To have substantial exchange, you need to be fully present. That is why facing one's accuser is a fundamental right of the accused.
Jaron Lanier on the fundamental problem of online anonymity.
Check out the big brains on Brett
If having a large brain is such an advantage for humans, and it seems hard to argue considering where we've ended up in the pecking order of species, then how come more creatures don't have large brains?
This article in Discover magazine cites a few explanations from scientists:
- the brain is a huge energy-consuming piece of tissue, and humans had to evolve smaller, more efficient guts to compensate for the additional energy allocation to the brain
- we altered our diet to higher density energy sources like meats and seeds
- genetic mutations reduced energy transport proteins to muscles in favor of those funneling energy to the brain
If you were creating species like you were creating videogame characters and had to allocate a fixed energy supply among brain and other body parts, evolution came down in favor of dedicating more to the brain when it came to humans.
One of the intriguing and repeated tropes in comic books was that a person with an abnormally large brain inevitably turns to a life of crime and is in fact often a literal criminal mastermind. It's as if the only logical outcome for such a dominant intellect is to turn to a life of crime as any other behavior -- altruism, generosity -- would be inefficient and illogical. It may also reflect some deep-seated distrust of people who are too smart.
NY and SF: dining rivals
A reader asked San Francisco Chronicle restaurant critic Michael Bauer why celebrity NY chefs and restauranteurs didn't open outposts in San Francisco. Bauer's theory:
We’re a little provincial, a little smug about our homegrown talent, and a little less enthralled with big-name chefs who garner fame elsewhere and then bring a concept here.
As you can imagine with a topic like this, the comment thread escalated immediately into a bar fight between left and right coast foodies (if you see people and bottles and chairs flying out saloon windows, avoid the place).
If that's true, it's a loss for San Francisco, which does have a high density of hard-core foodies. Insularity is not healthy when it comes to dining, not in this day and age where chefs and diners can grow up learning and tasting so many different types of cuisine. It used to be that the sacred rule of thumb was that you didn't eat at an ethnic restaurant unless the clientele comprised a large number of people of that ethnicity. While it's still a useful diagnostic shortcut for more obscure cuisines or less diverse geographies, it has started to let me down more and more in the major US cities.
Chefs apprentice all over the world now, but even if they stay close to home, they usually have access to kitchens preparing all types of cuisine. Specialized ingredients are easier to source anywhere in the world now. Information wants to be free, and ethnic culinary secrets are no exception.
It's nonsensical that foodies who pride themselves on openness to all types of cuisine would not have that same attitude towards chefs from other cities.
The mentality of the modern news consumer
If the news is that important, it will find me
I first read that quote in this Brian Stelter article in the NYTimes which notes that one consumer stated it during a market research session.
That line sums up something really important.
One
I asked for something like this on Twitter a while back, and the lazyweb gods have answered: a Safari and Chrome extension that takes articles from popular sites that are broken across multiple pages to boost page views and merges them into one page. It saves you the trouble of finding the Print or Single Page link and clicking it yourself which seems like a minor annoyance but becomes a massive one when multiplied across dozens of articles every day. [hat tip to Daring Fireball]
No doubt about it, serious news organizations are in a tough bind trying to monetize. But making the user experience significantly worse to protect display ad revenue is attacking the symptom, not the problem. The problem is that most advertising is lousy and ineffective, and users, given a choice, will try to avoid it. In most news organizations, I'm guessing the journalists sit on a different floor or in a different wing from the ad sales team. It's not in their nature to try to actually improve the effectiveness of the advertising in a meaningful way; advertising has always been the second class citizen that pays the bills.
If you have a product or service that has many close substitutes, and if the core of your revenue model is something you don't spend a large percentage of your mindshare obsessing over, it's not surprising that your entire business is vulnerable. Even successful market leaders consistently fortify potential vulnerabilities. Think about how much Amazon obsesses over logistics, or how far up the supply chain Apple has invested in materials and chipsets.
Most people think of Google as a search company, but they have some of the smartest people in their company optimizing and improving AdWords, their primary source of revenue. Their ad auction model is continually refined by mathematicians and economists (sometimes those are one and the same). They try to improve their advertising for the entities on both sides of the exchange -- the advertisers and the end users -- by maximizing interaction rates.
When was the last time we heard any journalists or news organizations talking about the effectiveness of their display ads online?