Syriana

Watched Syriana this weekend w/ (no surprise) Rourke & Jen. I momentarily forgot my defenses for this movie, and had fairly high and defined expectations for it. Fortunately, I wasn't let down.

I was going to start by talking about how this movie, being directed by Stephan Gaghan, was exactly what one would expect, etc., lending a certain pretentious undertone to this blog entry (obviously everyone knows who Gaghan is and what to expect from him, right?). But as with most entries, I don't know this crap off the top of my head. I look it up on the web. That's really one of the main points of this whole blogging thing. By committing these thoughts to print, I need to actually go look up names, facts, data, etc. This helps save me from accidentally being a con man (a.k.a liar) when speaking of this stuff in casual conversation. (Okay, not really "accidentally" since this stuff is not really out of my control. After all, the words are coming out of my mouth. Let's just say when I verbalize stuff, assumption turns into fact with frightening ease. Rourke and Greg can sympathize, I'm sure.)

One short review in the New York Times for Syriana described it as very complex and requiring concentration to follow. I'm glad I was forewarned, because that was definitely true. In some masochistic way, we were fortunate that we were stuck sitting up in the absolute front wrong craning out necks upwards, because it was impossible not to pay attention with the screen in-your-face that way and with one's neck aching.

Stephen Gaghan directed and wrote this movie, and also wrote Traffic, which was very similar and set my expectations for this movie. I expected a thoughtful complex plot where characters in very separate positions influence each other and create a network of moral ambiguity. I got exactly what I expected (perhaps a little, but not much, more and definitely not less). Syriana is loosely based on the book See No Evil written by ex-CIA operative Robert Baer. George Clooney's character is based on Baer and his experiences. The story itself is really perhaps only inspired by the book (I haven't read it) since Gaghan has a point he's trying to get across.

There are many characters, each in their own scenario. They only intersect through the viewer and through the message of the movie. Some of them meet each other; some of them are aware of each others existence; some of them never meet and are never aware of the way their lives intersect.

What is this message? Well, something morally wrong, almost evil has definitely happened. Something is amiss in this world we live in. But, there is no evil conspiracy, no cabal of greedy and evil men plots the fate of the world and the demise of goodness. Rather, the actors are all basically good, basically trying to do what they think is right. However, in the pursuit of their individual interests and beliefs, they may be a little greedy (but I emphasize, little, no more than the extent any of us would accept as being "human nature") and are willing to be a little amoral (amoral in that they are willing to sacrifice small amounts of morality in pursuit of perceived higher goals. They're not trying to be immoral, just willing to set certain notions aside.) Some characters are greedier than others, but none are even close to evil. The problem is, the network effect of their individual actions serve to combine their individual lapses into something that is gigantically wrong.

Is it true? Well, I take it as a work of fiction (although See No Evil is supposedly true events). Just because it looks like and draws from current events doesn't mean it has any bearing on actual events or the state of the real world.

What's interesting to me, is that feels plausible. From an economic game theory point of view, or at least from the education I've had on the topic, conspiracies are fundamentally unstable. They collapse easily because the players all can gain individual advantage by defecting (e.g. breaking the conspiracy). Thus, while non-economic factors might hold things together for awhile (economic theory doesn't necessarily say how long a conspiracy might last), it only takes one defector at one point in time to collapse the whole thing. Thus, collapse is inevitable.

While the scenario posed in Syriana is the kind of outcome that one might attribute to some evil/greedy global conspiracy, there is no such mechanism here. Rather, it is emergent behavior based on individual parties who independently act in a manner consistent with generally (not perfectly) moral economic self-interest. There are bad events and bad outcomes without bad guys.

Anyway, I really liked this movie and highly recommend it.

Recently Watched Anime (Updated 12/19)

Updated 12/19: Solty Rei, not that good. Traumend, getting even better.

Decided to collate a bunch of the first (or sometimes first 3) eps of (mostly) recently aired stuff I've sampled in the last couple of weeks. No really horrible shows in this list, although since there really is so much stuff out there, I generally filter out stuff based matching description to my preferences before watching even a single episode.

For the subscribable stuff, I'd probably rank as:
Rozen Maiden Traumend > Mushishi > Blood+ > Black Cat > Solty Rei

Parappa the Rapper
Sony paid big bucks to have this animated by Production I.G. and J.C. Staff, probably the priciest production one could get for a TV show. Somewhat unusual since Parappa has a very simple visual style. Show is really trippy. Probably not watchable in a 26-episode stretch, but an isolated episode here and there could be strangely amusing. Enjoyed the one ep. mostly from it's strangeness, not really motivated to see more.

Black Cat
Big name animated form of popular Shounen Jump manga, bearing all the earmarks of having been in SJ (like Bleach or Naruto). Interesting combination of dark + cute in a shounen setting. More brooding, less machismo compared to Bleach and thus much more watchable. Seen first 3 eps, motivated to subscribe and see more.

Blood+
Rebirth of the "multimedia extravaganza" release of the same name (movie+game+printed materials+???) from several years ago. Apparently the franchise is not dead. Very high production value with a coherent story that predates the events in the movie (never played the game so I can't compare to that). Interesting story and high production value makes it quite watchable. Ranks somewhat higher than Black cat. Seen the first 3 eps, motivated to subscribe and see more.

Mushishi
Recommendation from Kristina and Zhang (turns out the manga is like, Kristina's all time most favorite or something like that). Had a very strange "wow" factor. The production values are high, but the visuals, music, dialogue, story, and characters are very subdued. At the same time, it was very gripping and emotionally evocative somehow. The episode didn't drag at all, instead the time passed very quickly event though not a lot of "stuff" happened. It was quite amazing actually. Seen the first ep, motivated to subscribe and see more.

Rozen Maiden Traumend
Sequel to Rozen Maiden, a surprisingly good show in a genre that I usually disdain. Kid gets involved with a group of sentient female dolls (e.g. 8 inches tall). In the original, there was an overarching plot, but it doesn't reach fruition. Instead, the show was driven by the interesting characters and their interaction (and was good because of it). The sequel, so far, is equally strong. The characters are still the main point, but since we're spared some of the startup cost of introduction (since we know them from the previous series), plot starts to play a heavier role.

This show really gets stronger as the eps. proceed. For example, they introduce Kanariya, one of the new dolls, who is pretty saccharine and ditzy and would have been quite annoying, except that her personality characteristics are used by the plot to set up a very serious and dramatic point that seems to set the tone for the entire series. I can't emphasize enough how interesting and amusing the character interaction is. The contrasting use of cute and serious is perhaps one of the defining traits of anime in general, and is quite well executed in this show.

Seen the first 6 eps, motivated to subscribe and see more.

Solty Rei
Most recent Gonzo (e.g. Blue Sub #6, Last Exile) series featuring, as expected, an eye-candy mix of 2D and 3D CG graphics. Seems to be set up as a kind of cyberpunk cop/bounty hunter story. Hard boiled bounty hunter (Roy) lost his daughter in some kind of horrific calamity called the Blast Fall ~10 years ago. He meets up with some kind of powerful robot in the form of a girl who appears the same age as his daughter would be. Hopefully this setup means less potential for dubious fan service. First ep was quite entertaining, but very much a "dive-right-in" kind of introduction, so it will take a few more episodes to determine if it's worth watching to completion.

Eps 2 and 3 should start some kind of story but unfortunately, gets caught up in some genre confusion. So Solty, the mysterious robot girl, becomes like a surrogate daughter for Roy, the widower bounty hunter (although there's some "drama" because he's too hard boiled and caught up in the loss of his real daughter to easily accept her). Coincidentally, the president of the bounty-hunter agency, where he gets work, is an attractive widow (Miranda) with a daughter (Kasha) and lives right next door to him. For some reason, Miranda is totally taken with Solty, wants to treat her as a second child, but presses Roy to be the one to adopt her. Roy agrees to do so under the condition that Solty live at Miranda's place, but Solty keeps breaking into his apartment. What is going on here?! Interspersed in there is some mission to guard some mysterious case that's going to be stolen by a band of famous thieves, who turn out to be good guys because the case contained illegal drugs that the client was planning to sell to some kids... My patience wears thin.

Solty Rei is on notice. 2 more episodes, and then, it's gone.

Noiseman Sound Insect
Recent Studio 4C art film. There is a plot to this one, but it takes a while to sync up with it (not unusual given that it's an art film). Really high quality artwork and animation, as is typical with Studio 4C stuff. Not a series. Willing to re-watch while showing to others.

Take the X Train
Really old art-ish OVA. Plot is somewhat reminiscent of "Stink Bomb" from Memories, although perhaps somewhat less comical. It does have a similar light-hearted approach to a serious setting, and is somewhat darker. It did drag in bits, and is about an hour long. I found it worthwhile, but probably wouldn't re-watch.

Riesling tasting

Riesling tasting at Vintage Wine Merchants on Santana Row. Wines pretty, much got better and better in a logarithmic way, so except for certain notable characteristics noted in the later wines, it was harder and harder to taste the difference. Thus all the ...'s when I was unable to characterize a variation from the thread. The ellipsis doesn't mean the wine was bad or unnotable, but that I had said all I could say about it already.

2004 Scheurebe Kabinett
Sweet, no finish

2004 Muller-catoir Spatlese
Fruity, longer finish. Sweet

2004 Kerpen Wehlener Spatlese
Pear and honey. Particularly tasty. Reasonable finish, but not super long

2004 Spreitzer Spatlese 303
Fruity, more tart. Strong pear(?) finish, long.

2004 Leitz Rudesheimer Berg Spatlese
Tart, a little sparkly. Citrus and brown sugar(?)

2004 Diel Spatlese
Less sparkly, good but hard to distinguish, ordering may matter.

2004 Donhoff Schlossbockelheimer Felsenberg Spatlese
...

2004 Donhoff Oberhauser Brucke Spatlese
...

2004 Norheimer Dellchen Spatlese
...

2004 Niederhauser Hermannshohle Spatlese
More honey in finish

2004 Mueller-Catoir Haardter Burgergarten Auslese
Burst of sweetness, almost like a dessert wine but not thick

2004 Donhoff Oberhauser Brucke Auslese
Not as sweet as the M-C. More mineral taste. Tart finish

1996 Donhoff Niderhauser Hermannshohle Spatlese
Huge nose, very grape. Honey, some kind of herbal or forest taste. Kind of candy apple finish, but not too sweet.

Sales Scripts

Ever since entering the world of sales, I've been increasingly sensitized to sales techniques and strategies that are employed in almost everyday life. One standard sales technique is the use of scripts. Telemarketers, low-end door to door salespeople, or even religious groups employing low-cost and/or minimally trained staff often use this technique. An experienced sales professional will map out opening lines and a tree of responses to give to common objections in order to "harden" an otherwise minimally motivated or intelligent person. The staffer then memorizes this script and delivers the message from rote. For instance, a script may say "if a customer says they have no money, say 'I can offer you an installment plan of 10 payments of only $2.99.'"

A few days ago, some teenage-looking girl shows up at my door with some written paraphenalia in hand and delivers a shockingly monotone:

"Hi, I'm trying to raise money for a trip to Europe. If I can get 500 points, I will receive $5000 to fund an educational trip. Have you been to Europe?"

I reply "Yes."

She follows up with an extraordinarily unenthusiastic: "Really? Where have you been?"

"England," I say.

"Well, if you will buy one or more of the magazines in this list, I will earn X points for each subscription."

"No, I don't need any magazines."

Now, comes the scripted tenacity. She immediately follows up with a quick but dull:

"Many of your neighbors who said the same thing have bought magazines and donated them to charity. Would you like to do that?"

"No thanks."

Then, the clincher: "You don't want to help me?"

"Sorry, no."

I motioned to close my door and that was pretty much the end.

Two things struck me as particularly interesting about this chain of events. The first was the whole "Have you been to Europe" warm-up. The second was the really dejected "You don't want to help me?" I guess I don't realy get a lot of door-to-door sales visits or telesales calls, but among those I recall, this is the most sophisticated script in memory.

It also reminds me of a story Meng mentioned last week where two singing telegram people showed up at his door one night. The end up in his dining room, singing to him and his dinner crew. Suddenly, they stop, and proceed to utterly shock their audience by trying to sell some magazines.

This story then reminded me of the Mossad recruitment story where before getting into the training program, a potential recruit needs to talk their way into a random person's (picked by the trainer) apartment and end up being seen by a spotter on the person's balcony drinking a glass of water.

Connections... Connections...

Inniskillin Tasting

Went to another one of these bourgeois tastings at VinoVenue w/ Rourke. This one was an ice wine event run by people representing Inniskillin, a Canadian ice wine producer. They brought 3 people with them, including a local distribution/biz dev person. There were lots of props and propaganda. Unfortunately, the main host/speaker was not as amusing as the British port guy from the previous VinoVenue event (sadly, no notes from then). The guy said "wine geeky" a lot (and seemed to be kinda wine geeky himself). Rourke calls Inniskillin a "marketing machine."

Pearl Vidal 2003
Sweet fruity, not much acid taste but not cloying (balance?). Very thick, not citrusy

Oak Aged Vidal Icewine 2003
Said to be basically the same as Pearl except oak rather than steel aged. Supposedly very different taste, but I was unable to detect any variance from the prior.

Silver Riesling 2002
Lighter odor than the Vidals. Less honey odor, more of some kind of fruit, maybe citrus? Much less sweet, maybe floral. Some kind of cleanser scent; host claims it is desirable

Cabernet Franc 2002
Not as acidic, not particularly "red" (especially compared to late harvest Zin). Nose hard to distinguish from Vidal.

Sparkling 2001
Not made through secondary fermentation (makes bottles explode). Fermentation done in tanks to control pressure before bottling. All kinds of wierd flavors in it. Very interesting.

In the end, none of the ice wines were really that awesome, only the sparkling was kind of interesting.

Totally Bogus

So, I was flying out to Atlanta last week and, while browsing through the SkyMall, came across this extremely bogus looking item:

"Vintage Express Aging Accelerator Ages Beverages 10 Years In As Little As 10 Seconds"

I've always questioned the logic of buying stuff in SkyMall, since much of it is gimmicky and all of it is overpriced. But this is the first time that I've seen something so utterly fraudulent in there. Check out the flavor text that accompanied that tagline:

"The Earth's magnetic field aligns liquid particles much like tiny compass needles. This alignment is destroyed during the manufacturing process. Traditional slow aging realigns the particles, but is an expensive, time consuming process. Vintage Express quickly realigns the particles in beverages by surrounding them with extremely powerful Neodymium magnets to replicate the Earth's magnetic field. Because the magnets are ten thousand times more powerful than the Earth's magnetic field, beverages are aged rapidly. Vintage Express "opens" the flavor of a bottle of wine in only five minutes, and dramatically improves the flavor of Scotch, Whisky, Bourbon, Tequila, Vodka or any liquor in as little as ten seconds! The longer the beverage remains in the Vintage Express, the greater the effect."

And then, check out this ridiculous picture from the product website:

Who buys this crap? Although, apparently I'm not the only one to notice. Someone wrote in to James Randi's site (search down to the letter titled "A Matter of Taste") on the same topic about a year ago.

Information Leakage

So I was recently pointed to Meng's blog (by both Rourke and Meng), and noted this recent entry. Now, okay, you gotta subtract out the whole creepy-stalking-girls premise and replace the guaranteed-everyone-blogs assumption with something more probabilistic. (I was somehow in the mood to ponder this stuff after randomly watching the last episode of this BBC spy-reality-tv show that was actually quite engrossing.) What's left is a pretty interesting almost-anonymous information leakage attack that can be executed against live people in a non-electronic context with some probability of success.

I guess I find it interesting because, as someone who blogs fairly often, I can see myself falling for this kind of attack without realizing it. If I were a a diary type blogger, I could probably fall for such an attack even more easily. This tagging attack strikes me as one of those things that's ingeniously devious from one perspective, while completely invisible from another. But now, I shall be on my guard...

"Raunchy" Shoujo Manga?

Another piece of trashy J-news from WaiWai, this time about American girls' obsession with shoujo manga. Besides having some interesting observations, the article is chock full of the usual tabloid silliness characteristic of this news source, which is, of course, what makes it amusing. The article starts with:

"Americans can't get enough of shojo manga, the racy comic books for elementary schoolgirls that have recently been filled with stories with such themes as homosexual love and relations between incestuous lesbian sisters"

Heh... "racy" comic books for "elementary schoolgirls." And those topics sound pretty indecent.

"We now devote one third of our entire floor space to comics," Shingo Nozaki, an employee at Japanese bookseller Kinokuniya's suburban New York outlet

About 80 percent of the store's customers are American teen girls.

"Kids from junior high and high school flood into the store as soon as school finishes," Nozaki tells Shukan Shincho.

The popularity of manga is definitely intersting. The "suburban New York outlet" mentioned here seems to refer to the Kinokuniya branch at the Pallisades Mall in Nyack. I do wonder why they go to Kino instead of just Borders; guess Kino is just cooler. And, where in the previous quote they say that this manga is for elementary school girls, now they say that it's junior high and high schoolers who are buying it.

Well then, so where is this "racy" indecency mentioned in the opening paragraph?

Currently selling well in the U.S. is Fruits Basket, a shojo manga by Natsuki Takaya. Fortunately, the weekly opines, that's a decent story unlikely to create an unfavorable impression of Japan.

"Our biggest sellers," Nozaki tells Shukan Shincho "are undoubtedly the shojo manga that have the cutest pictures."

Yeah... Fruits Basket. I can't think of anything less indecent than that. And the biggest sellers are the ones with the "cutest pictures." Raunchy, elementary school indecency seems nowhere to be found.

Those who are reading carefully may notice that yesterday's Techno-Elitism (5) entry is now missing. I made a serious factual error in one of the features I was discussing and have withdrawn the article, pending repair.

Short Beer-Pong Asians

Huh? No, actually, I read three interesting articles in the New York Times this weekend that have nothing to do with each other.

The Short of It
The average height for a male in the United States is 5'10". At 5'5", that means most Americans dwarf me. (The average height for a male in China is 5'6", still slightly taller than me.) And it is this topic of height that is covered in the first article in the New York Times that I read (NYT-Short.pdf in my private stash). The article is quite long and covers a range of topics that would be futile to summarize here. It's basically about a surge in growth hormone treatments in children that is both expensive (~$20K/year for several years) and mild (~1-2 inches of total growth increase). The article also covers a recent study which concluded:

"A team of psychologists, led by David E. Sandberg at the University at Buffalo, concluded that a child's stature, whether tall or small, had "minimal detectable impact" on his or her social standing among schoolmates. At least in this setting, even extremely short children (those around the first percentile) made friends and earned the respect of their peers as easily as kids of average size."

But also makes reference to effects measured in adult earnings, which I had read previously elsewhere:

"There is a considerable literature suggesting that taller men receive higher pay than shorter men, and one recent study concluded that economic discrimination against short adult males was equal in magnitude to racial or gender bias in the workplace."

The article also touches on a number of issues ranging from methodology flaws in earlier child height psychology studies and the author's own experiences.

Beer Pong
I acutally did not know about beer pong until I witnessed it (under the game's alternate name Beirut) while on a ski trip a couple of years after I graduated. I found this second article that I read from the NY Times (NYT-BeerPong.pdf in the stash) quite amusing. It's about how the popularity of this "game" is growing and breweries have been cashing in on the trend. One company even sells portable "beer pong tables" for $150 apiece. They sold 2,000 this year. The article also has a hilarious quote about "Bud Pong":

"This past summer, Anheuser-Busch unveiled a game it calls Bud Pong. The company, which makes Budweiser, is promoting Bud Pong tournaments and providing Bud Pong tables, balls and glasses to distributors in 47 markets, including college towns like Oswego, N.Y., and Clemson, S.C.

Bud Pong may soon expand into more markets, said Francine Katz, a spokeswoman for Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc.

But Ms. Katz said Bud Pong was not intended for underage drinkers because promotions were held in bars, not on campuses. And it does not promote binge drinking, she said, because official rules call for water to be used, not beer. The hope is that those on the sidelines enjoy a Bud."

Uhh yeah... the "official" rules call for "water to be used." I buy that argument... really...

Sister's Think Parents Did O.K.
This NYT article (NYT-AsianParentsRaise.pdf in the stash) was about a book written by two Korean-American sisters who argue that the stereotypically rigid Asian-American upbringing they had was the right approach and outline how they feel children should be raised by this example. It was, perhaps, only interesting for nostalgia reasons, but had this one very amusing quote:

"One daughter's C-minus in biology could cast shame upon them all, so the Kim family reviewed each report card as a group in order to strategize about how each child could address weaknesses."

The use of the phrase "cast shame" brings to mind all kinds of amusing seppuku jokes. Perhaps an untimely F would warrant a trip to Club Sudz...

Techno-Elitism (4): Example (Xanga 3)

When I wrote part 3 (Xanga 2), I included a point about RSS that I meant to follow up here in part 4 (Xanga 3). However, I forgot to include it when I initially posted this entry on 10/16/05. I have ammended this entry on 10/18/2005 to include the forgotten diatribe, which appears at the end of this post.
(3) Xanga compared to the state-of-the-art
The comparison has less to do with having every whiz-bang feature than comparing engineering trust and elegance to the current state-of-the-art. Recall that Blogger was eliminated from the running because it had a few too many features. It's not being used in a feature-for-feature comparison against Xanga as much as a comparison of clarity of concept, quality of engineering, and trust. Blogger targets a more "serious", topical blogger across a wide demographic range, with blogging itself as the primary activity. Xanga seems to target a young, primarily teenage, audience centered around public diaries as a relationship building vehicle. Blogger directly monetizes its user base by encouraging blogs to carry AdSense advertisements, which allow Google and the blog author to share in the revenue. Xanga montetizes its user base by carrying banner ads from RightMedia (all those yieldmanager.com links), by offering "premium" services, and other little things like having the links to music for users' "currently listening to" sections be an Amazon refereral link with Xanga set as the beneficiary.

The structure of these premium services is kind of questionable. Xanga allows free users to upload up to 200mb of images, premium users get this increated to 200gb. However, they allow only 100mb of uploads per month, so really, one wouldn't even notice the difference for two months. The other premium features are also kind of bogus, like the "skins" feature which basically allows you to choose from a number of pre-built look-and-feel templates or edit the html template yourself (something that blogger allows by default but also is probably of limited use to its less-technical target audience), the "custom module" feature that allows you to add your own sidebar boxes (again, by coding the html yourself), "downloadable archives" (download your own historical posts! Wow! I have to pay to retrieve my own content? Swell...), and the ever popular "no more ads" (probably the only reason to do this). I suppose if the ads weren't so obtrusive and shady, there'd be no motivation for anyone to go premium. A WYSIWYG editor used to be part of the premium service, but has been made free as of August 2005. These "premium" features seem to be of questionable use to the target audience, calling into question Xanga's clarity of concept. Except as a side project to milk the occassional ignorant but rich user (or their parents/friends/relatives), there seems to be no particular subset of the user population that would find these features particularly attractive.

Since Xanga's main feature is blogging, users' pages start with their journal. But right at the top of the screen by the user's name are xanga's two main secondary "modes": reviews and events. Well okay, that's cool. But why reviews and events in particular? How do those features function in support of their target audience and purpose? Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, these features are just kind of haphazardly slapped onto the site without any concept of how reviews and events would function in terms of diaries and relationship networks. As a result, nobody I can find seems to use them. It's as if someone had read in an article somewhere that reviews and event calendars were "sticky" features and decided to implement them on that basis alone, with no thought of the high-level use cases.

The comment mechanisms of the two sites is pretty similar overall, although they do diverge in a number of telling details. Blogger lets the owner choose whether registration is required to comment. Xanga requires registration in order to comment with the reason:

"Due to issues involving abuse/harrassment, we don't currently allow non-members to comment on Xanga posts. If a friend leaves a comment without creating a Xanga account afterwards, their entry will be lost. :-( As we add more blocking and moderation tools to Xanga, we will consider lifting this restriction."

Fine, guess there is the potential of a lot of harassment on the Internet, but wait... something is amiss. Blogger is by far a bigger community than Xanga, yet allows anonymous posting. Is it because it has more "blocking and moderation tools"? Well, no. Actually, it's about the same. Xanga actually has one extra feature (block lists), but isn't comparable since it is based upon the mandatory registration requirement. LiveJournal also allows the owner to choose whether or not commenters must register (plus has a feature for screening entries before they become public). So why does Xanga alone have this restriction? I dunno. But it has the very pronounced effect of making the community very insular. Regardless of the preferences of the owner, non-Xangans cannot participate in the community in any manner. Whether one considers this a brilliant form of viral marketing or an evil form of user lock-in largely depends on one's point of view. In the context of social networking sites like Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, or LinkedIn, this is par for the course. There's no friend-linkage between users of these different sites. In the context of other blog services like Blogger or LiveJournal, this is a notable omission since only Xanga lacks this feature that simultaneously has a large "cultural" effect.

Xanga comments also adds a featured called eprops which allows users to attach 0-2 eprops (basically points) to their comments to indicate some positive reaction to the entry. More on this feature itself later, but there's some ironic humor related to the help on this feature.

"Question: Can I delete eprops that people have left on my post?"
"Answer: You can't delete eprops... but you can block that person from comment or propping your site ever again."

That's just so remarkably... unhelpful. So maybe you don't like eprops, but banning a user for giving you one just seems so harsh!

In addition to the occasionally unhelpful help, there are also a couple of oddities in the user interface. To the left, is a screenshot of the main navbar in a user's administrative interface. In addition to constantly annoying you with requests to sign up for the premium service, some of these links seem to have unknown or unexpected function. Clicking on "Email Posting" doesn't seem to do anything at all but refresh the page. Perhaps this is a premium feature or something, but the help doesn't seem to describe it at all. Clicking on "Archive Files" causes you to jump to Xanga's main page. This feature is documented as a premium item, but the behavior in free mode is positively head-scratching. I had to do it a couple of times to see whether it was some kind of intermittent error, since a lot of (poorly designed) sites will redirect you to its main page when errors occur. But no, I got a mysterious jump to Xanga's main page every time. Positively bizzare...

There's more broken stuff, perhaps the most important screwed up thing. I introduced RSS in part 3, as a feature integral to most blog and news sites. It's also integral to the way that I monitor blog and news sites. However in Xanga, RSS is nowhere to be found... But wait! A quick google turns up this blog entry, which reveals Xanga's hidden RSS capability and how to access it... except the RSS that the feature generates is broken in a way that's subtle to casual inspection but is utterly unparseable by any feed consuming program (and thus totally unusable). Well, fortunately, having some conversion mechanism means that intrepid coders can come to the rescue. In this case, the same blog entry contains comments that link to people who have created programs that can fix the broken RSS, thus I am saved from Xanga's incompetance.

Tomorrow: Real Xanga wrap-up (sorry I lied yesterday, my affliction caused part (3) to end up being way long) and why I am wrong

Techno-Elitism (3): Example (Xanga 1&2)

Case 2: Too Elite for Xanga
This case is more complicated and less historical than chain mail. So, I'll break down the issues into four parts: (1) Initial perceptions, (2) What is state-of-the-art, (3) Comparison, (4) Dubious design.

(1) Initial Perceptions
Two things instantly jump out. The first, is the extremely obtrusive banner ads. The kinds of flashing and flickering things that have gone out of style on larger (and possibly more reputable) ad-driven sites like Yahoo, Google, or even AOL. The second, is the strange list of words on the left that turn out to be the handles of subscribers. Unfortunately, after I tear my eyes away from the heinous banners, they next drift down to "GodSaidYourShitIsMine", "TheSexyBeastofCU", or "xxAznBBAngelxx" (what's with the xx's!!), well before I can make them focus on what is supposed to be the main content of the page. I'm sure this is the reasoning behind their choice of identifier: to grab my attention. But okay, the second thing is a detail that is not really a Xanga issue per se. The ads are still what bug me, not because I have a problem with ads, but becuase these are like, the bottom-of-the barrel borderline-scam ads. You'd have to go to a shady warez or porn sites to get any sketchier. What kinds of ads are there? There's the ever present "free iPod" ad which is basically a pyramid scheme to sell out your friends' email and demographic info. There's one that tries to sell various crappy "online universities," including the ever dubious University of Phoenix. There's one that tries to trick you into subscribing to a ringtone service by offering you free ringtones (so tricky!). But okay, this isn't the first time I've seen sites supported by "sub-premium" ads. Actually, Dave works for a company that deals in such things. The real issues emerge when you examine Xanga in context.

(2) The State of the Art
Well, I'm no master of the blogosphere. But in my opinon, the state of the art in hosted blog systems is Google's Blogger service. Before I talk "up" Blogger, a moment to talk it "down" a little and say why I felt it was not a task fit in this case. Blogger has a flexible ownership hierarchy where a user account contains a separate public identity (e.g. handle/screen name) and zero-or-more independantly named blogs. LJ and Xanga are designed solely for diaries, where one's user name is both one's public identity and blog name. Thus for someone wanting to do a diary-style blog, there is a small amount of additional setup effort associated with Blogger, whereas LJ and Xanga are dedicated exclusively to this format. Blogger is structured more towards having titled blog entries with parenthetical dates (although this can be modified). LJ and Xanga use the date to title entries in true diary format.

From a larger-scale perspective, Blogger's system is very elegant since it allows a person with a single login identity to publish multiple blogs each with different public identities. The sign-up process is very straightforward and it takes only a couple of seconds to set up. Comments can be open to the public (w/o registration), restricted to registered users, or restricted to approved members of the blog. You can choose to show or not show the profile images of registered commenters. A "magic" e-mail address is created that you can use to blog-by-email. There is a mobile blogging feature that allows you to blog from your phone using SMS. The posting interface is very clean, with a WYSIWYG editor for composing and formatting your post. There's a spell checker and a really neat image upload and layout tool. (Blogger now allows images to be posted as part of its free service.) And, no ads (this is true for LJ as well). This means not only no foreign and dubious content on a blog, but also that you have complete control over the look and feel of the entire page. This may seem minor, but imagine you have a site with a black background, but the required banner ad is surrounded in this big white box and the color scheme of the ad is whatever the ad provider wants. Without full control over the full page, you would be unable to stray far from the provider's default scheme without risking some truly jarring visual interactions.

But what really endears me to blogger, is that it "plays nice" and its documentation is very friendly and well-written. What do I mean by "plays nice" and "friendly"? Well, Blogger is primarily a text blog service that recently added the ability to add images to posts. It's not a photo-blogging service like Flickr. The documentation doesn't pretend that users don't want to do things that aren't provided within the site and takes into account that they might want multiple choices. The documentation directly addresses questions like "What are other ways to post pictures to my blog?" and then instruct you how to link Flickr to your Blogger blog. Why am I so impressed by this? Remember that Blogger is owned by Google. Flickr is owned by arch-rival Yahoo. Despite this highly competitive situation, they have decided that user experience and freedom is a priority over locking them in, and I really respect that.

There is also RSS feed information in the template for easy subscription. I use the "Live Bookmarks" features built into Firefox's bookmarking mechanism (screenshot to the left, click for a larger version) so that I can see changes and additions to people's blogs, the CJAS gallery, and news, all from my browser. If you look in the lower-right, there's an orange icon in the corner of the screen. Blogger automatically has the template configured so that icon will appear in browsers (like Firefox or Opera) that support RSS. A user can just click on that icon and add the feed as a bookmark. This way, I can scan for new content just by waving my mouse rather than visiting all those sites. There are even online services like BlogLines that will display all your feeds and their content from a single interface. There are even little desktop widgets built for Konfabulator that can track feeds. There's also an external posting mechanism that lets you standalone programs like w.bloggar (there's acutally a whole ecosystem of these things and they generally function with LJ as well) in case you find that more convenient.

Tomorrow: Xanga wrap-up

Techno-Elitism (2): Attempted Definition & Example

Techno-Elitsm
What is it? It's about tool-task fit and elegance of design. It's about trust in the technology and meeting a definable need. It's about a relative comparison to other similar objects or the current state-of-the-art. It's a shared sense of what is "elite" and what is "lame". Above all, it's about setting criteria and searching for the best instead of settling for what's provided or what's popular (although both may be criteria).

There's a shared mindset, a common foundation for analysis, that's not necessarily related to the amount of technology one posesses, although perhaps related to the amount of technical knowledge one has. Shared, in that in communication, people who are so-afflicted take this framework for granted. For instance, when discussing products and services with, say, Jerry or Rourke, we approach the comparison problem in the same way and tend to apply that approach uniformly to just about anything that consumes our time or money. There are also, certain shared knowledge and assumptions, some of which may be so deap-seated that they cannot be consciously recalled.

This framework is also incomplete.

But first, the definition I've provided is somewhat unintelligible. So, concrete examples of how techno-elitism functions in the context of the two cases above.

Case 1: Too Elite for Chain Mail
The key triggering phrase in Carol's email is:

Then send this to a whole bunch of people you know

It sets off the chain mail alarms that forces non-action even though (1) others just replied, with no need to spread it to new people, and (2) in an era of intense spam, chain mail's infrastructure impact is minimal. I suspect that, in terms of Internet time, the concept of a chain mail threat is positively archaic. So what is this threat? Well, at many institutions, especially those who have had Internet e-mail for a long time, propagating chain mail is a policy violation. CIT describes the nature of the violation in several locations, including a FAQ and a list of rights and responsibilities. Why is chain mail forbidden? Becuase it is among the activities classified to "impede, interfere with, impair, or otherwise cause harm to the activities of others." How can chain mail be so harmful? Well, in the old old old days of UUCP and dial-up based e-mail links it's acutally possible for such manual behavior to clog up the mail delivery network. But those days are long gone and the issue of chain mail is miniscule compared to the volume of spam modern e-mail networks need to handle.

There are also the issues of general netiquette and that chain mail is generally associated with bad results whether from ill-concieved but genuine altruism or from various kinds of malicious or disingenuous intent. There are no examples of chain mail being a tool with positive value. The very form of a "please pass it on" style e-mail is enough to discredit it.

Imagine, if you will, the Red Cross sets up a three-card-monte table in Times Square to raise money for disaster victims. Who would play? The concept of three-card-monte is so closely linked to cheap criminal activity that there is no way to disassociate the two.

Of course, if one isn't aware of the and sordid history of chain mail, there's no reason to eschew it.

Tomorrow: The more complicated case of Xanga.

Techno-Elitism (1): Triggering Events

I started to write this entry 4 days ago, and it has turned out to be incredibly long, more like a paper than a blog entry. Thus, I've decided to break it out into shorter chunks and put it out over a period of days, backdating each entry to the approximate day when it was written so that relative date terms like "yesterday" will still make sense.

The Email
About two weeks ago, Carol sent out an email to 23 of her friends (including myself) with a list of fun personal questions like "Favorite drink?" or "What do you do to vent anger?" and the following instructions:

Welcome to the new edition of getting to know your friends. Okay here's what you're supposed to do, and try not to be lame and spoil the fun! Just copy (not forward) this entire e-mail and paste into a new e-mail that you can send. Change all the answers so that they apply to you. Then send this to a whole bunch of people you know, INCLUDING the person that sent it to you.

Three people I know replied to this. I did not. Carol has sent this kind of thing out before; I didn't reply to those either. Two of those who did respond, Greg and Lillian, listed me as the response to the question "Who is the least likely to respond?" It's not because they're not my friends, or becuase the questions are too personal, or because I'm too lazy. It's because one particular phrase in the email triggered an almost conditioned response. More on that later, the story continues.

The Blog
Yesterday, Catherine IMs me about starting a blog. The general requirements boil down to a diary-type (like Ben's) rather than a topical (like Lawrence's or mine) structure. The candidates that come up are Blogger, LiveJournal, and Xanga. While I love Blogger, it wasn't a good fit (more on this later). Between LJ and Xanga, my recommendation was LJ because it was ad-free (especially since Xanga's ads are of the particularly dubious flashing "free iPod" sell-out-your-friends pyramid scheme variety) and also because something about Xanga triggered an almost conditioned response that rubs me the wrong way. About 9 hours later, a decision was made.

turns out i got a xanga site because i know a lot of people on xanga

No problem, it's certainly not uncommon for people to not follow my recommendation. Especially in online media, the power of network effects is well known. Social proof is one of Robert Cialdini's six weapons of influence. Xanga has certain (and some dubious) features that take advantage of this. Still, my sense of disappointment was profound. It felt like one of my friends had just walked willingly into the jaws of an evil beast.

Why am I such a party pooper? I happen to be afflicted with a particuarly acute form of techno-elitism.

Tomorrow: An attempt to describe what this techno-elitism is.

Serenity

So, I saw "Serenity" with Rourke and Jen this weekend. Usually, movies don't form the kinds of cross-activity linkages that make me think to write about them. But there was something interesting not only with the movie itself, but a whole set of "things" surrounding it.

From the start, there was something strange going in to the movie theatre. For some reason, I had no expectations. Not that I didn't know anything about the movie. The topic had been on irc for a few days. I had seen a few episodes of "Firefly" and was aware of the buzz around Joss Wheedon. We'd discussed the topic and I shared the opinon of several other friends that I didn't really watch "Firefly" because I felt it had been boring. The idea of having a 2-hour long sci-fi movie that was boring seemed like a potentially intruiging piece of work, but I can't say that I was expecting it to be boring. Rather, all of the buzz and my personal experience summed together in a weird way that resulted in a net expectation of... completely unknown.

But the clincher is the movie itself. I liked the movie. When we were exiting the theatre, Rourke and I asked each other the usual "what did you think?" My answer was "it was good" followed by a slight backtrack of "it was certainly entertaining" and then a "i thought there was something interesting about it."

Although "Serenity" stands on its own, it's chock full of references to please "Firefly" watchers. There is a certain amount of expected familiarity about the characters. Supporting roles (or at least what seemed to be important supporting roles) are paraded in a number of varying cameos. The punchline of the movie seemed understated for someone like myself, but according to Rourke (a "Firefly" watcher), has a lot of importance to viewers of the TV series. A lot of effort and emphasis was placed on the one-liners and service scenes. In fact, in the most pessimistic view, one could see "Serenity" as a sequence of nostalgia and fan service strung together with a plot.

Hmm... this sounds like a movie I watched just one week prior. "Advent Children" is Square-Enix's Final Fantasy 7 movie, a kind of epilogue to the game. Not unlike my experience with "Firefly", I'd never played the game, only watched select parts of it while being played by others. "Advent Children" is chock full of fan service cameos and nostalgic references. It's also borderline unintelligible without significant memory of the game.

However, whereas "Advent Children" is interesting, "Serenity" is both interesting and good.

Really, the similarites are startling. "Serenity" doesn't have a cinematic feel, possibly due to Wheedon's greater experience with TV. But when everything is summed up, the two movies arrive at completely different levels, despite their remarkable similarity. Maybe it's because the overall storyline is simpler and clearer. Maybe because the one-liners are actually witty as opposed to juvenile. Maybe it's because "Advent Children" is heavily soaked in adolescent male power fantasy whereas "Serenity" is much more emotionally sophisticated.

As usual, elucidating comments are welcome.

One Track Mind

You might have noticed that my previous entry ("Not My Job") claims to have been posted on Sept. 14, but didn't actually appear until just now (Oct. 2). So really, for all of September, I made only 1 post at the beginning of the month. This is not to say for the entire month of September, nothing of interest crossed my path or crossed my mind. But rather, I hate to abandon projects and really like to finish what I start. I generally feel that if it's worth starting, it's worth finishing.

It just turned out that some things, once started, turn out to be somewhat more complicated to finish than others. The previous posting is an example of that. Not that it turned out to be super long or super complex, but between Sept. 14 and today, it acutally went through a number of incarnations before I could figure out exactly what I wanted to say. And since I really like to finish what I start, I couldn't bring myself to add other postings until that one was complete.

But now it is, and hopefully that will mean more entries for the month of October. It seems like I haven't done anything on technical topics, which seems odd since I think about technical topics almost all the time. I'll definitely need to get some of those ideas out.

"Not My Job"

"In the spring of 1988, I visited the headquarters of the U.S. Strategic Air Command based in Omaha, Nebraska... Our military guide led us into the underground headquarters and showed us how one could communicate with every missile silo and bomber base in America. At the end of our visit, he took us on board the giant aircraft that the U.S. president would use during a nuclear attack... The plane was jam-packed with communications gear and trailed a huge antenna so that the president could communicate even with a submarine commander submerged in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Everything was planned down to the last detail -- and a trained crew of eighty stood ready to take to the skies at any time of the day or night."

"When our guide paused for questions, I raised my hand. 'Not to be presumptuous,' I asked, 'but if I were in the president's shoes in the middle of a nuclear crisis, the first person I'd want to talk to would be the Soviet premier so that we could figure out how to stop the war. Do you have a communications link on this plane to the Hot Line and a Russian translator on board?' The Department of Defense official looked me straight in the eye and answered, 'Communicating with the Russians is not our job. It's the job of the State Department.'"

This somewhat long quote is from the book, "The Third Side"by William Ury, which I'm almost finished with. There are a lot of interesting stories in this book that I'll relate over time, but this particular episode is early in the book and is related to stuff I was thinking recently about.

When Ury tells this story, he's trying to motivate the reader to act and assume an active role when they encounter conflict, particularly when they are not one of the directly involved parties. This message rings particularly true for me because I've always been distressed/annoyed/frustrated when I encounter the "not my job" attitude where necessary actions are identified but left deliberately undone, supposedly excused by some unclear chain of responsibility. Or, even worse, realizing that identification may create responsibility, some choose to remain deliberately blind in order to avoid unearthing a need whose fulfillment might fall into their lap. This kind of behavior is so frustrating to me, that it's easy to categorize the people who do such things as degenerate, and dismiss both them and their actions. But upon closer inspection, this behavior is much more complex and not necessarily irrational. Let's go back to Ury's story from the top.

In a situation like the one posed, when the stakes are so high, Ury wants it to seem self-evident that any party with knowledge of a problem, regardless of their pre-existing level of involvement, should take action. But there are often compelling reasons why this happens. Take the relationship between the Defense and State departments in this story. Should the military "take the initiative" and start handling the issue of communication with the Soviets, the State department would probably be far from pleased that a "rival" has intruded on their prescribed responsibilitys, and an inter-departmental turf war would result. In the end, the President might need to break up the fight and remind each side of their boundaries. Nothing will have changed and taking initiative would become even more difficult in the future. A few rounds of this sort of thing would dissuade any rational person from straying far from their paper boundaries.

But the madness doesn't end here. Identifying a problem can create problems of its own when one is paralyzed from acting. Recall all the 9/11 intelligence "scandals" about analysts who identified the terrorists and the precise risks they posed yet whose reports went nowhere. It's easily plausible that upon seeing the level of interdepartmental collaboration necessary to utilize their intelligence, those in more executive positions weighed the risk as not great enough to pay the political cost of taking the bold initiative necessary. Only in the aftermath of a problem turned into a crisis do these things come to light and blame placed. Now, the identification itself has become a liability. Better to just be blind.

Well, okay, that's a pretty cynical view of things, but not entirely unrealistic. Sure, government is a often cited as a protyptical example of bureaucratic dysfunction, but it seems like this kind of thing could strike almost anywhere as a function of basic human nature and organizational behavior. It seems like smaller organizations with flatter hierarchies and more flexible areas of responsibility would be less likely to fall into this "not my job" syndrome. But still, I've seen it happen in structures so small and so flat that there must be other forces at work here as well.

Part of it may be the qualities of individuals, especially in smaller places. Would those who have been personally burned after taking the initiative or those who have never tasted a personal victory as a result their own actions be more likely to try to absolve themselves of responsibility rather than take charge of results? How contagious is personal initiative or "not my job"? Can organizational structures be built that filters for certain characteristics while supressing others? Can organizational structures emerge that inadvertently select for less-desirable characteristics?

Econ is cool but...

Read this article today in the New York Times titled "The Opportunity Cost of Economics Education" (If you know me and the link has expired, it's NYT-EconEducation.pdf in my private stash.) This gist of the article is about how most students learn little from introductory courses in economics because there is just too much material packed into a short space of time and because such courses are too geared towards the small population who will become professional economists compared to the larger population of people who will not, but will benefit greatly from increased economic understanding. The problem may even be worse than students just not learning much, they may learn the wrong thing as illustrated by this quote about a simple question about opportunity cost:

"When they posed their original question to a large group of college students, the researchers found that exposure to introductory economics instruction was strikingly counterproductive. Among those who had taken a course in economics, only 7.4 percent answered correctly, compared with 17.2 percent of those who had never taken one."

That's kind of bleak. I hope that didn't happen to me when I was taking all that econ in B-school. Well, fortunately I had actually heard of this study and this point of view before, because two of the microeconomics courses I took were taught by Robert Frank, the author of this article, who mentioned the topic several times. He clearly articulated the overarching goal of his courses: To have us exit the course with the economic intution of the average economics PhD. The goal was succinct, and, unlike so many other goals set in classroom and organizational environments, Prof. Frank stayed focussed on this goal throughout the course. He periodically restated the goal to make sure we remembered where we were going, and all of his lectures, assignments, and tests were aimed at this goal. We zeroed in on a number of key concepts (without another course, I can't say if it's small or large), analyzed them in enough detail for them to make intuitive sense, and then were tested on the topic. We made use of "prototype" examples, stories and illustrations of concepts that would boost retention. Even if I didn't remember the precise answer or equation, I could walk through the story and rebuild the concept from first principles. Despite one embarassing circumstance in his intermediate course, where I was unable to articulate the efficient markets theorem when he called on me in class (having recognized me as a student in his previous class), I feel I retained a surprising amount of knowledge from that class, especially in comparison to undergrad courses.

In many ways, I feel that Prof. Frank's observations hold true not only for introductory courses in economics, but across most introductory courses, especially ones in engineering (although my "Intro. to China" course was also packed to the gills with historical details of which I have no recollection). I remember TAing for CS100 (introductory computer science, really programming for people who have never programmed before) and watching the assignment difficulty grow from println() to having to invent recursive depth-first-search and memoization in a matter of weeks. (Students were given an assignment to write a maze solver, not having acutally learned data structures and DFS formally yet. Similarly, there was a follow-up assignment where they were given this slow recursive fibonacci generator and had to "make it run faster," forcing them to discover memoization on their own.) Yeah, this kind of thing really separated the boys from the men, I suppose. The ones who were of the "super hacker" variety thrived while everyone else struggled. But is gearing an "intro" course like this, which is sold as being widely accessible to all backgrounds, to only the top 5% of the class (many of whom probably should've placed out of the class anyway since they've obviously seen the material before) really a good idea?

In matters CS, I've always been somewhat endeared to this kind of "sink or swim" methodology since I've often thrived in courses like this. Well, mostly the ones that involved programming... but... I've been programming since I was 10 years old. Surely my background is atypical of the average introductory CS student, and, while it's nice to have a course specifically targeted at me, is that really the best course of action in general? No, the norm is the experience of being buried by facts in Asian 212, cobbling together these crappy papers, which were supposed to allow me to integrate all the historical context learned in class, but really were an exercise in avoiding the vast quantities of material that I had not absorbed.

Gah... This has drifted way off the topic of economics. Anyway, Prof. Frank's courses were awesome, and I also really liked the textbooks we used. They weren't the kind of dense anthologies that these things often are, but were very entertaining to read on their own, actually.

• "Principles of Microeconomics" by Robert Frank and Ben Bernanke. A very easy and worthwhile read that focuses on intuition rather than math (this is still a textbook). Bernanke is one of the governors of the Federal Reserve and is currently one of the contenders to replace Alan Greenspan.
• "Microeconomics and Behavior" by Robert Frank. A somewhat more comprehensive and more advanced textbook, with a fair amount of overlap with the previous one. It's a denser read though.
• "The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us" by Robert Frank and Philip Cook. This is not a textbook, just a normal format nonfiction book. I haven't read this yet, but from the amazon.com excerpt, definitely want to. I highly recommend reading the excerpt.
  

Questions and Answers

Another Otakon has gone and passed. As usual, the J-guests got the shaft, stuffed into subprime timeslots and subjected the usual lack of panel structure and random questions from an underinformed audience. I was talking to Greg about the sorry state of these panels and comparing them to some of the guest panels at Anime Expo that I had been to a number of years ago where they picked a topic that a number of guests had in common (being manga creators in this case), and then putting them onto a panel and having them discuss with live translation and audience input. What made this such an interesting experience was learning about stuff that I didn't know about and wouldn't even thought to ask. The problem is that really in the big picture, neither I nor almost any other fan is really in a position to know how to ask a really interesting question. We have so little context that we don't know what we don't know. It's like when I'm giving training and after delivering the agenda, ask if there are any questions. Well, usually there are none since the students know too little about the topic to be able to formulate questions.

Fast forward a day and I'm at a hotel in NJ im'ing Ben and Catherine about CAFE and discussing the use of questions as openers when greeting people and creating conversation. But coming up with good ones is surprisingly difficult since something very generic like "Hello, may I tell you about the anime club?" or "Are you interested?" feels flat and insipid. There's a catch-22 here where you need to know a decent amount about the subject before you can come up with a good question. (In this case the problem is tractible since we do know something about the target based on their behavior at the event.)

And then as precursors to answers, questions have a lot of power. The target of a question often feels a significant compulsion to answer a question, and thus internalizes the topic and perhaps even temporarily structures all thinking in the way indicated by the question. Imagine asking a series of questions like "When's the last time you had a really good dish of pasta? What were it's properties? How do you think they made it?" Then, follow up with "Oh, I just heard of this great Italian place that just opened. Wanna try it?" There is almost limitless potential here.

In school, training, and work, we spend most of our time learning to come up with answers and then applying that skill. However as a precursor, the question frames and structures the entire exercise. How the question is posed can determine if the problem is tractable and useful. Hard problems are often so invisible that we don't know to pose a question that hilights them and thus blissfully march onwards to doom. We are trained how to structure answers, but are left to our own devices when trying to define questions. Take for instance: "How do we save CJAS when membership has been in decline for years?" Is this the right question? What about: "Is CJAS worth saving?" Well, that's a higher-level question in some ways, but again, is it the right one? How do I know if I have the right question? How do I know how to find the right question?

To some extent, simply realizing how important it is to come up with the right question is enough to set one on the right track. It's really difficult to "know what you don't know," but acknowledging that there is this kind of boundless unknown out there that needs to be investigated somehow is enough to get started. The problem is, it's too easy to get set on the track of looking for answers prematurely without having defined the question, especially for engineers like me. I always need to consciously remind myself to stop, consider what the question is, and ponder whether that is the correct question. Unfortunately, hand in hand with "always need" is "often forget." Ah, well...

Internal and External Perspectives

I caught wind of two articles recently that provide two intersting views of anime fandom in Japan. They first is an analysis of otaku as consumers by the Nomura Research Institute, and the second is JETRO's updated "Japan Animation Industry Trends." These two articles have an intersting contrast because the Nomura article analyzes the internal behavior of otaku consumers while the JETRO article analysis the external environment surrounding this behavior. Although, when I actually read the articles, they spark two entirely different lines of thought.

The Nomura article is interesting in how it segments and analyzes the behaviors of otaku groups. It identifies 7 segments of otaku based on the goods they consume: Comics, animation, games, PC assembly, mobile IT equipment, audio/visual equipment, and cars. It also equates otaku to the term "enthusiastic consumer." Across all enthusiastic consumers (regardless of the good they consume), the article describes several common behaviors. The ones that particuarly caught my eye are "strong orientation toward forming a community" and "actively creating fan fictions" (although the latter is a pretty bad title for the effect described, which includes such non-fiction activities as "publishing critical essays, making character figures, and studying how to become skillful at games"). These two behaviors tie closely one of the two ways I see otaku commonly defined in peoples' minds: an "additive" and "subtractive" way (for lack of better terminology).

In the subtractive view, you view an otaku primarily by what the subject lacks due to the intensity of their interest in a given topic. So, interest in anime has left them little room for social skills, showering, unrelated popular culture, and current events. Thus by this standard, hikikomori-type behavior is a close relative of otaku. When I've brought up this concept, it seems to resonate more with the less-otaku, although my sample size is tiny. This is the traditional negative stereotype of otaku and, in a typically cynical and pessimistic outlook, the way I expect to be initially viewed when I am identified as an otaku.

In the additive view, you view an otaku primarily by what the subject has gained due to the intensity of interest in a given topic. Foremost among such behaviors, are a strong social network with other like-minded individuals, and a high level of active participation even for typically passive forms of consumption. Thus by this standard, hikikomori-type behavior is almost antithetical to otaku. This is the perspective that the Nomura article focuses on, and is the definition that Lawrence and many other otaku researchers use. This is a position that I used to view as too optimistic and too distant from the non-otaku expectation to be viable. But more and more, I am gravitating towards this as a more accurate point of view.

Why has my leaning changed? Well, part of it is practical reasoning. Let's say there's a population of these maladjusted subtractive otaku out there. Where would I encounter them? Would they come to an anime club? Participate in activities? Probably not, but perhaps some bold ones do. Well, once they start listening to coherent conversations about diverse topics, are they going to stick around? Perhaps they'll flee in fear? Are non-otaku really more likely to encounter them than me? Based purely on my subjective sample of anime fans I've met, few to none of them really fall in this subtractive otaku mold. Does that mean I haven't seen any of them? Sure, I've seen a few, although most in a kind of "behind glass at the zoo" sort of way. But defining otaku this way is so narrow, that:
(1) There would be very few people in this category overall
(2) The effective probability of meeting such a person is near zero

Well, defining a group of effectively zero people seems kinda pointless. It's not useful to ponder a set of hypothetically unpleasant characteristics that I won't actually encounter. A survey of the flaming-hoop-jumping behavior of circus lions isn't great value if I'm out in the African plains among the majority of real lions. The otaku I read about in the media, interact with, influence, and am influenced by all would be defined as additive. Tsutomu Miyazaki and the AUM Shinrikyo are in the distant past. The way that the industry and its enthusiastic consumers have shunned "AUM-like" representations says a lot about how the population of otaku really shun that sort of mentality. When 20,000 people converge from far and wide to show off their elaborately constructed costumes and engage each other in structured dialogue, or 250 people spend a year to prepare such an event with little to no monetary compensation, it is difficult to intuitively say that the subtractive view is the more correct one to map onto the population.

And then from the purely business-greed-money perspective, the Nomura article would imply that otaku as consumers are notable and valuable for their additive behavior.

The JETRO article, on the other hand, is kind of a laundry list of statistics. The most interesting non-numeric part for me is the diagram of the structure of the animation industry, through the layers of production contractors, sales organizations, and distributors. There are some interesting stats to go along with some my earlier blog entries.

• Average cost-per-episode for anime in 2003: ¥10M (~$95K), but as low as ¥5M (~$48K)
• Number of anime programs per year: 2850 (55/week or 7.8/day)

They also cited a lack of expertise in conducting international business when it comes to foreign licensing. The number of anime programs per year clarifies the previous statistic with the whole "192 Episodes per Day?" issue. This is an annual figure. 7.8 shows per day acutally seems a little low to me if reruns are included, but that's a possibly incorrect instinct. It just dawned on my that I can correlate some of this to the count of anime shows listed in Newtype to see if we're looking at the same ballpark numbers.

Irresistable Manipulation

Two groups of students are given tests. Group A gets a test asking them to consider sentences that have politeness as a common theme. Group B gets a test without such a theme. The students are then sent to meet a professor who never shows up. Group B people leave after some amount of time, in tens of minutes perhaps. Group A people basically wait forever. Without realizing it, members of Group A have been subjected to subtle yet powerful manipulation.

Students are surveyed and rate a professor at the end of a course. A different group of students attend a single lecture by that professor and rate him. Another group of students watch 10 minute video clip of the professor's lecture and also rate him. Another group does the same with a 5 minute clip, then another with a 1 minute clip, another with a 10 second clip. The result? All the groups of students give the professor the same rating, regardless of how much time they spent observing. The implication here, is that snap judgements are formed quickly and that, once formed, are difficult to change.

These examples come from Malcolm Gladwell's recent book "Blink." I heard them this morning in an interview with Gladwell on NPR, I have not read the book. I have, however, read Robert Cialdini's "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion," which describes many powerful effects and was written more than 20 years ago.

In sales training, we learn the tip of the iceberg in navigating social constructs and influencing individuals and groups to our desired outcome. I've seen it work in practice. Reams of psychology research and papers confirm: the ability to irresistably manipulate minds is real. All it takes is knowledge. And this body of knowledge grows every day.

Well, perhaps "irresistable" is not entirely correct.

In "The Exorcist," Max von Sydow's character warns his young protege "The devil will mix lies with the truth. You must not listen." We can envision vivid portrayals of a cranky Brooklyn man with his family, listening to something disagreeable on the radio and yelling "This is total BS. Turn it off!" We've heard the stories of religious zealots who, rather than reasoning against their less religious foes, simply cut them off and instruct their followers not to listen. I don't need to pay attention to the person speaking to me. I can think about my upcoming vacation and stare out the window into the parking lot, counting the cars. A test subject in Group A can, instead of earnestly taking the test, randomly circle answers in order to get out as quickly as possible.

But this would be a pretty sad way to live one's life. There are people who do this; I try to avoid them. Closing one's mind to the world creates the fundamental assumption that one's internal model of the universe is the pinnacle of accuracy and that nothing can improve it. Studies are assumed to be biased and manipulative. Logic assumed to be false.

Instead, I try to consider the world in a way influenced by Russo and Schoemaker's "Winning Decisions : Getting It Right the First Time." Especially after taking Prof. Russo's related course (and discovering him to be one my my favorite professors of all time). It seems obvious that my model of the world is, while usable, heavily biased by a number of random and non-random factors, making it brittle, and thus requires constant input and adjustment. To receive that adjustment and make improvements in my capabilities, I need to be constantly open to listening, receiving, and considering input from others; especially disconfirming evidence that shows that something about my view of things is wrong.

How can one reconcile this need to be open to external influence (especially influences that conflict with existing beliefs) with the evidence that the act of receiving is all that's necessary to be subject to powerful external manipulation?

"The Third Side" by William Ury

I was listening to NPR yesterday and heard this program on the show "Humankind". Their guest was William Ury, the famed negotiation specialist who wrote "Getting to Yes." Ury was promoting his new book "The Third Side" which is about how in a two-party conflict, a third party can have a huge impact in creating a more positive outcome, sometimes by doing little more than bearing witness to the situation.

Ury struck me as tremendously compassionate when he stressed how we all have the capability, and perhaps even the repsonsibility, to act in a "third side" kind of role because this position has so much power in improving the outcome of a conflict situation. (He also stresses how little engagement is necessary to be an effective "third side".) This is in stark contrast to my New Yorker, "keep your head down and eyes forward" kind of upbringing. I'm reminded of a time when we made a gorup outing into the city and passed by this frail old woman in a wheelchair who had gotten stuck trying to roll from the street onto the sidewalk. Almost all of us, myself included, basically ignored or didn't notice the woman and her quiet pleas for help. Jerry however, heard her and acted, pushing her securely onto the sidewalk where she could continue her journey on her own power. It's not as if I didn't notice, but as part of this defense-fear-NYC kind of reaction, erased her from my reality for that moment.

I didn't get to hear the whole radio program, I should fill out the survey on that site and listen to it on my iPod. I also need to stop in at Border's and buy that book.

That Dry British Humor

Along with millions of other people, I finished the sixth installment of Harry Potter recently, although on audiobook rather than on printed page. The forced pacing and addition of delivery style that comes from having a practiced reader brings out certain elements that I might not have noticed if I were blasting through the book at a furious visual pace. There was one particular line that really stood out as being hilariously funny, down in chapter 26 right before Harry and Dumbledore start the thing with the potions:

"Harry did not speak. Was this why he had been invited along? So that he could force-feed Dumbledore a potion that might cause him unendurable pain?"

When reading it visually, the humor is not readily apparent, and will probably be lost by explanation if it didn't already hit you. At first, it seems like this is a bit of internal semi-dialogue, showing you what's going in Harry's mind. But really, this thought is quite non-sequitur; it is obvious that this is not the reason Harry was brought along. (Can you imagine Dumbledore saying "Yes Harry, I am actually a masochist. This is the true reason why I brought you. Now hurt me, quickly!") Not only that, but given the context, there's no reason for Harry to be thinking such a thing; he should be too frightened and stressed to have such idle thoughts. Hearing it delivered, the out-of-place-ness really jumps out and makes it appear that this is the author's statement, made as a joke to the reader, right in the middle of an sombre scene where one would least expect it.

Well, there goes another joke, destroyed by over-analysis.

Bourgeois Indoctrination

Yes, it's that most bourgeois of Northern California activities... wine tasting. Today, in Sonoma County: Dry Creek and Anderson Valley.

Farmer's market in Healdsburg included the "Toffee Doctor," some dude dressed up as a doctor selling decent toffee. The health inspector gave his stall her approval.

First stop: Rosenblum
Downtown Healdsburg, more like a store than a tasting place.
Decent and very smooth Viogner
Decent and economical late-harvest Zinfandel. Not as good as the Ridge Essence, but less than half the price at $18/bottle.

Second stop: Raffanelli
Had to spit in sink. Two large dogs. Previous group had ex-Burlingamoids who fled after the region became a "yuppie dump." Simultaneous to these comments, Rourke types away on his Blackberry.
Very fruity Zinfindel, slightly peppery and possibly the first good Zin I've had

Third stop: Dry Creek
So-called "late harvest" Zin was only like a slightly sweet regular Zinfandel; kinda a gyp
Brought grappa

Fourth stop: Dashe
Ridge's old winemaker. Their tasting place is shared with some other small winemakers in a facility called "Family Winemakers." Rourke discovered that the Dashe late-harvest Zin he bought at Whole Foods could only have been sold to him through a heinous error, both too early and too cheap by far.
Really good Zin, rivals Raffanelli for best Zin of the day. Had the intense flavor of Dry Creek's so-called "late harvest", just by itself.

Fifth stop: Goldeneye
Nice dried raspberries, two unexciting Pinot Noirs.

Sixth stop: Londer
Dude's house, tasted in kitchen. Retired doctor. Dubious dirt road but Rourke avoided scraping the bottom of his car.
Really good Pinot Noirs very flavorful and fruity
Really fruity and aromatic dry Gewurzstraminer
Bought sweet Gewurztraminer and Pinot Noir "Paraboll"

Seventh stop: Navarro
Stole unripe grape from vine. Firm fruit, single seed.
Interesting peppery Pinot Gris
Unremarkable White Riesling and Edelzwicker(riesling,gewurtzraminer,pinot gris blend)
Solid, "classic" pinot noir
Bought Pinot Noir juice

Eigth "stop": Greenwood
Stole several unripe Pinot Noir, White Riesling, Chardonnay, and Savingnon Blanc grapes

Ninth stop: Husch
Interesting "preserved pear" tasting late-harvest Gewurztraminer

Whew... a total of nine stops is pretty epic; more than enough wine for a single day. So then we wnet to Mendocino for dinner.

Dinner, more specifically the food, was totally hilarious. Mendocino is right next to the ocean. It's fog covered and smells of the sea. Thus, it seemed natural to go to a place decorated with a big fish outside and order seafood. Things went downhill from there. First, the clam chowder was awful. Really, inexcusably so. There was so much flour, to make up for a lack of cream, that if there were any more, we'd be eating one big clam dumpling rather than soup. Rourke ordered "Scallop plus prawn and chips." I got a rock shrimp scampi. What was hilarious was how theoretically wrong these dishes turned out to be.

Rourke's dish ended up being a couple of heavily battered scallops and shrimp (like fish-fry style batter) and a nasty ultra-sweet cocktail sauce. My shrimp came with this weird rice pilaf that had chopped scallions in it, and what could only be described as a diner stir-fry. Brocolli, carrot, onion, mushroom, red cabbage, and cauliflower cut small and then cooked over high heat with a little oil. This side dish and Rourke's over-battered scallops, I found totally hilarious. Rourke simply thought his food was bad. After we left the establishment, we saw a family examining the menu outside. I commented, "Do you think we should warn them about the food?" Rourke proceeded to yell to them "Don't do it!!!" prior to us disappearing around a corner.

Media in Japan Article

More about journalism, for later review and and analysis:

http://www.jpri.org/publications/workingpapers/wp40.html

Naisho no Tsubomi

An article from the non-stop trashy J-news section of Mainichi Shimbun. The title of the article that starts with "Creepy Geeks" is hilarious. And if you're into trashy J-news, there are plenty of links to the rest of the site that should satisfy you.

The plane! The plane!

"Aww.. I was hoping to meet a girl in Australia"
"C'mon! African warzone! Ship of death!!"

Well, this movie, Sahara, was pretty bad. You might have noticed a recent increase in blogging activity. This is due to the increased amount of time I've spent flying recently (lots of sitting around in airports and airplane seats) combined with using the blog-by-email feature with my blackberry.

Retaining Fandom

At a recent panel at the Japan Society, Lawrence defined otaku as an anime fan who is part of a social network devoted to the subject. This network is a defining aspect of otaku and thus isolation behavior like hikikomori, which seems superficially similar, is actually quite different and distant. By this metric, I can precisely set the amount of time l have been an otaku at a few months shy of 11 years. This definition also allows me to more precisely define the people I know who have deserted their previous otaku affiliation and sets the number at somewhat larger than I originally considered. (Mostly because I'd only previously considered people who abandoned the field in college.)

I have often wondered why it is that more than a decade later, I remain a dedicated otaku whereas so many other people I know of have defected. Lawrence's definition makes the reason remarkably clear; the network is everything. It is really no surprise that as I have remained an otaku, so has my circle of otaku friends, despite passing through several major life-changing mileposts such as the transition to full time employment, marriage. and childbirth. So then the real question is, how has our otaku network from CJAS endured and maintained its intensity?

The influence of IRC is one obvious starting point. Having a kind of 24h shared living room with global reach is a powerful stabilizing force. Something very different than what can be had through one-to-one channels like phone or IM. However, the mere presence of IRC alone is not enough. There is something peculiar about the way we use this medium. We use IRC precisely like a living room, perhaps even the living room at F1 in particular. However, that is not the dominant or even normal use of the technology in the broader context of Internet usage. Our IRC is very personal with its own social customs. It is not only designed to connect people who are already connected in real life, but also to perpetuate the type of interaction they have when physically colocated.

Virtual association is also not the only factor. Organizing annual or semiannual gatherings would also be a factor. But there is also something peculiar about the way these events go. In reunion-type activities, the time is often filled with a lot of catching-up and reminiscing. Our gatherings usually entail primarily new exploration and activities and very little "relinking". More like a weekend gathering of nearby friends similar to when I do stuff with Rourke and Jen. Obviously IRC has a lot to do with it, but I am surprised and intruigued (although perhaps I shouldn't) that upon resyncing IRL, we find that our virtual windows into each others circumstances are mostly both accurate and complete.

One thing that seems to be the case is that this situation of persistent and long-lived cohesion is somewhat rare , and that I, from an insider's perspective, find it extremely valuable. It's hard to imagine living without it. I have some idea of how it came to be about and see how there was a very lucky confluence of events and personalities. Thinking about this topic leads to the question of how such enduring networks can be created. Can what was discovered by luck be re-created through skill? How important is the group's common-activity based root? What about other contexts like work or shared affilitation (like school alumni or neighborhoods)?

Beck

There seems to be a lull in really watchable new shows this season, so I've been loading up some of last season's shows that I've missed, plus Gundam Seed Destiny. GSD is actually a mixed bag, with episodes that are painful to watch about twice as frequent as those that are really satisfying, but I've already invested in the startup cost for getting into the series and this is one of those shows that I feel provides value by making me informed about the scene.

On contrast to this, although still shounen, is Beck. Beck is in the "band" genre, which means that it covers the formation and development of a musical group. While fairly well represented in manga, few of these titles are animated. Thus among its animated peers, I can only cite Kaikan Phrase (a TV series) and To-Y (a much older OVA), although there are possibly more which I do not know of. I find shows of this type interesting because it's a male-oriented genre that is less apt to get embroiled in the adolescent power and sex fantasies that are so common with this audience. Even series that I like such as Naruto and Hunter X Hunter are at their core, vehicles for boys who feel powerless to empower themselves in their imaginations. A similar motivation exists at the core girl-oriented titles like Ichigo 100% (need I spell it out for you more explicitly?). Since they strike their target audience at such a basic level, it's no surprise that these genres dominate the scene.

Beck is a refreshing change from this onslaught. The story focuses on a high school boy who meets an American-raised Japanese guy with an impressive history and future band aspirations. The main character, who has no musical experience, gets starstruck and becomes embroiled in the long and difficult process of learning to sing, play guitar, and all the stuff it takes to make a band. But really, watching Beck also makes me wonder why this genre seems to be a better vehicle for dramatic and realistic storytelling compared to other shounen genres.

One of the things that has attracted me to this genre after seeing To-Y is that shows in this kind expand the boundaries of anime awareness beyond the stereotypical robots/magic/girls definitions while at the same time presenting a different kind of storytelling and focus than female-targeted titles. And I wonder, why is this the case? One possibility is that despite being about music, manga is a silent medium and song production is fairly expensive for anime. Thus, without the ability to directly represent the core content theme, creators need to take an indirect approach and put their efforts into making the writing represent the effect that music has upon its participants.

In contrast to this, shoujo manga, which faces a similar task of indirectly representing emotions and dramatic tension, often draws upon visual cues like background changes or character deformations for indirect expression. Of course that begs the question of why band anime do not draw heavily on visual cues. Since my band anime exposure is limited to 3 titles and my manga exposure is almost nonexistant, I don't even know where to begin to answer that question.

So, what band titles should I read and watch?