This map on religion and regionalism is fascinating, and reminds me a lot of the pop/soda/coke regional map.
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)
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:
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.
I was pleased when Chad directed me to the New Yorker piece on commuting last year which garnered much attention. I myself have spent quite a bit of time on the highways of 101, 280 and 237, not to mention countless trips down the peninsula on the Caltrain. What Chad directed me to, though, was a quote I completely glossed over the first time I read this article, one by Robert Putnam:
“I was shocked to find how robust a predictor of social isolation commuting is… there’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”
According to this calculation, the following chart represents your life as a commuter. On the x-axis is the number of minutes you spend commuting, and on the y-axis the percentage of your potential social life that you retain with the given commute time.
The impact of this chart is striking, almost to the point of absurdity. With a literal interpretation, someone with a one-hour commute each-way will only retain 30% of their relationships. What’s more, the quote is really derivative of a result he shows in his most popular book, Bowling Alone, where he actually paints the picture much more bleakly, tying commuting to the downfall of civic engagement (surprise!):
We are commuting farther. From 1960 to 1990 the number of workers who commute across county lines more than tripled. Between 1983 and 1995 the average commuting trip grew 37 percent longer in miles. Ironically, travel time increased by only 14 percent, because the speed of the average commute, by all modes of transportation combined, increased by nearly one quarter. Three factors have made for faster travel, at least in recent past–the switch from carpools and mass transit to single-occupancy vehicles, which are quicker for the individual worker though socially inefficient; the increase in suburb-to-suburb commuting; and greater flexibility in work hours. On the other hand, traffic congestion has metastasized everywhere. In a study of sixty-eight urban areas from Los Angeles to Corpus Christi o Cleveland to Providence, annual congestion-related delay per driver rose steadily from sixteen hours in 1982 to forty-five hours in 1997.
In short, we are spending more and more time alone in the car. And on the whole, many of us see this as time for quiet relaxation, especially those of us who came of age in the midst of the driving boom. According to one survey in 1997, 45 percent of all drivers–61 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty-four, though only 36 percent of those aged forty-five and over–agreed that “driving is my time to think and enjoy being alone.”
The car and the commute, however, are demonstrably bad for community life. In round numbers the evidence suggests that each additional ten minutes in daily commuting time cuts involvement in community affairs by 10 percent–fewer public meetings attended, fewer committees chaired, fewer petitions signed, fewer church services, less volunteering, and so on. In fact, although commuting time is not quite as powerful as an influence on civic involvement as education, it i more important than any other demographic factor. And time diary studies suggest that there is a similarly strong negative effect of commuting time on informal social interaction
I would not be the first to question the methodology and results of Bowling Alone, but Putnam’s data is aging quickly, and ignores everything Internet. Perhaps EVDO cards and Blackberrys are helping us stay in touch, but any commuter, technology or not, will identify with the feeling of being out of touch. Putnam’s data are extreme, but at a gut level the intuition seems right: commuting hurts your social life. The more you commute, the less time you have for friends.
In 1986, Richard Hamming gave a talk at the Naval Postgraduate school entitled “You and your research” relating his experience working with some of the best scientists of the last century. It’s a must-read for anyone who does research for a living, and probably applies to just about any line of work. A few of my favorite quotes:
“I believed, in my early days, that you should spend at least as much time in the polish and presentation as you did in the original research. Now at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation. It’s a big, big number.”
“The people who do great work with less ability but who are committed to it, get more done that those who have great skill and dabble in it, who work during the day and go home and do other things and come back and work the next day.”
“Often a scientist becomes angry, and this is no way to handle things. Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time.”
In reading The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, I came across one of those pieces of research that just keeps coming up in conversation, so I’ll post it here. The theory is known as “peak-end rule,” as expressed by psychologist Daniel Kahneman, describes the way that people remember events by the peak and the end of the experience. For instance, if I go to an amusement park, this heuristic says that I will remember my trip by the height of excitement and the way I felt when I left. The classic experiment showing this phenomenon is described by Mr. Schwartz:
Participants in a laboratory study were asked to listen to a pair of very loud, unpleasant noises played through their headphones. One noise lasted for eight seconds. The other lasted sixteen. The first eight seconds of the second noise were identical to the first noise, whereas the second eight seconds, while still loud and unpleasant, were not as loud. Later, the participants were told that they would have to listen to one of the noises again, but that they could choose which one. Clearly the second noise is worse–the unpleasantness lasted twice as long. Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of people chose the second to be repeated.
These results are not limited to abstract, constructed experiences. Schwartz another experience with a little more real-world impact:
In the test, one group of patients had a standard colonoscopy. A second group had a standard colonoscopy plus. The “plus” was that after the actual examination was over, the doctor left the instrument in place for a short time… and it made a difference. It turned out that, over a five-year period after the exam, patients in the second group were more likely to comply with calls for follow-up colonoscopies than patients in the first group.
And of course, this example takes advantage of the colonsocopy rule: any research that deals with colonoscopies makes me uncomfortable, and therefore has more impact.
As I mentioned, since I discovered this rule, it keeps popping up in discussions I have been having. Having recently been on a vacation, it strikes me that this heuristic is of utmost importance in planning long events. It appears that the optimal planning for a vacation (or any event for that matter) would look something like this:
In the case of my vacation, the last high-point of my time in Europe was in Florence, followed by one brief day in Copenhagen. Not that there’s anything wrong with Denmark, but that day ends up coming up in more of my conversations than the rest of the trip because that is how memory works (that and blood jello is really, really disgusting). If you’re planning any trips soon, make sure to end on a high note, because you will be the one telling the stories.
I like to bunch up all of my stressful events into short periods of time. In the past few weeks I have moved to a new apartment in Hayes Valley, rented my old place to a subletter, walked into the cloistered halls of academia and am currently sitting in my friend Jussi’s apartment in Berlin:
I will be traveling down to Dresden on Sunday to attend the International Communication Association (ICA) conference where I’ll be presenting some of the findings from my thesis. The paper is finished, but I’ll post the slides and the paper when I’m trapped in my hotel room in Dresden.
If you’re in Germany or heading to ICA, please look me up, or SMS me at my temporary number, +49 176 6539 8184.
There have been a few requests lately for the results of the MIT Weblog Survey that I conducted last summer, so I figure I should respond publicly.
I’m sorry for the delay, and I admit I was hopeful in my assessment of the time it would take me to release the results. In the past three months I’ve moved, started a new job and a new life. Things have settled down a bit now, and I have some spare time to devote to writing up the results. I honestly expect to have them done by next week.
In the mean time, if you’d like a copy of my thesis, please email me, I’d be happy to send it to you. I’d just prefer to keep it semi-public until the survey results are posted. Sorry again for the delay.
I am obviously always on the lookout for weblog statistics, as it has become a core part of my thesis. Today a marketing company by the name of comScore has released a report detailing a number of different statements about the weblog community. I’d like to take a moment to remind people that this is a marketing survey, and as such should be carefully scrutinized before drawing any conclusions.
First, comScore’s methodology claims that they have 2 million active subjects, recruited through Random Digit Dial and an “online recruitment program,” for which they provide no details. They do however list the incentives that are provided to those individuals:
Sans the third incentive which is the blanket “feel-good” incentive for all surveys, I challenge you to think of someone who is attracted to the first two. Let’s just say they’re not your average person or internet user. They also note:
All demographic segments of the online population are represented in the comScore Global Network, with large samples of participants in each segment. For example, our network includes hundreds of thousands of high-income Internet users - one of the most desirable and influential groups to measure, yet also one of the most difficult to recruit.
Without diving into what “high-income Internet users” are, having hundreds of thousands subjects from a assumedly small portion of the population leads me to believe that they’re not really interested in representivity, but rather, umm, marketing. Given that they do not justify their sample, nor provide margins of error, the initial sampling frame should be considered bunk.
Second, if their sampling of weblogs seems strange at first, it is. They were interested in how the aforementioned sample visited weblogs, so they decided to look at visits to 400 blog-related domains, which they culled from “top blog lists.” These domains include hosting services (e.g. “*.livejournal.com”) among the other top blogs. Keep in mind that this sample of 400 domains incorperates community sites (freerepublic.com, fark.com, slashdot.org, metafilter.com, etc.), professionally written sites (gawker.com, drudgereport.com, fleshbot.com, etc) and potentially spam (crazyass13.com throws my spam alarm).
I’m assuming, based on their distribution of unique visitors shown below, that all of these sites are included in one sample, with the top sites being blog hosts (although note the missing blogspot, which supposedly saw 19 million unique visitors), and the second group being community sites and professional blogs. As far as many people might be concerned, the “real blogs” start around #30, for which they provide no description. How this is a sample of weblogs at all, I can’t say. But building categories around this strange set of sites seems a little unsound.
What this report, in sum, seems to say to me is that some large number of people have visited either a professional weblog or some weblog on any number of the hosted services in the past year. This should not be surprising. I get a blog site response from Google just about once every five queries. Without any description of how many of these blog visitors saw only one blog in the entire period, I’d say an overwhelming majority could be from search engines (which they admit).
Given their sampling frame and blog selection methodology, it seems hard to extrapolate any meaningful statistics about true blog readership. Until they release the data, I would quote these numbers with extreme caution.
For those wondering whether or not I’ve died in my apartment in a vat of sweet-smelling liquid that masked the smell of my rotting body, the answer is NO! I’m alive and well, just in the wake of one of the more excruciatingly painful periods of work-induced anti-social behavior. And as a consolation, I never have to defend my thesis again.
Unlike most Ph.D. defenses, the Media Lab counterpart is quite public, held in an auditorium-sized room, and can occur before the thesis document is finished. Last Thursday at 9am I went through this process presenting my thesis titled The structural determinants of media contagion, and I came through fairly unscathed. It was fairly well attended once people woke up (around 9:30 I guess), and my committee decided I was ready to enter the cloistered halls of academia… after I finish writing the document.
It’s unfortunate, but true. I can’t put Dr. on my credit card just yet, nor can I pretend like I have any plans after that. In the mean time I’ll be writing in limbo until my April 5th deadline. I’ll hold off on the results until then, lest I contradict myself in two weeks time. But I just wanted to thank everyone that helped me get here, and there are so many. If you’re reading this, I’m sure you know that I mean you, because just about everyone who possibly could have lended a hand did in some way (even if it was just by taking the survey).
So thanks. I’ll be filling in the details in a few weeks, but you can take solace in the mean time that I’m taking showers again and interacting with people other than the three friends I’ve developed in my brain over the past two months.