this modest but sad excuse for public participation was the best offer to ask questions and offer input to TPP negotiators since the public phase of the negotiations began more than two years ago. So civil society groups, academics, experts (“nerds”), and regular Joe concerned citizens said yes.

The above Kafkaesque scenario reveals a truly odd and disturbing 21st-century situation. Asking informed questions is probably man’s oldest form of letting someone know his views. But in 2012, with all of the technology that allows for unprecedented (if not totally unfettered) flows of information, the vestiges of 20th-century secrecy continue to permeate international lawmaking, as reflected in the negotiations of TPP.

TPP is misleadingly labeled as a trade agreement, making it seem like a relatively narrow and limited agreement involving traditional topics like tariffs and exchange of goods—the sort of government-to-government discussions that seem too esoteric to have much impact on the everyday citizen. It is, in fact, much more than that. As explained by the USTR, TPP is an “ambitious, next-generation, Asia-Pacific trade agreement that reflects U.S. priorities and values.” President Obama, who announced the goal of creating TPP in November 2009, hassaid that TPP will “boost our economies, lowering barriers to trade and investment, increasing exports, and creating more jobs for our people, which is my No. 1 priority.” That sounds pretty important—and more than a little vague. Unfortunately, we don’t know much about it beyond those platitudes.

Here’s what we think we know. Based upon the leaks that have occurred, it seems thatan enacted TPP would require significant changes in U.S. and/or other signatory countries’ laws. It would curb public access to vast amounts of information in the name of combating intellectual property infringement (or piracy, depending on your choice of words). The owner of the copyright in a song or movie could use a “technological protection measure”—what are often called “digital locks”—to prevent your access to it, even for educational purposes, and regardless of whether the owner had the legal right to do so. Your very ability to read this article, with hyperlinks in it, could be affected by TPP. So, too, might your access to works currently in the public domain and available free of charge. And these concerns are only related to the intellectual property rights chapter of TPP. There are apparently more than 20 chapters under negotiation, including “customs, cross-border services, telecommunications, government procurement, competition policy, and cooperation and capacity building,” as well as investment and financial services. Technically, TPP would only take effect in the 10 negotiating countries: Australia, Brunei, Chile, Malaysia, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, United States, and Vietnam. Mexico joined recently, and Canada and Japan may soon follow. But in reality, it would also affect citizens of any nations that interact with at least one of those 10—which means even the shut-off North Korea might feel its influence.

by David S. Levine, Slate |  Read more:

Photo by Hemera/Thinkstock

A Vision of the Future

[ed. By coincidence I stumbled across an article about Lyfe Kitchen just after posting this. Life imitating parody.]

It’s the year 2367 and all food is gluten-free. No restaurant, grocery, or bakery serves anything with gluten in it, and guess what? Everything still tastes great. This is because a consortium of scientists of all nations, now united under the umbrella of the “Socialist States of America” and led by their leader, “The Obama-Tron,” have devoted millions of hours of research and effort into eradicating gluten in food. But that’s not the only thing that’s changed.

The amount of time people save by not having to ask, or answer, the question, “Is that gluten-free?” when ordering food has lengthened every individual’s life span by an estimated fourteen hours. This extra time is used by most people to write negative reviews of things they see, or hear, or have heard about, on their twitter-think devices, and these negative reviews are instantaneously circulated to anyone else who has paid the monthly fee for that service.

Any distance can be travelled in seconds by any individual using a “personal atomizer,” so people can be just about anywhere at any time. Still, many people are often late to appointments. Gluten cannot be blamed for this lateness, as it has been eradicated. It’s simple thoughtlessness—clearly they just don’t care.

Cars run on gluten-free fuel, which is an improvement on the green fuel that replaced gasoline completely in 2056. The original green fuel was a combination of wheat, seaweed, and curry powder. It was loaded with gluten, and then there was the fact that everything smelled like curry. I mean everything—the whole outside. People got used to the curry smell and now, even though it’s not necessary, they can choose curry-scented fuel—and there’s also patchouli. Does that sound awful to you? Just remember, there’s no gluten in it, so … gotta take the good with the bad, eh?

by Bob Odenkirk, New Yorker |  Read more:

llustration by Bendik Kaltenborn