Uncanny valley chart on 30 Rock

The uncanny valley graph made an appearance on 30 Rock last week where the show’s writers upped the chart’s silliness by explaining it “in Star Wars.”

More Wikipeida jokes: Now with substance!

A few days ago I posted a quick Wikipedia joke from 30 Rock with no particular purpose other than I thought it was funny. Over the weekend, I saw another Wikipedia reference, this time on The Simpsons:

I figure that if I keep posting everything I see on TV, I need to add some commentary to make it worthwhile for readers, so here goes.

What is interesting about these two jokes is that they are both reacting to the major criticism of Wikipedia: because anyone can change anything, the information on the site is inherently untrustworthy. In this case, a misinformed person like Homer can change whatever they want to fit their reality, and, in the case of the 30 Rock clip, individuals who don’t like how they are portrayed there can alter the facts to make themselves appear in a more favorable light.

Studies of Wikipedia have shown, however, that the site is fairly robust in that it recovers quickly from malicious edits. So, at least in this regard, the parody of the site on both shows is a little stale.

What I think the writers of The Simpsons joke get right, though, is the attitude of some Wikipedia vandals. In the clip above, when Homer mentions his desire to “change a lot of things” on the site, I believe the malice and sense of offense in his tone might be similar to what would prompt a person to do this.

Twitter business model: Selling interactions

Twitter, the ubiquitous microblogging platform, has investors worried because, despite its popularity as a life-streaming application, it isn’t clear how the service can make money. Although the company is experimenting with ads in Japan, there is some concern that U.S. users would reject ads on the site.

Another possibility, though, is the use of Twitter as a marketing platform. SMS Text News recently reported on an interesting use of Twitter by a marketer at Boingo:

Pat Phelan is bored out of his skull waiting for his flight at the fancy new Heathrow Terminal 5. How do I know? He Twittered this. Well, an enterprising person at Boingo Wireless (also using Twitter) decided to use his/her initiative and make Pat an offer of a free wifi pass:

Best ever use of Twitter for business @boingo saw that I was delayed in Heathrow and offered me a free wifi logon, really cool

Why isn’t facilitating these kinds of interactions Twitter’s business model? Since users like this sort of thing, Twitter wouldn’t take any kind of hit from them, and I’m sure marketers and customer service workers would be thrilled to have an easy way of connecting with customers who are in a jam. Twitter could could then take a small percentage of resulting transactions, or just a few pennies as a “finder’s fee,” similar to the eBay model.

Wikipedia joke on 30 Rock

30 Rock had a pretty good Wikipedia joke in its last episode, Subway Hero. Here’s the setup: Tracy sticks a screwdriver in his CD player and has a near-death experience. While in the netherworld, Tracy meets Richard Nixon, and the spirit of our 37th president convinces him that a black man can, in fact, support the GOP. The scene below comes after Tracy and Jack preview a PSA that Tracy has recorded for Jack’s PAC, the Committee to Re-invade Vietnam.

The great thing about the joke is that Nixon seems like the kind of person who would have been really, really worried about what was on his Wikipedia page. And, of course, Tracy is the kind of guy who would try to update Wikipedia with a screwdriver.

Darkest. Simpsons joke. Ever.

I suppose the humor here is the parody of The Sopranos; but this is really dark, especially for The Simpsons. (Speaking of The Sopranos, if you haven’t finished that show, you may not want to watch this clip because it contains a kind of spoiler.)

Twitter everything, nothing at all

The back story:

UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck was arrested on April 10 without any charges in Egypt for photographing a demonstration.

He used his mobile phone to twitter the message “Arrested” to his 48 followers, who contacted UC Berkeley, the US Embassy and a number of press organizations on his behalf.

The TechCrunch story by Michael Arrington is titled “Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice.” Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider disagrees:

We’re glad James is out of jail, but it seems that Twitter probably didn't spring him—being an American, with access to a cell phone, was probably more important.

So, did Twitter free Buck, or is the hype around the story merely hype? I think the reality is somewhere in between. While I agree with Kafka that the key here is that Buck is an American, it certainly helped him out a lot that he had a cellphone and was able to quickly notify his friends about his situation. He could have done this a number of ways, but he chose to use Twitter. It isn’t clear why he made this choice—maybe a call wasn’t possible?—but he did.

So what role did Twitter actually play in this situation? First, it broadcast the message of his predicament to a number of people at once, making it possible for all of them to agitate for his release and contact others—UC Berkley—who could also agitate for him.

Second, and I think perhaps crucially, Twitter made a permalink of Buck’s cry for help. As they passed on his story to larger organizations, Buck’s friends could point them to the archived version of his post, a fact which I imagine would have made their pleas for help on his behalf more convincing (of course, I have no proof this happened).

Although Buck clearly benefitted from his American citizenship, if Twitter helped him at all, I imagine it was in these two ways.

More Rowling copyright news

Apparently, J. K. Rowling’s readers will never understand what it is like to fanatically devoted to the characters in the Harry Potter books.

“My prime concern, if not my only concern,” she added later, “is these characters who have meant so much to me and continue to mean so much to me over a very long period of time. It’s very difficult for someone who is not a writer to understand.”

J.K. Rowling, in Court, Assails Potter Lexicon

Review: Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991)

I first encountered The Embodied Mind when I took Peg Syverson’s class “Minds, Texts, and Technology” during my first semester at UT in 2005. I remember being somewhat overwhelmed by it then: the authors—Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch—pose a radical challenge to then-current (1991) conceptions of cognitive science. Tracing the field of cognitive science through two stages, cognitivism and emergence, the authors explain that neither of these approaches take into account the role of bodily experience in the process of perception, arguing that this experience is a necessary precondition for cognitive functions.

According to the authors, the first stage of cognitive science, cognitivism, arose in the middle of the twentieth century as an outgrowth of cybernetics. While Varela, Thompson, and Rosch felt that cybernetics was initially a rich conversation between a number of differing views of the mind and how it functions, cognitive science came to be dominated by the cognitivist paradigm. These cognitivists described cognition as merely symbol processing in the brain, processing which was enabled by the mind’s creation of representations of the outside world.

However, cognitivism had a problem. According to Varela et al., researchers were unable to find biological examples of the mind’s symbol-processing, a lack which caused them to shift the location of this processing to the subconscious. In short, cognitivism required the separation of consciousness from cognition, a move which led cognitivists to posit the existence of an autonomous self—an ego or soul. However Varela, Thompson, and Rosch note that when one looks for the ego or self, the only thing that can be found is experience. They therefore claim that cognitivism failed because it tried to describe experience strictly through the means of analysis, without focusing on bodily experience.

Emergence, or connectionism, attempted to deal with some of the problems posed by cognitivism by suggesting that the phenomena of mind emerges out of the numerous simple, biological processes that make up the brain. Because connectionism is sub-symbolic—that is, it doesn’t require symbol-processing in the mind—it was represented an advance over cognitivism because it was able to explain both symbolic behaviors and non-symbolic behaviors. Cognitive scientists found it attractive because it is close to human biology, produces workable models, and fits the dominant scientific paradigm, namely, that there is a real world out there that some subject can discover through cognition, a paradigm which emergence shares with cognitivism.

However, Varela, Thompson, and Rosch argue that neither cognitivism or emergence can deal with the failure of science to find the source of the self, and that both flounder when they attempt to account for the role of the outside world in cognition. According to them, western science, except for some notable attempts by Minsky, Jackendoff, and Merleau-Ponty, has chosen to completely ignore these questions.

One result of this failure to bring these two worlds together is what the authors call the Cartesian Anxiety. The Cartesian Anxiety is the separation of mind and world—subject and object—into competing subjective realties, leaving us with the feeling that there is either a stable world, or there is only representations; that is, realist and subjectivist assumptions. This is a problem for both cognitivism and connectionism because both rely on a pre-given world that is represented symbolically or sub-symbolically.

As an alternative to this approach, the authors argue that the interaction of individual perception with physical reality “brings forth a world” that is dependent on the both, rather than being independent of either. One of their primary examples of this bringing forth a world is the study of color vision. The authors demonstrate that the perception of color is dependent on the physiology of an organism (pdf) to demonstrate that the experience of the outside world is brought forth by the organism in concert with that outside world; the “world” that is experienced is dependent on both.

Consider, for example, these optical illusions.


The squares that appear blue in the example on the left are actually the “same” color as the squares that appear yellow in the example on the right. The reason that they appear to be separate colors in these two images is a result of the interaction of our three-dimensional color vision and the colors which surround them in the image. This particular illusion, which makes one color appear to be two, is brought forth by our physical bodies interacting with the physical world.

Results like this one prompt Varela, Thompson, and Rosch to suggest a third stage in the development of cognitive science: enaction. According to the authors, enaction posits that perception depends on bodies and that cognition is the result of recurrent patterns of perception. Only enaction is able to account for cognition without extracting the mind for actual experience. An enactionist model of cognition, then, would view the mind as existing as the result of these patterns of perception, rather than as a symbol processing machine or an emergent phenomenon that reproduces a stable outside world.

One final note. Up to this point, I haven’t really mentioned one of the authors’ major arguments in this text: that Buddhist models of conceptualizing the self and experience are superior to those of Western philosophy. It is this connection to Buddhism that suggested enaction theory to the authors. I didn’t spend much time discussing this connection here because, personally, I think enaction can stand by itself as a theory of mind. However, I’m sure that for many readers, especially in the cognitive science community, this connection could be a deal-killer that discredits the book’s entire argument (hat-tip to Jim Brown for noting this problem).

Free? Language and hidden costs

While traveling to and from New Orleans for the 4Cs conference last week, I got to catch up on my magazines and ran across this article by Wired senior editor Chris Anderson.

In the article, titled “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business,” Anderson argues that improvements in technology have driven down the cost of serving individual web users, meaning that many products and services, both on and offline, can be provided to consumers virtually for free.

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is "free to air," and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don't charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They're not selling papers and magazines to readers, they're selling readers to advertisers. It's a three-way market.

In a sense, what the Web represents is the extension of the media business model to industries of all sorts.

The way this works out in most instances is that companies provide services to users for little or no cost, and then make their money using one of the following models:

• “Freemium” – What’s free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version.
• Advertising – What’s free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone.
• Cross-subsidies – What’s free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another.
• Zero marginal cost – What’s free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.
• Labor exchange – What’s free: Web sites and services. Free to whom: all users, since the act of using these sites and services actually creates something of value.
• Gift economy – What’s free: the whole enchilada, be it open source software or user-generated content. Free to whom: everyone.

While I think this list is helpful, and I agree with Anderson that the internet has created interesting new business models, I was a little put off by some of his examples.

Consider this sidebar on Ryanair’s low-cost flights around Europe. Anderson explains that the airline can sell tickets for $20 even when the flight costs them $70 per passenger because the difference can be made up by selling premiums such as food or the ability to check extra baggage. However, one of the “optional” expenses listed in the article is a $6 credit processing fee. While Anderson presents this fee as an extra, as if consumers could choose to pay it, it seems to me to be a hidden cost—an example of “Gotcha!” capitalism—rather than a optional service.

Similarly, Anderson’s description of Comcast’s “free” DVRs is a little off. Anderson claims that “Comcast has given about 9 million subscribers free set-top digital video recorders,” and that the company makes it money back by charging users a monthly fee for the box. But Comcast customers can’t keep their equipment, so it’s not quite accurate to say that the DVRs are free. Rather, customers are hit with hidden “installation fees” and have to pay $13 a month for the equipment, which will then be reclaimed by Comcast when the customer moves or cancels their service.

In both these cases, what Anderson is describing as “free” is free in name only. Instead of describing a new business model, in the case of the Comcast DVRs the word ‘free’ seems to be used to mask the true cost of the product. While Anderson’s article is interesting, and he provides a helpful description of the uses of free products in the new economy, I think his failure to be more descriptive in this case somewhat tarnishes the overall argument of the piece.