Short termism

The long view is in danger of extinction. More and more we focus on the new, new thing. David Armitage and Jo Guldi writing for the Chronicle of Higher Education said, "We live in a moment of accelerating crisis that is characterized by a shortage of long-term thinking. Rising sea levels and other threats to our environment; mounting inequality; rotting infrastructure. Our culture lacks a long-term perspective."

I am not sure it is a crisis, but it is something to be aware of. I am an academic, an educator. We generally believe the three pillars of this life are:

• Teaching
• Research
• Service

But, I once read an alternate theory that suggested the three pillars are:

• Gather knowledge
• Chronicle the events of our time
• Mentoring

Similar, but different. I write a lot about the events of our time. Most commonly, it is about security, (which is about as short term as it gets), but also cultural events.

One hundred years from now will anyone remember Ashley Madison?  Will it be considered important that some number that hovers around 32 million users signed up for an infidelity web site. The institution of marriage, generally for life 100 years ago, is now transient for many people. (Don't worry I am not getting preachy, I am simply recording an event of our time).

So, what can we do? We can interview real people and document real events. For instance, just yesterday, I interviewed the founder of a small business startup that endured daily adversity for three years, because it is a real event of our time. 

According to the Smithsonian, "In every community — in families, neighborhoods, workplaces, and schools — there are people who have knowledge and skills to share — ways of knowing and doing that often come from years of experience and have been preserved and passed down across generations. As active participants in community life, these bearers of tradition are primary sources of culture and history. They are, as folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes, "living links in the historical chain, eye witnesses to history, shapers of a vital and indigenous way of life. They are unparalleled in the vividness and authenticity they can bring to the study of local history and culture."

Through documenting their memories and stories, the past comes to life in the present, filled with vivid images of people, places, and events. And it is not only the past that we discover: we learn about the living traditions — the foodways, celebrations, customs, music, occupations, and skills — that are a vital part of daily experience. These stories, memories, and traditions are powerful expressions of community life and values. They anchor us in a larger whole, connecting us to the past, grounding us firmly in the present, giving us a sense of identity and roots, belonging and purpose."

And there is guidance on how to go about this type of knowledge gathering. They go on explain the process of the interview. And it really matters in a world of perception management. For various reasons, people are fabricating and publishing stories that are completely false, there are digital identities that don't really exist and very soon, if not now, they will be AI sentient. 

In a well received keynote I gave several years ago called 12 Laws of IT Security Power, I suggested looking at Google Trends at least once a week. But we want to balance that input to our thinking with something long term and solid. I am an occasional Wikipedia editor, but I bought a set of the last printed edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, (revise that :).

Facebook - suppressing conservative news stories

Gizmodo ran this story, "Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users."

True or false, unknown, but it certainly got people's attention:

ABCnews reports, "A senior adviser to Donald Trump will attend a meeting with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday with prominent conservative leaders in response to a recent report of Facebook’s handling of conservative news stories, a campaign official said today. "

According to The Verge, "Facebook's chief executive Mark Zuckerberg is meeting with Glenn Beck and other leading conservatives this week to discuss allegations of political bias in the social network's Trending Topics section. In a Facebook post on Sunday, Beck said Zuckerberg's office had called him about the meeting, and that he wanted to "look [Zuckerberg] in the eye as he explains."

Whatever the truth actually is, one blogger scored serious buzz, ""We removed this from Facebook because it violates our Community Standards," Facebook wrote me. "So you're temporarily blocked from using this feature."

Here is what Facebook has to say, "The Trending Topics team is governed by a set of guidelines meant to ensure a high-quality product, consistent with Facebook’s deep commitment to being a platform for people of all viewpoints. Our goal has always been to deliver a valuable experience for the people who use our service. The guidelines demonstrate that we have a series of checks and balances in place to help surface the most important popular stories, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum. Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to discriminate against sources of any political origin, period."

The questions of the hour are:
1) Will this be forgotten by next week, or will it grow into a significant issue?
2) Will this have any impact on people's perception of facebook?
I will set a calendar entry to check up on this in about ten days.

5/25/16 Recode runs an update story:
"Facebook said at the time that this was not true. It reiterated that Monday in an open letter to Thune, in which it highlighted an internal Facebook investigation. "Our investigation has revealed no evidence of systematic political bias in the selection or prominence of stories included in the Trending Topics feature," the letter reads."

Facebook is making some changes as a result of the investigation. My opinion is this is a tempest in a teacup and the story will sink from the public consciousness.

Is Sofia Real?

Received a Linkedin invite, went to check her out. She has 34 connections and 1 endorsement for various skills. I suspect a bot of some sort.

I wrote a Linkedin 1st level connection and asked if he knows her in real life. Then I tried a reverse image search. In my view the results are not conclusive, though top row, third from the left looks like a possible match, a "beautyblogger" from Mexico. What I still do not understand is just what is possible by doing this. Hit ignore on Linkedin.

Present bias - toilet paper

You can't take a freshman psychology course without learning about the decision process of waiting for a larger return or getting less now. This is often called present bias. There are tons of these studies, but they seem academic, not grounded in the real world.








However, according to TheAtlantic: "To see how often consumers at different income levels take advantage of discounts, Orhun and Palazzolo analyzed seven years’ worth of data on toilet-paper purchases made by over 100,000 American households. They picked toilet paper because it’s “tailor-made” for what they’re interested in studying: It’s often sold in bulk, it’s frequently on sale, and it’s non-perishable and easily storable."

Higher income people spend 6% less per sheet of toilet paper because they buy in bulk at stores like Costco. Lower income people tend to buy four packs at corner stores.

"The argument isn’t that they’re inherently less sharp, but that they become, as a result of their circumstances, more prone to making irrational, present-biased choices. On the other side, there is a body of evidence supporting the idea that those without much money are simply making the best possible decisions they can make, given their crummy circumstances."

Could be, in which case this is not perception management. So, let's look under the hood. The search string "purchase toilet paper" yields 1.4M results and the results are interesting, at least to me:

At the top of the page, both left and right are paid ads. So some companies believe that people buy toilet paper online. The ads on the left are for high end toilet paper. The ads on the right are for what I call airport toilet paper.

The ads bring up the issue of how do you market toilet paper, after all it kind of sells itself. But the paper companies want you to be a repeat customer. According to Slate: "The Scott Paper Company became the first to offer toilet paper on a roll in the 1890s, and its products were marketed under private labels that each had their own advertising scheme. Many used words and pictures to connote luxury, as in The Waldorf and The Statler, two brands named after fancy hotels. Some showed images of ladies in ball gowns or gentlemen riding in horse-drawn carriages."

However, more recently, instead of appealing to the rich, "The preponderance of bears on toilet-paper packaging—along with angels, babies, and puppies—derives from the dominance of the major players in the bath-tissue industry. Procter & Gamble, Georgia-Pacific and Kimberly-Clark together control about two-thirds of the market, and their brand icons—the Charmin bear, the Angel Soft baby, and the Cottonelle puppy—showed up in the United States over a 15-year span beginning in the late-1980s."

The top two organic searches for "Purchase toilet paper" are Overstocks and Amazon. They both carry a brand called "Angel Soft" 2-ply to make a snap comparison. Overstock has 60 rolls for 65.49 with free shipping, 1.09 a roll, Amazon has 60 rolls for 48.25, .80 per roll. Wal-Mart does not appear to stock 60 rolls, but 36 "double rolls" is 15.97 or $.44 a double roll.  The key point, if you buy in bulk you can get below the dollar a roll mark. I will try to walk into a few small stores, or a grocery store and see what they have.

5/24/16 Safeway in Lihue. With Club pricing, 12 double rolls is 9.99 or .83 roll.

At Big Save, 12 "double" rolls are 9.99 on sale, .83 per roll.

One last thing, when I did my search, one of the paid ads was Amazon. What price do they offer, surely the same as when I visited the page via organic search, right? Not hardly. You can purchase premium toilet paper for less than a dollar a roll, but not everyone does.

6/14/16 Home Depot 8.97 for 24 rolls, .37 per roll.  I had noticed the price of toilet paper at Home Depot seemed to be lower. 

Climate change - Republican party

I apologize if this appears political. If you read more posts, I simply look for cases where reality and perception do not line up. The Republican party in the United States has been interesting about climate change. None of the candidates for the 2016 election accepted climate research. The GOP has fought President Obama's efforts to make a change. Never the less 2015 was the warmest year on record according to NASA and NOAA.

Meanwhile, despite their perception, islands are sinking:

Laptops and tablets may alter the way we think

Gadget reports: "Tablet and laptop users, take note! Using digital platforms for reading may change the way you think, making you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly, a new study has found.

The findings serve as another wake-up call to how digital media may be affecting our likelihood of using abstract thought, researchers said.

Scientists from Dartmouth College in the US tested the basic question - would processing the same information on a digital versus non-digital platform affect "construal levels" the fundamental level of concreteness versus abstractness that people use in perceiving and interpreting behaviours, events and other informational stimuli."

The Telegraph reports: "It found that those performing tasks with paper were overwhelmingly more capable of interpreting the meaning of the material, while those using computers would retain particular details.

For example, when choosing between two ways to describe “making a list”, those answering on a computer would select “writing things down”, and those doing so on paper would choose “getting organised”."

If you get a discount coupon for liquor, does it mean you are an alcoholic?

I was reading an "Ask Slashdot" question about online tracking. Here is one of the comments:

"I work in the micro-targeting business and we love people like you. It is the ones who think they are immune to the work we do that are actually the most susceptible because you'll never see it coming. It hasn't been about in-your-face advertising for at least a decade.

It is about swaying you without you even realizing you are being swayed. Here's an egregious example: One of our clients sells alcohol. They use our data to figure out who has alcoholics in their family and then we send them snail-mail coupons for significant discounts on their products, sometimes even completely free, because we know that alcoholism has genetic and environmental components that family members often share and because 10% of the population accounts for 50% of the industry's profits. [washingtonpost.com] Those are the people they want to sucker in. And guess what? When the data shows that a heavy drinker has stopped drinking, we send them coupons for freebies too. But we don't just mail them out directly, we have them printed up in their newspaper or their magazine subscription. So it isn't obvious that they've been singled out.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg. This is the largest industry on planet earth. Facebook alone is valued at 350 BILLION DOLLARS predicated solely on their ability to manipulate people. It doesn't matter how much mental fortitude you have, you will succumb at some point. My company alone has a 10 million dollar budget for pure research in the field of psychology as it applies to swaying people. As the apocryphal saying goes, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time...""

Now you can't believe everything you read, even on Slashdot :) So let's see what we can find on the Internet.

According to Small Business, "Given a 2012 Gallup poll indicating that most Americans surveyed described themselves as regular drinkers, marketers of beer, wine and liquor have a lot of targets. However, alcohol preferences and consumption habits differ based on a number of factors. Age, gender, geography and leisure habits all influence drinking behavior, and businesses may find their largest target markets are heavily influenced by what alcohol they are trying to sell."

Note, the two perspectives do not contradict one another. Large ocean with lots of fish in it, but some fish have higher value to fishermen. Currently men consume more alcohol than women, but women are drinking more and are "percepted" differently than men.

According to Marketing Today, "In fact, the data show that in comparison with the general population, women are more likely to spend more on adult beverages on-premise than last year (30% of women versus 19% of the general population), and more likely to try new adult beverages, then buy them for at-home consumption (42% of women versus 35% of the general population). 

In addition, women are more likely to take "cues" in deciding what beverages to order. Menu descriptions and samples influence 39% and 32% of women, respectively, whereas the same cues influence 29% and 26% of the general population, respectively."