Stephen Baker - The Numerati

Why Google needed a Superbowl ad posted on February 8, 2010

News

We were watching the Superbowl on TiVo, about a half hour behind, when I got a text message from my son at college: "Google's super bowl ad was horrible. I'm going to use Bing."

I didn't think it was bad, but I'm more prone to sentimentality than my son (to put it mildly). As I started this post, my point was going to be that the ad wasn't targeted at people like him, a blogger who actually considers which search engine to use. And it certainly wasn't for the masses who had clicked the ad on YouTube. I figured it was more for millions of people who use search occasionally, but don't yet understand the breadth of its applications. After all, how does Google fare with people who have migrated in the last two or three years from dial-up, or are still there? For a company with 70% of the search market, that segment might represent growth. And you're more likely to reach them on the Superbowl than with a viral campaign on the Net.

But as I rewatch the ad, I suspect it might move too fast for that audience. I imagine relatives of mine watching it. Instead of seeing themselves typing rapid-fire queries and madly clicking, they're picturing a grandchild doing it. But of course, he might be using Bing.

Early Lumiere films posted on February 7, 2010

General

Imagine historians 1,000 years from now studying the 19th and 20th centuries. They're busy reading 19th century correpondence, seeing some early photos and daguerrotypes, and then suddenly, at the turn of the 20th century, humanity snaps to life, first with voices, then with moving images. (By the time they get to the YouTube era, these future historians might be overwhelmed by all the voices and clips, just like the rest of us.)

In any case, among the first moving images they'll see are these, filmed in about 1895 by the Lumiere brothers. (ex 3 Quarks Daily)

Definition of an AOL searcher posted on February 6, 2010

Tribes

The users of different search engines fall into different tribes, according to this study in Ad Age. (ex Unbound Edition) That shouldn't come as a surprise. I found the definition of the AOL searcher especially poignant:

AOL customers feel less intellectual than their peers, are 55 and older, spend their money more responsibly, want to blend in to the crowd, feel like they've gotten a raw deal out of life, expect less from their future and, believe it or not, still use dial-up modems.

Hmmm. What sort of marketing campaign should we work up for them?

Incidentally, if any of you speak German, here's an article I wrote for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It's about what we should be storing in our heads, a theme I've been exploring a bit in recent talks.

Huffington Post: Crawling with data addicts posted on February 5, 2010

General

The Huffington Post has recently passed the Washington Post in traffic. It got 410 million page views last month (and 35 million on the iPhone alone). Data is a big part of the site's success.

At the media panel at the Webtrends conference this week, Huffington Post's chief technology officer, Paul Berry, described some the methods. Every hour, editors see how the traffic that hour compared to the same hour a week ago. The site is a laboratory for so-called A/B testing, where stories are played against each other to see which draws more traffic--and how long each story should stay on the front page.

"We've built a lot of internal tools," Berry said. "A lot of us are addicted, like crack addicts, to these stats."

HuffPost also tracks readers' shifting moods by carrying out automated "sentiment analysis" on the two million comments the site generates every month. (In other words, machines look for key words and report on whether the comment was favorable or not. If you look at individual results, they're fairly primitive. A sentence like "I'm not saying I'm not crazy about it..." can throw a machine for a loop. But they get the big picture.)

Berry said that many large advertisers are still eager for traditional over-the-fold real estate. But they get more clicks when their ads accompany stories about them. Clicks on Bing ads "go through the roof" when the story's about Microsoft, he said. (Traditionally, at least some magazines have worked to separate advertisers from stories about them, but those days are disappearing fast...)

Berry said that in its editorial layout, Huffington follows the "Mullet Strategy:" Business in front, party out back.

Microsoft takes on Google and IBM in science cloud posted on February 5, 2010

News

Microsoft, the Times reports, is offering scientists free access to its cloud computing. This is important because scientists are grappling with mountainous troves of data, and they need Google-like (or Bing-like) computing clusters to crunch them. I read recently that the biological data amassed last year surpassed all of the biological data in history, presumably from the dissection of the first frog until weeks before the Obama inauguration.

The need for scientific clouds is clear, and as I wrote two years ago in BusinessWeek, IBM and Google are on a similar track. My question is this: Is scientific data going to get tangled in a software battle? IBM, Google and others are offering an open-source cloud software known as Hadoop, which is based on Google's MapReduce. Microsoft is providing its own platform, Azure. The grand promise of cloud computing will be for scientists to share data sets, and even to delve into ones from seemingly unrelated fields. That way they might find correlations between, say, meterology and disease.

But if scientists in the Microsoft cloud are doing their work in Azure, will they be able to collaborate with others working in the cloud? The last thing science needs is a platform battle in the next generation of computing. (This thread of questions on a Microsoft site shows developers grappling with the challenges of offering Mapreduce within Azure.)

I also notice that the Microsoft-NSA grant is for U.S. scientists. I'm assuming researchers from elsewhere will have access too. Researching teams in science stopped paying attention to borders long ago.

Wondering what scientific cloud computing looks like? Rob Gillen, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratories, explores some meteorology data using Azure and other Microsoft technologies, including the Surface touch screen. (This version is more for the presentation of cloud data, I would assume, than the nuts-and-bolts of actual research.)

Accenture study: Companies structured for gut-thinking, not analytics posted on February 4, 2010

General

An Accenture study released today has some grim news for the analytically-minded. The survey of 600 senior managers shows that more than half of the blue-chip companies have structures that block analytics from decision-making. The problem: There's not enough talent, and the talent they have is often cordoned off in a geek wing.

Interestingly, while 71% of the top managers expressed strong commitment to statistical analysis in their companies, they often don't practice what they preach:

"The research revealed that senior managers currently fail to see fact- and data-driven analysis as critical when making key business decisions and instead rely heavily on ‘gut feel’ and ‘soft’ factors such as consultation with others, intuition and experience."

Makes sense. If you've crawled your way to the top of a big company, you're probably pretty confident in the gut-based decisions that guided you. So analytics might be fine for everyone else... As today's Times op-ed on dysfunction at Microsoft makes clear, the status quo has a rock solid constituency in just about any company.

Blue Brain: Henry Markram's thinking machine posted on February 4, 2010

Science

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo.

Here's a movie I want to see. It's about Henry Markram's venture to build a computer model, neuron by neuron, of the brain. (ex Frontal Cortex)

Stamen Design: Illustrating the physics of information posted on February 4, 2010

statistics

Ben Cerveny of Stamen Designs was speaking before me at the Webtrends Engageconference yesterday. Stamen, an eight-person shop in San Francisco, produces fascinating and provocative visuals from big data sets. He showed data of everything from real estate to news as squiggling, morphing blobs and lines. Sometimes it looked like cell biology, but Cerveny pointed to another science. He said Stamen was looking for rule sets for the "physics of information."

That idea has been batted around for a while. Last year I read The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size, by Tor Norretranders. He went into great length about information and the second law of thermodynamics. The idea is that information, like heat, tends naturally toward entropy. It loses its structure and disperses. It starts to look more like the general stream on Twitter and less like The New York Times. And the job of journalists or algorithm writers is to use intelligence to bring order to the information. In that sense, we do the work of the Maxwell's Demon. That's a fictitous character thought up by James Maxwell who has the intelligence (and dexterity) to separate fast- and slow-moving molecules, and thus create "free" energy (and counteract entropy). The question, of course, is whether the energy gained by separating the molecules would compensate for the energy spent in separating them. Somewhere in there is the value of information.

Anyway, Stamen does cool work. The photo above is from Trulia, a company that has a vast data base of real estate transactions through U.S. history. You can click on a neighborhood and see the development patterns. I like the one of Miami Beach. They also do lots of work with Digg, the crowdsourced news aggregator. Check out Digg Labs. You can even turn the swarm, which shows the sprouting and clustering of news items in their community, as a desktop screen saver. (I'd be tempted, but wonder (thinking back to Maxwell's Demon, how much energy it would gobble.)

This reminds me. One morning I was breakfasting in Palo Alto and wearing a shirt I picked up in Madison: Wisconsin Physics. One smart aleck stopped by my table, pointed to my shirt, and said: Wisconin physics? Do they have different laws of thermodynamics there?

Memories of old airports posted on February 2, 2010

General

I'm in the Houston airport, waiting for a flight to New Orleans, and I came up with an idea that would seem ridiculous to anyone under 30: "Who should I call in Houston?" There was a time, not that long ago, when a stop in a distant city was a chance to call friends there for a quarter. If you had an hour, you could chat with four long-distance friends for a buck. What a deal.

One other thing I remembered. As recently as the 1970s, airport food was the worst in the world. I remember old dried-out hamburgers and hot dogs sitting under heat lamps, big scum-coated buckets of chili con carne. They were terrible, and they cost two or three times the going rate outside the airport. It was horrible, but here's the thing: We didn't have to spend so much time in airports. Most of the time we dashed through, sometimes straight from the car to the plane, with barely a stop to show someone our ticket.

So now that we're trapped for far more time in airports, they've brought the rest of the world (ie. malls) inside. In some places, like this Einstein Bros. Bagels in Houston, they even have Wi-fi.

Tracking the data trackers posted on February 1, 2010

Datamining

Is the call-center rep getting surly? Kevin Johnson at New Credit Rules has a tip: Inform the person you're recording the call.

Fine, I thought as I read his post. But does he really expect us to record these calls? (Recording on the sly is illegal in some jurisdictions.) Turns out that for Johnson, taping is just part of a vigorous data strategy. His idea, as he writes in an older post, is to amass data on the companies that are busy studying his. "To a large extent," he writes, "this industry is built on asymmetrical information—the companies having more or better information than you do. As a customer, you must empower yourself and know what is going on at all times and hold companies accountable."

His strategy is exhaustive:

I document every encounter I have with a customer service representative or a company, as if I am a spy. In the same way a customer service representative may ask me to verify my mother’s birthday, I ask the representative to give me his or her name, employee identification number, and location. (It’s important to do this before things could get heated. Representatives tend to withhold information during a confrontation.) I have a digital dossier for each company going back years. It has been my holy grail, enabling me to enforce promises, correct errors, track down employees, etc. In fact, many times I have found that my information is more accurate than theirs.

Reminds me of a Smokey Robinson song (which I learned in the Jerry Garcia version).

Secretly I've been tailing you
Like a fox that prays on a rabbit
I had to get you and so I knew
I'd have to learn your ways and habits
Oh, you were the catch that I was after
But I looked up and I was in your arms
And I knew that I was captured

What's this whole world coming to?
Things just aren't the same
Anytime the hunter gets captured by the game...

(The Blondie version is below.)

Read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, and it has colored my day an ashen shade of gray. Awake to existence, tho, and vulnerability.

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The Book Bag - Zoe Page

The Wall Street Journal - John Derbyshire

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung - Milos Vec

The Guardian (UK) - Steven Poole & Christopher Exeter