Ditch Your Loyalty Cards

I carry a tiny wallet. It can hold only my driver’s license, MetroCard, three credit cards, and about $100 in cash. My friends wonder how I get by with so little carrying capacity. Answer: I don’t participate in customer loyalty programs. No cards that earn me coupons from drug stores, no key fobs for discounts on groceries, not even a little piece of paper with stamps that entitle me to a free sandwich. Loyalty cards are usually a bad business strategy. They’re either a creepy way to monitor and exploit your habits or a desperate gambit by weak retailers to distract you from their own shortcomings. Most companies use loyalty programs as a crutch when they’re out of ideas, and, therefore, these schemes are ultimately bad for customers as well. If a cashier tries to shove a loyalty card into your hand, it’s a good indicator that you should be taking your business elsewhere.

A brief history of the customer loyalty program shows why. In 1981, American Airlines CEO Robert Crandall made three observations about his industry. First, a tiny proportion of customers were responsible for a huge percentage of revenue. At the time, more than half of American Airlines’ customers took just one flight per year, whereas the top 5 percent flew 20 or more times. Second, business travelers, who made up the bulk of that top 5 percent, cared very little about the price of any individual ticket. Finally, airlines are all basically the same.

As much as people tout the quality of a few airlines, Crandall’s assumption that his competitors offered the same levels of service, safety, and timeliness is beyond serious dispute. A 2010 study showed that a mere 5.5 percentage points separated America’s most on-time airline (Southwest) from its 10th best (JetBlue). Flight safety experts insist there is no way to statistically separate the safety records of major airlines, because accidents are so rare. As for service, I don’t need to hear curated house music while I put my bag in the overhead bin, nor do I fully appreciate the value of a warm towel.

Since Crandall couldn’t compete on quality and his biggest customers didn’t care about price, he made a novel offer: Choose American Airlines over our identical competitors, and we’ll toss in a free flight every now and then or bump you up to first class. It was called AAdvantage, and most management experts agree it is the father of the modern customer loyalty program.

Here’s the takeaway: Loyalty programs only make sense in industries in which a company can do nothing to differentiate itself from its competitors, and customers lack either the motivation or the price sensitivity to shop around. Those descriptors apply to very few businesses. In addition to airlines, the programs probably make sense for car rental companies, newsstands, and possibly a few others. In most industries, though, companies that think they can’t compete on service or quality are not trying hard enough.

Take a look at grocery stores. A few chains, including Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, attract customers through superior quality or unique products. It’s no coincidence that these stores don’t have loyalty programs. They don’t need them, because they’ve given you a compelling reason to shop with them. Grocery outlets with harsh lighting, cheap flooring, and signs handwritten in marker—you know the ones I mean—almost always have some kind of club program, because they can’t think of any other reason for you to walk through their noisy, unresponsive sliding doors. (Wegmans is alone among premium-quality grocery chains in having a loyalty program, but it dates back to 1990, before the chain surged past its humdrum upstate New York competitors.)

Business management scholars have written piles of studies on customer loyalty programs, and virtually all of them reach the same conclusion: In most industries, they’re hopelessly mismanaged. It’s not that the programs don’t work; it’s that they work too well. Customers become so well trained to follow loyalty discounts that they won’t buy without them. According to a 2002 article in the Harvard Business Review, many retailers now offer such extensive rewards for loyalty that they’re no longer making money on their top customers—the very people the programs are supposed to entice. In addition, most customers engage in what researchers call “polygamous loyalty,” which is a creative way of saying disloyalty. The overwhelming majority of fliers, for example, belong to multiple rewards programs. It’s a race to the bottom, as companies are so afraid of losing customers to their competitors that they destroy their own profitability and forsake strategies to attract customers in novel ways.

Those rare loyalty programs that management researchers favor lock customers into uncomfortably personal relationships with a grocer, airline, or clothing store. Take, for example, the widely celebrated program launched by the British grocery chain Tesco. The more often a customer shopped at Tesco, and the more high-profit-margin products he purchased, the more coupons he received in the mail for more high-margin products. In other words, Tesco trained its customers to buy pasta with a larger markup, like dogs that salivated at the sound of a bell. In addition, Tesco monitored its customers’ buying habits closely. When a loyal shopper who visited the store weekly suddenly missed a couple of weeks, the chain feared that one of its sheep was straying from the herd and dispatched some coupons to shepherd him back. Maybe you’re comfortable with that relationship, but I don’t want a large grocery chain tracking my weekly movements, and I’m willing to forgo 40 cents off of Greek yogurt to avoid it.

by Brian Palmer, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Joe Logon/Flickr via Creative Commons

Want to Disappear Completely? Step 1: Find a Desert Island

And when Dave swung the dinghy wide around the cape, his customer at last caught sight of the island, a shark’s tooth of sand and grass jutting from a small mountain of impenetrable bush. Heaven! Dave said to himself.

Heavy seas shouldered the tin boat sideways. Up front, mate! Dave shouted over the bee-loud motor. His customer clambered forward and sat himself backward on the bow, twisting at the waist to keep his eyes on the islet. The evening sky behind it was striped orange to purple.

The customer was thinking about how a guy can’t get himself shipwrecked anymore. Can’t one day discover that his storm-tossed ass has been beached upon a refuge, where he’s free to wile away life, alone with the Alone. It’s impossible now. All the deserted but potentially habitable islands are privately owned, or secret naval bases, or satellite tracking stations. Among other reasons.

Head on a swivel! Crocs! Dave sang out, his hair a white pennant behind him. Soon to be 70, Dave Glasheen was the smooth sienna of well-oiled and -kept things. He had been living on this outlying island for more than 15 years. We wouldn’t want to swim this at night, no we wouldn’t, he said. The water leaking into the bow rose above his customer’s ankles.

Hours earlier, Dave had picked him up from a World War II–era airstrip many miles distant in the mainland’s thick jungle. This intra- Australian airfare, as well as all sea transport, had been included in the $3,100 Dave charged for his two-week desert-island experience. The customer had wired the money directly into Dave’s bank account, as instructed. Also as instructed, he’d brought salamis, two loaves of good bread, coffee, and little else.

This was like a vacation but not. The impulse was the same, maybe. Long had the customer been shopping around for a space that was remote from the world. A spot where, he hoped, everything had been got rid of except for whatever couldn’t be lived without. What the smart set’s always wanted from their getaways.

The customer had inquired after fire towers and bathyspheres, deep caves and sensory-deprivation chambers. Idaho. The Arctic. He even looked into elective lobotomies and self-trepanation, just to see. Then— of course. The desert island came to him one winter Saturday. He had been in the bathtub, apocalyptically hung over. He was paddling warm water against his face and wondering, Just what the fuck is it I’m doing here?

The question was not new. It was what his mind reset to whenever he stilled himself, stopped diverting. For instance, he would close the browser on other people’s Twitter feeds and Instagrams (he was dependent on the Internet), finally put down the book, or, yes, wake up cottonmouthed in a spinning chamber of shame—and then it would begin to materialize: WTF, man? The question wavered in his mind’s eye before tightening into painful clarity, as vision tends to do after hard blows to the head.

The truth was that most things for him had turned into giant, squawking question marks. He was living far from home in an unfashionable part of New York City, uninsured and friendless (but for the roaches). He was a relatively young man, yet even a young man’s bliss had not been his. He’d loved little but had his fill of a hell of a lot. Had indulged himself, in fact, to where he made himself sick. Now he hid from the everyday melee of competing agents and material forces whenever he wasn’t scheduled to work. Should he have to take the subway somewhere, he found himself blinking back tears. What attempts he made at meeting new people were pre-written and floated into online ether, like bottled messages. He almost wished he’d knocked somebody up.

Instead, he decided to venture to a desert island off the edge of northeastern Australia. It was at least the first step, he figured. If a boat is foundering, you dry-dock it for repairs. Likewise, if you suspect your heart has a hole in it—take yourself out of the world. (...)

Restoration Island is a speck, a seventh of a square mile sitting only a few hundred meters offshore of the Cape York Peninsula. But the island is far removed, closer to Papua New Guinea than it is to any Australian city.

It got its name from William Bligh, the commanding lieutenant of the HMS Bounty. In 1789, Bligh’s crew mutinied after he refused to grant them a return to Tahiti, to the idyllic life (and easy natives) they imagined to be waiting for them there. The mutineers set him adrift in an open boat with a handful of loyal men. Left for dead, Bligh nonetheless managed to navigate to this island, where he and his crew scrounged food and recuperation. “Restoration Island,” they called it. They found a couple of huts, but no people. (...)

A decade ago, this island was kempt, civilized. The grass was mown and the buildings had doors. But now it abided nothing man-made. This disrepair embarrassed Dave. It made it seem as though he, too, was deteriorating. Past retirement age he might be, but he was just starting his life. He saw it all so much clearer now.

The tiki bar on the south shore, for instance. Now it had crumbled into the surf. But in 2003, he had used that tiki bar to entertain Fred Turner. Fred Turner, the McDonald’s chairman. In the midst of a fishing trip, Fred flew in on a helicopter to see the island and have a beer—and he had such a lovely time that he came back to camp on Resto with his executives and their families. Fred sat Dave at his right hand during dinners; once, he asked him to give a speech. Fred’s a hero, Dave made sure to mention in his address. Fred’s the college dropout who put the Golden Arches in 118 countries, the visionary who thought up the Chicken McNugget and the Drive-Thru and the whole standardized dining experience.

Oh, Dave hated the product, dearly. But no great man was more forward thinking than Fred. He got his millions, and then what did he do? He founded the Ronald McDonald House charity. Dave admired Fred’s class of corporate don best of all, the altruistic blokes who make it their business to help even after they’ve gathered their brass. He bet most of them were good people. How else could they have become so successful?

He explained this to his customer as they breakfasted on Cheerios and kiwis. Then Dave took him on a tour of the bush. Do you know the Google guys? he asked as they entered the jungle behind the clearing. What kind of blokes do you reckon they are?

by Kent Russell, New Republic |  Read more:

Image: Brian Cassey

Harold Feinstein ~ Sheet Music Montage, Coney Island 1950.
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Arne Svenson, The Neighbors #17
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Soylent Dreams for People

[ed. From the four-part series Nothing but the Soylent.]

Soylent creator Rob Rhinehart was kind enough to sit down and talk with me for a bit on the Ars Soylent experience. He answered some of the questions that came up in the comments over the past several days.

The one I most wanted him to elaborate on was on the why of it all. The comments on the past pieces in this series have been brimming with folks who can't (or won't, perhaps) see the point of Soylent. Whether it's because they love cooking too much or they can't understand why someone would drink a nutrient slurry in place of food, some people were not at all on board.

"Soylent is supposed to be like an ultimate staple meal," began Rhinehart. "When you think about food, a lot of people immediately jump to the best aspects, which are great—eating for recreation, eating with people. This is an important part of life and food is intimately tied with culture and tradition."

But not every meal is artisanal, fresh, and healthy; Soylent aims to fill in those gaps like a utility. "People will talk about beer and wine and gourmet coffee, but most of the time they're drinking water. By focusing on Soylent as a staple, fool-proof meal, this could do a lot more for health than some new recipe based on lettuce or something."

The name

The name itself, "Soylent," has drawn fire—but that's part of the reason why Rhinehart chose the name in the first place. "For food, a lot of people tend to react quickly and not give it a lot of analysis. Piquing curiosity is very important here, and giving the product some kind of flashy marketing name would kind of—people would miss it quickly. But the name 'Soylent' is really good for encouraging further discussion and thought. Clearly, I'm wanting someone to investigate it a little deeper if I'm calling it 'Soylent.' It doesn't seem very marketable!" The name serves several purposes—it catches the interest of geeks as almost an inside joke ("IT'S MADE OF PEOPLE!"), and it's remarkably sticky.

Hasn't this been done before?

This, though, leads into another topic that readers commented repeatedly on: Soylent's originality, or its perceived lack of. Meal replacement products aren't anything terribly new, and there are products both in the consumer space and also in the medical and healthcare space that can be substituted in for solid food. Soylent is billing itself as a revolutionary product. Is it?

"From the consumer standpoint, those things aren't designed to be sustainable or really even that healthy," Rhinehart said, referring to things like Carnation Instant Breakfast and Slim Fast and other common off-the-shelf meal replacement shake-style drinks. "They're certainly not something you'd want to run your body off of—a lot of fructose, simple sugars, and by calorie it's really expensive. We've reached a point of calories-per-dollar and sustainability and nutrition where we're really trying to compete with groceries."

On the medical side, products like Jevity and Nestlé's entire line of liquid tube feeding products are in a separate league from Soylent. "We're not making any medical claims, other than it being safe for consumption," clarified Rhinehart. Additionally, from a perspective of calories per dollar, both the consumer and the medical liquid nutrition products are outside of what Rhinehart wants to target for Soylent. Rhinehart wants Soylent "to compete with rice and beans," he explained. "The routine meals that a lot of people are eating—that's what we want to compete with, especially if we can displace fast food."

by Lee Hutchinson, ARS Technica |  Read more:

Image: Lee Hutchinson

The Boredom Room

Takajo, Japan — Shusaku Tani is employed at the Sony plant here, but he doesn’t really work.

For more than two years, he has come to a small room, taken a seat and then passed the time reading newspapers, browsing the Web and poring over engineering textbooks from his college days. He files a report on his activities at the end of each day.

Sony, Mr. Tani’s employer of 32 years, consigned him to this room because they can’t get rid of him. Sony had eliminated his position at the Sony Sendai Technology Center, which in better times produced magnetic tapes for videos and cassettes. But Mr. Tani, 51, refused to take an early retirement offer from Sony in late 2010 — his prerogative under Japanese labor law.

So there he sits in what is called the “chasing-out room.” He spends his days there, with about 40 other holdouts.

“I won’t leave,” Mr. Tani said. “Companies aren’t supposed to act this way. It’s inhumane.”

The standoff between workers and management at the Sendai factory underscores an intensifying battle over hiring and firing practices in Japan, where lifetime employment has long been the norm and where large-scale layoffs remain a social taboo, at least at Japan’s largest corporations.

Sony wants to change that, and so does Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. As Japan’s economic recovery slows, reducing the restraints on companies has become even more important to Mr. Abe’s economic plans. He wants to loosen rigid rules on job terminations for full-time staff. (...)

Sony said it was not doing anything wrong in placing employees in what it calls Career Design Rooms. Employees are given counseling to find new jobs in the Sony group, or at another company, it said. Sony also said that it offered workers early retirement packages that are generous by American standards: in 2010, it promised severance payments equivalent to as much as 54 months of pay. But the real point of the rooms is to make employees feel forgotten and worthless — and eventually so bored and shamed that they just quit, critics say.

Labor practices in Japan contrast sharply with those in the United States, where companies are quick to lay off workers when demand slows or a product becomes obsolete. It is cruel to the worker, but it usually gives the overall economy agility. Some economists attribute the lack of a dynamic economy in Western Europe to labor laws similar to Japan’s that restrict layoffs. (...)

Critics of labor changes say something more important is at stake. They warn that making it easier to cut jobs would destroy Japan’s social fabric for the sake of corporate profits, causing mass unemployment and worsening income disparities. For a country that has long prided itself on stability and relatively equitable incomes, such a change would be unacceptable.

by Hiroko Tabuchi, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Ko Sasaki

Dan Winters, Photo Booth.
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Rhumba

Found a baby rattlesnake in the house when we got here last fall—not dead yet but dying, stretched S-like on the large glue board I’d set out to catch the scorpions and daddy longlegs that hold barn dances in our empty house while we’re gone. This is my fancy about what the critters do in our absence: dozens of pale tan creatures, barbed tails arced high, sashay their long-legged partners across the living room floor, or lasso and ride the skittery six-inch black centipedes that sometimes scurry along our baseboards flaunting their wicked orange feelers. We find their desiccated corpses under chairs, beneath windows, laid out in the empty laundry basket when we return in the fall. My mind thinks: What has exhausted them so? A barn dance. A play party. A Wild West rodeo. More likely it’s the poison I spray in the crevices before we close up the house to head north for the summers, but I enjoy the barn-dance fancy.

Our rattlesnake problem isn’t fancy, though. It’s fact.

“Watch out for the snakes,” my husband and I tell each other when we go outside to walk or work. Our rock house sits on a rocky bluff in the Sans Bois Mountains of southeastern Oklahoma. Somewhere north on the ridge behind us is a winter den. If you’ve seen the rattler scene in True Grit, you’ve got the picture. This land where we live is the same country. The Sans Bois and the Winding Stair are twin ranges: rugged, low, humpbacked mountains slashing east to west above the plains, thick with hickory, oak, southern pine; they hold the same jagged sandstone bluffs and limestone caverns. When the days shorten, the rattlers come passing through on their way to that hidden crevice, where, until spring, they’ll sleep entwined in great complicated knots, moil all over each other, crawl outside to sun themselves on warm days. A group of rattlers gathered together like that is called a rhumba, by the way. A rhumba of rattlesnakes.

One strangely warm November day in 2011, Paul and I watched a five-foot diamondback crawl out from beneath the ramp to our shed. The snake was beautiful, really, ruddier than most, and as thick around as my forearm, its rattles lifted high as it moved in no particular hurry but with clear purpose, down into a rocky drainage ditch, up again on the far side, continuing across the ridge in obedience to that den’s siren song. I come from a people who will not allow any poisonous snake to live. My husband is a city guy from Boston with no family tradition of snake killing. Whether either of us could have brought ourselves to shoot that diamondback is a moot point, however. We didn’t have a gun.

My dad has been mentioning this lack ever since we bought the place years ago. He took one look at the rocky ridge behind the house, the huge sandstone slabs that lie tumbled about the property like a giant’s toy blocks—a thousand places for a rattler to love—and shook his head. “Y’all might want to think about getting yourselves a gun.”

Okay, we’d think about it, we said. (...)

I wrote a story once about a fellow who liked to drink in bars in southeastern Oklahoma with a young rattlesnake coiled under his hat—he’d sweep off his hat to reveal the baby rattler, just to shock and impress the ladies. That fiction was based on a true story my dad told about a cowboy snake wrangler from Heavener who did such things, and died from it. When I was researching the story, I learned a few facts. Rattlesnakes can strike two-thirds their own length and get back to coil so fast the human eye can hardly see it. They have medium-to-poor eyesight, a perfected sense of smell through that constantly flickering tongue, and excellent motion detectors via bones in their jaws that can feel the tiniest mammal footfall. They have acute heat sensors in the pits between eye and nostril—that’s what gives them the name “pit viper.” When a rattler strikes, its fangs pierce the flesh, instantaneously injecting venom as if through a hypodermic needle. Venom is the correct term, of course, not poison, although locally we still, and probably always will, call them poisonous snakes. In humans, a rattlesnake bite is horrifically painful. Symptoms include swelling, hemorrhage, lowered blood pressure, difficulty breathing, increased heart rate, fever, sweating, weakness, giddiness, nausea, vomiting, intense burning pain. If left untreated, death can come within hours.

Most species of rattlesnake—the velvet-tail, the ground rattler, even the eastern diamondback—when disturbed, will try to withdraw. Not the western diamondback: it will stand its ground. It may even advance to get within better striking distance. Western diamondbacks account for the majority of snakebite deaths in the United States. They account for most of the rattlesnakes we see on our mountain. Two weeks after the shed-ramp rattler, we encountered another. This time the whole family was there to witness.

by Rilla Askew, Tin House |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

Keith Stanley, 365 Days of Ikebana - Day 26
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The Global Elite’s Favorite Strongman

Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, agreed to meet me at 11 a.m. on a recent Saturday. Kagame’s office is on top of a hill near the center of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, and I took a taxi there, driven by a man in a suit and tie. Whenever I’m in Kigali, I am always impressed by how spotless it is, how the city hums with efficiency, which is all the more remarkable considering that Rwanda remains one of the poorest nations in the world. Even on a Saturday morning, platoons of women in white gloves rhythmically swept the streets, softly singing to themselves. I passed the Union Trade Center mall in the middle of town, where traffic circulates smoothly around a giant fountain. There was no garbage in the streets and none of the black plastic bags that get tangled up in the fences and trees of so many other African cities — Kagame’s government has banned them. There were no homeless youth sleeping on the sidewalks or huffing glue to kill their hunger. In Rwanda, vagrants and petty criminals have been scooped up by the police and sent to a youth “rehabilitation center” on an island in the middle of Lake Kivu that some Rwandan officials jokingly call their Hawaii — because it is so lush and beautiful — though people in Kigali whisper about it as if it were Alcatraz. There aren’t even large slums in Kigali, because the government simply doesn’t allow them.

The night before, I strolled back to my hotel from a restaurant well past midnight — a stupid idea in just about any other African capital. But Rwanda is one of the safest places I’ve been, this side of Zurich, which is hard to reconcile with the fact that less than 20 years ago more civilians were murdered here in a three-month spree of madness than during just about any other three-month period in human history, including the Holocaust. During Rwanda’s genocide, the majority Hutus turned on the minority Tutsis, slaughtering an estimated one million men, women and children, most dispatched by machetes or crude clubs. Rwandans say it is difficult for any outsider to appreciate how horrifying it was. Nowadays, it’s hard to find even a jaywalker.

No country in Africa, if not the world, has so thoroughly turned itself around in so short a time, and Kagame has shrewdly directed the transformation. Measured against many of his colleagues, like the megalomaniac Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who ran a beautiful, prosperous nation straight into the ground, or the Democratic Republic of Congo’s amiable but feckless Joseph Kabila, who is said to play video games while his country falls apart, Kagame seems like a godsend. Spartan, stoic, analytical and austere, he routinely stays up to 2 or 3 a.m. to thumb through back issues of The Economist or study progress reports from red-dirt villages across his country, constantly searching for better, more efficient ways to stretch the billion dollars his government gets each year from donor nations that hold him up as a shining example of what aid money can do in Africa. He is a regular at Davos, the world economic forum, and friendly with powerful people, including Bill Gates and Bono. The Clinton Global Initiative honored him with a Global Citizen award, and Bill Clinton said that Kagame “freed the heart and the mind of his people.”

This praise comes in part because Kagame has made indisputable progress fighting the single greatest ill in Africa: poverty. Rwanda is still very poor — the average Rwandan lives on less than $1.50 a day — but it is a lot less poor than it used to be. Kagame’s government has reduced child mortality by 70 percent; expanded the economy by an average of 8 percent annually over the past five years; and set up a national health-insurance program — which Western experts had said was impossible in a destitute African country. Progressive in many ways, Kagame has pushed for more women in political office, and today Rwanda has a higher percentage of them in Parliament than any other country. His countless devotees, at home and abroad, say he has also delicately re-engineered Rwandan society to defuse ethnic rivalry, the issue that exploded there in 1994 and that stalks so many African countries, often dragging them into civil war.

But Kagame may be the most complicated leader in Africa. The question is not so much about his results but his methods. He has a reputation for being merciless and brutal, and as the accolades have stacked up, he has cracked down on his own people and covertly supported murderous rebel groups in neighboring Congo. At least, that is what a growing number of critics say, including high-ranking United Nations officials and Western diplomats, not to mention the countless Rwandan dissidents who have recently fled. They argue that Kagame’s tidy, up-and-coming little country, sometimes described as the Singapore of Africa, is now one of the most straitjacketed in the world. Few people inside Rwanda feel comfortable speaking freely about the president, and many aspects of life are dictated by the government — Kagame’s administration recently embarked on an “eradication campaign” of all grass-roofed huts, which the government meticulously counted (in 2009 there were 124,671). In some areas of the country, there are rules, enforced by village commissars, banning people from dressing in dirty clothes or sharing straws when drinking from a traditional pot of beer, even in their own homes, because the government considers it unhygienic. Many Rwandans told me that they feel as if their president is personally watching them. “It’s like there’s an invisible eye everywhere,” said Alice Muhirwa, a member of an opposition political party. “Kagame’s eye.”

by Jeffrey Gettleman, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Nadav Kander

Cancer's Origins Revealed

Researchers have provided the first comprehensive compendium of mutational processes that drive tumour development. Together, these mutational processes explain most mutations found in 30 of the most common cancer types. This new understanding of cancer development could help to treat and prevent a wide-range of cancers.

Each mutational process leaves a particular pattern of mutations, an imprint or signature, in the genomes of cancers it has caused. By studying 7,042 genomes of people with the most common forms of cancer, the team uncovered more than 20 signatures of processes that mutate DNA. For many of the signatures, they also identified the underlying biological process responsible.

All cancers are caused by mutations in DNA occurring in cells of the body during a person's lifetime. Although we know that chemicals in tobacco smoke cause mutations in lung cells that lead to lung cancers and ultraviolet light causes mutations in skin cells that lead to skin cancers, we have remarkably little understanding of the biological processes that cause the mutations which are responsible for the development of most cancers.

"We have identified the majority of the mutational signatures that explain the genetic development and history of cancers in patients," says Ludmil Alexandrov first author from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. "We are now beginning to understand the complicated biological processes that occur over time and leave these residual mutational signatures on cancer genomes."

All of the cancers contained two or more signatures, reflecting the variety of processes that work together during the development of cancer. However, different cancers have different numbers of mutational processes. For example, two mutational processes underlie the development of ovarian cancer, while six mutational processes underlie the development of liver cancer.

Some of the mutational signatures are found in multiple cancer types, while others are confined to a single cancer type. Out of the 30 cancer types, 25 had signatures arising from age-related mutational processes. Another signature, caused by defects in repairing DNA due to mutations in the breast cancer susceptibility genes BRCA1 and 2, was found in breast, ovarian and pancreatic cancers.

by Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute |  Read more:
Image: WTSI

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Porn: the Shocking Truth

I recently came across a 15-year-old pupil of mine absolutely beside herself with grief. After a certain amount of cajoling, she eventually wailed that some boys in her class had called her “brainy”, before bursting into a fresh flood of hysteria.

Fumbling for the Kleenex, and wondering - not for the first time - what the hell had happened with feminism and this generation of teenagers, I attempted to mop up her tears and explain that being described as “brainy” was a Good Thing and something she should be pleased about, even if the idiotic boys were too stupid to recognise that. “I love being called brainy,” I said, soothingly.

These words had the desired effect, or so I thought. She instantly stopped crying and looked at me in astonishment. “But that’s nasty, Miss,” she cried.

It was now my turn to look puzzled. She sighed. “Miss, being brainy means you give head to a lot of people. Giving brain means giving head.”

This conversation crystallised something that had been nagging at me for quite some time.

Language is a powerful signifier for all humans, but perhaps more for teenagers than most. For them, language is not just a tool of communication, but a means of establishing class, race, religion, which part of town they’re from, the music they listen to, the groups to which they are affiliated and myriad other things that adults forgot when they hit 20. This has always been the case, but what is new among the teenagers I work with is the casual appropriation of what were once compliments as insults - invariably targeted at females. If a girl “gives character”, she needs slapping down. If she’s “lively”, she’s slutty.

Teenagers are not particularly thoughtful about their words or actions, so when you spot a trend, worrying or otherwise, the only way to understand it is to ask them why they’re doing it. It is actually surprising how much this question surprises them - but it gets them talking.

“Sex is a way to get girls to do more stuff weirdly. If they do something and you threaten to tell everyone, they do more stuff.”

“I hated giving blow jobs, but didn’t want to look weird. And he said I was a freak if I didn’t. He was my best mate, but sex turned him into someone else.”

If this was a purely linguistic trend we could all sigh with relief, put the kettle on and hope it goes away. But it’s not just a linguistic one. It is manifesting in the thoughts, actions, character and behaviour of teenagers everywhere, and if you think it’s just the bad ones, the naughty ones, the poor ones, the sink estate ones, you are being very naive indeed.

This is, thanks to the internet, the first generation with free, easy and mass exposure to hardcore pornography. These are the first teenagers to have grown up with “sexting”, sex tapes, making their own sex tapes on phones, saucy snaps of classmates on Facebook, MSN orgies and extensive insight into the sex lives of celebrities and politicians - hell, even teachers.

It is impossible to discuss the long-term effect this will have on a generation of teenagers because we’re not there yet, but I can tell you about the short-term effects. I’ve been observing them closely for a couple of years. And some of what I’ve witnessed would be shocking to less seasoned adults.

by Chloe Combi, TES Connect | Read more:
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Where Nokia Went Wrong

Nokia’s agreement on Tuesday to sell its handset business to Microsoft for $7.2 billion is something of a minor business coup for Nokia, since a year from now that business might well turn out to have been worth nothing. It also demonstrates just how far and fast Nokia has fallen in recent years. Not that long ago, it was the world’s dominant and pace-setting mobile-phone maker. Today, it has just three per cent of the global smartphone market, and its market cap is a fifth of what it was in 2007—even after rising more than thirty per cent on Tuesday.

What happened to Nokia is no secret: Apple and Android crushed it. But the reasons for that failure are a bit more mysterious. Historically, after all, Nokia had been a surprisingly adaptive company, moving in and out of many different businesses—paper, electricity, rubber galoshes. Recently, it successfully reinvented itself again. For years, the company had been a conglomerate, with a number of disparate businesses operating under the Nokia umbrella; in the early nineteen-nineties, anticipating the rise of cell phones, executives got rid of everything but the telecom business. Even more strikingly, Nokia was hardly a technological laggard—on the contrary, it came up with its first smartphone back in 1996, and built a prototype of a touch-screen, Internet-enabled phone at the end of the nineties. It also spent enormous amounts of money on research and development. What it was unable to do, though, was translate all that R. & D. spending into products that people actually wanted to buy.

One way to explain this is to point out that Nokia was an engineering company that needed more marketing savvy. But this isn’t quite right; in the early aughts, Nokia was acclaimed for its marketing, and was seen as the company that had best figured out how to turn mobile phones into fashion accessories. It’s more accurate to say that Nokia was, at its heart, a hardware company rather than a software company—that is, its engineers were expert at building physical devices, but not the programs that make those devices work. In the end, the company profoundly underestimated the importance of software, including the apps that run on  smartphones, to the experience of using a phone. (...)

[ed. From the Comments Section: This article repeats common misperceptions: “Nokia was acclaimed for its marketing, and was seen as the company that had best figured out how to turn mobile phones into fashion accessories." In fact, Nokia had hired a good industrial designer and produced fairly good looking phones for awhile; this was not because of any deep consumer insight. It was a cool product from an interesting company that few had heard of from a country that few knew much about. Many within the company believed that their growing and soon-to-be-dominant market share was proof of marketing prowess. There was no traditional consumer research-based approach to product design. (As we have seen, you can skip that step if your company is headed by Steve Jobs.) So despite spending money on research and paying lip service to consumer needs, the product development process was never based on deep consumer insight. There was almost an attitude within the company that people had learned to use Nokia devices and the Nokia UI because they loved the company and the product, and therefore would stay with Nokia in the future.

This is a fundamental flaw that doesn't show up in a way that is plain enough for senior management to understand until you stop having the hot product from the cool company. We in the States saw this slip fairly early on when young people started telling us in research that Nokia phones were what their parents owned and not a product or brand that spoke to them. (Yes, there was an appreciation of industrial design within the company, but design was far removed, physically and metaphorically, from the company, where there was never a true design ethos—beyond the physical appearance of the phone.)

Nowhere was this gap between self-perception and reality greater than with the "Communicator." Referred to by some as "the brick," the company tried several iterations, with very little software or form factor innovation, and ultimately very modest sales (and a complete flop in the US). As with most large companies, they were operating within an echo chamber. Many top executives used Communicators, despite their un-user-friendly software and hardware, and you even saw administrative assistants using these expensive, high-end devices at Nokia's HQ in Espoo.

There was also a profound failure to understand the importance of the ecosystem that surrounds a platform, something that Apple has capitalized on masterfully. This mistake was grounded in the belief that it was hardware that mattered. The company’s approach to N-Gage, Nokia’s attempt to establish a mobile games platform, was a great demonstration of this. As a member of the global developer organization, I was sitting in the audience in Espoo when Anssi Vanjoki announced the device. We were shocked. No one had briefed the developer organization management, and as it turns out, that was by design. There was no plan for a broad games developer effort and no understanding of the importance of one. Instead, they had adopted the old console approach of working with a small number of hand-picked publishers. (It is no small irony that Finland’s most successful mobile phone export of the last few years has been the global game hit, Angry Birds.)]

by James Surowiecki, The Atlantic |  Read more:
Image: Angel Franco/The New York Times/Redux

Silicon Valley Tactics to Keep Control

The gods of Silicon Valley have repeatedly sought to take the companies they founded public while retaining control as if they were still private.

Recent events at Google and other technology companies show that perhaps this control may be bad not only for the companies but also for the founders, who are increasingly living in a world bereft of checks and balances.

Silicon Valley has for the most part held public shareholders in mixed regard. Preferring to keep them on the sidelines is not a new development.

Google was a leader in this movement. When it went public in 2004, it did so using a dual-class structure. Its co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, were issued shares with 10 votes apiece, while public shareholders received shares with only one vote. The idea was to ensure that the co-founders kept control of Google even if they sold some of their shares.

But boundaries get pushed, as does everything in the tech world. Facebook went further in restricting shareholder control when it went public by adopting a dual-class structure that allowed its co-founder Mark Zuckerberg to keep control even if he owned less than 10 percent of the company. In fact, if Mr. Zuckerberg dies, his heirs still have the potential to control the company.

Putting this in perspective, had Apple gone public with Facebook’s structure, Steven P. Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, and Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak (most recently a “Dancing With the Stars” contestant) would possibly still be in control.

Not to be outdone, Google proposed last year that the company issue a new class of shares with no voting rights. According to public documents filed by Google, this share class was put into place at the behest of the founders, being justified by Mr. Brin and Mr. Page as allowing them to “concentrate on the long term.”

The idea is that absent the pressures of the public market, executives can look after the long-term best interests of the company. This will allow Google to experiment with things like Google Glass, which may not be immediately profitable.

It’s an alluring argument. On the plus side, this allows for the company to look out for a wide array of interests beyond shareholders’ that focus solely on stock price. In the media, this structure has worked with some success (The New York Times Company, for example, has a dual-class structure).

But the problem with this structure is that the shareholders’ voice of dissent is locked out. And studies have shown that in general, this type of dual-class structure does not perform as well as traditional arrangements.

by Steven M. Davidoff, Dealbook |  Read more:

Image: Harry Campbell

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