Ok, the headline is a lie. $280 Billion, roughly 2% of US GDP wasn’t lost by the US.
The truth is that it is the Swiss who spent 2% of their GDP trying to “support” their currency. Central bankers like most policy makers are horrible traders. The fact they play with tax payers money only makes it easier for them to act recklessly. The UK did something similar when the pound fell out of the ERM in 1992.
As widely speculated previously on the pages of this blog, the SNB (Swiss National Bank) confirmed earlier it has lost billions of euros due to currency speculation in attempting to keep the CHF low. As the FT reports: “The Swiss National Bank on Wednesday revealed the cost of its massive foreign exchange interventions to restrain the value of the franc, with losses of more than SFr14bn ($13.3bn, €10.4bn) in the first half of this year.” Following such a massive losses for the small country (nearly 2% of GDP) it was only a matter of time before the other 26 Swiss cantons, which share in the profits and losses of the SNB, said enough. “The SNB said last month it had stopped intervention…more
If you build or work with brands or have an online site that involves community or sharing this Google 1 hour video is a must watch. Reputation is brand, it is how other percieve things, people and everything else. These value judgements created and managed by others are powerful.
Learn how people treat each other, build reputation, rob each other, slander lie cheat or create genuine value for others with these systems.
Human behaviour structured into voting, liking, karma etc. is fascinating. The context determines the correct tools to use. Choose carefully your online business, brand and customers belief about you is at stake.
Some basic anthropology here, put together in a nice slideshow with how social networks operate. Social networks aren’t new, just the tools that allow them to be visible to others and the capacity to support more of them. Facebook et. al act as amplifiers for our capacities to maintain ties and have those ties visible. Some issues presented in this great slideshow:
This is a great video about the impact of creative solutions by thinking about experience and the small stuff. Design thinking applied with humour and really understanding user context.
The world isn’t linear. Find the small things that matter, for they are the levers that can move the world.
You sell, program, design, create, lead, manage etc.
If you are American the first thing you do when meeting someone is ask what they do. It is so ingrained in the culture we get weirded out when someone appears to not care or talks of art, politics etc.
I challenge you to get to really know someone at the next introduction. Ask them, “Why do you what you do?” You may have to ask a few times. If a person has a great internal drive or works for a company with real vision, you should hear an inspiring and inspired answer.
The World Bank has a division called Doing Business. For my money, they are the true rock stars of the development and aid world. Crisis response gets the celebrities and the donor feel good factor, but helping small entrepreneurs and government bureaucracy run better is what mitigates the crises in the first place. This team helps people, help themselves.
For example if there are good building standards actually followed with proper permits, fewer people get hurt in earthquakes and typhoons. If more people have stable, safe incomes via small companies that are registered, they are more resilient to crises of many forms, including localized crop failure, disease and other hazards and vicissitudes of life.
Getting property registered, safer jobs for people and making more small companies means better bureaucracy and streamlined procedures. Pulling more of the black economy into the formal sector is better for everyone in the long run. This means making govt better. Doing Business helps this by tracking procedures costs and other aspects of doing business.
By letting countries better understand their own policies and compare them with best practice they can implement reforms. Countries are aware, that best practices in these areas is good for them and for foreign investment.
If you are interested in development, investment or understanding the revolution going on in the frontier markets and developing world, read this clear and concise summary of what is going on in East Africa as an example. Doing Business 2010 East Africa
Below are some excerpted graphs, summing it all up. It is exciting stuff for us all as small businesses grow, jobs, wealth and health get created, GDP grows, education typically increases and most quality of life indicators go up. I am big fan of this approach and working on a wiki based approach to the World Bank work for individual property & dead capital called Property Wiki
Had a few conversations recently about corporate strategy and the power of narrative, shared stories which allow leaders to deliver amazing things, vision statements to use parlance du jour. Culturally shared narrative in companies allows people to align behind a vision and understand their role in being a part of something greater than themselves.
Art history is all about studying narrative and context of cultural remains. Here is an excerpt from Simon Shama’s Power of Art Series on Bernini. I would highly recommend watching the series on Netflix etc. Amazing stuff, makes me miss my Art History classes.
The ability to inspire to greatness in physical output, organization, or raw creative genius in others is a powerful skill.
While researching an article I am writing for fun on non-transitive games, business strategy and value I came across the fact that a multi-million dollar art dispute was resolved using rock papers scissors (RPS). How cool is that?
My wife and I use RPS technology for dispute resolution all the time, usually 2 out of 3 resolves most issues unless there is an escalation to 3 out of 5 .
From the RPS Wikipedia article: When Takashi Hashiyama, CEO of a Japanese television equipment manufacturer, decided to auction off the collection of impressionist paintings owned by his corporation, including works by Cézanne, Picasso, and van Gogh, he contacted two leading U.S. auction houses, Christie’s International and Sotheby’sHoldings, seeking their proposals on how they would bring the collection to the market as well as how they would maximize the profits from the sale. Both firms made elaborate proposals, but neither was persuasive enough to get Hashiyama’s business. Unwilling to split
up the collection into separate auctions, Hashiyama asked the firms to decide between themselves who would hold the auction, which included Cézanne’s “Large Trees Under the Jas de Bouffan”, worth $12–16 million.
The houses were unable to reach a decision. Hashiyama told the two firms to play rock-paper-scissors to decide who would get the rights to the auction, explaining that “it probably looks strange to others, but I believe this is the b
est way to decide between two things which are equally good”.
The auction houses had a weekend to come up with a choice of
move. Christie’s went to the 11-year-old twin daughters of an employee, who suggested “scissors” because “Everybody expects you to choose ‘rock’.” Sotheby’s said that they treated it as a game of chance and had no particular strategy for the game, but went with “paper”.[8]
Christie’s won the match, with millions of dollars of commission for the auction house.
Large Trees Under the Jas de Bouffansold for $11,776,000 at Christie’s.[7]
The pharmaceutical industry has gone through a bit of a marketing revolution in the US over the last 15 years where they got to enlist & enroll patients with advertising sometimes to questionable effect.
Chips waiting to go onto pills
Now feedback is going to start happening. The era of one drug fits all business model is going to be seriously challenged. Genetic screening related to efficacy and live individual pharma-efficacy are going to rise up very fast.
Studies involving tissues and the ever changing macro-biome of individuals will become more common. These studies will provide greater and more transparent context to a treatments efficacy than was ever seen before.
When a-prior genetics and context are tied with drug reactions and efficacy one can expect a raft of changes to both dosages and treatment suggestions. This will be fantastic for patients and most likely have a “grey” period of off-label activity either in the US or other jurisdictions. This new flood of information will also cause confusion and even more greatly potentially alter the doctor patient power balance information asymmetry due to the patients greater access to information and motivations to get things right.
By off label, I mean using a screening test to determine amounts and go/no go decisions for medications. A passive test while not explicitly off label will provide information that alters a typical course of therapy. Eventually this information will most likely mean smaller but more effectively targetted drug markets.
Here is one of the bio-physical tools that will help this. A pill with a chip in it that will tie-pharmaco-kinetics to body responses in real-time. All I can say is wow. The pharma industry will probably not notice this as it will take a few years to have impact and a lot of the activity may happen outside of the US in more progressive and experimental jurisdictions.
The Competitive dynamics between various therapies and medications may mean an increase in fights for market share and eventually big-pharma will be arguing for genetic test kits to arm their patients with. Large standardised pharmacodynamic info assays will probably be matched against a whole host of therapies and become bolt on additions to standard genomic screenings. They will after all, only be software and bio-informatics stuck onto existing data sets of patients.
The FDA seems to be in a “close your eyes and make it go away” state of mind in regards to off the shelf genomics testing, but this won’t stop this revolutionary technology from seeping into the rest of the world.
The Miral (mi-ral) Scale measurs how many people at a given time share an idea. As the world becomes more connected and shares experience the global concepts of hive mind and connected become more relevant. The social graph as expressed by Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook is a concept of a floating social network, but hasn’t been quantified or grounded. The human experience is becoming a ever greater more about shared and linked experience. Concepts that reside in human consciousness have been referred to as Memes, a themetic expansion of the concept of the gene from biology, put forth by Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene. Memes spread via culture and shared experience. The Miral Scale = Memes * Humane species hive mind When a virus spreads through a host species it is called viral. The concept of the miral scale is that memes spread through the human species and are said to be Miral. The Miral scale measures the number people who have a specific concept in their mind at a certain time.
Miral spread
meme concepts are granular and can be infinitely large, small or complex. They can be visual, audio, conceptual, tonal etc. The only important component is that a meme is present and can be expressed or experienced and therefore spread. Importantly a person may or may not have the consciousness of carrying the meme.
Memes can be described in simple or complex fashion. Red cube, cube and green cube are 3 different memes which may register with the viewer as unique. In the same way the exposure to Lima beans may be associated with a physical response associated with the visual que of a Lima bean. Thus the Lima Bean can be good, bad, recognized or un-recognized. This is an example of a compound meme. Memetic concepts can link or radiate from a central concept in a infinite variety.
The Miral Scale
The Miral scale ranges from 0-10 and is logarithmic ranging from 0 to the number of conscious members of the species. Thus Miral scale ranking circa 2010 would look something like the following table:
Miral level
0.0
1.2
2.0
3.0
4.0
5.0
6.0
7.0
8.0
9.0
10.0
Meme carriers
0
7
68
680
6,800
68,000
680,000
6,800,000
68 million
680 million
6.8 billion
The Miral scale changes as a function of the size of the species. For example it is estimated that there were 1 billion people alive in 1800. Thus the high end of the scale 10.0 would have equated to 1 billion people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
A meme’s impact on the Miral scale changes overtime
New concepts and ideas arrive, fads explode, old cultures and ways of thinking die with those cultures and people who carried them or are forgotten from living memory. Artifacts may bring them back. Facebook supposedly has 500m members. If one assumes each is a unique person and that for every member of Facebook there is another person who is aware that Facebook is a website. Then there are an estimated 1 billion Facebook is a website meme carriers, putting Facebook at 9.17 on the Miral Scale. It is estimated 116 million people have registered for Friendster, assuming a 2:1 awareness to registration ratio gives it a Miral scale of 8.69. Assuming 200 Million MySpace registrations and a 2:1 awareness factor yields a Miral Scale rank of 8.77. Younger fast growing services such as Foursquare are estimated to have just north of 1 million users. Assuming a 2:1 awareness to user ration would give it a Miral scale rank of 6.47.
Service
Estimated users
Ratio of user:meme awareness
Miral scale
Facebook
500m
2:1
9.17
MySpace
200m
2:1
8.69
Friendster
116m
2:1
8.77
FourSquare
1
2:1
6.47
A brand is an example of commercial culture hacking to increase the brand’s Miral Scale
It is easy to imagine that the biggest brands have some of the largest Miral scale rankings, Coke for example is almost a human universal in terms of its logo. Anthropologists and sociologists can point to a few human universals such as the relationship of mother, father etc. that may be titled differently but would be considered 9.99 on the Miral Scale as meme or concept held as human universals.
Memes, bits & pixels
Different technologies, cultural expressions, idioms, beliefs and traditions all rise and fall over time. Meme’s can exist within or beyond a language construct, they can be experiential. For example various groups hearing a famous piece of music such as Beethoven’s 9 symphony may have recall it and be able to distinguish it from other “classical” music, but may not be able to label it. Meme’s transcend linguistic labels but are typically expressed using language. Written meme’s or experiences can be exclusively shared within the domain of linguistic expression. Reading about a scene in the Harry Potter series can be considered distinct or related to the visual expression, depending on how one wishes to define the meme. Memes work in a similar fashion to the concept of the Bit or pixel in computing. The bit or pixel is a finite and exact thing, which appears to have little value outside of a multitude of bits and pixels. Bits and pixels in context allow for a multitude of constructs and expressions. These absolute ideas such as bits, pixels and memes posses significant importance. Memes are not static or absolute, but vary over time. The Miral scales ebbs and flows and may disappear altogether only to reappear via the experience or discovery of old cultural artifacts, new expressions or the synthesis of new ideas. History is by definition the slowly fading memetic stream. History rediscovered rebirths old memes increasing the Miral scale.
MemeQ
The human mind being finite has a potential memetic carrying capacity which is probably a function of both the memory and the ability to synthesize and store memories dynamically in new contexts. One could argue that there is probably a normative memetic carrying capacity similar to an IQ, a memeQ if you will that varies with developmental and physical potentials achieved.
The concept of the Hive mind is referred to when sci-fi writers or others like to discuss a collective consciousness. Connectedness is assumed to have a lot to do with intelligence, but most cognitive scientists agree we are far away from a truly generalized theory of intelligence. The miral scale only indicates points of memetic awareness and nothing else. That being said, If one assume the normative level of the memeQ to be set at 100 per individual, then the Species has a memeQ storage capacity of 100*6.8 billion or a hive mind capacity of 680 billion memeQ’s in 2010. It can of course be argued the definition specious metric of memeQ is tautological, nonetheless it is a starting point for a debate. There is no way to measure the memeQ of an individual at this point and no particular way to extract or relate it to other general theories of intelligence, memory, creativity or cognition in general.
MemeQ potentials
Intelligence like many human attributes is a genetic potential. That potential is realized within its range relative to the nutrition, education, support and even stimulus of the environment around in which the individual develops. Lack of micro-nutrients such as iodine for example can lead to the loss of 10-15 IQ points. Growing up in a household with a smaller vocabulary has been shown to produce children who have smaller vocabularies. Why vocabulary size and intelligence aren’t known to be correlated with memetic potential, it may be indicative of the fact that human miral capacity is potential itself which has a developmental range for each individual.
Why should anyone care about a Miral Scale or memetic potentials.
To paraphrase Winston Churchill, if the Empires of the future are the empires of the mind, then understanding memetic spread and capacity within groups will be important. Marketing, education, culture, and even what some may consider the march of human progress is most likely about developing and honing the memetic potential of individuals and groups. Ignorance, unrealized capacity and lost opportunity at the individual level is more and more about lost opportunity for the group. The next great discovery in medicine, energy, law or culture is inevitably assumed to be greater when shared by everyone, understanding how memes spread, are managed and evolve will be one of the keys to the Empires of the present and the future.
Excel tool for expressing a Miral scale estimate.
Free Excel tool for calculating a meme score. Here is a free excel tool for converting a Miral rank to the number of people estimated to carry the meme.miral calculator
I think these could be used in HR, branding, innovation and many aspects of process management involving people. software makes this possible.
If applied in a thoughtful manner, they could be used for super-ordinate tasks or complex projects.
Examples of Psychological Motivators
Fun: can change behavior for the better (examples at thefuntheory.com)
Sequencing: sequential goal development. Break things down into goals or challenges. Status: ability to increase your standing among people. Scarcity: we infer value in something that has limited availability or is promoted as being scarce. When you see supplies are low, you are encouraged to take action. Examples: limited tickets left, limited amount of points to allocate, limit amount of characters, etc. The more of an incomplete picture you see, the more you want to see the rest of the image. Feedback loop: we are engaged by situations where we see our actions modify subsequent results. Examples: visual search with automatic reload. Delighters: we remember and respond favorably to unexpected and playful pleasures.
Set completion: the closer our collection is to being complete the higher our desire to get a complete set of items. Ownership bias: we value a good or service more once our property right to it has been established. People want to ensure representations of you are accurate. Examples: Foursquare mayorship. Social proof: people tend to follow the lead of others when they don’t know what they should do. Examples: Digg votes, Outlook campaign. Recognition over recall: do not ask to recall things, let people recognize through visual presentations.
These principles are going to be available as a card set of 50 insights that can be used as an easy reference and brainstorming tool. Each card describes one insight into human behavior and suggests ways to apply this to the design of Web sites, Web apps, and software applications. Learn more at Get Mental Notes.
A fun presentation on behavioural design. I especially like the Tao Te Ching quote: “We mold clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness that makes it useful.”
Technology is pretty fun in how it expands and stretches concepts.
Do you remember the first time you had to invite your “friends” to connect on Facebook? Then Friending became a verb. Socially we each have a channel capacity to handle a certain number of relationships at varying degrees of intensity, variants on the Dunbar concept. Nobody really has +200 friends in the old socially contextual meaning of the word. Mobile phones indicate we typically have 3-5 speed dial friends and then our Social Fat tails kick in. Here is a little hint: friends would show up on the weekend to help you move your couch or watch your kids for awhile if you asked.
The same elastic semantic challenge is now posed by the term “app” short for applications. The i-phone has over 100k apps, android north of 50k. Applications used to be based mostly around data manipulation, selection and then representation of data with deep feature sets to really tweak things. Deep feature sets meant one could ever more fine tune, their data creations, manipulations or experiences.
Rise of the Shallow Feature set app. Shift to shallow feature sets for partial attention devices and environments.
Now “apps” as presented by smart phone environments are more about rich content containers. These app containers are designed to produce a degree of boundedness and familiairity of the content within the context of the device or environment in which they are being viewed and experienced. The feature sets as represented by the apps are limited and smaller than deep apps on the desktop. Most people only experience deep apps via MS Office or profession specific tools such as In-design, Flash, CAD or some other high end tool used in their profession.
Mobile apps are shallow applications (consider them as limited menu function sets). Smaller devices used in time crunched environments such as glancing at a phone mean smaller less focused dives into manipulation, ie. the rise of the shallow app. Nobody tweaks a 3rd level deep graphic in a spreadsheet on a phone or edits a deeply recursive C++ routine on a hand held device, that is too deep for the glance based partial attention user environment and limited form factors of these devices.
It is interesting to see the application label stretched to include content presentation more than ever before and ditch the deep feature sets. The app is taking a bit of mindshare from the browser, the original shallow feature set representation tool using mostly a forward and backward button combined with hyperlinks. The app on the mobile has to be a shallow appliction. Mobiles are not deep application device substitutes. I-pads and tablet applications will most likely be deeper than mobile apps, but shallower than desktop apps. The office type suites may work on a tablet/pad but don’t plan on going deep with them.
Microsoft should fear the rise of the Shallow app, on smart phones and browsers. The only justification for operating systems lock in is the office suite with its ubiquity, deep feature set and behavioral lock in due to deep user familiarity. The sunk cost of years spent learning a deep feature set is probably Microsoft’s greatest off balance sheet asset. Many users will find they no longer need a desktop as they don’t need or use deep apps.
New interfaces and shifting the deep feature set in office could be costly to Microsoft if it means users will have to start out at learning things all over again. Often when this happens customers shift products or explore other venues as they start learning all over again, starting with the shallow feature set.
Shallow apps in shallow use environments won’t replace desktops or deep apps on desktops, but they will make things richer and more interesting. For those who don’t need deep apps, the desktop is dated. Tell your friends
I never thought writing about math could be so fascinating on so many levels, history, drama, despair and the end beauty of the logic in the final solution as the Equation that couldn’t be solved.
For my designer & engineer & biophyscisist friends, I would urge studying constructal theory which recieves far too little attention but is more important than most static visualizations of numbers in processes found in nature. It is deep and profound in its simplicity and possesses nuance which has yet to be discovered in many areas science, design and engineering.
Math is one gateway to seeing the deep quiet sublime in nature.
Here is a great video on the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. I found this via one of the best psychology and economic blogs out there, Farnam Street. Yes that is a big endorsement for a very important resource.
The video above highlights the management skills and style of shifting between extrinsic and intrisic motivations using the simple analogy of trying to pay your mother-in-law $1,000 for a terrific holiday dinner in front of everyone. By shifting her labors from an intrinsic to an extrinsic motivated environment you have shifted and cheapened the outcome.
Why is knowing if your group/brand/team is intrinsically or extrinsically motivated important?
Intrinsic motivation is all around, in good will, craftsmanship, professionalism (pride in work not pay), relationships, artistry and maintenance of cultures of goodwill and comraderie.
The social era of software may well be killed if the shift to extrinsic motivators isn’t handled very carefully. Sometimes referred to as “selling out”. etc. Shifting a behaviour, culture or belief system from intrinsic motivation to extrinsic motivation can kill a culture, company or brand.
On the other hand simple extrinsic or transactionional environments may be difficult to shift to “trust” or belief based intrinsic environments.
Cultures, companies and brands can’t simply toggle between one type of motivation and another, managing, leading or maintaining consistency in belief systems is critical to stability. Sub-cultures (the coders, creatives, designers, teachers etc.) who are intrinsically motivated may move on if they feel their core group is now populated or motivated by sell-outs.
This isn’t an anti-capitalist rant, but rather an acknowledgement that as movements, groups, brands and organizations shift from either intrinsic to extrinsic motivations, change happens and isn’t easily undone. Among the best companies there is a big difference in culture between individuals seeking to be the best paid and be their best. The outcomes are not mutually exclusive, but I would argue one is more sustainable than the other and builds a higher quality organization.
If you are contemplating a culture change for your company, product, , brand or team, firstly know thyself and consider what going to happen when as many bands put it, “when did it become more about the money than the music?“
Globally the last 10 years have been very good for us. When I say us, I mean it like an anthropologist. We are more educated, longer lived and wealthier than we have ever been as a species, oh and there are more of us. So tell the Malthusians and Erlich fans to stuff it, so far so good. There are risks out there, but so far capitalism and the industrial revolution have been delivering the goods for everyone. There are very few parts of the planet that aren’t better off than they were 50 years ago. I am a big believer in progress and think that we can overcome most obstacles, even those we create for ourselves wether they be political, economic or environmental. This isn’t to say progress is easy or given, but rather to say that it is possible.
The age of innovation and the era of progress is accelerating. Yes there is massive debt and there will be period of regression and pain, but things are moving forward and becoming more civilized all the time. We are all developing nations.
Check out the sweet new worldbank data collection that is online and available for mashups.
Open data allows for better management and benchmarking. The worldbank helps to produce a dashboard of human development.
Measure it before you can manage it. Get a baseline and then improve it. Measure twice, cut once. Here is an article about Mobile Metrix using Cellphones in the emerging world to survey they poor and understand them quantitatively and qualitatively better.
This is great for a few reasons. It shows innovation and technology in the private sector helping to quantify the less quantified. The story also highlights the positive externalities and network effects of cellphones and ambient information waiting to be captured.
These kinds of metrics are the start of what is required for really understanding what is going on in many poor areas. Listening, measuring, experimenting and iterating are all keys to improving whether in the public or private sectors serving the bottom of the pyramid.
My wife and I went to visit the incredible Barnes Art Collection in Philadelphia over the weekend. Too much mawkish Renoir for me, but some incredible Matisse and Van Gogh etc. The Barnes collection is the best I have ever seen in terms quality to quantity ratio for modern 1860-1930 art. Truly outstanding, only lacking a sample of the out of fashion pre-raphaelites from the period.
I am an Art geek. As a grad student in Paris, my walking commute used to take me by the IM pei pyramid at the Louvre in the mornings & evenings with smokes, MBA classes and coffee in the afternoon. I was a happy lad.
Visitors to Paris would politely suffer my personal “Art talks and walks” through out the city. I customized a tour for my twin brother focusing on the idealized female nude form (always a big hit).
Barnes Collection, The Jewel box
The Barnes collection, location and building in which it sits are effectively nothing more than an overstuffed and incredible jewel box.
Due to the small size of the facility and the high quality of the collection, reservations must be made in advance. This limitation is definitely worth it. A trip to the MOMA or the Metropolitan museums in New York can all too often possess the charm of reading ads on the inside of a packed F train subway in August. The experience is all armpits, attitude and vapid stares,withered in heat and sticky humanity.
A small intimate setting like the Barnes with a dedicated and less check-box type tourist is really something. Definitely worth a second and 3rd look as it is such an incredible collection as to be overwhelming during a single visit.
I am a huge fan of the era modernist era as it was such a fascinating period in which the perceptions of how the West sees itself in the (technical, political and natural world) iterated so rapidly. The industrial revolution had ushered in incredible wealth and prosperity in a frenzy, that really hasn’t been seen since. Those of you who just waited in line for i-pads, please reserve judgement with and seek greater objectivity.
From 1865 to 1914 humanity seemed on an ever faster roller coaster of political, technical and scientific improvement and improvisation that hasn’t been seen since. The artists of that period fought to keep up. Heck the US even got a little crazy, loosened the old bowler hat and finally let women have the vote in 1920, something the Swiss got around to in 1974.
People change their opinions and beliefs over time. Cultures change over time. If you visited your own country in 1950, you would feel like you had travelled to another culture as beliefs, behavior and social norms would be slightly different, a bit like an American waking up in Canada.
According to this chart as individuals our political identity changes with time in a fairly standard path. I haven’t looked deeply at the data and source OK Trends, but it may bear further analysis especially as countries median age increases. China for example is currently the fastest aging country in the world.
Who were you at age 18, where are you now? Everyone changes, nothing is fixed.
The Danish have a saying from the 60′s that fits this chart.
If you aren’t a communist when you are young, you don’t have a heart. If you aren’t a capitalist by your 30′s, you don’t have a head.
People (behaviour), Technology and Economics have been areas of life focus for me since I can remember. Communication, context and behaviour are another way of expressing these things. Economics is more about behaviour than numbers, most economists just don’t want to admit it yet.
The technologies that have most changed us most since 1989 (end of the cold war) are communication based. Affordable jet travel, bio-medical etc. have paled in the face of communication’s impact. As a species we learn faster, do things more efficiently, adapt and respond more rapidly all due to improved communication, this includes document creation and sharing as media.
Marketing, creating change, promoting safety are all about communication. Typically the originators of communication, either a marketing agency, govt. or person can only reach their direct network to affect changes in state, belief or behavior.
Successful communication is viral. It is something so compelling I will share it with you. Packaging communication is one of the major industries to grow as more and more of us seek to change the knowledge, beliefs and behaviours of others.
How does one package communication to make it viral.
Here are some tips from pennsylvania study with the bold sections lifted from the text of the Source document Social Transmission & viral culture:
As Sperber (1996) notes, “to explain culture…is to explain why and how some ideas happen to be contagious”
the survival and propagation of cultural items depends on their fit with shared psychological processes (Heath, Bell, and Sternberg 2001; Kashima 2008 Schaller and Crandall 2004).
clear utility in the economic sense because they provides people with information that improves their lives.
because useful information has social exchange value (Homans 1958), sharing it may encourage reciprocity (Fehr, Kirchsteiger, Riedl 1998) or be driven by people’s desire to look good or self-enhance (Wojnicki and Godes 2008).
sharing emotional content with others, people can clarify that ambiguity and gain deeper understanding of how they feel (Rime, Mesquita, Philippot, and Boca 1991).
to the extent that emotional material challenges people’s beliefs or way of seeing the world, they may share it with others to help them cope or reduce feelings of dissonance (Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 1956). Third, sharing emotional content with others can strengthen social bonds and deepen social connections (Peters and Kashima 2007).
The Emotion of Awe is strong and appears to require the spread of the context of the awe creating meme
Surprise. surprise is not awe, but rather new information in a fresh context or something highly counter intuitive. Malcolm Gladwell books are about surprise.
Valence (or shared emotional state). Valence is used to share an emotion or state, consider LOL cats or stories.
useful articles are more likely to be viral.
This specific study used New York times articles email forwards for research.
The Miral scale for meme quakes and states.
I consider a successful meme to possess the atrribute of being miral i.e. likely to be passed on. Miral pro-nounced like viral is my created word. Pass it on.
The Miral scale
Each meme has a miral score from 0 inferring it is effectively in stasis where effectively no one possesses or considers the meme to 10 in which case everyone possesses the meme. Both extreme states are absolutes, but important in framing the argument. Old books that forgotten and unread, may possess ancient memes with a 0 miral factor as do new ideas yet unthunk. Dead memes are like ancient bacterial spores that can spring back to life at a moments notice. Archaeology is a form of miral mining.
To be useful the miral scale ranges from 0 to 10, 10 being the entire human population, namely the memetic substrate and the scale is logrithmic similar to the richter scale. Thus a memequake or rapidly spreading meme growing by a factor of 10 in the human population increases by a factor of 1.
A meme with a miral factor of 10 encompasses 7 billion people. A meme with a miral factor of 9 is shared by 700 million people and 8 by 70 million people etc.
Marketing is the business of miral creation and memetic packaging for maximum miral amplification to induce a state change in belief that changes behaviour. Marketing = Heard it> Believed it > bought it.
My wife and I use RPS technology for dispute resolution all the time, usually 2 out of 3 resolves most issues unless there is an escalation to 3 out of 5 
.
