Jeremiah Stanghini

Markets Are Cyclical: Why the Internet Monopolies Don’t Matter (that much)

There was a nice feature on Technology in this past week’s Economist. In fact, there were a number of articles I found intriguing (medical tricorders was a good one!), but I want to draw your attention to one in particular: Battle of the internet giants – Survival of the biggest. The case is made that these internet behemoths are getting too big and that their scope needs to be curbed. Okay, I understand that, but I think that the fear is a bit unfounded. Here’s why.

Remember back to when railroads were the only way to get around? Remember when all commerce and long-distance travel was done by locomotive? Now, I don’t know if this is a perfect comparison, but bear with me for a second. There were at least a few big players in the railroad game back in the 19th century (Union Pacific, Central Pacific, and Southern Pacific). I’m sure that there were people back then who were irked that there were monopolies in the railroad business and probably wanted there to be more regulation (like is being argued in the article about the internet).

However, with the turn of the 20th century, a new form of transportation was starting to emerge: the automobile. It didn’t happen overnight, but the automobile eventually became a much more preferred method of transportation.

There’s another example: television. Remember in the early days of TV, there were just a few channels? If you had a TV (and you watched it), you probably saw the same program that everyone else who had a TV was seeing. Again, I don’t know, but I imagine that some folks were pretty peeved by this monopoly. Although, slowly but surely, there came to be more and more choice of TV channels. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where we’re unlikely to ever see the most watched television program eclipsed because there’s so much choice. Though, some would argue that there still are monopolies in television.

And now what’s starting to breach the monopolies of TV? The internet and online media. There was a slide deck that was passed around courtesy of Business Insider earlier last week that shows the future of digital. There were lots of graphs and lots of data. One of the graphs showed that the percentage of live TV watching has dropped 25% in just the last 4 years. Conversely, recorded TV watching is up over 50%! And a new category has emerged: streaming TV. Whereas there was no streaming TV watching in 2008, it now makes up 7% of primetime viewing in the US.

So, even with all of this choice in television, there is still room for newness and growth.

Tying this back into my argument about the internet behemoths: maybe we can’t see it now, but based on history, I would bet that there’s going to be something that comes along (eventually) and unseats these internet behemoths. Of course, that’s not a reason not to regulate them, but it is something to keep in mind when you see articles like the one in last week’s Economist.

Lessons from Strategema: the Star Trek Strategy Game

Star Trek was a show that certainly had an influence on me during my formative years. That is, Star Trek: The Next Generation. I remember gathering round the TV with my family to watch new episodes when they came on (or reruns). From time-to-time, I still like to catch an episode or two. Last night, I happened to catch a couple of episodes, one of which I think has an important lesson.

The episode in question is called: Peak Performance. It comes from near the end of season 2 (of The Next Generation). Earlier in the episode, Data and another character, one who is a ‘grandmaster’ at the game Strategema (strategy-like game), sit down to play. During their first encounter, the grandmaster beats Data. This puts Data into a bit of a tizzy as he is an android and should — theoretically — be unbeatable. That’s one of the subplots throughout the episode, but not the main reason I’m writing this post.

Near the end of the episode, the grandmaster grants Data a rematch. I’ve been able to find the clip online, so I’ve embedded it below (at just about the time of the clip where the scene with Data and the grandmaster commences):

It’s such an important lesson — sometimes playing not to win (is a form of winning). In some circles, folks might think of this as playing fearfully. In other circles, one might call this “risk mitigation.” In reflecting on what happened, it seems that Data knew he couldn’t beat the grandmaster, so he employed the next best strategy — stalemate.

I like to play chess every now and again — playing for a stalemate is a strategy. If you know you’re playing against a formidable opponent, a draw may be just as satisfying to you as a win. I think this is one way to look at this clip.

The other way I want to explore is the idea of risk mitigation. I know, I know. That phrase sounds a bit “bleh,” right? Well, it’s important. It’s important to minimize risk, or minimize one’s exposure to risk. This is exactly what Data is doing when he is playing for the draw. If Data had pursued those obvious places for advancements, he would also be leaving himself open to attack.

Ethics: A Jagged Line

Earlier this calendar year, I had an ethics class. It was only a half-semester course, but I rather liked it. That’s probably because I really enjoy morality and ethics. In fact, some of the research I worked on during my undergraduate degree required me to read one of George Lakoff‘s books, Moral Politics. Even now, I really enjoy reading the work of researchers like Dan Ariely, who often write about ethics. Anyway, back to the ethics class from earlier this year.

Towards the end of the course, the class was having a discussion about something that I don’t remember. In the course of the discussion, it was clear that there were valid reasons (on both sides) of the dilemma. As the discussion was wrapping up, the professor drew a jagged line on the white board (much like the jagged line in the picture at the beginning of this post). I don’t quite remember the “exact” phrase that the professor said, but that’s not important. The important thing is that I remember the takeaway — ethics are not black and white.

Conveniently, the jagged line picture also has ‘black and white,’ but the metaphor I like to think of is the straight line (vs. the jagged line). Some might think that there’s a clear right and a clear wrong — in every situation (a straight line, if you will). However, I think that life is much more nuanced, much more complex than that — a jagged line. Sometimes doing “x” in a situation will be ethical, and sometimes doing “x” in a situation will be unethical. It’s important to understand the context to understand the ethicality of a situation. That’s certainly an important takeaway, if you watch Professor Sandel’s Justice course.

Before I end this post, I wanted to touch share something from the current President of George Mason University, Angel Cabrera. He’s only the 6th President in the school’s history and his most recent position was as the President of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona. He recently wrote a post for the World Economic Forum. An excerpt:

No matter how high the legal penalties may be, an opportunistic, self-interested manager within a large corporation can always find a way to make the pay-off of a bribe a no-brainer. This is so because the personal benefits of earning a contract can be significant and the probability of getting caught can be easily minimized. The very same factors that make the modern corporation so productive – specialization and localization of knowledge – also make it extremely difficult to control the decisions of each individual manager. The delegation of authority to managers with specialized knowledge makes the corporation vulnerable to decisions by those managers because they are often the only ones who understand the full complexity of a given contract (technical details of the products being sold, personal circumstances of the individuals involved in the transaction, dynamics of the social and institutional context in which the transaction takes place, etc).

When the golden opportunity presents itself to bribe, benefit from it and not get caught, the only thing that can stop him or her is a deeply engrained belief that the action is morally wrong.

Do You Know Where Your Filters Are?

It’s been a couple of days since I last published a post. I’ll try to make sure that I have something published everyday for the next couple of days, but it is near the end of the semester and I have more exams (3) than I’m accustomed to.

I’ve had this link on my list of things to write about, so I thought I’d put something together really quickly this afternoon and clear it off the list. I’ve written before about the importance of cleaning off the list to allow for new ideas to come in.

The title of the post at the link I’ve had on my list to talk about is: “6 surprising facts about how we see the world.” I want to be encourage you to go and read the post on the other site because there are lots of good graphics/picture/videos that help to reinforce points. That being said, there are a two things that I’ll share.

Before sharing a couple of things, I do want to mention something I remember learning during my first Master’s (that’s reinforced in this link I’ll be talking about): we don’t see the world in the present. Pardon? That’s right. We don’t see the world as it’s happening — instead — we see it as it happened. That must sound a bit strange, but it makes sense after I add some more context to it. Think about how we see the world — through our eyes. When light enters our eyes, our lens focuses the light on the retina. The retina then carries signals of light to a somewhere in the brain by way of the optic nerve. While this happens fast, it still takes time. As a result, there is a delay (albeit a small one) between when light hits your retina and your brain processing what you see. Therefore, we don’t see the world in the present. Okay, now back to that link:

According to Dr. Mark Changizi, what is also common to trichromat primates is exposed facial skin (ie. faces not covered with fur). When the skin is exposed, these primates can communicate their emotional state based on the level of hemoglobin and oxygen in the blood. A green hue of the skin usually indicates sickness (low hemoglobin, oxygen), redindicates blushing or excitement (high hemoglobin, oxygen), blue – cold, lethargy(high hemoglobin concentration), and yellow – fear or bloodless (low hemoglobin concentration).

In other words, we see color not because color exists in the physical world but because color vision is useful for communication.

It never occurred to me (though, I never sat down to consider it) that seeing color was evolutionary. There’s a great picture of what we as (trichromats) vs. other mammals.

The other thing I wanted to share:

Now let’s go a step further. We’ll show how people’s need to find answers to the most important questions of life has less to do with some spiritual search for meaning and more with the fact that we evolved a mechanism which actively interprets the phenomena we experience. In other words, we form beliefs about ourselves and the world around us because these beliefs are useful for our survival.

So what exactly is this mechanism? Dr. Michael S. Gazzaniga, in his article The Interpreter Within: The Glue of Conscious Experience, explains:

The answer appears to be that we have a specialized left-hemisphere system that my colleagues and I call the “interpreter.” This Interpreter is a device (or system or mechanism) that seeks explanations for why events occur. The advantage of having such a system is obvious. By going beyond simply observing contiguous events to asking why they happened, a brain can cope with such events more effectively should they happen again.

Yet, the answers we seek do not have to be based in reality. They merely have to be consistent with our experiences and perception…

Beliefs can be very powerful. They can cause us to war with each other or they can simply cause us to believe something that might not be based in fact. If you’ve never heard of Byron Katie or The Work and you’re interested in learning about some of the ‘filters’ you might use to see the world, I strongly urge you to check it out.

The Wisdom of the Crowd Has Spoken: One-Timers It Is!

A couple of weeks back, I wrote a post about the top 10 FIFA goals of 2012. In the list, there were a collection of goals, some of which were “one-timers” and some of which were the result of a great deal of individual effort. Well, on Thursday, FIFA highlighted the top 3 vote-getting goals. On the list, there was one goal that was the result of a great deal of individual effort and two goals that were the result of one-timers.

Is that what you expected? Would you have expected more individual effort goals to have been on the list? In looking back at my post, I didn’t say whether I thought one-timers would have more on the list and it wouldn’t really be fair to hazard a “guess” now that the answer is known.

So, I wonder — of the top three goals remaining, which do you think will win? Since there are only three videos, I’ll embed them below.

Here’s the one individual effort goal:

One of the one-timers:

And the other one-timer:

If I had to guess, I think the last one will probably win.

Interestingly, “just hours after FIFA announced its candidates for the 10 best goals of 2012,” there was a goal that some are saying may just be the goal of the century! After watching it, I think you’ll see why:

“Simply stunning” — the sports announcer says. Even the England fans applauded the goal (from a Swedish player). Unfortunately, this goal will not be considered for “best goal of 2012” for FIFA, but they say that it could be considered for best goal of 2013. I wonder what the betting line in Vegas is for this winning best goal of 2013. . .

Ecology: Systems Theory in Action

John Green‘s crash course in world history has ended (it had to some time, right?) and he’s now onto a new topic: literature. This version of crash course is going to be smaller (only about 12 weeks), but I’m still excited for it. He’s already two weeks in, so if you’re interested — I’d check it out.

As John Green’s crash course ended, I thought I’d check up on what Hank Green’s new crash course was going to be. Hank, being John’s brother, also does crash course. His first crash course was in biology. As much as I enjoy learning about “life and living organisms,” I didn’t think that my time (at this point) was best used by keeping up with this course. In fact, I did watch a couple episodes to see if I might be wrong (but I wasn’t).

So — what’s Hank’s new crash course? Ecology! I am so in!!

Ecology is a branch within biology that deals with the relations/interactions between organisms and their environment. In essence, ecology is a perfect example of the importance of systems theory. Aside from my elementary school days, my only exposure to ecology was when I picked up Integral Ecology at Chapters to thumb through it — on several occasions.

Hank’s already into the third week of crash course ecology, so if you’re interested, it’s time to catch up! Here’s the first one:

Sometimes, You Really Never Know What the Day Will Bring

Tonight was a bit unexpected. One event (the apartment across the hall having its floors finished) led to a series of events that caused me to end up at a place I probably wouldn’t have foreseen going to, at the start of the day. Since the smell in my apartment was unbearable, after class, I ended up on a roundabout walk looking for a place to eat.

My original plan was just to grab something quick nearby and then head to the Starbucks to catch up on things. Well, that didn’t happen. After walking for about 2 miles, I ate dinner at a local Chili’s, but not before finding a rather artsy place. From the outside, the artsy place looked like it was more a café than it was a place to eat, so that’s why I walked to the Chili’s.

After scarfing down some Shrimp tacos, I headed back to the artsy place, where it also happened to be Open Mic night! (So much for catching up on things, right?) I had a fantastic time. Sure, my plan was to catch up on things, but sometimes, you have to roll with things and let life take you where you’ve got to be. Not only did I have a great time, I’ve found a local artsy place that I can walk to whenever I’m in the mood for that kind of vibe.

Two more things I want to say:

1. The place I went to Epicure Cafe. Fantastic place. I highly recommend it. It’s not the kind of place you’d expect to find in a strip mall, but you’ll be pleasantly surprised. They are highly rated on Yelp! and were feature in Northern Virginia Magazine!

2. I had never seen someone “be” a one-man band. It was captivating and I have a lot of respect for someone who can keep track of all the different things you’d have to keep track of in order to play a one-man band — and play it well! If you’ve never seen a one-man band, here’s a great example:

Mind Lab: How Is Our Consciousness Connected to the World?

A little over a week ago, I was introduced to Mind Lab from Japan’s Science and Technology Agency. It. Is. Awesome! There are 4 lessons that take about 15 minutes each, so you could (theoretically), complete the lessons over your lunch break. There are some parts with sound (so you may want headphones), but theoretically, you could skip those parts and still get the gist of the lesson. If you want, you could also bookmark the page and come back to parts. So, if you only had 15 minutes, you could do the first lesson and then go back at a later time when you could finish another lesson (or all the lessons).

In the first lesson, we learn about blind spots, eye saccades, and apparent motion. In fact, you even get to measure the size of your blind spot. In the second lesson, we learn about 3D images in a 2D space, and how shadows effect our perception. In the third lesson, we learn about colors and the way that our brains can interpret the same image in two different ways. Lesson #3 is very intriguing. It reminds me of the those cognitive illusions you’ve probably seen in a psychology class. In the fourth lesson, we learn how contours effect how we perceive the existence of objects. There’s also something else during the last ‘slide’ of lesson #4 that I don’t want to spoil for you — but I really hope that you check it out.

In fact, after you’ve done lesson #4, be sure to come back and check out this link. The implications of what you’ll discover at the end of lesson #4 have been written about in that post.

I also wanted to mention that it’s been pointed out that the interactive nature of these lessons would likely eclipse any way in which they could be taught in the “old-fashioned” way.

Why I Like Twitter: The Great Equalizer

Twitter is one of my most used tags (as you can see from the Tag Cloud on the right-hand side). Part of this is because I started that series of people I follow on Twitter, (which is way out of date). In fact, I probably don’t follow a lot of the people who are in those posts, but when I wrote those posts, I did. Anyway, I’ve been using Twitter for almost a year and a half now and I felt compelled to share why I like Twitter.

One of the main reasons I use/like Twitter is for the ability to curate things I may like to read. Some folks would say that this is the same function that RSS served when it first came out — yes, this is true. When RSS came out, I wasn’t as active on the Internet as am I now. But of course, this isn’t the only reason I like/use Twitter. You can also have conversations with people (plural!). For instance, just last week, after watching The Conspirator, I took to Twitter to say some things about capital punishment. In my series of tweets about capital punishment, I had some questions. Thanks to Twitter, someone responded to my question — and even included a source!

Perhaps the thing I like the most about Twitter — everyone’s on an equal (arguably) playing field. Yes, some have more followers than others and yes, there are promoted tweets, but more or less, the people on Twitter are tweeting for themselves. That is, when Lady Gaga tweets something, it’s probably her talking. Similarly, when I tweet, it’s me tweeting. There are famous athletes like LeBron James, famous actors like Tom Hanks, famous chefs like Guy Fieri, and — of course — famous politicians like Barack Obama. Though, not every tweet from President Obama’s Twitter account is something from him (personally).

What Was That Lyric Again?

No doubt, at some point in your life, you’ve heard a song on the radio and thought you were singing the right lyrics only later to find out — you were absolutely wrong. Most of the time, the thing you think the artist is saying is really funny. Well, let’s start Monday morning off with a laugh. Here’s a video from cdza that offers up some of the funniest misheard lyrics in history:

And just for fun, here’s a bonus video that you might find just as (maybe more?) funny. It is the “history of lyrics that aren’t lyrics.”