Oh Boogers

Two more little frameworks for the collection, this time about swearing.  The swearing section of Pinker’s talk appears to be taken from the book Forbidden Words.

There are five (practical) applications for swearing.

  1. Dysphemistic – Opposite of euphemism. Force listener to think about negative thing.
  2. Abusive – Abuse, intimidate, or insult others.
  3. Idiomatic – Refer to (but do not explicitly mention) something in order to arouse interest, be macho/cool, or express to peers that the setting is informal.
  4. Emphatic – Emphasize what is being said (pretty self-explanatory).
  5. Cathartic – Rid oneself of negative feelings by outwardly expressing it.

I am trying to train my self to quickly categorize which one of these is in play when ever I hear somebody swear.  Of course, none of these is as simple as they look.  Cathartic, for example, might be a kind of plumbing problem where the emotion escapes our inner containment building, or it might just be a signaling device for notifying others that our inner plumbing is over heated, or it might be a fight warning repurposed by our language centers.  Also, with swearing, you never know who the audience – often it’s part of our inner dialog.    Clearly there is plenty of room for ambiguity and misunderstanding as to intent.

People often apologize after they swear.  “Excuse my French”  You would think there would be unique apologies for each of those five.

Slicing this in an entirely different way swear words appear to come in five principle subspecies, and they – sort of – travel with a emotion.

  1. Body Effluvia (disgust) – oh booggers!
  2. Sexual (revulsion) – Fuck a duck!
  3. Others (contempt, hate) – Damn Middlemen!
  4. Supernatural (awe) – EGad!
  5. Disease, death, infirmity (dread) – A pox upon you!

I plucked that list directly from Plinker’s slides.  He assures us that the emotions are all negative.  But I think powerful is more accurate.  I can’t quite tease apart disgust from revulsion; and I suspect that titillating is actually the emotion triggered by sexual swearing.

We do not appear to have labels for all these different species, though blaspheme names the fourth one.

The third one has a modern label: politically incorrect.  Which only goes to highlight that advocates of politically incorrect speech are pro-swearing; probably for the purpose of being abusive bullies.

Kinds of Relationships

Pinker is a bit of a jerk.  He is very dominate by virtue of being a fire hose and he never tempers his pronouncements with even the slightest bit of doubt.  Thus you often feel a strong “now just wait a minute there!” emotion when reading or listening to him.  All that said it can be fun to go for along for the ride.

I once worked in a team that had gifted it’s self a subscription to an wonderfully foolish supermarket tabloid.  We kept in the conference room.  Slowly but surely we would, all of us, read every article.  And, we came to notice that the fictions reported, entirely with a straight face, in these articles began to enter our brains as if they were true.  You’d find your self saying “I read that in Brazil they found … no wait, maybe that wasn’t true … oh nevermind.”

I have exactly that same problem with Pinker, but it’s worse.  All I can recall is that at the time I read or heard him explain X I had strong doubts about the argument’s coherence; but now – later – it’s too late.

With that warning out of the way … I enjoyed this talk he gave (video, audio, partial as cartoons).  For example it has a very fun offensive section on swearing and the functional purpose taboo words.

One thing I liked was that his had a number for frameworks I should take the time to add to my collection.  For example Alan Fiske three kinds of relationships:

  • Dominance — don’t mess with me
  • Commonality — share & share alike
  • Reciprocity — business like or tit for tat

It is no end of fun to map those three into some of my other triples (rock, paper, scissors?).

If I actually go look into Alan Fiske’s work I bit it appears there are four kinds; let me quote from here.

P – Market Pricing (MP): Haggling over a commercial transaction between strangers who do not plan to meet repeatedly. Involves bidding, bluffing and countering while keeping one’s true buying limits a secret. Non-personal instrumental exchanges with no self-disclosure.

A – Equality Matching (EM): Equality of exchange over time, a balance of exchanged favours, accruing social debt and obligation when receiving favours, the discharge of debt or gain of credit when giving favours. Tit-for-Tat. Ground rules for peer relationships.

E – Authority Ranking (AR): Negotiated inequality, deciding over time who has more importance, status or dominance over others. Unequal exchange where the dominant obtains resource advantages but accrues an obligation to support or sustain subordinates in some way.

I – Communal Sharing (CS): People contribute what they can and take what they need. Almost always constrained to the inclusive fitness group, nuclear family and sometimes various degrees of extended family, rarely beyond.

In the four reciprocity has been split into two groups; reflecting how very different one shot transactions are from longer term transactional relationships.

Dog bites man: teens have more fun – adults worry

Here’s the pull quote: “young teenagers ran about 40 percent more yellow lights and had 60 percent more crashes when they knew their friends were watching” from an amusing  article about an experiment into the effect of friends on behavior.  The experiment involved two groups – teens and adults – in two settings – alone and with friends watching.  Actually – in conformance with standard practice – experimenters lied; the friends weren’t actually watching.

This is a very nice result, but it seems to me that the article, and presumably the experimenters, didn’t spin up enough insta-theories for why there might be this difference.

The motivation for playing this game presumably falls into three buckets – playing by the rules to maximize your score and cash reward,  having fun, and finally using the game experience as an token in your social relationships.

The player is juggling these motivations as he tunes the style of his play.  I think that teens are more aware of these three sources of reward than adults are, having played more games, and more games in a social setting.  Further I think that teens have a more nuanced awareness that games are, well games; and are more likely to discount the point/cash reward aspect of the game.  They are more playful.

Of course the experimenters did this entire exercise inside a brain scanner.  The data shows the teens had more fun than the adults.

So, the articles conclusion, that this shows how peer pressure leads teens to take more risks, seems excessive to me.

Previewing UI commands

Undo is, of course, the single most awesome advance in user interface ever.  What makes it awesome is that it lets the user poke around in the UI fearlessly.

Big useful software has lots of commands.  Even if you have made it safe to browse and play with the commands it can be hard to organize the commands so users can find them.    The Mac’s menubar was big help, but it only works up to a certain scale.  A monster program; like full featured word processor or spreadsheet just doesn’t fit.  One of the problems with multi-button mice is that few users manage to discover how to browse and try the commands are hidden under various mouse buttons.  Similarly one of the problems with floating toolbars is that few users manage to get around to finding, exposing, and then trying each of the tools.  And of course it all gets worse when the behavior of the tools varies slightly depending on selection state, what’s selected, and how many things are selected.

There is a long history of attempting to look over the user’s shoulder and guess what he’s trying to do.  The most infamous example is of course the Microsoft paperclip.  UI is a bit like a game, the hundreds of available commands provide possible next moves in the game.  Given the size of the space of possible moves it seems obvious that the software might be able to make helpful suggestions.  In a sense the way that menu items are enabled/disabled depending on what’ selected is just that; at least it avoids the foolishly suggesting commands that aren’t available.

This video shows an interesting extension to some of these ideas.  The UI this case does two things.  First off it suggests commands based on what the user has selected.  That’s not really different than enabling/disabling menus based on what’s selected.  The reason it feels different is that the the UI is also taking a guess what, of all the possible operations, it thinks the user is most likely to be doing.  It’s guesses aren’t particularly impressive, but it’s very suggestive.

There is a nice additional trick shown.  As the users is browsing to decide what command to invoke the UI shows him previews of what the command’s effect will be.  Preview like this is easy if you have a solid undo infrastructure, and enough computes.

Rolling up Flickr

Yahoo’s fate was pretty much sealed in the aftermath of Microsoft’s take over attempt.  Shortly there after control of the firm shifted to a handful of wealthy individuals who’s only aspiration was to maximize the short term return on their investment.  Yahoo will die or be torn asunder trying to met their demands.

So what about Flickr?  Which without exaggeration I think can be described as one of the few great cultural achievements of the last twenty years.  What can they do to it?  What will squeeze the maximum return on investment out of it?  Fast.

Here’s a possibility: Yahoo is sells the Flicker community to Getty Images.  Let me explain.

While opinions vary about copyright’s fate, everybody agrees that copyright is looking a bit sickly right now.  The internet upset the traditional distribution barriers, barriers that encouraged bottlenecks.  Bottlenecks where copyright fees could easily be collected.  The physical world analogy for this transformation is a toll bridge over a fast and dangerous river.  If the river dries up it’s going to be hard to get people to pass thru your toll booth.

One school of thought argues that technical and physical realities have changed; and that makes the copyright business models obsolete.    Moral or legal arguments are irrelevant if they are physically impossible to implement.  And much the same way that you can make compelling arguments against extreme disparities of wealth, you are severely limited in how much you can do about it.  You can temper it, but you can not eliminate it.  You can temper our inability to pay creators of information goods; but you can’t eliminate it.  It’s not like they aren’t going to do it anyway.

Another school of thought holds that shifting distribution channels are nothing new.  Each time one emerges there is a period of, to use the analogy, untaxed river crossing.  And each time bottlenecks emerge and it becomes possible to collect the tolls once again.  And there is a lot of history to suggest that’s the case.  Distribution networks, like all unregulated networks, tend to condense so their are hubs.  A boatload of efficiency emerges out of that condensation.  The standardization they enable goes hand and hand with the opportunity to collect a toll.

One of the pleasures I get from thinking about his stuff is the stories.  Here is an amazingly fun story about condensation in a distribution network involving dope smoking, junk food, and the cash flow of the a distributor.

A common 20th century pattern in shifting distribution channels was the roll-up.  Early in the century every city had it’s own department store, and by the end of the century these had all merged.  Early in the century every neighborhood had it’s own hardware store, privately owned by a single proprietor.  By the end of the century national chains had displaced or rolled up displaced the neighborhood business.  At this point there are very very few locally operated businesses.  The pattern that a new industry starts with a diversity of vendors and condenses into a few is surprisingly inevitable.

Which brings us to Flickr.

Flicker is a photo sharing community.  It is a direct competitor to the more traditional stock photography industry; companies like Corbus and GettyImages.  These businesses provide a place were a publisher can shop for an image, pay his toll, and get back to work.  They are classic two sided network buisnesses; bridge between the photographers and the publishers.  Keeping most of the revenue for themselves.  Their success depends entirely on the vitality of copyright.  No doubt all those images at Flicker under liberal creative commons licenses have undermined the value of those businesses.  Copyright is pretty sick these days.  Thus, years ago, when Bill Gates bought Corbus by reaction was a combination of “wait!, copyright’s on it’s deathbed” and “oh, he think’s it will recover.”  Markets climb a wall of worry, and all that.

In talking about Corbus the Wikipedia page states: “By buying out the many family-owned businesses that created the field, Getty and Corbis are in the process of “rolling-up” the stock photo business.”

So.  How would you go about rolling up Flicker into your stock photo business if you wanted to?

This morning a friend, who has a delightful popular presence on Flickr was invited by Flickr and GettyImages to sign an “Contributor Agreement for Photo Sharing Content.”  The incentive was that she might receive a 20-30% share of any royalties they collect.  It includes this clause:

“Exclusivity:  All Content accepted by Getty Images is on a Content exclusive basis. Such Content and any Similars may
not be submitted to any third party for license, sale or distribution. However, on a non-exclusive basis, You
may use Content and any Similars for Your personal or self promotional, non-commercial use, including
Photo Sharing, provided that You do not compete with or limit the rights granted to Getty Images under the
Agreement. On an exclusive basis you may use Content and any Similars for limited edition, signed and/or
numbered fine art prints (though Getty Images retains the exclusive right to sell and license prints not
signed or numbered).”

So let us imagine how this plays out.  Currently thousands of pages on thousands of sites around the Internet are decorated with images she created.  After she signs this agreement the bots working on behalf of GettyImages quickly discover them all.  Actually, I suspect thier bots already know this information and they invited her to sign up because they know her images are widely copied.  The also know she didn’t already relinquish her rights with a liberal creative commons license.

She currently manages the “enforcement of rights” problem her self.  Trading off the chance of some royalities against the cost of chasing after those royalities.  But since she makes her income from the work she photographs the wide distribution of the photos has many beneficial effects.  It builds her fan base, it’s advertising, it contributes into the community she her work is situated in.  So how to manage the enforcement problem is more subtle than it might appear at first glance.

Not so for GettyImages, their business decision on enforcement is simple.  For example if sending a note to every site with one of my friends images on it asking for a toll maximizes revenue, why not.

So, I think, Yahoo is selling the Flicker community to Getty Images.  I wonder if Google could do something analogous with their image search collection.

packaging efficency

I bought a light bulb.  It goes in my kitchen ceiling, to replace a 65 watt down spot.  The box says it will last 35 thousand hours (which is about four years). They talk about 20 years.  Though it only has a 3 year limited warranty.  These things cost fifty bucks.  Usually, Though i got mine on sale.  Rumor is that involves a subsidy by the local utility.  At the sale price, my calculations indicate it’s payback is about three years.  Of course maybe I’ll just leave the lights on more.

I’m amused by the amount of packaging this bulb enjoyed.  I guess if you spend fifty bucks for this thing you’d expect precious packaging.  The circles on that carpet are about a foot across.

Better sparrows

I received an amazingly over engineered bird feeder for christmas.  It’s primary goal is the frustration of squirrels, though it also has numerous adjustments for the size of the bird.  The next step is obvious.  A bird feeder that only feeds attractive birds.  This would involve a video camera along with some image processing.  Next we could tune the system to place evolutionary pressure on the sparrows: push them toward something more decorative.