Far from shunning “shaky footage”, audiences think users’ videos more intimate and authentic than broadcasters’ slick shots, says Claire Wardle of Storyful, a firm that spots and verifies user-generated content. “If they don’t show it, people will go to YouTube to see it.” Journalists covering big news stories are getting better at scouring social networks for sources. And thrusting news firms have tried to outdo their competitors by building systems that encourage readers to submit material to them directly.
Investigative journalists are making better use of amateur sleuths by requesting documents, testimonials and a spare hand. Every journalist needs help shovelling for dirt.
Read more at The Economist
Thursday, May 30
Wednesday, May 29
Technology forecasting
Scorn the latest advances and you risk being left behind, as when Sony kept investing in flat-screen versions of cathode-ray televisions in the 1990s while Samsung piled into liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), and eventually replaced Sony as market leader. Embrace new ideas too early, though, and you may be left with egg on your face, as when General Motors spent more than $1 billion developing hydrogen fuel cells a decade ago, only to see them overtaken by lithium-ion batteries as the preferred power source for electric and hybrid vehicles.
To determine when to proceed with a new technology many managers and engineers employ popular heuristics, some of which are seen as “laws”. The best known is Moore’s law.
In reality, however, such laws are unreliable because progress is rarely smooth. So Ashish Sood of the Goizueta School of Business at Emory University, Atlanta, and his colleagues have come up with their own law, which is explicitly based on the tendency of technology to progress in stops and starts. As the number of competitors in a new field increases, both the size of the steps and the length of the wait for the next step can change.
Their “step and wait” (SAW) model, recently published in Marketing Science, notes that advances in performance are often followed by a waiting period before the next step forward.
Read more at The Economist
To determine when to proceed with a new technology many managers and engineers employ popular heuristics, some of which are seen as “laws”. The best known is Moore’s law.
In reality, however, such laws are unreliable because progress is rarely smooth. So Ashish Sood of the Goizueta School of Business at Emory University, Atlanta, and his colleagues have come up with their own law, which is explicitly based on the tendency of technology to progress in stops and starts. As the number of competitors in a new field increases, both the size of the steps and the length of the wait for the next step can change.
Their “step and wait” (SAW) model, recently published in Marketing Science, notes that advances in performance are often followed by a waiting period before the next step forward.
Read more at The Economist
Sunday, May 26
A plan to assess people’s personal characteristics from their Twitter-streams
Modern psychology recognises five dimensions of personality: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. Previous research has shown that people’s scores on these traits can, indeed, predict what they purchase. Extroverts are more likely to respond to an advert for a mobile phone that promises excitement than one that promises convenience or security. They also prefer Coca-Cola to Pepsi and Maybelline cosmetics to Max Factor. Agreeable people, though, tend to prefer Pepsi, and those open to experience prefer Max Factor.
People are, of course, unlikely to want to take personality tests so that marketing departments around the world can intrude even more on their lives than happens already. But Dr Haber thinks he can get around that—at least for users of Twitter. He and his team have developed software that takes streams of “tweets” from this social medium and searches them for words that indicate a tweeter’s personality, values and needs.
For a study published in 2010 by Tal Yarkoni of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Dr Yarkoni recruited a group of bloggers and correlated the frequencies of certain words and categories of word that they used in their blogs with their personality traits, as established by questionnaire.
Some of the relations he found were commonsensical. Extroversion correlated with “bar”, “restaurant” and “crowd”. Neuroticism correlated with “awful”, “lazy” and “depressing”. But there were also unforeseen patterns. Trust (an important component of agreeableness), for example, correlated with “summer”, and co-operativeness (another element of agreeableness) with “unusual”.
Inspired by Dr Yarkoni’s findings, Dr Eben Haber and his team are conducting research of their own, matching word use with two sets of traits not directly related to personality. These are people’s values (things they deem to be good, beneficial and important, such as loyalty, accuracy and self-enhancement) and their needs (things they feel they cannot live without, such as excitement, control or acceptance).
In a test of the new system, Dr Haber analysed three months’ worth of data from 90m users of Twitter. His software was able to parse someone’s presumptive personality reasonably well from just 50 tweets, and very well indeed from 200.
Read more at The Economist
For a study published in 2010 by Tal Yarkoni of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Dr Yarkoni recruited a group of bloggers and correlated the frequencies of certain words and categories of word that they used in their blogs with their personality traits, as established by questionnaire.
Some of the relations he found were commonsensical. Extroversion correlated with “bar”, “restaurant” and “crowd”. Neuroticism correlated with “awful”, “lazy” and “depressing”. But there were also unforeseen patterns. Trust (an important component of agreeableness), for example, correlated with “summer”, and co-operativeness (another element of agreeableness) with “unusual”.
Inspired by Dr Yarkoni’s findings, Dr Eben Haber and his team are conducting research of their own, matching word use with two sets of traits not directly related to personality. These are people’s values (things they deem to be good, beneficial and important, such as loyalty, accuracy and self-enhancement) and their needs (things they feel they cannot live without, such as excitement, control or acceptance).
In a test of the new system, Dr Haber analysed three months’ worth of data from 90m users of Twitter. His software was able to parse someone’s presumptive personality reasonably well from just 50 tweets, and very well indeed from 200.
Read more at The Economist
Video games Battle of the boxes
VIDEO games are big money-spinners. According to DFC Intelligence, a market-research firm, the industry was worth almost $80 billion in 2012 (combining software, gaming revenue and devices), or roughly the same as the film industry’s takings. Although gaming on smartphones, tablets and social-networking sites is growing fast, dedicated games consoles still dominate the business.
Read more at the Economist
Read more at the Economist
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