Ged Carroll

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  • The Coddling of the American Mind

    The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The book sprang out of an article that the authors wrote for The Atlantic – How Trigger Warnings Are Hurting Mental Health on Campus.

    Jonathan Haidt

    Haidt is a social psychologist by training and currently serves as professor of ethical leadership at New York University Stern School of Business. I heard an interview with Haidt on the the dark psychology of social networks and this book came up which was the key reason why I bought it.

    The Coddling of The American Mind

    Greg Lukianoff

    Lukianoff is a lawyer by training and president of Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a US based group that  free speech rights on college campuses. If it was Lukianoff on his own I would likely dismiss this book as partisan.

    Premise of The Coddling of the American Minds

    In The Coddling of the American Mind Haidt and Lukianoff discuss factors that are affecting the resilience of young people emerging from colleges in the US.

    They suggest a number of factors for the increasing intolerance and threats to American life from the left and the right.

    • Intimidation and violence on campus – the book highlights examples on both the left and right of the political spectrum. Violence by left wing protestors at Berkeley was particularly disturbing due to the lack of action by law enforcement
    • Witch hunts against academics
    • Self reinforcing cycle of political polarisation
    • Paranoid parenting compared to the latch-key parenting that older people would have been used to growing up
    • The decline of outdoor play
    • Safetyism – the move of safety culture from improving physical safety promoted by the likes of Ralph Nader (safer workplaces, no lead paint on toys etc) to encompass mental and emotional safety as a priority
    • The quest for justice. The complexity of how you define justice is important

    Haidt and Lukianoff are of the opinion that you need to prepare people for life and to be resilient. That this approach doesn’t detract from the desire to change the world seems to be ignored by advocates of the status quo.

    How the book has been received?

    The Financial Times generally praised the book and it ended up on the New York Times bestsellers list.

    The book was perceived as an attack on progressive liberal values by some reviewers, whereas I think it wasn’t attack on those values, but the means by which they are being pursued. It confronts the hard truth that there is intolerance at both ends of the political spectrum and a lack of dialogue.

    Has campus liberalism gone too far? | Financial Times

    The Idioms of Non-Argument | The Atlantic

    Does Our Cultural Obsession With Safety Spell the Downfall of Democracy? | The New York Times

    Have Parents Made Their Kids Too Fragile For the Rough and Tumble of Life? | Washington Post

  • Audi Skysphere & other things

    Audi Skysphere

    Audi launched its latest concept car the Audi Skysphere. It’s electrically powered as you’d expect. Massive screens for displays and sustainable materials used in the interior. It has autonomous driving when its in a ‘grand touring’ mode. It allows for the owner to drive in a ‘sports car’ mode. All pretty normal stuff so far.

    But sports car mode means that the vehicle length shrinks. That’s right the Audi Skysphere changes shape rather than just changing functions up via electronics.

    In terms of styling, Audi calls calls jazz age Horsh tourers the influence for the Audi Skysphere. Audi is descended from Auto Union AG. Auto Union AG was formed in 1932, with the merger of Horch, DKW, Wanderer and the original Audi Automobilwerke. That’s why the Audi logo has four circles and why Horsh is the influence.

    Its long, wide and low bonnet brings to mind the Dodge Viper. The sides reminded me of Ford’s ‘Edge’ design language, if it was done by Zaha Hadid Architects. Lots of the details such as the lights use a mass of small triangles, reminding me of Hadid’s Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion. It also serves a reminder that computerised shapes are usually made up of lots of small polygons. Triangles must be a thing in car design at the moment, not only does the Audi Skysphere feature them, but so does the new Hyundai Santa Cruz throughout its design.

    Audi talks about the Audi Skysphere in terms of progressive luxury, which seems to be about experience and not making a huge environmental impact. They talk about vegan leather (that could be anything from fungi derived proteins to a PVC style plastic) and microfibre (finely spun and woven (usually) polyester / nylon fibre mix).

    The problems are likely to be in the system that the car would go into.

    • How is insurance handled for an autonomous vehicle?
    • Who is the insured party? Vehicle manufacturers would like for it to be the owner who might be responsible for any autonomous vehicle decisions. Putting software product liability out of their hands and on the buyer.
    • Who would be the defendant in the case of someone being run over?
    • How would vehicle inspection tests like Germany’s TUV or the UK’s MOT handle a collapsable chassis?

    I am a bit disappointed to see that Audi isn’t thinking seriously about a post Lithium world sodium ion batteries or hydrogen powered vehicles

    Los Angeles Olympics 1984

    The Los Angeles Olympics was the last olympic event that made a profit. This was down to the city being able to use existing venues for all the competitions and a less onerous demand on resources than games ran since then.

    Los Angeles didn’t have the reputation for design that Munich or the 1964 games in Tokyo had. So this video by the Olympics gave me new insight into the experience. I remembered the logo and the mascot, but since I watched only a small amount of the LA Games. This was because I was working on the family farm at the time. The bits that I did see were on an old black and white TV, so I missed a lot of the design details shared.

    Home-made silicon foundry

    I’d not heard of Sam Zeloof before. Over the past few years he has managed to fabricate integrated circuits ‘chips’ in his own home. Admittedly when we say home, we are talking about a big American multi-car garage. The results is impressive. One obvious thing to point out is that he is not putting in dust suppression techniques like you would see in a commercial fab.

    Solid Logic Technology

    IBM came up with an interesting ceramic hybrid technology that powered the Apollo missions and IBM’s System 360 computers. They were engineered for a robustness that even silicon micro-processors couldn’t match.

  • Fear of finding out

    Fear of finding out – an introduction

    Fear of finding out was how Paul Holmes characterised marketing as a discipline and its approach to return on investment. This was an article that was originally published in 2019, but was going around in circles that I keep an eye on online recently.

    The article characterised marketing in this way:

    Marketing and public relations continue to focus on reach and awareness. Is that because they’re afraid of finding out whether they really make a difference?

    The PR Industry’s FOFO Problem | Provoke Media

    What do marketers actually focus on?

    According to Nielsen:

    top marketing objectives
    Please rank each of the following marketing objectives for your business from most important to least important. Chart shows the percentage of respondents who picked that objective as their No. 1 priority.
    Source: 2021 Nielsen Marketing Report: Era of Adaptation.

    Looking at those marketing objectives ROI and business impact are a key consideration embodied in both customer acquisition and brand awareness.

    Long and short term goals

    In order to understand marketing one has to understand that marketing provides short term benefits and long term benefits. Certain techniques skew towards a short term delivery and others deliver over the long term. The approach mentioned in Fear of Finding Out was very skewed to short term techniques.

    That means that the return on investment timeframes could be very different. The longer the time frame that you are measuring the full return on investment, the harder it is prove it.

    But surely you want things to work fast? True. But what if there are marketing techniques that keep on giving? Think about advertising jingles that stick in your head. They have mental availability decades after you’ve heard them.

    In How Brands Grow by Byron Sharp, he distills down the findings from decades of empirical research into marketing. Two of the most important factors are mental availability and brand salience.

    Mental availability is the probability that a buyer will notice, recognize and/or think of a brand in buying situations.  It depends on the quality and quantity of memory structures related to the brand.

    It is different from brand awareness or brand recall because it is situational in nature and thus hard to measure, a notable exception would be through observational research in retail environments. Brand awareness and consideration are two relatively indicative proxy measures for mental availability.

    Here’s what research firm Nielsen had to say about those proxy measures:

    Nielsen research shows that a 1-point gain in brand metrics (e.g., awareness and consideration) drives a 1% increase in sales. Importantly, upper-funnel efforts also generate an array of ancillary benefits that can drive more effective sales activations—and not just for consumables. For example, Nielsen recently measured how effective a financial services company’s marketing efforts were at driving sales across approximately 20 markets and found that the correlation between the upper funnel brand metrics and marketing efficiency was exceptionally strong (0.73).

    Long-Term Business Vitality Should Outweigh Short-Term Sales Gains by By Cara Kantrowitz, Vice President of Solutions Consulting, Nielsen Research

    A second aspect is brand salience which is how distinctive a brand is. This again helps with the memory structures that relate to a brand.

    You might remember TikTok memes for a few months?

    Go News India

    What is the mental availability created by all but the most persistent Facebook ads? What’s the mental availability of a Google ad?

    How are you measuring and driving brand salience for your company? Because that will affect sales further down the funnel.

    For business to business audiences, which are covered in Byron Sharp and Jenni Romaniuk’s How Brands Grow part two – the results are very similar.

    The now bias

    The now bias can be seen in the finding of the research cited by Holmes. The responses (and probably the question design that elicited them) are very focused on the bottom part of the marketing funnel / sales support.

    Among the other troubling findings of Proof’s research, which included more than 400 senior business leaders in 160 key Fortune 1000 C-suites:

    94% reported that they had little or no reliable understanding of the quantifiable business value actually delivered by marketing;

    97% said they had little or no idea how much money they should be investing in marketing and PR;

    72% said that they expected that 2019 marketing budgets would be cut by 10% or more.

    Says Mark Stouse, Proof founder and a veteran of marketing and communications roles at BMC Software, Honeywell, and HP: “Many of the C-suite respondents went out of their way to say that their frustration did not stem from a lack of belief in marketing’s impact, but rather the failure of their marketing teams to embrace full accountability for ROI and business value.”

    This doesn’t ring true based on research I have seen from Nielsen:

    important measurement
    Please rate the importance of each of the following metrics / measurement capabilities to your organization. Chart shows to p-2 (very important and extremely important) on a 5-point scale.
    Source: 2021 Nielsen Marketing Report: Era of Adaptation

    Research by Ebquity suggests the marketers are focused on ROI. You can get the full research here.

    Marketers also have a now bias, that’s due to astonishing levels of CMO turnover in many organisations that’s only increasing over time.

    The now bias creates revenue opportunities for agencies, with a temptation to do what’s right for them rather than their clients. ‘The quantifiable business value’ are likely to be getting worse. While client budgets are stagnant, media buying agencies are taking more of the money on online advertising (7 – 10 per cent commission, compared to 3 per cent on other media channels).

    So there is a natural business incentive for them to lean into ‘business transformation’ / ‘digital disruption’ narratives popular in board rooms. Digital has its place, but it might not be the panacea that you’re looking for. I say that not as a digital cynic, but as a seasoned digital focused strategist, which means doing the research and recommending the right media for the right job.

    efficiency

    Depending how you look at media channels some are better than others.

    effectiveness

    So how is the now bias exhibited by the C-suite? In business value they don’t think about brand building. Yet businesses are quite happy to factor in brand value when thinking about the value of goodwill on the balance sheet of their accounts.

    More marketing related content can be found here.

    More information

    The PR Industry’s FOFO Problem – Marketing and public relations continue to focus on reach and awareness. Is that because they’re afraid of finding out whether they really make a difference?

  • Photo hashing & other news

    Apple photo hashing

    Report: Apple to announce client-side photo hashing system to detect child abuse images in user’s photos libraries – 9to5Mac – photo hashing its not foolproof. Once the proof of concept exists, Apple won’t be able to withstand the pressure authoritarian government could use it to track other materials. Tencent’s WeChat is already collecting memes that the Chinese government wouldn’t like from foreign WeChat accounts so that it can train its algorithms to locate similar content with domestic users. The risk for Apple’s customers in other markets like Russia, China and the middle east is real. Apple’s development of photo hashing has garnered a lot of coverage

    Apple plans to scan US iPhones for child abuse imagery | Financial Times 

    Apple led the market on encryption, but other players like WhatsApp have made it clear that they won’t follow Apple on photo hashing.

    Apple has been trying to ignore the voices complaining against its photo hashing initiative. The problem is that those voices are the early adopters and developers who have made Apple what it is today. I think that this could end very badly for Apple in the long term. Particularly when viewed in context of questionable ethical choices despite its progressive positioning on issues in western markets

    Apple Discusses “Screeching Voices of the Minority” in Internal Memos – It’s difficult to even write a piece like this, pointing out that a feature ostensibly created for good could have bad implications. Again: What happens when a country like China uses this feature to find people with images critical of the government? Why wouldn’t the industry want to start searching for pirated content on iPhones in a few years?

    Apple Privacy Letter: An Open Letter Against Apple’s Privacy-Invasive Content Scanning Technology – a legion of the great and the good of the technorati from around the world on the photo hashing

    One Bad Apple – The Hacker Factor Blog 

    Even the FT weighed in.

    Business

    The China risk factor continues to reverberate: China’s Corporate Crackdown Is Just Getting Started. Signs Point to More Tumult Ahead. – WSJ

    Chinese music group pulls $1bn Hong Kong IPO after tech crackdown | Financial Times – interesting move, especially given Netease’s exposure to the edutech sector

    ‘If Masa said yes, who am I to object?’: SoftBank deals unleash internal compliance tensions | Financial Times – sounds like desperate measures

    China

    Is Pax Sinica possible? – China will need to start upholding democratic values and norms, and cultivating peaceful relationships with other countries. Pax Americana has survived for so long, because many countries, including China’s neighbours, rely heavily on the US for trade, finance, technology, and security. They will be reluctant to accept Pax Sinica, unless China offers them something better. And that must begin with pax – I suspect that Premier Xi would be thinking more along the lines of mercantilistic trade relationships and vassal statehood, which would be more in keeping with pre-revolutionary China

    Consumer behaviour

    Everybody needs to get vaccinated, says Tilman Fertitta – Fertitta’s comments about employees admitting that they had fake vaccines cards is pretty disturbing. It isn’t like vaccines are in short supply in the markets that has restaurants in like New York. The counterfeit vaccine cards must be more about avoiding vaccines all together

    Historical language records reveal a surge of cognitive distortions in recent decades | PNAS – Individuals with depression are prone to maladaptive patterns of thinking, known as cognitive distortions, whereby they think about themselves, the world, and the future in overly negative and inaccurate ways. These distortions are associated with marked changes in an individual’s mood, behavior, and language. We hypothesize that societies can undergo similar changes in their collective psychology that are reflected in historical records of language use. Here, we investigate the prevalence of textual markers of cognitive distortions in over 14 million books for the past 125 y and observe a surge of their prevalence since the 1980s, to levels exceeding those of the Great Depression and both World Wars. This pattern does not seem to be driven by changes in word meaning, publishing and writing standards, or the Google Books sample. Our results suggest a recent societal shift toward language associated with cognitive distortions and internalizing disorders. – literally society is sick

    The xenophobic chicken and the propaganda egg: disentangling official and popular nationalism in China – by Kevin Carrico – NSL can’t cancel me – you could not make some of this up. But then, you also couldn’t make up the QAnon community if you tried either.

    ‘Sales funnels’ and high-value men: the rise of strategic dating | Dating | The Guardian – I suspect this is an edge case but its interesting

    Where have all the pre-teens gone? – The Face 

    Design

    ongoing by Tim Bray · Apps Getting Worse – Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted. – This also explains why Skype got designed into irrelevancy

    FMCG

    Unilever installs a detergent refill machine in Mumbai | Trendwatching – this all feels like things have gone full circle. My Mum and Dad growing up as children in rural Ireland talked about how many dry goods products were sold by weight in the village store. My Granny used to keep spices and flavourings for baking in a bucket sized tin that she’d been gifted decades before by the village store owner. Used packaging was a community asset rather than a liability. The biscuits were sold by the dozen in a paper bag by the shopkeeper. I can just about remember the village store and its long time owner Mrs Paddy Kelly, (Mr Kelly had died decades ago but I have no idea what Mrs Kelly’s name was). By the time I was born, it was more like a modern convenience store, with a farm supplies store attached. Electricity had come to the farm when I was three or four, so we had a fridge and an icebox – ideal for a block of HB vanilla ice cream that came back from the shop wrapped in newsprint to try and keep it cold.

    Secondly, by having a vending machine in store; Unilever are still managing to keep control of their brand.

    Japan

    Japan’s fractured polity exposed by COVID-19 crisis – Nikkei Asia – Whatever the intention, the public sees hypocrisy, inconsistency and incompetence. The vaccination rollout has been a mess. The public was asked to practice “self-restraint” and stay at home for the fourth state of emergency as the country opened its doors to tens of thousands of athletes and officials for the 2020 Olympics. 

    This dismal state of affairs clashes with the image of competence and professionalism that Japan has enjoyed for decades, and for which it is admired around the world. 

    Japan looks good in international COVID comparisons, but by its own standards, the situation is perceived as chaotic and a failure of leadership. The public has lost faith. Cynicism has spread as people blame a sclerotic government that does not seem to understand the many recent transformations of Japanese society

    Legal

    South Africa grants patent to an AI system known as DABUS — Quartz Africa – The patent application listing DABUS as the inventor was filed in patent offices around the world, including the US, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. But only South Africa granted the patent (Australia followed suit a few days later after a court judgment gave the go-ahead). South Africa’s decision has received widespread backlash from intellectual property experts. Some have labelled it a mistake, or an oversight by the patent office. However, as a patent and AI scholar whose PhD aims to address the gaps in patent law created by AI inventorship, I suggest that the decision is supported by the government’s policy environment in recent years. This has aimed to increase innovation, and views technology as a way to achieve this – back when I worked for DSM before I went to college, a lot of of our patented products were developed using software that tested and then gave us optimal formulas – yet the patents went to the doctor who was the nominal head of the lab

    Luxury

    LVMH’s Deal With Google Is Groundbreaking. Here’s Why. – develop business solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI), it raised many questions about how brands are embracing the use of digital technologies to reshape the luxury experience. Google said they would join forces to empower LVMH’s individual luxury brands to create new, personalised customer experiences that fostered long-term growth, through functions like demand forecasting, inventory optimisation, as well as develop new business use cases at scale and explore co-innovation opportunities by launching a data and AI Academy in Paris

    Luxury Daily | Have China’s ‘trafific stars’ become toxic for beauty brands? – Chinese versions of K-pop stars are becoming embroiled in scandals that affect their brand partners

    Retailing

    Crocs, Ralph Lauren, LV All Get More Expensive As Apparel Prices Soar – Apparel prices across US retailers rose nearly 5% in June, the biggest leap in a decade.

    Software

    ongoing by Tim Bray · Apps Getting Worse – Every high-tech company has people called “Product Managers” (PMs) whose job it is to work with customers and management and engineers to define what products should do. No PM in history has ever said “This seems to be working pretty well, let’s leave it the way it is.” Because that’s not bold. That’s not visionary. That doesn’t get you promoted. – this explains why Skype got designed into irrelevancy

    Sports

    Why Puma cancelled a $2.7 million deal with Nigeria — Quartz Africa – Nigeria’s current sports administrators are delighted. The athletics federation said Nigeria’s sports minister had successfully stopped athletes from receiving Puma bags containing about 40 items each in Tokyo through the Nigerian embassy. To this set of administrators, the 2019 deal was not properly agreed between Puma and previous leaders of Nigeria’s athletics body

    Wireless

    General Dynamics Mission Systems Introduces Badger Software-Defined Radio – Soldier Systems Daily – interesting decline in size, but much slower than would be likely to happen in the commercial space

    Samsung flagships can no longer compete with the Chinese smartphones – The current flagship Galaxy S21 series has never managed to win worldwide love. Judging by the information from South Korean publications, the flagships, which were supposed to destroy competitors, failed miserably in sales. Based on the report of Counterpoint analysts, it can be concluded that the Galaxy S21 series has not been able to repeat the success of any of its predecessors, starting with the Galaxy S5 – this looks like PC sales when ‘white box manufacturers’ disrupted Winter brands such as IBM and Compaq

    Research Alliances Grow to Learn How 6G Will Play Out – EE Times Europe

    Thailand

    Jack “dekfarang” Brown is having a tantrum – by Andrew MacGregor Marshall – Secret Siam – foreign influencers enjoyed by Thais were a thing I didn’t even know about

  • Video arcade and other things

    Vintage video arcade

    Found footage shot of a hvideo arcade in Tokyo, Japan. The footage was apparently filmed in June 1979. A few things that surprised me about the video arcade:

    • I didn’t realise how nostalgic I would feel for the vintage Space Invaders cabinet design. I had played one a number of times but wasn’t any good at it
    • I was surprised to see English language on the screens rather than Japanese. Usually games had to get translated into English for use outside Japan
    • The table service to table top games was really interesting. I remember seeing a few of those glass table cabinets in pubs and motorway services cafes (usually not plugged in). The use case in Tokyo was much more social than arcade designs became with stand up cabinets
    • The 1960s era music playing in the background, I was expecting more current for the time western and Japanese pop
    https://youtu.be/-AtA4SJicsE

    Liam ‘Aidyn’ Fitzpatrick

    I knew Liam from my time in Hong Kong. He’s a journalist, a muso and so much more. He did an interview and picked a playlist on the Beats & Peaces podcast hosted by Jeanette Slack for Clockenflap. Think of it as a cooler version of Desert Island Discs.

    Liam shares his love of post-punk music and the kind of material that I imagine would have been on the turntable at Q magazine. His love of Japan might seem odd, given the discussions around cultural appropriation now, but I think that his experience has never been more important. Jeanette and Liam also get on tear on the importance of ambience in restaurants and why music programming in restaurants is so important. You can listen to the podcast here.

    Skateboarding

    Nike has been having a great Olympics kitting out some of the skateboarding gold medals. Skating has featured prominently in advertisements targeting women to do sports.

    Wieden + Kennedy have put together an advert that evokes vintage Disney with its style. The descriptor of ‘New Fairies’ made me think of the content by Korean professional long boarder Ko Hyjoo.

    Tangerine Dream documentary

    There is Tangerine Dream documentary to support the Tangerine Dream Zeitraffer exhibition at the Barbican Music Library.