ChittahChattah Quickies
June 6th, 2009
- The Ruins of Fordlândia – Henry Ford's miniature America in the jungle attracted a slew of workers. Local laborers were offered a wage of thirty-seven cents a day to work on the fields of Fordlândia, which was about double the normal rate for that line of work. But Ford's effort to transplant America– what he called "the healthy lifestyle"– was not limited to American buildings, but also included mandatory "American" lifestyle and values. The plantation's cafeterias were self-serve, which was not the local custom, and they provided only American fare such as hamburgers. Workers had to live in American-style houses, and they were each assigned a number which they had to wear on a badge– the cost of which was deducted from their first paycheck. Brazilian laborers were also required to attend squeaky-clean American festivities on weekends, such as poetry readings, square-dancing, and English-language sing-alongs.
- Fordlandia: The Failure Of Ford's Jungle Utopia – Henry Ford tries to build a Midwestern American company town in Amazonian Brazil – for the rubber, even though you can't grow plantation rubber in the Amazon. Absolute epic failure results: they were unprepared both industrially and culturally. "But the more it failed, the more Ford justified the project in idealistic terms. "It increasingly was justified as a work of civilization, or as a sociological experiment," Grandin says. One newspaper article even reported that Ford's intent wasn't just to cultivate rubber, but to cultivate workers and human beings."
- Report Non-Humans – Marketing for upcoming sci-fi flick District 9. See my interactions column "Interacting with Advertising" for more discussion on the "tricks" of hiding advertising in the aesthetics of real informational signage. Is it okay here because we're in on the joke?
Tags:
advertising, alien, amazon, automobile, bench, brazil, business, capitalism, colonialism, community, culture, ego, epic, fail, failure, film, ford, fordlandia, history, industrialization, interacting, jungle, marketing, output, promotion, rubber, settlement, social, society, viral
ChittahChattah Quickies
April 29th, 2009
- Miro Adoption Center: Adopt of a Line of Code – This is a clever adaptation of a familiar community funding approach (i.e., highways) to open-source software:
"Adopt a line of source code for just $4 a month, and together we can keep Miro alive and growing! You’ll receive a customized page and widgets that display your line of code. Even a little photo of your new buddy, and its personalized name!"
ChittahChattah Quickies
April 22nd, 2009
- Large collection of (actual?) screenplay pitches (technically query letters). – Just one:
Title: Remnants of Hammers
Logline: Constant bickering drives this comedy-drama as the plots of immature Bill, rabble-rousing Eldon, and ex-Marine George converge upon poor Dr. FitzUrse. - The Che brand – In "Che’s Afterlife.” Casey has written a book that is not only a cultural history of an image, but a sociopolitical study of the mechanisms of fame. It is about how ideas travel and mutate in this age of globalization, how concepts of political ideology have increasingly come to be trumped by notions of commerce and cool and chic, and how the historical Che gave way to other Ches: St. Che, said to possess the ability to perform miracles; Chesucristo, a Christ-like figure revered for his ideals, not his advocacy of violence; an entrepreneurial Che, promoting the lesson “that individuals should honestly strive to produce their utmost for the good of all”; and the Rock ’n’ Roll Che, more representative of youthful anti-authoritarianism than of any political dogma. Che has become a generic symbol of the underdog, the idealist, the iconoclast, the man willing to die for a cause. He has become “the quintessential postmodern icon” signifying “anything to anyone and everything to everyone.”
Tags:
brand, business, che, cliche, fame, film, Guevara, history, icon, image, interviewing, letter, meaning, politics, query, selling, stories
ChittahChattah Quickies
April 20th, 2009
- Survey Says Baby Boomers Think Playing With Your Blackberry During A Meeting Is Rude – The 'tude in the blog entry about the survey is as interesting as the 'tude the survey's creation and content point to. Social norms shift and that gets introduced and changes the way people interact gets put through the social norm filter: is it rude? Is it distracting? Should other people stop doing it? Or should we get over it? This just points to the transition we're going through rather than offering any clear sense of what's going on. Full disclosure: I'm a Gen-Xer and I bolted from a boring presentation a few weeks ago when the person behind me tapped on the shoulder and asked me to stop using my iPhone as she found it distracting [I was discreetly using Google Reader in my lap].
- Gartner's Hype cycle – a graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and business application of specific technologies – Hype cycles characterize the over-enthusiasm or "hype" and subsequent disappointment that typically happens with the introduction of new technologies.They also show how and when technologies move beyond the hype, offer practical benefits and become widely accepted.
Five phases of the hype cycle
1. "Technology Trigger" —A breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest
2. "Peak of Inflated Expectations" — Frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations; There may be some successful applications of a technology, but there are typically more failures
3. "Trough of Disillusionment" — Fails to meet expectations and becomes unfashionable
4. "Slope of Enlightenment" —some businesses experiment to understand the benefits and practical application
5. "Plateau of Productivity" — benefits become widely demonstrated and accepted
Tags:
adoption, business, collaboration, communication, culture, expectations, gartner, generation, hype, innovation, interaction, interpersonal, management, marketing, meetings, norms, productivity, technology, transition, trends, workplace
ChittahChattah Quickies
March 3rd, 2009
Tags:
blogging, business, design, email, ethnography, fail, feedburner, hbr, images, innovation, intel, research, strategy, subscription
ChittahChattah Quickies
February 21st, 2009
Tags:
accuracy, belief, brand, business, cigarette, consumed, csi, culture, design, downtime, economics, economy, electronics, evaluate, evidence, evolve, expectations, failure, feedback, forensics, frontstage, gadget, gizmo, health, history, innovation, legal, magazine, maintenance, money, naming, nicotine, offline, police, prediction, prop, prosecution, research, science, simulation, smoke, smoking, strategy, technology, testing, use, user
ChittahChattah Quickies
February 5th, 2009
ChittahChattah Quickies
January 23rd, 2009
- MediaMaster is shutting down – We did some really interesting user research to help define the overall value proposition, concept, and user experience. Exciting to see what they were able to do but obviously disappointing to see where it ended up a few years later. "Don’t wait for large corporate partners to make your business viable, it needs to be so on its own. Design it well from the start, it helps when you don’t have to re-engineer the interface, it’s the most complex part! (That was not a problem we had)"
Tags:
business, design, experience, interface, launch, media, mp3, music, research, service, startup, venture, website
ChittahChattah Quickies
January 16th, 2009
- PETA (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) attempts to rebrand fish as "Sea Kittens" – Sorta reductio ad absurdum re: my latest interactions column, Poets, Priests, and Politicians
- Rug company Nanimarquina brings global warming to your living room – "If there is an iconic image that represents the natural devastation of global warming, it is the lone polar bear stuck on a melting ice flow. Now eco rug company Nanimarquina has teamed up with NEL artists to create a beautiful ‘Global Warming Rug’ – complete with stranded polar bear floating in the middle of the sea – to represent the most pressing issue of our time. Rugs have been traditionally used throughout the ages to tell stories and communicate messages, and we think this is a lovely, poignant new take on a time-honored tradition." What effect does it have when an issue like global warming gets iconified and aestheticized like this? Does it drive home the seriousness of the situation, or make it more palatable?
- Asch conformity experiments – (via Eliezer Yudkowsky) Asch asked people about similarity of height between several lines. Confederates answered incorrectly and this influenced the subject themselves to support this incorrect answer.
- Confirmation bias: the tendency to seek out information that supports what we already believe – (via Eliezer Yudkowsky) The 2-4-6 problem presented subjects with 3 numbers. Subjects were told that the triple conforms to a particular rule. They were asked to discover the rule by generating their own triples, where the experimenter would indicate whether or not the triple conformed to the rule. While the actual rule was simply “any ascending sequence”, the subjects often proposed rules that were far more complex. Subjects seemed to test only “positive” examples—triples the subjects believed would conform to their rule and confirm their hypothesis. What they did not do was attempt to challenge or falsify their hypotheses by testing triples that they believed would not conform to their rule.
- Overcoming Bias – Blog by Eliezer Yudkowsky and others about (overcoming) biases in perception, decisions, etc.
- Hindsight bias: when people who know the answer vastly overestimate its predictability or obviousness, – (via Eliezer Yudkowsky)
Sometimes called the I-knew-it-all-along effect.
"…A third experimental group was told the outcome and also explicitly instructed to avoid hindsight bias, which made no difference." - Planning fallacy – the tendency to underestimate task-completion times – (via Eliezer Yudkowsky) Asking people what they did last time turns out to be more accurate than what they either hope for or expect to happen this time
- Cognitive Biases in the Assessment of Risk – (via Eliezer Yudkowsky) Another example of extensional neglect is scope insensitivity, which you will find in the Global Catastrophic Risks book. Another version of the same thing is where people would only pay slightly more to save all the wetlands in Oregon than to save one protected wetland in Oregon, or people would pay the same amount to save two thousand, twenty thousand, or two hundred thousand oil-stroked birds from perishing in ponds. What is going on there is when you say, “How much would you donate to save 20,000 birds from perishing in oil ponds,” they will visualize one bird trapped, struggling to get free. That creates some level of emotional arousal, then the actual quantity gets thrown right out the window.
[I am not sure that's the reason why; I think there could be other explanations for the flawed mental model that leads to those responses]
- Conjunction fallacy – (via Eliezer Yudkowsky) A logical fallacy that occurs when it is assumed that specific conditions are more probable than a single general one. Example: Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more probable?
1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
85% of those asked chose option 2 [2]. However, mathematically, the probability of two events occurring together (in "conjunction") will always be less than or equal to the probability of either one occurring alone.
Tags:
aestheticization, asch, assessment, baychi, bias, birds, blogs, brain, brand, business, cognitive, confirmationbias, conformity, culture, decision, decisions, environment, environmentalism, estimation, experiment, experiments, fallacy, fish, groupthink, ideas, Inhabitat, jargon, language, lingo, logic, Nanimarquina, NEL, paradox, PETA, planning, productivity, psychology, research, risk, rug, science, social, sociology, statistics, storytelling, theory, work
ChittahChattah Quickies
January 10th, 2009
- Wired on the big big money being made selling virtual items in online games – With about 30 workers on staff, Liu was able to keep a gold-farming setup running around the clock. While the night shift slept upstairs on plywood bunks, day-shift workers sat in the hot, dimly lit workshop, each tending three or four computers. They were "playing" World of Warcraft, farming gold at an impressive clip by hunting and looting monsters, their productivity greatly abetted by automated bots that allowed them to handle multiple characters with little effort. They worked 84-hour weeks, got a couple of days off per month, and earned about $4 a day, which even for China was not a stellar wage.
- Wired on Ray Ozzie and cultural change at MSFT: At first, the skunk works-like nature of Ozzie's operation engendered suspicion and resentment – Previously, a big part of any development team at Microsoft was making sure its new product worked in lockstep with everything else the company produced. While that approach avoided annoying conflicts, it also tended to smother innovation. "This philosophy of independent innovation…is something Ray pushed very strongly," Ozzie's approach was to encourage people to rush ahead and build things. Then he'd have a team of what he calls the spacklers fill in the gaps and get things ready for release.
He spent a lot of time on the physical workspace for his team. He had workers rip down the labyrinthine corridors on one floor and called in architects to create a more open design. Now, walking into the Windows Live Core group is like leaving Microsoft and visiting a Futurama set. Office windows open onto hallways so that quick eye contact can trigger spontaneous discussions. Whiteboards are everywhere. Pool tables, mini-lounges, and snack zones draw people toward the center of the space.
Tags:
business, change, china, cloud, culture, economics, games, gaming, goldfarming, innovation, labor, Microsoft, mmo, msft, outsource, ozzie, process, software, strategy, technology, videogames, wage, wired, wow