I've blogged and written journalism regularly about people's emotional relationships with robots and artificial life forms. But the Washington Post just published one of the best things I've ever read on the subject -- a feature article by Joel Garreau on the emotional relationships between today's soldiers and the many robots they use to keep themselves alive.
It opens up with a story about how an army roboticist was testing a clever new design for a robot modeled on centipede -- which explodes land mines by intentionally stepping on them:
At the Yuma Test Grounds in Arizona, the autonomous robot, 5 feet long and modeled on a stick-insect, strutted out for a live-fire test and worked beautifully, he says. Every time it found a mine, blew it up and lost a limb, it picked itself up and readjusted to move forward on its remaining legs, continuing to clear a path through the minefield.Finally it was down to one leg. Still, it pulled itself forward. Tilden was ecstatic. The machine was working splendidly.
The human in command of the exercise, however -- an Army colonel -- blew a fuse.
The colonel ordered the test stopped.
Why? asked Tilden. What's wrong?
The colonel just could not stand the pathos of watching the burned, scarred and crippled machine drag itself forward on its last leg.
This test, he charged, was inhumane.
Awesome. And the article gets better and better -- and more and more surreal -- from there on in. Garreau reports on soldiers who award "purple hearts" to their bomb-defusing robots that get injured; soldiers who describe in details the personality quirks of their 'bots ("Sometimes you get a robot that comes in and it does a little dance, or a karate chop, instead of doing what it's supposed to do"); soldiers that take their robots on furlough, to give them "rest".
As Garreau points out, the army's use of robots has a cyborgic element: It's sometimes hard to tell where the robot ends and the human begins. He tells the story of a Predator drone pilot who crash-landed a damaged Predator, and in the seconds before the crash, unconsciously lunged beneath his seat: "He had bonded so tightly with the machine hundreds of miles away that he was searching for the lever that would allow him to eject."
(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!)
Check it out: NASA has released a CGI-animated trailer promoting our eventual return to the moon. Stylistically, as sliabh notes:
Someone at NASA has been watching way too many Battlestar Galactica and Firefly reruns ...
Heh. Actually, what really cracked me up was how strangely threatening the video seemed. There's all this creepy, minor-key horror-movie music, combined with bleed-in text that ominously proclaims: "We took a giant leap ... we stopped ... we're going back." Then there's a shot of a lunar vessel approaching and impassively snapping pix through its single HAL-like eye. Then boom! It's all action, with a bunch of rovers thundering across the lunar surface like beetles while launch-ships swirl overhead, all set to unsettlingly thumpy action music. It feels precisely like the trailer to the upcoming Transformers movie ... except in this case the invading, marauding aliens are us. Why, yes, we humans are returning to the moon -- because we're gonna dismantle it and SLAUGHTER ANYTHING IN OUR PATH.
Seriously, it's super weird. Did NASA actually intend this to seem so, uh, apocalyptic? The whole segment appears to have been shot not from the point of view of us optimistic, yay-for-space-exploration geeks, but from the point of view of some nameless, gentle race of peaceable moon inhabitants who are about to get totally vaporized by a ruthless horde of colonizing, gibbering humans.
(Thanks to sliabh for this one!)
Yesterday I blogged about "resuscitation science"-- and the startling discovery that rapidly infusing a nearly-dead person with oxygen can actually hasten their cellular death. In contrast, scientists in this area are arguing that someone who's been deprived of oxygen for a while should be kept cold, very slowly warmed up, and only then gradually introduced to oxygen.
After reading about that, Tony Comstock emailed me with this great anecdote:
I used to be a white water river guide, and many of the most exciting rivers were fed by snow melt and ran very cold. There was simple saying regarding resuscitation of people who had drowned in these rivers: they're not dead till they're warm and dead. While this could mean performing ultimately fruitless CPR for more than an hour, it also saved lives.
As I wrote back to Tony: "I'm always intrigued to see the ways that the everyday practices of people in the world -- farmers, athletes, mothers, etc. -- intuit scientific principles long before scientists themselves figure them out ..."
There's a fascinating piece in today's Wall Street Journal about how tech-savvy parents are picking unusual names for themselves and their kids -- so that they'll be more googleable. The parents, as the story points out, are aware that search engines dominate modern epistemology: If you can't be found on Google, you don't exist. Ask.com says that 7% of all its searches are for personal names; meanwhile, 80% of executive recruiters do an online search for applicants' names, and 40% of people say they've used search engines to hunt down long-lost acquaintances. Women who acquire a super-common last name when they marry find that they vanish from the googleosphere.
In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves -- or their offspring -- to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites' member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that's becoming an especially tall order for those with common names. Type "John Smith" into Google's search engine and it estimates it has 158 million results. [snip]Some people have taken measures to boost their visibility online, including creating listings in professional directories and paying companies to help them appear more prominently in search results. Parents-to-be routinely plug baby names into search engines to scout out the online competition. Some actors and musicians weigh the impact of less unique stage names.
The big problem with the article, though, is that it never mentions the most screamingly obvious and generally bulletproof way of ensuring you have lots of Google juice: Blogging. Today's search engines reward people who have online presences that are well-linked-to. So the simplest way to hack Google to your advantage is to blog about something you find personally interesting, at which point other people with similar interests will begin linking to you -- and the upwards cascade begins.
This is precisely one of the reasons I started Collision Detection: I wanted to 0wnz0r the search string "Clive Thompson". I was sick of the British billionaire and Rentokil CEO Lord Clive Thompson getting all the attention, and, frankly, as a freelance writer, it's crucially important for anyone who wants to locate me -- a source, an editor, old friends -- to be able to do so instantly with a search engine. Before my blog, a search for "Clive Thompson" produced a blizzard of links dominated by the billionaire; I appeared only a few times in the first few pages, and those were mostly just links to old stories I'd written that didn't have current email addresses. But after only two months of blogging, I had enough links to propel my blog onto the first page of a Google search for my name. Sometime soon afterwards I moved to the #1 spot, and these days a search for the single word "clive" -- an extremely common name outside the US -- produces my blog as the fifth result on the first page. Woo hoo!
Okay, I'll stop the gratuitous boasting. But the question remains: Why didn't the Journal piece talk about this? Possibly because the writer had unconsciously adopted the corporate/advertising view of the Internet, which is that, dammit, there's got to be some way to throw money at this problem and automatically vault our company's crapola product to the center of the nation's attention, right? Corporate interests generally hate Google, because they cannot easily buy their way to prominence. Not that it stops them from trying: That's why there's an industry in "search engine optimization" -- which the Journal duly namechecks -- and, of course, splogs and spambots. But the truth is that the only way to get really good, durable google juice is to work for it. There's no magic solution. You certainly can't just sit around and expect the search engines to love you because you're, like, awesome.
I particularly like the fact that whenever someone bemoans the ungoogleability of those with unduly-common names, they use the example of "John Smith." Hey, all you John Smiths: You're doomed! Give up! You'll be drowned in a tsunami of hits for the historical John Smith of Pocahontas fame, right?
Yet if you actually do a Google search for John Smith, you find that indeed, the top few hits are for the famous John Smith, as well as the current UK politician John Smith. But you'll also find that seventh hit on the first page is for ... John Smith, a British folk musician.' This isn't a guy with a big ad budget, or even, as far as I can tell, any advertising budget at all; he sells through CD Baby, which indicates to me that he's totally indie. But clearly he's amassed a lot of Google juice, and it's probably because he's made a few smart moves that are likely to attract links: He offers plenty of samples of his music, as well as several completely free MP3s, and has a guestbook for comments. I bet if he added a blog to his site he could kick himself up even higher on the Google rankings.
The problem with this solution to Google anonymity is precisely that it requires so much work. As people noted in my thread on Radical Transparency a few months ago, the Web and the blogosphere privilege the time-rich, which means they're hardly meritocratic. I regularly get swamped with work and don't blog for weeks at a time, which I personally hate -- when I'm not blogging it feels like a juicy part of my brain has shut down, and I generate far fewer useful ideas; but it also terrifies me because I know that I'm probably losing Google juice. I'm rarely time-rich.
On the other hand, I prefer a world that gives some advantage to the time-rich over one that reserves all the advantages to the money-rich.
Check out this totally awesome video: An interview with the guy who recorded the theme music for the Doctor Who show! You get to watch him twiddling the knobs on his utterly gnarly 1970s synthesizer, reproducing the swoopy, buzzy opening tones -- and chatting with the documentary host about the nuances of ring modulators and how they impacted the crafting of the Dalek's vocal inflections.
I could sit around watching stuff like this until I die. It reminded me of the discussion that erupted back when I blogged about Coagula, a little app that translates images into synth-like sounds; when translated a picture of my face into a noise, my friend Eric Weissengruber pointed out that "your face sounds like the beginning of the old Doctor Who theme." It also reminds me that I've always wanted one of these suckers for my guitar ...
(Thanks to Music Thing for this one!)
Given the increasing attention to obesity in America -- which is either a major public-policy challenge or a moral panic, or both, depending on your point of view -- I've been reading up on the science behind it all. So I was totally into this awesome piece in today's Science section of the New York Times, in which Gina Kolata surveys the four-decade-long work of the research physicians Rudolph Liebel and Jules Hirsch (pictured above, in his Times snapshot).
They did some incredibly hard-core experiments to explore the reasons people got so fat. In one study, they took a bunch of obese people who agreed to live at Rockefeller University Hospital for eight months -- dieting carefully to bring their weight down by about 100 pounds each. It worked, and when they examined the patients' fat cells, the scientists saw that the cells had transformed: They used to be huge and stuffed with yellow fat, and now were normal in size. But they all regained their weight later on. As Kolata reports:
[That] led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.Before the diet began, the fat subjects' metabolism was normal -- the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.
The Rockefeller subjects also had a psychiatric syndrome, called semi-starvation neurosis, which had been noticed before in people of normal weight who had been starved. They dreamed of food, they fantasized about food or about breaking their diet. They were anxious and depressed; some had thoughts of suicide. They secreted food in their rooms. And they binged.
The Rockefeller researchers explained their observations in one of their papers: "It is entirely possible that weight reduction, instead of resulting in a normal state for obese patients, results in an abnormal state resembling that of starved nonobese individuals."
In a reversal of this study, Ethan Sims of the University of Vermont took a bunch of naturally slender people and had them eat up to 10,000 calories a day, until they became obese. They had no trouble losing the weight and keeping it off. In a later study, Hirsch and Liebel examined children who'd been adopted and found that their adult propensity for obesity -- or thinness -- closely tracked their biological parents. If their biological parents were obese, it didn't matter if the kids grew up with skinny parents who taught them healthy eating patterns; they most often wound up obese too.
The public-policy implications, the scientists argue, are significant. If it's true that the children of obese parents are the ones most likely to become obese -- "80 percent of the offspring of two obese parents become obese, as compared with no more than 14 percent of the offspring of two parents of normal weight" -- then it's waste of money to target the anti-obesity message at the children of skinny folk. One could do more to fight obesity by devoting resources to locating and supporting those most at risk.
Mind you, given that being fat carries such a powerful social stigma, one might wonder about the emotional ramifications of a nation-wide effort to round up all the fat kids and target them with weight-control programs. Either way, this question of the genetic basis of obesity is really interesting, and I now want to read Kolata's book Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss -- and the Myths and Realities of Dieting
Why I blogged a while back about how anesthesiologist Patrick Kochanek had created "zombie dogs" -- canines that were officially brain-dead for three hours, then slowly brought back to life. What I didn't know is that he's part of an apparently booming new field of "resuscitation science," medical research aimed at dramatically refashioning our ideas about how to bring nearly-dead people back from the brink.
Some of the discoveries are pretty wild. According a piece in Newsweek, Lance Becker -- another emergency-medicine expert -- has recently made headway in grappling with one of the biggest mysteries: Why do we die when our oxygen flow is cut off? Traditionally, doctors have assumed it's because our cells need oxygen to live, so they die when they're deprived. But that theory was dealt a big blow when scientists finally started looking at oxygen-starved cells under a microscope, only to find that they survived just fine for up to several hours when cut off from blood flow (and thus oxygen).
Becker, in contrast, discovered something really nuts: That when you deprive cells of oxygen for more than five minutes, they die not because of an immediate lack of oxygen. They die when the oxygen supply is resumed.
Why? As Newsweek reports:
Biologists are still grappling with the implications of this new view of cell death -- not passive extinguishment, like a candle flickering out when you cover it with a glass, but an active biochemical event triggered by "reperfusion," the resumption of oxygen supply. The research takes them deep into the machinery of the cell, to the tiny membrane-enclosed structures known as mitochondria where cellular fuel is oxidized to provide energy. Mitochondria control the process known as apoptosis, the programmed death of abnormal cells that is the body's primary defense against cancer. "It looks to us," says Becker, "as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die."
The implications for ER medicine are huge. If Becker's right, current emergency practices actually kill people -- because when you're brought into the ER and you're not breathing, the first thing they do is flood you with oxygen. But all that does, Becker claims, is radically accelerate the speed at which your cells die. What ER doctors ought to do instead, he theorizes, is chill your body down and very, very slowly warm it up while gradually reintroducing oxygen.
Which sounds, now that I go back and look at it, rather like the zombie-dog experiment. Either way, this resuscitation area is bound to get curiouser and curiouser as time goes on.
(Thanks to Plastic for this one!)
Wired News just published my latest video-game column, and this one is about physical sports. It's got an an interesting pedigree. A while ago, I was chatting with Hasan Elahi, an art professor at Rutgers University (I was actually interviewing him for an upcoming story I've written about him for Wired magazine.) I mentioned to Elahi that I'm fascinated by game design, and wondered idly why -- in an age where video-game design is flowering -- there's almost no-one designing new physical sports. Elahi informed me that one of his grad students, Tom Russotti, actually was designing new sports, and he put me in touch with him. Ta da: A few months later, I hooked up with Russotti in Prospect Park here in Broolyn, where I got a chance to play one of his new sports! (That video above is a record of our spastic game: I'm the guy in the jeans who appears in the first scene.)
Interestingly, this column highlights the dirty secret about my Wired News gig, which is that it really isn't about video games at all. It's about ludology and the philosophy of play! It just turns out that video games are the best possible vehicle to discuss ludology these days -- so they're the natural subject matter.
Anyway, the column is online here, and a permanent copy is archived below:
The dawn of "Aesthletics"
Why don't game designers create more real-world, physical sports? I talk to one guy who does
by Clive Thompson
I catch the Whiffle ball with one hand, spin around, and begin dribbling it off my bat as I drive for the goalposts. Damn: I'm swarmed by defensemen frantically waving their bats and trying to block my shot. Taking a dive for it, I spy an opening -- then smash the shot past the goalie.
Woo hoo! I've just scored the first goal in a ferocious game of "Whiffle Hurling."
Yes, Whiffle Hurling. I suspect you've never heard of it. Actually, I'm positive you've never heard of it -- because the sport didn't exist until two years ago.
Whiffle Hurling was invented in July 2005 by a Tom Russotti, an MFA grad student at Rutgers University -- and the sole practitioner of what he calls "aesthletics." So far, only 10 games of Whiffle Hurling have ever been played. I can personally attest that it's insanely fun and offers up a genuinely new blend of activity: The crazy intensity of Irish hurling mixed with the low-stress, low-injury appeal of Whiffle ball. It manages to be simultaneously casual and intense, which is perfect for nerds like me.
And it also poses an interesting question: Why don't more people invent new sports?
After all, we live in a golden age of play. The video-game industry is bristling with innovation: You've got haptic controllers on the Wii, titles like Eye of Judgment merging card-games with computers, and the increasingly strange economic activity in online worlds. Our culture is clearly hungry for new forms of play.Yet how many new major physical sports have you played in recent years? Zero, I'll bet. The pantheon of major team-sports -- football, basketball, baseball, soccer, hockey -- hasn't significantly altered in decades.
So Russotti decided to expand the field a bit. By creating a new sport, he decided, he could level the playing field between athletes. When you join a pickup game of basketball or football, it's always slightly marred by the fact that some of the players will be totally experienced -- making it slightly more dull for the less-expert folks. A new sport wouldn't have that problem.
Russotti began casting around for ideas, and while visiting a family vacation home in the country, found a pile of discarded Whiffle bats. Presto: Russotti decided to design a variant of hurling that uses Whiffle plastic. The rules are generally similar to the old Irish sport: You can catch the ball with your hand and remain stationary, but to move you have dribble the ball on the Whiffle bat. Otherwise you have to pass by hitting the ball.
"I figured it'd have all the action, the exhilaration, but different physics because of the plastic balls and bats," Russotti told me when I met him and a gang of friends in New York to play the game. (He also instituted some delightfully silly rules: One team is required to wear sombreros.)
As we raced around the field, I quickly intuited some basic strategy. For example, I realized that I didn't need to drive up too close to the goals -- I could shoot successfully from midfield. Then I realized that it paid to be aggressive: If the opposing team was about to gain control the ball, I'd dive headlong into the mud and whack it away -- using something closer to a golf swing. Pretty soon I'd developed a reputation on my team for being psychotically willing to fling myself nose-first on the ground.
Meanwhile, one of my opponents demonstrated a scarily amazing facility for dribbling the ball long distances -- which let him easily traverse the field, since you're not allowed to interfere with a dribbling player.
Essentially, were figuring out how to play. And this is, counterintuitively, a big part of what makes a new game so great: You get to explore the intriguing and unpredictable ways that the rules interact.
Video-game players understand this implicitly: We often find that the thrill of a new game is in the process of mastering it -- not the mastery itself. (Indeed, once a video game is mastered we often stop playing it.) You never get this experience with an existing, well-known sport like soccer or football, because the rules have been exhaustively explored.
Russotti, too, has had to gradually fine-tune Whiffle Hurling as he watches how the athletes interact. During the first game, he discovered that offensive players were camping out near the goalposts, which made it trivially easy to smash a goal past the goalies. (I love it: Camping.) So Russotti instituted a 15-foot goal-shooting line. And after personally suffering a brutal black-eye injury in the first five minutes of the inaugural game, he instituted a "no physical contact" rule.
This is other delicious thing about playing a new sport: You get to watch the rules evolve, which gives you front-row insight into the intellectually fascinating process of game design. Baseball and football and hockey all underwent the same tweaking process, but because they don't change much any more, people don't think of them as designed objects. And because we don't think of them as designed objects, we don't think about designing new sports.
The irony, of course, is that Russotti is merely doing what children already innately do. Children in playgrounds invent their own physical games every day. It's a completely natural human activity, but it's drummed out of us once we go to school and are told that the small group of advertising-supported team sports are the only "serious" ones. For the rest of your adult life, you never deviate.
Unless, of course, you hook up with Russotti. In a few weeks he's going to showcase another new sport he's invented: A version of basketball played with three opposing teams, three nets and two balls.
I can't wait.
That musical score above? It's a piece of classical music based on the structures of the protein Thymidilate Synthase A. Some biologists at UCLA developed a set of nifty parameters for translating the structures into music, ran a couple of different proteins through them, and produced a pile of sheet music. You can check out the sheet music and listen to the MIDI files played via your browser's built-in music module -- a piano, in my case -- here! (To listen to that specific bit of music pictured above, click here.)
Interestingly, the results sound eerily like the cheesy MIDI soundtracks to mid-80s side-scrolling arcade shoot-'em-up games like Gradius or Scramble. I'd love it if a casual-game designer used use this stuff for a new Flash-based shooter!
There are also some possibly practical uses for this technique, too, listening to proteins is a novel way of analyzing their structures and how they work. As the researchers write:
Huntington's disease is an example of a triplet repeat disorder in which an expansion of a repeated glutamine sequence causes the protein to lose its proper function. Such an expansion leads to a late-onset neurological disorder. The LacY permease protein spans the membrane of Escherichia coli and has a distinct hydrophobic region of phenylalanines. This sequence facilitates the protein to move through the bacterial membrane. In the Huntingtin example, one can hear an obvious repeated pattern of glutamines and polyprolines, and this pattern can be compared to the less obvious repeated pattern of phenylalanines heard in the LacY permease.
I love the idea of using music and sound as a new vector for studying biology. It reminds me a bit of Jim Gimzewsk's work on "sonocytology" -- listening to the vibrations of individual cells, which I blogged about two years ago.
Everyone knows that if you don't want to screw up your back, you should lift heavy objects by bending your knees, not your back. But 20 per cent of all workplace back injuries in North America are caused not by lifting -- but by pushing and pulling heavy weights. So what's the correct way to pull or push?
For years, scientists assumed that the forces at play in your body when you push or pull never spin out of control they way they do with lifting. Whenever they measured these forces, they didn't seem big enough to cause serious damage.
But recently, two biomechanists -- Kevin Granata of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Bradford Bennett of the University of Virginia -- realized the previous experiments had left something out: The "cocontraction" of muscles, which is the body's use of opposing muscle groups to stabilize the body. So they wired up a bunch of experimental subjects with gonimeters to measure muscle activity, and had them push levers at various force levels: 15 per cent of their body mass, 30 per cent, or as hard as they could push. The results? As Cognitive Daily reports:
... when cocontraction was factored in, the force on the spine increased by as much as 400 percent, depending on the height of the handle and the amount of force applied. Cocontraction was greatest when participants bent lower to push on the handle, as they would when pushing the heaviest loads. In these cases, stress on the spine matches stress in lifting tasks and may be what leads to the most injuries.They also note that as the amount of pushing force increases, the vertical component of the pushing force also increases, because the volunteers need the corresponding downward force on their feet to gain traction. This makes a pushing action more like a lifting action, again potentially increasing the chance of injury.
Ow. I don't think their study formally concludes the best way to push or pull, but it's a cool area to study. It also makes me feel sore just reading about it, because I've had a hair-trigger back ever since grade 13 in high school, when I worked at a lighting store and screwed myself up ferociously by lifting superheavy chandeliers with one hand while wiring them into the ceiling with the other. I had been an otherwise perfectly healthy 18 years old, but a year of that sort of work left me so bent over with pain that I had to lie in bed for four days recovering. "If I'd known you were a cripple," my boss told me as I limped home, "I wouldn't have hired you." Nice.
A really sad note: Granata, a co-author of this study, was one of the professors who died in the recent Virginia Tech shootings.
It's real. In fact, it's a lovely example of the noble Grimpoteuthis -- the crazy-deep-water-dwelling "Dumbo Octopus", so named for its big floppy ears (or whatever the heck those things are). Collision Detection reader Paul Gemperle sent me a couple of links to some amazing photos of Grimpoteuthis, as well as a short French documentary of the thing in action.
The video is hallucinogenically strange in the way that only films of benthic-depth sea creatures can be: Gauzy see-through animals lazily turn themselves inside out, ultracreepy writhing masses of collective-life-form tentacles lunge for prey, and Dumbo octopuses impassively regard the camera lens with what appears to be an intelligence probably not much lower than a member of Congress. In one shot, a huge-ass lidded eye attached to some snouted celaphopod opened up to stare at me and I was like, man -- this stuff looks like a Ridley Scott f/x masterpiece. Or a really awesome video game.
All of which made me think: Deep-sea life is so aggressively odd-looking that it's indistiguishable from Hollywood CGI creations. Sure, that Dumbo octopus is real; but if it weren't, how could you tell? Someone ought to harness this blurriness as a pedagogical technique. They could make a short documentary aimed at grade-school kids that mixes fake CGI sea animals with real ones, and challenges them to figure out which is which. It'd be a nice way to hammer home the central fun of marine biology, and of science in general: Why bother making things up when reality outweirds you every day?
(Thanks to Paul for this one!)
When you're trying to lose weight, portion control is a big deal, as everyone knows. But how well can we actually tell how big our portions really are? A bunch of elegant experiments by Cornell psychologist Brian Wansink have proved that we suck at judging the quantity of food we're eating, because we're regularly tricked by size illusions: If the container serving us is really huge, the amount of food seems smaller and we inadvertantly binge.
Wansink's experiments are incredibly clever at teasing out how easily we're fooled. In 2005, he offered moviegoers two-week-old popcorn -- "stale enough to squeak when it was eaten" -- in medium and super-big buckets; despite the fact that the food tasted like crap, the ones served in super-big buckets ate 33.6% more. (A PDF of his paper is here.) In a 2003 experiment, Wansink served people soup in a bowl that secretly and slowly refilled itself as people ate. They ate 73% more than those served the same soup in regular bowls.
As a profile of Wansink in today's New York Times points out:
The scariest part is that most of us think we are immune to these hidden persuaders. When the moviegoers were told about the popcorn experiment afterward, most of them scoffed at the idea that their bucket size had any effect on them. "Things like that don't trick me," one of the gorgers said.
And as Wansink notes in his soup paper -- a PDF is here -- the folks who consumed 73% more did not perceive themselves to have eaten any more than normal.
I have this problem with coffee all the time. Coffee shops keep on serving java in increasingly massive cups, so by noon I've generally consumed enough caffeine to exterminate a house pet. Indeed, if you really want to eat less, Wansink's big suggestion is to buy antique plates off Ebay, because plates from the 40s are way, way smaller than today's plates -- so you wind up eating less because your portions seem bigger. He uses that picture above to illustrate the perceptual trick: The black dot's the same size in each case, but looks smaller in the second picture because the surrounding dots are bigger.
Apparently Wansink wrote up all his findings in a book last year called Mindless Eating, but somehow it slipped under the radar for me; I'm going to go buy it now!
See that object above, on the right? It's the most perfectly spherical object ever made by hand. It's only the size of a ping pong ball, but its surfaces are so smooth that were it blown up to the size of Earth, the tallest mountain would be only eight feet high. It's one of four spheres that are current floating in Gravity Probe B, which is possibly the coolest piece of space engineering evah.
Gravity Probe B is an audacious attempt by NASA and Stanford to confirm Einsteinian physics by measuring, with utterly berserk precision, how much Earth's enormous mass curves space-time around it. The Probe is a satellite that contains four chambers of superfluid helium, chilled to a martini-like minus-271 degrees Celsius. A sphere -- composed of fused quartz -- floats inside each chamber and spins rapidly, forming a three-dimensional gyroscope. They're so free of any physical disturbance that they form an almost perfect space-time reference system. The spheres can detect changes in their positioning as small as 0.5 milliarcseconds -- roughly the width of a human hair viewed from 20 miles away. Heh.
So here's how it works: The Probe is aligned to a distant guide star, IM Pegasi. According to Newtonian physics, a gyroscope free of any interference ought to point in the same direction for eternity. So if the spheres inside Gravity Probe B drift away from their orientation to IM Pegasi, they're being affected by the Earth's space-time pull -- and we'll be able to measure it and see if it conforms to Einsteinian predictions. Specifically, the two effects we'll be able to see are "frame dragging" and the "geodetic effect". As one scientist described it:
"If experimental science is an art, then I would look at GP-B as a Renaissance masterpiece," says Jeff Kolodziejczak, NASA's Project Scientist for GP-B at the Marshall Space Flight Center.
The whole reason I'm blogging about the Probe now is that it's been in orbit for three years, and NASA is finally getting preliminary data out of it. Apparently the gyroscopes indeed appear to be drifting, though it'll take a while to separate the signal from the noise to fully confirm the frame-dragging effect. In the meantime, if you want to built a papercraft model of the Probe, there are plans here.
I've always wanted to write a humungous magazine feature about Gravity Probe B, because it's such a freaky epitome of the wonderful craziness and bulldogged tenacity of scientists. It was originally proposed 47 years ago (!!) -- but was delayed for decades waiting for funding, waiting for the shuttles to be built to get it aloft, then discovering that, whoops, the shuttles couldn't actually handle that sort of payload, then designing a rocket to finally get it aloft. They also had wait for all manner of engineering breakthroughs to make those spheres. But what a metaphorically lovely finale: The most perfectly round objects ever made by humanity, flying through the void on one of the purest scientific quests ever.
So, I'm coming insanely late to this one -- actually, to be precise, I'm coming insanely late to everything now, because I haven't been blogging for six freaking weeks! (Slammed by work, crushed by deadlines, whine, whine, meow, meow, etc.) Anyway, regular readers of this blog -- assuming any actually still, y'know, exist -- will recall that back in January, I blogged about a Wired story I was researching on "radical transparency": Why so many organizations were realizing that it made more sense to talk openly about their internal doings than to be secretive about them. I asked people for their input, and a huge and amazing thread ensued.
Last month Wired published the actual article, and it's online here! The niftiest part is that in the margins of the print copy of the article, we ran several comments from the blog, with pointers indicating the part of my article they either inspired, commented upon, or disagreed with. It was, as one fact-checker noted to me while working on the piece, "like running letters to the editor before the piece has ever seen print", heh. I think the comments are awesome -- and thanks to everyone who posted originally! It was incredibly valuable being able to hear people's thinking while I was hacking through this stuff myself.
The cover of the Wired issue took on a life of its own -- because the magazine decided to run an acetate overlay of Jenna Fischer from The Office, and when you lift the cover she appears ... naked, albeit covered coyly by a sign. When I found out the concept, I remember thinking, christ, isn't that precisely like those pens from the 1950s where you turn them upside down and the woman's bikini vanishes? And as you'd imagine, the blog commentary was acerbic.
At any rate, the piece is here: let me know what you think, and thanks again!
The See-Through CEO
Fire the publicist. Go off message. Let all your employees blab and blog. In the new world of radical transparency, the path to business success is clear.
By Clive Thompson
Pretend for a second that you're a CEO. Would you reveal your deepest, darkest secrets online? Would you confess that you're an indecisive weakling, that your colleagues are inept, that you're not really sure if you can meet payroll? Sounds crazy, right? After all, Coke doesn't tell Pepsi what's in the formula. Nobody sane strips down naked in front of their peers. But that's exactly what Glenn Kelman did. And he thinks it saved his business.
Last year, Kelman was the newly hired CEO of Redfin, an online brokerage firm that was, as he puts it, "the ugly red-haired child" in the real estate world. Redfin was trying to turn the industry upside down by refunding people two-thirds of the commission that real estate agents normally charge. Customers loved the idea -- why the heck did you need to hand over 6 percent of the price of your house, anyway? But agents hated it for destroying their fat margins, so they began blacklisting Redfin, refusing to sell houses to anyone who used the service. Kelman was struggling to close deals for his clients.His first reaction was to keep the situation quiet and pretend everything was OK. "We were really ashamed that our customers were getting pushed around, so we tried to keep it this dirty little secret," he says. But when months went by without any improvement, he decided to take a different tack.
Kelman set up a Redfin blog and began posting witty screeds about the nasty underbelly of the real estate business. He denounced traditional brokers, accusing them of screwing customers with clubby, closed-door practices. ("If we don't reform ourselves, and take out all the sales baloney, too, people will come to hate real estate agents the way they hate tobacco companies or Big Oil," he wrote.) He publicized Redfin's internal debates, even arguments about the design of its Web site. He mocked himself: One post described how he had sat at a college job fair for hours, waiting in vain for a single student to approach him. ("This was particularly sobering because it meant we had outlosered our neighbor to the right, Ford Motor Company," he wrote.) Meanwhile, in the blog's comments, old-school agents were unleashing hissing attacks on Redfin. Kelman left the critiques ine and lashed right back, in full view of his customers.
His enemies got nervous. All this intestinal spew seemed maso chistic. Worse, it was probably bad for business. Everyone's business.
But customers loved it. More and more signed on to use Redfin, and by the beginning of this year, Kelman and his crew were closing several deals a day. "Instead of discouraging customers, being open about our problems radicalized them," Kelman says. "They rallied and started pulling for us."
Like some crazed convert, he trumpeted his epiphany: "I honestly believe that if Redfin were stripped absolutely bare for all the world to see, naked and humiliated in the sunlight, more people would do business with us." Follow me, he urged.
And many have. Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups -- and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right -- and wrong. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he's accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak. In February, after JetBlue trapped passengers for hours in its storm-grounded planes and canceled 1,100 flights, CEO David Neeleman tried to deflect the blast of bad publicity by using YouTube to air his own blunt mea culpa. Microsoft, once a paragon of buttoned-down control, now posts uncensored internal videos -- and encourages its engineers to blog freely about their projects (see page 140). The very process of developing ideas, products, and messages is changing -- from musing about it in a room with your top people to throwing it out on the Web and asking the global smartmob for a little help. That's how this article was written: I've been blogging about it since I started, and some of the reader input I received is reproduced on these pages. (1)
The Internet has inverted the social physics of information. Companies used to assume that details about their internal workings were valuable precisely because they were secret. If you were cagey about your plans, you had the upper hand; if you kept your next big idea to yourself, people couldn't steal it. Now, billion- dollar ideas come to CEOs who give them away; corporations that publicize their failings grow stronger. Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you -- and everyone trembles before search engine rankings. Kelman rewired the system and thinks anyone else could, too. But are we really ready to do all our business in the buff?
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"YOU CAN'T HIDE ANYTHING ANYMORE," Don Tapscott says. Coauthor of The Naked Corporation, a book about corporate transparency, and Wikinomics, Tapscott is explaining a core truth of the see-through age: If you engage in corporate flimflam, people will find out. He ticks off example after example of corporations that have recently been humiliated after being caught trying to conceal stupid blunders. There's Sony, which put a rootkit -- a piece of spyware -- on music CDs as a secret copy-protection technique, only to wind up in court when bloggers revealed that the code left their computers vulnerable to hacker intrusions. There's Microsoft, this time on the wrong side of the transparent shower curtain, offering to pay people to buff up the company's Wikipedia entry. And Diebold, which insisted its voting machines were unhackable -- until a professor posted a video of himself rigging a mock election on them. The video went viral and racked up some 300,000 YouTube views.
Secrecy is dying. It's probably already dead.(2) In a world where Eli Lilly's internal drug-development memos, Paris Hilton's phonecam images, Enron's emails, and even the governor of California's private conversations can be instantly forwarded across the planet, trying to hide something illicit -- trying to hide anything, really -- is an unwise gamble. So many blogs rely on scoops to drive their traffic that muckraking has become a sort of mass global hobby. Radical transparency has even reached the ultrasecretive world of Washington politics: The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation has begun putting zillions of public documents in elegantly searchable online databases, leaving it to interested citizens to connect the dots. One adroit digger recently discovered that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert had earmarked $200 million for a highway to be built near a property he had a stake in. When the property was sold, Hastert made a 500 percent profit on his original investment, provoking a wave of negative coverage.
All of which explains why the cult of transparency has so many high tech converts these days. Transparency is a judo move. Your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info -- so why not make it work for you by turning everyone into a partner in the process and inviting them to do so?
Take Southwest Airlines, which last spring set up an "online watercooler" -- a blog where 30 employees ranging from marketing executives to pilots and ticket agents post weekly entries about their jobs and personal lives. By last summer, the site was so well read that when CEO Gary Kelly posted about the possibility of Southwest adopting assigned seating -- ending its first come, first seated policy -- more than 600 people swarmed the discussion area to weigh in. (The consensus? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," says Paula Berg, who runs Southwest's site. "People who fly us all the time already know how to work the system.")
Some of this isn't even about business; it's a cultural shift, a redrawing of the lines between what's private and what's public. A generation has grown up blogging, posting a daily phonecam picture on Flickr and listing its geographic position in real time on Dodgeball and Google Maps. For them, authenticity comes from online exposure. It's hard to trust anyone who doesn't list their dreams and fears on Facebook.
So maybe it's not very surprising that at firms like Zappos.com, the rapidly growing online shoe retailer, CEO Tony Hsieh can experiment with levels of disclosure that most executives would consider freakish. A company-wide wiki lets staff members complain about problems and suggest solutions. Hsieh and other executives work at desks sprinkled among the banks of customer-service phone agents ("Anyone can hear our conversation," Hsieh said when I called). If customers can't find the shoes they want at Zappos, agents are encouraged to point them to other stores. Suppliers are given detailed information about which shoes are selling and how much profit Zappos has made off them. None of this hurts Zappos; on the contrary, Hsieh figures it makes his employees, suppliers, and customers more forgiving of everyday snafus. "The more they know about us, the more they'll like us," he predicts.
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BEING "LIKED" SOUNDS AWFULLY TOUCHY-FEELY -- yet it's central to this flowering of glasnost. Today's public has been serially disenchanted by years of corporate scandals and on-the-cheap customer service so inhuman it couldn't pass the Turing test. "I think that most of the rage people feel toward these big institutions, like government or corporations or media, is that they feel they're not listened to, that no one's there," says Shel Israel, coauthor of Naked Conversations. By seeming "basically like a normal human," a company can quickly generate a surge of goodwill. As Redfin's Kelman puts it, "There's a whole class of CEOs who can hardly write an email. But I feel like in this new digital world, there are haves and have-nots, and people who can't write convincingly -- they're leaving themselves defenseless. The people who clearly enjoy writing and blogging are like CEOs 2.0 -- they have competitive advantage over other CEOs."
The new breed of naked executives also discover that once people are interested in you, they're interested in helping you out -- by offering ideas, critiques, and extra brain cycles. Customers become working partners.(3) Kelman used to spend valuable work time arguing why the real estate business had to change; now his customers do battle for him, wading into Redfin's online forums to haggle with old-school agents.
When I posted a long entry on my blog describing this story in detail -- normally a huge no-no in the competitive magazine business -- interesting ideas came pouring across the transom. One reader, a software designer in France, told me he'd recently published the source code of his proprietary programs -- and that doing so had increased sales. Clients were more likely to trust his wares, he found, when they knew what was going on beneath the hood.
Others enjoyed ripping apart my new theories. Several pointed out that secrecy can be necessary -- CEOs are often required by law to keep mum, and many creative endeavors benefit from being closed: Steve Jobs came up with a terrific iPhone precisely because he acts like an artist and doesn't consult everyone.(4) In fact, secrecy is sometimes part of the fun. Who wants to know how this season of 24 is going to end? It's not secrets that are dying, as one reader named gjudd noted, but lies.
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NEARLY EVERYONE I SPOKE TO HAD A WARNING for would-be transparent CEOs: You can't go halfway naked. It's all or nothing. Executives who promise they'll be open have to stay open. The minute they become evasive about troubling news, transparency's implied social compact crumbles.
Jason Goldberg, CEO of the job-finding site Jobster, discovered this the hard way. In December, rumors began swirling that he was planning layoffs. On his blog, Goldberg stoutly denied everything: "Everybody's all a-speculating. A lot of falsehoods are being bandied about." But he was also dropping coy and ominous clues. He posted a list of songs he was listening to, including "And I'm Telling You I'm Not Going" and "Dirty Laundry," and he reminded staff to use up their vacation days.
A week later, he announced that Jobster was -- whoops -- laying off 40 percent of its staff. Goldberg had to have known all along. Critics savaged him as a hypocrite, and mocking blog entries piled up.(5)
Goldberg probably hopes that little incident will quietly fade away. But it won't, for one simple reason: When you type "Jason Goldberg" into Google, a link to an International Herald Tribune story detailing the entire debacle appears near the top of the first page of results. Anyone who searches for Goldberg will immediately trip over the biggest faux pas of his career. It has entered, as it were, his permanent record.
Which illustrates an interesting aspect of the Inter net age: Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. And that's one of the most powerful reasons so many CEOs have become more transparent: Online, your rep is quantifiable, findable, and totally unavoidable. In other words, radical transparency is a double-edged sword, but once you know the new rules, you can use it to control your image in ways you never could before.
Think about how Google works. When you type in a term, the search engine puts the site with the most links pointing toward it at the top of the list. That means bloggers and discussion boards are extremely powerful in influencing Google's search results, because bloggers and discussion-board posters are promiscuous linkers, constantly pointing to things they love or hate. Google hoovers up those links and makes recommendations based on them. Jason Goldberg may prefer that people didn't read that Herald Tribune story, but it doesn't matter. Tons of bloggers and online writers have decided to link to it, and they have the final word. Companies have watched their biggest screwups quickly migrate to the top of a Google search. When Shel Israel and blogger Jeff Jarvis wrote about wretched treatment by Dell's customer service, their posts were so gleefully linked to that for a while they appeared as the number one and two search results for "Dell."(6)
"Online is where reputations are made now," says Leslie Gaines Ross, chief reputation strategist -- yes, that's her actual title -- with the PR firm Weber Shandwick. She regularly speaks to companies that realize a single Google search determines more about how they're perceived than a multimillion-dollar ad campaign. "It used to be that you'd look only at your reputation in newspapers and broadcast media, positive and negative. But now the blogosphere is equally powerful, and it has different rules. Public relations used to be about having stuff taken down, and you can't do that with the Internet."
But here's the interesting paradox: The reputation economy creates an incentive to be more open, not less. Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation. Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won't work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it -- or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your Google list of life.
This is precisely what Richard Edelman realized after his own PR firm landed in hot water. Edelman had long urged his client firms to engage openly and honestly with customers online. But last fall, bloggers exposed the fact that Edelman's firm had been involved in some icky subterfuge: His employees had created a set of "flogs" for Wal-Mart -- fake blogs that pretended to be written by genuine, real-life Wal-Mart fans. Angry posts began working their way up to the first page of a Google search on "Edelman." So Edelman himself did the only thing he could do: He apologized on his own blog, apologized some more, and began posting his own responses on blogs that were attacking him. He was wildly promiscuous, personally putting the message out anywhere he could, in what became a largely successful attempt to swamp the Google bots and prevent the critique from metastasizing. "If you're not out there playing, then you're kind of missing your left arm," he says.
Indeed, network algorithms do not favor the cagey or secretive. They favor the prolific, the outgoing, the shameless. In the Reputation Economy, even a healthy, happy company needs to worry about its good name if only six or seven people are talking about (and linking to) it. When that's the case, "a casual reader has only a few opinions to determine what sort of company or person you are," says Peter Hirshberg, chair of the blog search engine Technorati. One bad blog post can kill you. But if you've got hundreds or thousands of sites linking to you and commenting on you, the law of averages takes over, and odds are the opinion will be accurate: The cranks will be outweighed by cooler heads. Again, the Net rewards the transparent.(7)
In January, bloggers began passing around a story that was disastrous for Southwest Airlines: The company had allegedly refused to let an overweight man with hepatitis C board a flight unless he bought two seats -- even though he'd gained weight because of the disease and was traveling to a lifesaving operation. Southwest immediately posted an apology and explanation for the error. It even allowed a link to the negative story and then -- in one of those judo moves -- managed the torrent of hits and links into a net positive. "People don't want to hear about it in The Wall Street Journal -- they want to hear about it on the blog," Southwest's Berg says. Most commenters accepted the apology, and some plunged into a sophisticated discussion of the economics of carrying overweight passengers.
There's no going back, yet many young CEOs worry that they're on a treadmill: Once they've started blogging, they can't stop, and that takes valuable time away from running their businesses. They also worry that all their witty little missives are simply giving critics fuel for later pyres. One new firm, Reputation Defender, last year began offering services to "clean up your tracks" online -- by emailing sites and discussion forums that contain unflattering information and asking, nicely, to have it removed. "We do search and destroy," says Michael Fertik, the company's founder.
One can imagine how the twin engines of reputation and transparency will warp every corner of life in years to come, for good and ill. The political culture in Washington might be affected -- especially when the first MySpace candidate gains the trust of the electorate by openly posting about every closed-door meeting, importunate lobbyist, and campaign strategy session.(8) (The Sunlight Foundation is already encouraging politicians to do this.) Perhaps the first day of your new job, you'll be given a laptop, a keycard -- and a public blog you'll be expected to post to 10 times a day. Or maybe one day a firm's reputation will collapse in a matter of hours when a minor gaffe is instantly amplified by a global Google mob. The future could be a brushed-chrome machine made of truth and honesty -- or some gothic nightmare in which the whole economy is driven by gossipy high school dynamics.
Either way, there's no use trying to resist. You're already naked.
Very Short Stories
1) Comments in the margins are drawn from the author's blog, collisiondetection.net, where he invited readers to participate in the writing process.
2) Secrecy won't be dead. It will simply hide in plain sight. The hyperconnectivity and transparency of this kind of world accelerates the flow of information, creating incentives to hijack the process to push particular memes, including disinformation. The techniques for manipulating information flows will only become more sophisticated over time as the world becomes increasingly connected.
Posted by Mark Safranski3) On tapping the hivemind, have you considered the difference between the "wisdom of crowds" and "tyranny of the majority." It is something that I haven't heard too many people talk about but what happens when the majority is wrong?
Posted by Tristan Louis4) Hey Clive! I think the ultimate counter example of the moment is the iPhone. You can't imagine something like that coming out of an open, deliberative process. I think there is a difference between general efficiency & utility and real excellence. Often it's dark secrets and small teams in dark rooms that still deliver the goods.
Posted by Robin Sloan5) If you want to keep something secret, pick up a pencil and write it on a piece of paper.
Posted by Scott Stoddard6) The last point you raised is the one sticking with me: Reputation is everything. The idea that if you don't talk about yourself, other people will... that's a strong one. What if you don't have the time to talk about yourself though? A corporation hires a PR agency to talk about them because they need the attention and need to control what is said. Is the digital divide being widened exponentially by this sort of group activity? Is access to the hivemind helping the digital Åehaves' outpace the digital Åehave-nots' at an accelerated pace?
Posted by Tony Blow7) One important area that might be worth investigating is academic research. It is becoming expected that researchers will publish their raw data online. This serves the dual purpose of keeping the researchers honest as well as allowing others to directly build upon their work. I'm sure you know that the sharing of scientific data was Berners-Lee's impetus for creating this ol' Web in the first place.
Posted by Bret Victor8) I've never seen an example of this, but I've always felt that political campaigns ought to be totally transparent. There ought to be embedded cameras and journalists who have 100 percent access to all meetings, with all content being posted on the Web. That would distill legitimate dialogue from the spin very quickly.
Posted by Darren Barefoot