Every year during MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP), Professor Patrick Winston gives a wonderfully reflexive and recursive talk about giving talks titled How to Speak. This lecture provides some useful speaking heuristics, especially if you’re in the business of helping people learn. This year the talk will be given Friday, Feburary 1 at 11am in room 6-120, but for those not in Boston, you can watch his 1999 performance in full (albeit a tad bit out-of-date):
The Echonest, a startup out of the Media Lab located in Somerville, MA, just launched an Audio Analysis API which processes MP3s and returns an XML document with a number of features including tempo, loudness, time signature, fades, timbre and a whole lot more. These can be used in a number of different cool demos that they are providing as reader exercises
Mr. Fogg will be discussing the class today an open PARC forum titled, Facebook applications, mass persuasion, & world peace. The talk is 4-5pm at the George E. Pake Auditorium. It should be a pretty engaging discussion.
Metafilter has released the metadata for all of their sites, including comments, favorites and contacts. I think it’s excellent that they are taking the time to do this, and hopefully a few academics will recognize the value of such a compact, influential community that has amazing historical data. (via waxy)
WhileThe Hudsucker Proxy is not one of the Coen brothers’ most lauded films, but I have always though of it as an amazing movie about the unlikely sources of innovation. It wasn’t until I read about Richard Knerr’s death that I realized the affiliation the movie has with Knerr’s real life, namely the invention of the Hula Hoop, Frisbee, and other circular toys of mass appeal. In fact, the Hula Hoop suffered similar ups faced in the Hudsucker Proxy:
In the first year, Wham-O sold as many as 40 million hoops; by 1960, 100 million, a mark no other toy had ever reached. After too many households had two or three of the hoops, the fad evaporated, leaving Wham-O marooned on a mountain of tubular plastic. Total profit: only $10,000, a result of business inexperience and millions of unsold hoops.
Richard Knerr was certainly an unlikely source of innovation, and I am positive that the world never saw the Frisbee or Hula Hoop coming. I think the Hula Hoop discovery scene is a great interpretation of the process of diffusion, and a fitting homage to Mr. Knerr’s amazing inventions:
When going to dinner on a Saturday in New York, one only has a few options: eat early, eat late, or eat at home. Last night we were confronted by Williamsburg Saturday-night economics, four restaurants in a row with over an hour wait, and I was reminded of a story that I read ages ago entitled Pocketful of Dough. The author, Bruce Feiler, is paid by Gourmet magazine to bribe his way into restaurants:
Curious, I hatched a plan. I would go to some of the hardest-to-penetrate restaurants in New York armed with little more than an empty stomach, an iron-clad willingness to be humiliated, and a fistful of dough. Most people (including the editors of this magazine) assumed I would get turned down at half the places on my list. “You’ll never get into Daniel,” said one. “Union Square Cafe?!” said another. “Forget it.”
My plan was to show up between 8:15 and 8:30 on varying nights of the week. I would go with a different companion each night. I would try to get a reservation by telephone that afternoon and go only if I were turned down. And I would carry a twenty and a fifty in my left pocket, and a hundred in my right pocket. I did have an incentive: I could eat at any place I could successfully finagle my way into.
What results is a classic piece of journalism that I cite at least twice a year. That is to say, I am only referring to it, not a practicing bribe-maker. Since the cat has been out of the sack for over 7 years now, I wonder what effect Bruce Feiler has had on wait times in New York? Next time I go to Williamsburg on a Saturday night, I will definitely bring some dough and report back on the timeliness of this technique.
I was surprised the other day when I stumbled onto Barack Obama’s Facebook page and discovered that he actually filled out his music tastes:
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder,
Johann Sebastian Bach (cello suites), and The Fugees
I think that given the task of coming up with a more inclusive list, I don’t think I could come close. Some pop culture researcher must have consulted. Seriously, who would be offended by anything on this list, and everyone probably identifies with something.
Some of his other tastes:
Movies: Casablanca, Godfather I & II, Lawrence of Arabia and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Books: Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison), Moby Dick,
Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Parting the Waters, Gilead (Robinson), Self-Reliance (Emerson), The Bible, Lincoln’s Collected Writings
I was fascinated by a piece on yesterday’s Morning Edition about sleep, In today’s world, the well-rested lose respect. A myth has been created by America’s most successful politicians, businesspeople and other luminaries that their success is in some way tied to a physical condition, short sleeping, that allows them to have more productive hours than the rest of us.
Sleep researchers believe that short sleepers are not prevalent , and that those who claim to be short sleepers are simply redefining what sleep is (and sleeping on the job, in the limo, on the plane, etc.) or are just used to functioning on insufficient rest.
So I ask, what’s more likely:
A superbreed of humans with the ability to stay awake longer than the rest of the population has taken over the powerful positions of the world in the middle of the night
A third, independent variable, namely drive or motivation, has led to both the success and stress-induced insomnia that come with being in a powerful position
This story is so powerful that one of the interviewees had the following to say about her daughter:
My daughter, who has a life-threatening disease, when I asked her if there’s one thing you could change about yourself physically, I’d expect her to say she’d like to get rid of her life-threatening condition. No way. She’d say “I would abolish the need for sleep, so I could get more done.”
I find it really tragic that our society has arrived at this position, and that people want to sleep less. I like to sleep 8 hours nightly, and if I’m ever powerful enough to be asked how I got to where I am, I’ll say it was the sleep.
Whenever I am selected as part of a survey panel, online or otherwise, I nearly always take the opportunity. I am “one of those people” who creates self-selection bias. I am a perennial student of surveys, and always interested in what researchers and marketers are trying to understand. I received an invitation this morning by a reputable magazine that I read frequently, and decided to take the dive. One of the many questions asked about online activities, specifically which of the following actions I have partaken in over the past 3 months:
Sent and/or received an Instant message (IM)
Sent and/or received a text message (SMS) on cell phone
Accessed the internet from cell phone or PDA
Downloaded/listened to or watched music/videos, podcasts or other audio files, webcasts, etc.
Created/uploaded art, photography, images, video, music, etc.
Participated in chat rooms or forums
Visited social networking sites (e.g. facebook.com, myspace.com, etc.)
Use RSS Feeds
None of the above
Suffice to say, I think that I am not the norm:
Perfect 12!! It’s always refreshing to be reminded that you are not average, especially when the media you consume, the people you interact with and the activities engage in suggest otherwise. Although it seems like many average internet users could fill up a large chunk of this list.
This is the personal weblog of Cameron Marlow, research scientist at Facebook. You can find a comprehensive list of content in the archives, or you can simply search using the box above.
