The Odds of a YouTube Breakout

Over at Slate Chris Wilson runs the numbers on your video getting its big break on YouTube:

On Friday, May 22, I used Web-crawling software to capture the URLs of more than 10,000 YouTube videos as soon as they were uploaded. Over the next month, I checked in regularly to see how many views each video had gotten. After 31 days, only 250 of my YouTube hatchlings had more than 1,000 views--that comes out to 3.1 percent after you exclude the videos that were taken down before the month was up. A mere 25, 0.3 percent, had more than 10,000 views. Meanwhile, 65 percent of videos failed to break 50 views; 2.8 percent had zero views. That's the good news: Your video is slightly more likely to get more than 1,000 views than it is to get none at all.

Yup, I'll buy that.

Tags: video, viral, youtube // COMMENTS OPEN (0)

Why Old People Think Young People are Spoiled

There is a great series of posts over at A (Budding) Sociologist's Commonplace Book that attempts to answer the question of why older folks think everyone younger than themselves is spoiled (part 2).

The author, a PhD student and blogger at The Panhandler's Guide breaks it down into four economic reasons: Inflation ($900 in 1974 is worth $3,892 today), substitution (kids today buy phones, but they also don't buy records), diffusion (as a technology becomes more mass the inflation-adjusted price declines) and increasing standards ("Increasing standards mean that the utility of many goods and services is constantly decreasing").

Tags: culture, economics, sociology // COMMENTS OPEN (0)

The Chaos in Your Head

Neuroscience and networks, two topics I can't resist.

And here they are all wrapped together in an article about how your brain constantly walks on the edge of chaos. Apparently, the chaotic cascades inside your head are what drives intelligence and people who let chaos take over more often (though not too much) are smarter (at least from an IQ perspective).

The neuronal avalanches that Beggs investigated, for example, are perfect for transmitting information across the brain. If the brain was in a more stable state, these avalanches would die out before the message had been transmitted. If it was chaotic, each avalanche could swamp the brain.

Oh, and apparently your brain has 13 degrees of separation. Who knew?

Tags: brain, networks, science // COMMENTS OPEN (2)

The Value of Shared Information

A few weeks ago I pointed out a study that explained, "groups tend to spend most of their time discussing the information shared by members, which is therefore redundant, rather than discussing information known only to one or a minority of members."

Today I ran across some research on how celebrities stay popular for so long that sheds further light on the subject. Essentially people talk about more famous people more because it's a social lubricant to have a shared topic, therefore making the famous more famous.

I've been spending some time thinking about how you break this cycle. Especially at work, it's important to share ideas that everyone doesn't know about yet as they may hold information that could push things forward in new ways. No answers yet, but it's interesting to think about.

Tags: culture, networks, psychology // COMMENTS OPEN (9)

Non-Random Iranian Election Results

How do you tell if Iran's election results are fraudulent? Well, if you're a statistician you look at the last two digits of the vote counts from the precincts that report and look for anomalies.

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average -- a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another -- are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

To put it in perspective, in last year's US presidential election "returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections." So there's that.

Tags: iran, politics, statistics // COMMENTS OPEN (0)

Bring Back Dueling?

An interesting thesis: "The form of the duel - with its pointless deaths, inherent injustice and absurd pride - seems to us against reason and morality. But it did answer a problem that always confronts human society: how can one settle a dispute between essentially equal parties?"

Also from the same article, they compare dueling to modern-day PR battles: "Instead, the modern equivalents of the duellists' "seconds" were the rival armies of spin doctors, and so the contest was carried on, at public expense, through the media."

Tags: culture, history, politics // COMMENTS OPEN (0)

Strange Airports

Fun. A list of four of the strangest airport runways including Gibralter, where pedestrians actually walk across the runway. As a side note, when I told people I was going to Hong Kong they all mentioned Kai Tak Airport which closed in 1998 but used to be in the center of town (Kowloon) and was known for it's amazing landings.

Tags: airports, travel // COMMENTS OPEN (1)

Good Question

On Twitter's role in Iran:

Sure, Twitter has been a fascinating window for those of us on the outside and at times a critical tool for some of those on the inside. I certainly won't try to deny this, but I have to ask: if - like most start-ups who show only casual interest in generating revenue - Twitter had folded months ago, would the protesters in Iran be somehow muzzled or in any way hindered?

Gotta say I agree with Nathan's answer: "To say so is nothing less than patronizing. Outward and inward communiques would surely have found another path." That's not to say it's a bad thing, just a bit of perspective on the situation.

Tags: communication, iran, media, twitter // COMMENTS OPEN (4)

A Solid Made up of Idling Cars

Ah traffic, a never ending source of wonderment by laymen and scientists alike. I really enjoyed this explanation of the critical mass theory of a traffic jam: A team at Nagoya University in Japan ran a bunch of people around a circle and discovered that 22 cars was the critical number. Once you had that many on the track small changes, like a split-second braking, reverberated through the system.

Jonah Lehrer beautifully explains this in terms of phase transition:

This is actually a pretty familiar scenario for particle physicists, who are used to studying phase transitions, such as the transformation of liquid water into solid ice. In this case, the critical threshold is temperature, which triggers clusters of molecules to slow down and form a crystal lattice, which then spreads to nearby molecules. A traffic jam is simply a solid made up of idling cars.

Nice visual.

Tags: networks, science, traffic // COMMENTS OPEN (3)

Truths without Truth

I posted this story about unfounded medical truths over at GE Adventure, but it's too good not to post here as well. Taken from How Doctors Think.

One of the most common congenital abnormalities of the heart is a hole between the two upper chambers, between the right atrium and the left atrium. Since the pressure in the left side of the heart is higher than in the right, blood will flow from the left atrium through the hole into the right atrium. This aberrant blood flow is called a shunt and can overload the right side of the heart, leading to heart failure and other complications. Lock told me that doctors send children for surgery to close these holes if there is a two-to-one shunt, meaning that twice as much blood flows through the right side of the heart than the left.

"Do you know where that two-to-one number came from?" [Dr. James] Lock [, chief of cardiology at Boston's Children's Hospital,] asked. I imagined ti was from careful clinical studies of children with the hold. "You would think so. But you'd be wrong. At a medical meeting in the 1960s, a pediatrician presented the question 'When should the hold be closed?' to a group of cardiologists. There was a heated debate about how much shunting required a surgical fix. So the meeting organizers, out of desperation, took a vote. Some voted for a lower number, some for a higher number. The median ended up being two-to-one. This was published in the American Journal of Cardiology. So now all textbooks have as the truth that you should close a hole when the shunt is two-to-one.

Tags: health, research // COMMENTS OPEN (2)

Scrabble Auctions

Those wacky economists are at it again. This time by reworking the rules of scrabble to allow for tile bidding:

At the beginning of the game tiles are turned over in sequence and the players bid on them in a fixed order. The high bidder gets the tile and subtracts his bid from his total score. (We started with a score of 100 and ruled out going negative, but this was never binding. An alternative is to start at zero and allow negative scores.) After all players have 7 tiles the game begins. In each round, each player takes a turn but does not draw any tiles at the end of his turn. At the end of the round, tiles are again turned over in sequence and bidding works just as at the beginning until all players have 7 tiles again, and the next round begins. Apart from this, the rules are essentially the standard scrabble rules.

The discoveries from the game are pretty interesting, especially around the scores of tiles. Blanks should actually make you lose points (they commanded 20 points on average in the bidding), 's' scores too high, 'u' and 'v' too low. Interesting.

Tags: economics, games, scrabble // COMMENTS OPEN (0)

Finance Fail FAIL

In case you're playing along at home, looks like Paul Krugman responded to the Duncan Watts article I posted about yesterday. Though he doesn't call out or link to the article, he pretty much shits on Watts' main thesis: "So I think of the pursuit of a world in which everyone is small enough to fail as the pursuit of a golden age that never was. Regulate and supervise, then rescue if necessary; there's no way to make this automatic."

A few things on this unrelated to economics: First, I LOVE how Krugman makes internet jokes. It's so awesome that a nobel-winning economist writing on The New York Times includes FAIL (or all your base, which was a recent headline). Second, it's kind of weird that he doesn't even mention Watts article, which it seems clear he is responding too ... Maybe he's not? Three, have I mentioned the internet is awesome lately? How cool is it that this kind of debate can just spring up.

Tags: economics, finance // COMMENTS OPEN (1)