The more you think, the more you sink

One of the most important moments in the first Matrix movie is probably the moment where Neo decides to leave his home after being invited by a guy and a girl. A girl with a white rabbit tatoo on the shoulder.

Why ? Because earlier on in the movie, he had received the message above : "Follow the white rabbit". I've always wondered why he did this. Obviously the realization of something unexpected and deemed unlikely encourages us to go out of our comfort zone. As if it was : a Sign. Paulo Coelho, the spiritual writer talks about the universe conspiring to get you to your goal when you want something hard enough. The universe will guide you using : signs. Coelho calls them : the signs of god.

The belief that clues exist to guide us through our lives is of the metaphysical order of course. But the underlying truth to it all is, once again, of the evolutionary kind. We are a species that evolved, probably like many others, to chose. To chose. No tot know but to chose.

You might have heard Jean Buridan, the medieval theologian who tells the story of a donkey at equal distance from two haystacks. Unable to chose any of the two, he starves for several days, then dies. Out of indecisiveness. Now, first of all, this is a story, I can bet you no donkey is that dumb. But more to the point, Buridan uses this example to illustrate humans indecisiveness. Buridan has been proven wrong.

Doctor Antonio Damasio, who spoke at TED 2011, gave an original tour of the human mind: We are impulsive machines. More importantly, our reason, which we think is a tool that allows to decide, is not. It is a egg-timer that'll set off action once time runs out. I haven't read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell yet but I bet there's something about that kind of mecanism in it. Nudge by Thaler and Sunstein, which I ordered, takes this concept into account.

It is no coincidence that we follow leaders that seem doubtless. Leaders throughout history, or at least the ones I can think of right now, have rarely given the impression of being thoughtful persons. People know they need someone to lead them even in the midst of uncertainty. In other terms, someone who will take action in though completely ignorant of what is happening. These are the presidents we elect : Not the ones that will ponder and evaluate, but the ones who will chose with no hesitation. Our evolved selves detect patterns of impulsiveness. They appreciate and value them.

Confidence, courage, are all marks of action in the midst of ignorance. It is as if knowledge and action are opposed in our minds. We evolved to chose however not to know. The most confident and courageous are the ones that can shut their brain up when they need to take action. These are the ones who will take initiatives, who will voice their opinion in the midst of a crowd. They didn't think the consequences through. They simply did what their impulse dictated. They may fail, but they tried. And trial and error is what got us here.

80/20 and the friggin' butterflies

So it's 2 in the morning but I can' t sleep without writing. No ! Please. Don't ask me why. The title says it all actually : I'm wondering how to reconcile the butterfly effect with the 80/20 Pareto law. The 80/20 rule is about power laws. One might think it always means that 20% of a sample is responsible for 80% of the output or anything in that sense and therefore one might end up thinking this is very similar to the butterfly effect since a little (20% = flap of the wings of a butterfly) is causing a lot (80% = tornado). This would be even more confusing if I told you about the 99/1 principle which occurs quite often in nature, especially when it comes to studies about your and my productivity (we do 99% of the work in 1% of the time we spent trying to do it)

Enter the blip:

The thing is however that the 80/20 priniciple also stands for systems that are resistant to change. So for example, the internet where 80% of the links refer to roughly 20% of the existing websites. The thing is that these websites have nothing to do with our butterflies. They are the heavy mamoths of the web (the new york times and Google and Facebook ...) that are very unlikely to be the unespected small butterfly that'll change it all.

So I'm wondering at 2:15am now (thank god my mom does'nt read this blog) how is it that a butterfly is capable of shifting the status quo of this very resilient system. We know new-comers have the potential to stir up things, especially on the web and we've seen hackers making the news and Anonymous bringing down giants but the web is still here as it was with its traditional 20%  of mamoth websites.

So here's my question: What can a butterfly do in a power law environment ? Is it supposed to change things slowly and nicely until they reach a tipping point ?

Examples of historical leaders such as Napoleon and Lenin are coming to my mind and I guess that yes, they did build momentum by bringing up, by educing as Dee Hock would put it, the desires and asprations of their yet-to-become followers.

Evolutionary examples also come to mind. How does a given version of a species come about ? It has to survive in its environment, better than others. That's it ! It's not only the species doing the work, it's the changing environment alos that's making hard on the old versions of the species, on the guys whi didn't have Lenine's and Napoelon's thoughts (the one's the people needed to hear) and also on the Web's mamoths.

That's how My Space came to an end. The changing environment and the lurking butterfly (Facebook). Beware of the lurking butterfly. I see.

Do-It-Yourself religion : The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

My last posts were about how the Web is revolutionizing every existing field where information asymetry previously ruled. This covers astronomy, health, nutrition, law but also, as it is featured today : Religion. Enter the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Some days ago, an Austrian young man made the news because he succeded in keeping his "pastafarian" headgear on his driver license photo. Niko Alm, a self-confessed atheist, said he belongs to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The Church of the flying spaghetti monster, which rise and emergence came as a reaction to the state of Kansas' ban of a course for "intelligent design" as an alternative to a course about evolution, has a series of commandments, as every self-respecting religion does :

• Beliefs include the fact that the monster likes pirates
• That Friday is a holy day during which believers shouldn't work
• That the monster created trees, a mountain and a midget first, then took care of the rest
• ...

Hence the pirate costumes on the website

The godcan be impersonated in this religion. This is usually rare among other religions :

To me, this is yet another manifestation of the fall of the asymetry of information. It's been quite some time that we've realized that talking snakes didn't get us here and that's not what I mean by the fall of the asymetry of information in this case. Rather, this CHurch of the Spaghetti Monster, the flying Spaghetti monster of course, is a step towards the abolition of the creationist absurdities. In other terms, a step towards the abolition of the last bastions of an age old asymetry of information which still remains in some places.

Hail, then, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Lord of the Pastafarians :

The Reims episode : Adventures in the realm of physicality

Seconds ago, an amazing choir started singing out of nowhere in the Reims cathedral. At first I thought it was a flasmob since nothing to me could explain this gathering of such a large number of people wearing different outfits in a church on a Saturday morning, but a previously organized and thought of mob, trained to impress with their voices. The truth is however, as one choir member told me, that it was a traveling choir. A "traditional" string-ties group that met thanks to the passion of its members and trained to perform and impress.

We tend to forget that it all started there. In that quintessential passion that moves us away from the couch and into life. Thank you Reims choir.

Later, a fractal window made its appearance and gothic architecture miniature seemed like a Mandelbrotian ensemble. The physicality of these things, the brute tranformation of an idea into matter releases the full, nearly tangible power of an idea, even if you can't touch or interact with the object.

The architect's plan remind me of a talk about African villages' fractal structure. Repetition is key. And isn't repetition, or in other terms copying, the base of it all with symetry being its most obvious manifestation (since symetry simply is the multiplication of the work yoi've already done by 2, as if you were dragging a cell in Excel). Copying is what our genes do, what stygmergic ants and termites rely on, what atoms use to go from a state to another. And how surprising is it that copying is exactly what you'd expect from a lazy organism, from a lazy structure. Copying is the laziest possible stratrgy, life's favorite strategy.

The cathedral's underground also reminds me of that record keeping the universe does. Every step, every stone every civilization laid is a treasure Earth embraves jalously in it until times immemorial. Archeology is the science that reads into the library Earth's ground and soil are.

The Universe's Memory

It must be serendipity or else it's the fact that I'm focusing on a given subject that now makes it possible to see what I haven't been seeing. As you might know, the butterfly effect is one of these concepts I find amazing. And it's been the case for quite some time lately. The awe went up a notch today as I ran through one of the last chapter's in James Gleick's "The information" Gleick describes how Charles Babbage saw the air as being the record of virtually (or rather physically) every sound that's ever been made on Earth. Every whisper, every step's sound, every animal's growl, every growing leaf on a tree's branches have moved the air around these creatures. It has impacted the atmosphere and left its trace. Hence, the air around you is a library of every sound that's ever been maid. It's a thought I had already had and found more poetic than scientific. But the planet never forgets. It's true. The Universe's memory is limitless.

The universe takes Everything into account. It even has a library of every picture, every scene, every set that's ever existed. Meaning the universe has a physical trace of Napoleon's crowning. Why, because the sun was there in that day, light was there and light was modified, steered by the presence of these people.

The Universe is a multi-dimensional library, or rather a deeply physical library. And that made me think about the butterfly effect. What ?! Well, yes

The butterfly effect is often summed up by the famous "can the flap of the wings of a butterfly in Mexico cause a tornado in Texas ?". And the reason why it could is because the universe does not forgive, I mean, forget :)

The universe takes every single physical event into account and adds it into the equation. Nothing is left out. Everything is consequential. Your every stroll, your eveyr word, your every blink and your every breath. You mean a lot to the universe.

The woman in the pic is completely unrelated to the post if not to say that she too is very important to the universe. But I assure you she counts for this post since she is spiking views like hell's hungry flames

The rise of emergence : Life's hidden equation

Needless to say I'm heart-broken for not being able to attend TED Global 2011. Even more so when it came to my attention that Matt Ridleyhas organized a session tackiling emergence.

It seems to be concerned mainly with biology according to the TED blog but it is immensely promising for the concept of emergence and gives high hopes about the possibility that the subject might hit the main stream.

Emergence is afascinating phenomenon mainly observed in Physics and biology but that social sceinces are trying to depict in human behavior. It is order out of disorder. The big bang of life really. And I wouldn't be surprised if the same emergent logic ended up explaining the Big Bang too.

However, the very concept raises an eternal question about that general formula underlying every possible thing in the world. The universal algorithm that dictates it all. And writing about it reminded me an excerpt of James Gleick's information where the authir explains scientists view of complexity and thier attempts to define it. The chapter end up showing how Complexity, Information and Probability (a proxy for randomness) are inter-twined.

How complex are you ? Compared to a drawing ? To a camel ? To a table ? To a text ?

You can circumvent the problem of course saying that every entity's complexity can only be defined relative to an ensemble it relates to : Texts' complexity would be measured comapred to other texts, tables' to other pieces of furniture ... But Kolmogorov, one of complexity's soviet union thinkers actually had a different approachwhere complexity would be defined relative to a universal language : the computer program language. You are as complex as the algorithm that would be necessary to be written in order to recreate you. In other words, you are as complex as th formula that underlies your construction.

This is amazingly revelatory and brings back to the universality of concepts such as complexity. I saw a talk today about simplicity and complexity by John Maeda

[ted id=172]

The insight here is "how simple can it get ?". How much can you narrow down the equation of life and Maeda does a great job : Life is about trying to get the most enjoyment and the least pain. think about all the organisms and the systems around you ; that's exactly it. Our educational system, our nutrition system, our industrial system. It has all converged towards cahin production like factories (we mass-produce identically-educated children, identically fed, pacakged and tasting chicken and cows, identical cars and tables ...).

This simple equation Maeda comes up with is really the one underlying every functionning entity's logic : I want to do the most with the least energy. And it brings me back (again :) ) to that universal equation : I believe what underlies all forms of life is really this minimal energy use, in other terms : Slothiness.

Yes ! As preposterous as this may sound, I believe life is lazy. This is its qintessial way of being. Life converges towards minimal energy use.

And no. I don't beliebve it's efficiency we're heading towards, meaning doing the most with the least. This is not how things are working. There is no underlying six sigma equation within nature. Nature's design isn't optimal, it isn't energy wise and resource effective, I don't think so or at least I don't see so, or else why would we have steered so far from that universal reality.

Life is lazy, or maybe is it because today is grey that it seems so ? No, just kidding :)

Can Social Media's ROI be measured ?

Marketing is a very large spending component of a company's budget. It's also one of the least accountable departments. Why ? It's a hard thing to get a hold of. The exact return, outcome and increase in purchases resulting from a given campaign is hard to compute to the quasi-impossibility of tracing every revenue dollar to the point (or marketing channel) where the customer actually encountered the brand. This becomes even more difficult in the case of social media. Marketing ROI has evolved these last years. Companies can actually figure out how effective a campaign was through targeted surveys ("How did you hear about us ?"). In the case of social media however, though surveys might be an answer, there is a qualitative component that might be too difficult for numbers to grasp. Hence the need for a solution.

Enter Foursquare

In one of its latest initiatives, showcased in a Fast company article, Foursquare bonded with American Express to link your Foursquare account to your Amex card. What happens is that, instead of showing a coupon on your phone, the discount or offer is accounted for on your card directly once you check-in in a given place. In other terms, whereas the old scenario was : "Hello, I have a coupon" / "Oh ! Well, it's $60 instead of $80 ". The new scenario is more like : " I'd like to buy this " / " Great ! $80 please ". Why ? Well, because the discount was already credited on your card when you checked in. So what ?

Well, coming back to our initial subject (i.e. social media marketing ROI), this means Foursquare can now provide hard data on sales made based on promotions and offers the clients make on its platform

So, so, so ?

So yes, there is a solution and it'll probably be app-based and necessitate a higher customer involvement. This means that companies offering social media marketing packages will need to find a way to make the customer's spending traceable (incentivizing that kind of data-giving through even more promotions) in order to measure the efficiency of their campaigns.

Hence, the days to come might not witness the rise of a "social media marketing accountability" industry but rather of "social media marketing accountability" features in existing social media marketing company's packages. Quite certain though is this : Accountability is the name of the coming game.

I know how to go from tweet to street

This whole reflection started with a question I formulated at TED Active with the Social Networks awesome-sque team. Since then, the reflection branched out, collided and got enriched by new ideas. It ended up forming a large puzzle imbricating all the useful encountered ideas that can actually take a tweet to street ...  Or almost. Enter the thought puzzle :

This article however is about the missing piece. Which I found today. Thanks to, yes, Malcolm Gladwell. It's a New Yorker article called "Small Change" and it's a small reflection surprisingly :

This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Even revolutionary actions that look spontaneous, like the demonstrations in East Germany that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, are, at core, strong-tie phenomena.

And there it was: the flash. Strong-tie phenomena are at the basis of high risk activism, and by extension at the center of any new endeavor, social breakthrough. Diffusion is a weak tie phenomena (the Granovetter kind), initiation is a strong tie phenomena. The way this fits into the puzzle is the following :

I knew groups formed like boxes of atom when a system was preparing to go from disorder to order, in a hub-like way. The behavior of that hub then spread, just as in a complex ant-like system through stygmergy which is a phenomenon enabled by a pheromone in animal species, typically. The human equivalent of pheromones can be empathy in some situations (mainly non-commercial and of an intellectual order) and profit in market-related events. So I knew the diffusion's how, but I didn't know the why. Why do hubs form around that particular cause ? Why did the first social hubs in Egypt, the ones that were going to unleash the power of the crowds at exponential speed, form ? Strong-ties.

They had a stronger kind of connection. It reminded me "La bande à Baader", Rirette Maitrejean's anarchist group, the black panthers' head chiefs, The two Steves that started apple ... Friends, strong acquaintances. Yes, Granovetter proved that you find a job thanks to weak ties and people you've met once, but you don't start a revolution with strangers. You start it with people you know, with a rock-band-like group of friends. People you truly trust. Trust. The vital pheronomone maybe.

The extinction of emotions

The "some things never change" argument Versus My nerves You're in the middle of a conversation about technology, in awe before the incredible leap our species has made in the field lately. However, the other party is only giving you mild approval. He/she nods, accepts the facts, then reflects about how humans will always be humans. Whatever the leap, regardless of how much the means and the medium evolve, we will still be the same : "men will look for women, women will look for men, the internet won't eradicate stupidity, the brightest and wittiest will always make it just as the fittest survived in the past and succeeded in reproducing, humans will try to predict and picture the future ... and fail  ... you know, we're evolving, of course, but some things never change" >:(

Enter My nerves >:(

No. I'm sorry. And to understand why I'm sorry, here's a beautiful illustration :

Now your opinion: Do you think the interaction between the two triangles in case A is equivalent to the interaction in case B ? How could it possibly be the same ? In case B, there's a circle in between for Pete's sake !

Unless the circle  is weightless, meaning unless it does not affect the interaction in any way, meaning unless it is non-existent in other terms then case A is different from case B. The kind of technology where the circle is non-existent, where communication is not altered in any way due to its presence does not exist. Each means of communication takes away some aspect of direct communication (I can' t see you when we're talking on the phone, I can't shake your hand in Skype ...). So let's agree on this : communication is different. It changed.

The evolution of emotions:

Can we now agree on another lovely illustration (yes, I have a tablet PC :) ):

Pretty obvious right ? Emotion is a function of communication among other things (x refers to these other things here). So since we already agree that communication has changed, doesn't that imply that emotion is also bound to change?

Do you think love has remained unchanged since 1800 AD, since 1200 AD, since 5000 BC. Maybe it still puts into play the same parts of our brain, but it is unimaginable that the way a man or a woman used to love a man or a woman has remained intrinsically unaltered since the dawn of time. What I am saying in other terms is : Emotions evolve. Emotions adapt, some emotions fade away, some are selected and survive. Yes, some emotions will go extinct. They will disappear and stop being relayed throughout generations because of their sheer lack of use.

In "The Information", James Gleick explains that though we moved from telegraph, to phone, to video, the theory that underlies information (the communication of a message as Claude Shannon might define it) is somewhat universal. But our fight for a means of communication as direct as possible has another goal. In our move from telegraph, to phone, to video, to the up-coming internet of things and internet connected sex-toys and gadgets that replicate the touch and feel that another user inputted on the other end of the line (yes, you aren't hallucinating, internet connected sex toys controlled from a distance are being used in Second Life by users who want to connect ... more) : this move, this fight, is our fight for emotions' survival.

Harvey Fineberg explains how we've outdone traditional evolution (we've stopped adapting to our environment and started adapting it to us):

[ted id=1131]

Apply this reasoning to our emotions : We are trying to preserve every one of them.

A history of emotions:

The part of the human adventure of which we have a trace of (what we call History) is but a fraction of the whole human adventure. Love as we know it might have descended from something else, much more recently than we think. Louis Georges Tin, a French sociologist, demonstrates, for example, how different a man's love for a woman is today compared to what it was in ancient Greece or during the Middle Ages.

How much of our emotional heritage we've lost throughout History ? How much evolved ? How much developed to respond to new situations among our civilizations ?

Moreover, if you consider, as Ray Kurzweil might argue that evolution accelerates, that it becomes quicker, then you might say that love is evolving today faster than it ever has, shyness too, sadness is changing form by the second, redefined as it is, by our countless interactions.

Compare the mails you used to write to your first darling and the ones you're writing today. How much of it is due to increased maturity, how much is evolution ? Can it be that it's happening this fast ?

Maybe I should study the use of different emoticons on MSN and various social networks throughout time : see which are fading away and which are increasingly being used. Get me right here : Human hearts and minds are unfathomable mines. But sometimes small murmurs have large echos in these places.

The coming reign of the 10 fingers : I see a greasy gorilla-glass future

The day started with an amazing ad by Samsung to promote its new Galaxy II called "Unleash your fingers" : [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyMfpJh3h4A&feature=player_embedded#at=90]

Only it soon headed to a very interesting article by Gizmodo's Jesus Diaz about how Photoshop's Ipad application shapes the future of computing. More interestingly however is a video he put in his article about 10GUI view of the future of computing:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf03YBxCyGI&feature=player_embedded#at=279]

And in this video : One striking sentence. What does it mean to go from Mouse to multi-touch ? How big is this shift in the history of humans' interaction with PCs ? Well, here's my take on things :

The day we will move to multi-touch interfaces instead of the traditional mouses, be it as 10GUI sees it or any other way, will be as major a day in the realm of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) as the day humans got their opposable thumbs : The evolution that allowed us to grab things, model them and start our exponential conquering of the earth.

Why ? For the moment : we are interacting with our computer screens with ONE point. ONE dimension : our mouse's pointer. Imagine the potential lying in the use of 9 more pointers : Your whole ten fingers ! Imagine the applications, the visualizations, the control you would have over your OS and your creations. Imagine the possibilities apps adapted to the use of all tens would offer !

The future will sure be greasy but I'de give ten years out of my life to spend thirty minutes in 2500, 10 of which I'll spend using one of their gadgets. If there'll be any gadgets at all then !

Serendipity VS Google

This post makes the case for a "I'm feeling lost button" but it also wonders about where this beautiful phenomena's heading in our Filter-filled era. What is serendipity ? Lenny Rachitsky does a great job defining it as the act of stumbling upon something fortunate while seeking something completely unrelated. In other terms : It's randomness smiling back at you. I believe Paulo Coelho grasps the concept wonderfully in "The alchemist" when he talks about "the universe conspiring to help you get to your goal".

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p0VK_-BoJI&feature=player_embedded]

Serendipity isn't free of charge. You have to take a step towards it for it to come meet you. I think of it as Newton's apple. He had to take a walk out of his apartment and go sit under a tree for a change. And hop ! There was the apple. You don't seek serendipity, you meet it. Life makes sure you do.

What are filters ? Filters are one of humanity's greatest inventions in my opinion. If you've read Chris Anderson's The Long Tail, you might have the same opinion. The Web started "making sense" when Google arrived. Yes ! that's how important filters are ! They allow you to find what you need. This is as major a step as the step from oral culture to written culture. Yes ! You read this right. Recall that chapter in James Gleick's "The information" where he explains how writing allowed humans to "look up" things. How could you possibly "look up" something in an oral culture where ideas don't have a physical existence.

Same with filters. The Internet would've remained a diffuse babble if it wasn't for Google. Yes ! I have an Android phone, a Chrome browser, a Gmail account and a proud Googler :) Google allowed us to "look up" things on the Web. The company's crawling algorithmic robots transform the Net into a searchable parchment !

So what's the problem ? Well, here's the problem as Eli Fraser puts it :

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s]

However, though the "filter bubble" is a reality and tailoring the Web to your tastes is threatening serendipity, I'm wondering how "Serendipity" ca be included in a "natural" way into our Web surfing routine. When people search, they want to find. Efficiency is the word. Randomness is a Pre-Google nightmare for productivity obsessed individuals.

In other terms, you don't want randomness, serendipity unless you're searching for it !!! Did you read that ? This way of thinking defeats the very purpose and spirit of serendipity.

So what's the solution ? Well, the very idea of this post came while reading an article about the future of shopping on Fast Company. There's this new app called Catalog Spree on the Ipad. The idea is to centralize in one store-like app all existing shop catalogs. It makes sense both from an environmental and efficiency point of view. I'm a hard believer in the upcoming disappearance of physical stores. Google brewed future shoppers won't go "looking" for the Pink Floyd symphonic disc when they can "look it up" on the Internet, nor will they "look" for the skimmed milk in a supermarket when they can search for it on the Supermarket's website.

Can you see ? In an app like Catalog spree, the only serendipity you can find is the one the app itself through the display of products shows you. It's the pair of red shoes you spot next to mocassins.

So what are you saying here ? In an efficiency-centered, filter-based future : serendipity will have to be engineered, built-in as a side-occurrence. Yes ! Serendipity and efficiency (filters) are irreconcilable.

Serendipity is reality's slap in the face to remind you : "You're not in control, you don't really know what you want, let me surprise you and you won't be disappointed". It's when that really charismatic, definitely annoying shop keeper convinces you to buy that shirt you really did't like saying : "Trust me". And the shirt "works" :)

We tend to want to be in control until we reach that point of maturity where we realize life has the potential to surprise us and guide us. This realization may become synonymous of downloading a "serendipity app" built into our filters in the future.

Twitter-based trading strategies (Yep, you read this right !)

To many, this might sound like the latest fad and one knows how quickly the financial sector gets hooked to fads. However, before we start debating, we might want to determine what we mean exactly by a twitter-based trading strategy. In my opinion, because of the many possible uses of Twitter, this term actually refers to multiple practices:

• The Twitter Alarm (short term trends) : In my view, this should be a no-brainer for traders. You're trading Apple stocks and news breaks about strikes in one of their screen providers' factories. You want to be sure to get that information as quickly as possible. Well more an more, news is likely to break on Twitter first. Hence, you need an alarm that sounds when a thousand hundred tweeters mention Apple. Excluding this strategy because Twitter "is not trustworthy" is dumb in this case because such a large outbreak in tweets about Apple is likely to be based on some sort of news. What if it's a re-tweeted false rumor ? It might be. And you might want to wait for the AFP news to sell. But that's where personal judgement comes in : Twitter is a tool. You are the user.
• Twitter sentiment indexes (long term trends) : To be clear, by long term I don't mean 5-year trends but rather 3-month trends (quarters). This technique I've talked about. It consists of using Twitter to model tweeters sentiment over a period of time and use it to predict the direction in which larger financial indexes will move. There are two premises here : First that using words in tweets, one can determine sentiment and second that this sentiment affects major financial indexes or stock prices in an indirect way by steering the traditional macroeconomic equilibrium. This is the strategy I'd like to discuss here.

In the following bullets, I'll point out everything fishy about the Twitter-sentiment-based trading strategies:

1. Semantics related problems: I'm starting with the biggest issue which is currently puzzling NLP (Natural Language Processing) specialists. It is an issue half way between linguistic and programming : A machine cannot process sarcasm and when you ask it to track "oil" on Twitter, it'll also spot the tweets relating to the "oil" Justin Bieber dropped on his shirt that afternoon (Bieber distortion) ... beyond the obvious problems however is a more profound problematic: What is sentiment and how are you processing it ? Because if you're looking for an index that indicates bad mood when it goes down and good mood when it goes up, I've got a bad news for you : Human sentiment is not binary. If you're trying to build a social-emotional predictor of the S&P 500, building it the same way the S&P is built is wrong. The now famous "Twitter predicts the stock market" tries to circumvent the problem but fails in my opinion. Sentiment is not an up or down that'll eventually determine the mood of the financial market.
2. Getting quality out of quantity : This refers to the first premise above (using words in tweets, one can determine sentiment). What this premise implies is that the words used by tweeters actually indicate sentiment. General sentiment. The mood of a sample of the population. I might conceive of a sentiment index about a brand or a concept or a person but a general sentiment that will in turn tip us about which way the S&P will go is too encompassing and reducing of human emotions for me to fathom. In other terms, I don't think general sentiment means anything.
3. Not stand-alone:  At this stage, you might be thinking "Yeah, I'll use the Twitter alarm but this sentiment thing is fishy". You're right. As long as it's not a stand-alone solution, I believe it can be a great add-on to a trading strategy. You can use free tools such as Twittrading which has the right take since it has a specific index for several stocks
4. People will game the system: But then doubts arise. What if it becomes too mainstream? What if people realize that funds and traders are actually sonar-scanning their tweets for insight ? Won't they just start writing misleading rubbish to fool the machines? You bet they will. But no one said the semantics game was a risk free one. Machines are already making mistakes. Here's one example of a tweet the Twittrading algorithm used to determine the Apple sentiment index (Yep) :
5. How representative: What you should consider is that this is sentiment based on tweeters' tweets. These are individuals who are rather accustomed to technology, more or less "wired". Hence the reason why you're more likely to get an accurate Apple Sentiment Index then a "Saint Gobain" or "Berkshire Hathaway" sentiment index. Tweeters are simply more interested in the former than the latter. And even if you do find semantic data about the latter, John Glasgow points out on Quora : "Retail trading accounts for roughly 11% of all trading volume, so individual investors have a small weight in overall stock prices. "
6. How predictive: This is about the second premise cited above (sentiment affects major financial indexes or stock prices in an indirect way by steering the traditional macroeconomic equilibrium). Again John Glasgow on Quora narrows it down to a question : "If Coca Cola has a lot of negative tweets, does that actually mean their sales will decrease?". I think this is a question worth pondering on.
7. It's working for movies ! It's true. Look at Fflick  (well, now it's Google's property ... too) and its accurate prediction of next box office hits based on tweets. But I see the market as being much more complex than the movie market where tweets are revelatory of future viewership and hence of future revenue ("Harry Potter 8's last trailer looks awesome !" usually means "I really want to see this movie") while tweets aren't revelatory of stock purchasing intent.

But whatever we write and say, it's already being done!  Pluga Al Fund is a financial fund using blogs to perceive sentiment, Thomson Reuters and Dow Jones are using Lexalytics (a social media analysis company)  to bring a new kind of insight to their clients. The New York Times states that "according to Aite Group, a financial services consulting company, about 35 percent of quantitative trading firms are exploring whether to use unstructured data feeds".

Why is this happening ? What happened to the good old Benjamin Graham techniques ? Well, it's still here. Only, since our lives are moving to the digital sphere, we should start "listening" to that sphere with more attention than ever.

Boxes of atoms, anarchist groups and the frontiers of chaos

I would really like to study the emergence of communist and anarchist groups towards the end of the 1920s in Russia or the appearance of these small groups right before the red revolution in every country that's had a communist experience. This need stems from the latest book I've been reading. If you believe, like me, that some fundamental laws lurk behind every system in the universe, "Linked : The new science of networks" will make you smile and awe alone during your reading hours in the subway.

At one moment, the writer, Albert-László Barabási, explains how atoms in matter, when transitioning from one phase to another (water turning into, say, ice), just before the change is finalized, right before the shift is done, can no longer be studied as individual atoms but should rather be studied as groups or boxes of "atoms" to which the same rules that apply to single atoms now apply, at that frontier between a phase and another, the limit between disorder and order.

And you can't help thinking about our networks when you read this: At the frontier of order and disorder, when our societies transition from a phase to another intermediately sink into chaos, just as they do before the country shift from a political regime to another, don't people have a tendency to group and create communities. And more importantly, according to which rules can we study these these communities ? Here's my take on this, in a very principle-stating version :

When approaching the vicinity of disorder (political, social or cultural revolutions), the members of a society often have similar ambitions, interests, goals, dreams and aspirations which translate into the formation of groups centered around these feelings. In other terms, the groups follow the same rules as the individuals because the one, just as the whole,  share the same goal.

This idea actually stems from a 6-minute video by Derek Sivers and a fellow TEDxBeirut organizer's post (William Choukeir)

[ted id=814]

How to create a movement ? What defines a leader ? A leader cannot emerge, would not exist if not for his followers. A leader is the one who translates the followers' fears, dreams, ambitions and puts them into words, acts them out, shouts them in public. Hence the following, hence the movement.

What leads to the creation of groups then is not the leader, it is the pre-existence of a common feeling that needs to be expressed. That is what unites a movement. That's why a group is actually the scaling up of an individual.

So when major social, political or cultural shifts start being felt in society, when the shift from one order to another approaches, when the disorder that will happen in between looks clearer day after day, people's common emotions bring them together, bonds them together and amplify their impact because that is what groups are : boxes of atoms acting similarly to fight through the chaos.

They are individuals to the power 10, 100, 1000 ... Group on ! Fight through !

Did Darwin choose your friends for you ?

Evolution is a trial and error process that leads to a species' characteristics best adapted to its environment to be preserved throughout generations. When it comes to social connections, studies show that the most connected among us are also the less lonely (duh), the happiest (mm) and the most likely to find a job thanks to the power of what Granovetter calls "weak ties". So, why aren't we all that connected ? If it's such a great feature, why didn't our evolution make us all the same way : Popular, connected, at the center of our networks ?

Well because being connected is not all bright and shiny. At least not all the time. That is because the most connected individuals, with the most friends and a central place in the network, are also the ones most prone to be hit by a disease when it starts spreading. It is possible that our most connected ancestors are also the ones who were hit most often by diseases and it is possible that this is the very reason that didn't allow the "connector's" gene to spread unto all of us. The "connectors" simply did not survive.

“Traits that are always adaptive tend to reach what geneticists call fixation in the population: in the long run, everyone becomes the same. But when there are conflicting pressures—under some circumstances, a trait is beneficial, but under others, it is not—then it is possible to maintain diversity in the population in the face of natural selection” says Nicholas Christakis. This "connector" gene did not spread because it was a conflicting characteristic that did not enhance the odds of survival invariably.

When it comes to business, marketing, the financial markets, imagine you're a hub, a central nod, as in the pic below, through which everything the network produces ends up transiting : You'll be the first to know when interesting news starts spreading but you're also the first one who'll get to hear about a false rumor.

Whether this is an interesting position to be in then depends on what position you're in. You want to be at the center of that network when you're looking for a job but you want to keep your distance when you're trading stocks. A trader will typically keep an eye on the center of the network (normally guys who buy into every fad, whose mood, decisions and process change every two days), see how it's working out for them at a given time and react accordingly.

You might then think that it's never good to be too far, right ? Wrong. Imagine you're a trader now and this network represents the owners of Mortgage Backed Securities in 2006 ... Sometimes, you want to be at the outskirts of a system. Imagine this network up there is New York City. You don't want to live in the very center of NYC if you want to give your lungs a chance for a better future. You would very much like to live in some quiet suburb.

Positioning oneself in a network is hence vital for survival and that is the gene, the characteristic, that lived on through the generations. Our abilities to choose which and how many friends to have, who and how many persons to deal with in different situations. Darwin, aka evolution (but the title sounded better that way) does have something to do with who your friends are.

When Social Media disrupts Science

I am a big believer in DIY science. I think science can gain a lot by exposing itself to amateurish interest and experiments, be it only through the insight the quantity of data could bring to conventional science. However, this is very different from what this article discusses on Fast Company's website. According to the latter, an inadequate cure for multiple sclerosis suggested by an Italian doctor and rejected by all the medical community was able to survive that denial in Canada where it got media coverage. As the logic of news diffusion would want it, the news ended up in the realm of social media where it gained defenders and Fan pages. This ended up giving unnecessary credibility to a false idea, Canadian supporters going as far as demanding funding for further research into the matter.

Yes, there is a situation where social media might propagate false truths and rumors. It happens all the time. People are wrong all the time and take half-facts for unshakable truths. However, titling an article like this

"Why you should consult your doctor and not Facebook on medical issues"

Gives the feeling that the Web is not to be trusted when it comes to medical issues. I disagree. The Internet cannot be your sole reference but it is a Very useful one since it aggregates the knowledge and experience of millions of patients, compared to doctors who aggregate only their knowledge and the experience of their patients.

Is Social taking over the web ?

In a very informative, though short, article, "Social Media Today" writer Daren Bach gives a hint at the exact route that will allow social (read Twitter, Facebook ...) to become the next emperor of the web:

Human link building is now closely tied to indexing social signals for relevant content by Google’s newly polished algorithm. Social trust, authority and engagement have become vitally important boosters for enhanced elevation to a higher Google PageRank.

You might be saying : So ? Google already ranks the sites that get the most clicks on top of its result pages. You're right, approximately right. Because Google's algorithm also takes into account the number of trust-worthy websites displaying links pointing at a given page in order to shoot that page up in the results' ranking.

And here comes the question: What's the ratio ? If Google is now taking into account :

1. The number of trustworthy sites linking to a given page
2. And Social trust (the number of "like" and re-tweets ?)

Bing, in its recent cooperation with Facebook, calls "the friend effect" (very enthusiastic Bing director there :) oh and thank you Wordpress for making it so easy to embed msn videos)

But, how big is 2. (social trust) compared to 1. (trustworthy websites + traditional wisdom of (all) the crowd) then ? And you might ask again : Why worry ? The people behind the "like" and the re-tweets are the same people who were sending a page up the Google result ladder with their clicks. The medium's changed but the outcome is still the same.

That's where I beg to differ. Because it's a different audience we're considering here. It's as if we're giving a "premium membership" or an extra importance to the choices of these Facebookers and tweeters, who may be the most connected among us but also the most prone to "the illusion of social networks" as TechCrunch's Semil Shah calls it.

They are the ones most likely (and this is an assumption with a big A) to "buy into" some news or rumor. The power users of the web, the ones most immersed in the web and social experience, doing more "real-time than real life" during their day and are hence prone to riding and sharing hypes and false rumors.

You can see this as a more general version of the Beiber distortion. Reflexions and additional information are welcome. The comments are yours to fill. Even Beiber fans ... you can comment too ..

The Bieber Distortion : A metrics problem (seriously)

This is a quote from a very interesting Adage article about the problems that occur when trying to apply metrics on social media :

And then there's what we at Ad Age call The Salt Lake City Effect, aka The Bieber Distortion. Last summer, in the course of tracking chatter about various Hollywood blockbusters via Trendrr, we saw, over the course of just a few hours, a seemingly inexplicable surge in tweets including the word "Salt," the name of the then-late Jolie vehicle.

Beyond the core problem that "Salt" has an unfortunately generic name for a blockbuster (unlike, say, "Inception"), we wondered: Did a new "Salt" trailer get released? Did Jolie experience a nip-slip or other wardrobe malfunction on a red carpet somewhere while promoting her movie? No and nope. It took awhile for us to figure it out, but by parsing individual tweets, we ultimately discovered that pop star Justin Bieber, who was then on tour, had just arrived at his latest destination, where he tweeted, "Salt Lake City is super chill. Air

just feels clean. Feels like it's gonna be a good day." His fans retweeted that bland observation endlessly, giving the word "Salt" a boost out of nowhere.

I just had to share this :)

Why Burning Man goers are closer to heaven than priests

This is directly inspired by the most inspiring talk I've watched for the day : [ted id=341]

Before delving into what makes the moral roots of liberals and conservatives, Jonathan Haidt enumerates what he calls the "5 foundations of morality" which are common to mammals and to all humans. The second one is fairness and reciprocity. And that reminded me of a talk I heard at BIL 2011 this year in Los Angeles by the incredible : John Halcyon Styn founder of Hug Nation and 1st Saturdays and a super-big fan of Burning man.

And his talk, of course, was just about that. Here's the extreme summary :

Temporary Gift Economy, Permanent Life Changes / John Halcyon Styn, host, Hug Nation

Burning Man is no longer underground. But the ripple effects of this temporary city are having impact far beyond fashion and music. Why is this "epic party" so important to so many people? Halcyon will explain the significance of a Gift Economy and how new patterns of human interaction are being shaped in the Nevada Desert.

Burning man is on my bucket list obviously but that's not what this post is about : It's about the philosophy on which this "epic party" thrives : Temporary gift economy. When you go to Burning man, you go with a "gifting" mind (gifted too, though that's not essential). John said you'll be surprised how many people will "offer" you things ("Hey there! Do you want some pasta ?"). But the incredible thing is that: They won't ask for ANYTHING in return.

And that's where Haidt's talk comes back in: Even if no body asks you for anything, your moral obligation for reciprocity is being leveraged and really in the most beautiful, undemanding ways.

And think about it : What are our religions based on? At one point, Haidt reminds us that they are based on that golden rule of fairness and reciprocity. Are they ? Are they still? No. At all. The basis of it all has been lost and drowned in heavy bureaucratic institutions. I'd love to discuss this further with anybody who disagrees in the comments.

Until that discussion, to priests and Church goers : Try out the company of the Burning people. Much more fun than church. And it's only once a year !

Google why ? (A geek's rant)

What follows is the rant of a typography lover who, despite all the love, respect and admiration he has for the greatest tech company in the world, simply doesn't understand where it stands anymore when it comes to Interface design. Lately, today actually, I saw this : When you scroll down in your history in Google Chrome, there's an option to see "More" and older webs pages you've visited. But can you see the Font they used for "More" ! I know, I know. My rant is excessive, sick, obsessive ... who cares ? Nobody. I agree. But this ladies and gentleman is the tip of the iceberg of a company that has lost all touch with style:

• Where is the unified interface design for all Google Products ?
• Is it that hard to set some guidelines inside the company for interface design to be truly unified ?
• Where is the design coherence between Android, Chrome and the rest of Google Products as much on the level of user design as on the level of user interface ?

Why care ? Because others do. Because Apple has that coherence throughout the microcosm it has created. So where is Google ? Is it that hard to catch up ? Is minimalism really a design choice when it hinders the user experience ? No

Google why then ?

Rant over. Thank you

How I made a $ 1000 writing blogs

Simple really !  I wrote 20 blogs for $ 50 each for one of the University colleges. Here's the Blog Page. Thing is writing 20 blogs in two months isn't obvious when you're preparing exams, presentations, essays and talks. So you need a hack to enhance your productivity dramatically. And my productivity hack is called : Starbucks hopping. Here's the newly created Facebook Group. What follows explains why you should go Like that page :)

"Starbucks hopping" really consists of hopping from one Starbucks to another. Yes. It is that simple. And it is that effective. Here's how it goes:

1) Start your day in a Starbucks

2) Order your drink (green tea is better than coffee)

3) Sit down, connect to the internet if you need to

4) Don't start by checking your mail !

5) Rather start by your main task for the day (essay, reading, homework ...)

6) Sip your drink while working

7) Just before your mind starts getting tired (after 3 to 5 hours depending on your resistance), get up and leave

8) Walk around town for an hour (visit stuff, enjoy the sun/the stores ...)

9) Find another Starbucks, order a drink

10) Repeat

Why work at a Starbucks ? Why hop from one to another ? Why spend a day doing that ? Here are the 7 reasons why (the way it added up to 7 is ridiculously artificial as you'll see :) ) :

1) The brain is a muscle. A special muscle but a muscle nonetheless. If overused, it will end up letting you down just as a muscle will fail when over-trained

2) Hence, if productivity hackers had to get some inspiration from the best body hackers and body builders who know how to get the most out of their muscles, they should go for : High Intensity - Low Volume Workouts, Long Idle Rest Periods. What does this add up to for the brain ? Short periods of highly focused and intensive work followed by relaxed rest periods.

3) In the world of muscles, rest is as important as workout. Same here. This is why hopping from a Starbucks to another while walking and visiting the city in between two work sessions will condition your brain for maximum efficiency.

4) Now timing is very personal. Meaning : 5 hours in a Starbucks and 1 hour of walking around then 5 hours in another Starbucks or 3h / 0.5h / 3h / 0.5h / 3h ... it all depends on you really and the nature of your tasks but make sure the walks between work sessions do relax you and make you change ideas for a while.

5) It's also an incredible fact that some of us or even most of us are more productive in public spaces than in libraries (Here's the Lifehacker Article about it). You don't feel as if you were competing with your neighbor on the table near you in a coffee shop, or that he's beating you to that essay's or to that reading's end, do you?

6) Now why Starbucks ? Any coffee shop will do obviously. I like Starbucks because it actually has great Wi-Fi Internet and the same Internet connection IP address (if that makes sense) in all stores so it saves you the pain of setting up a different Internet connection each time. And: There are Starbucks everywhere ! It's like a library franchise with great internet with great personnel and not too bad drinks :) (when am I getting paid for all this advertisement ?)

7) Now why coffee shops? Go to a McDonald if you want. Mind your health though. The thing about coffee shops actually is that they're more relaxed. And the big idea here is that treating your most important work as if it was a coffee break is ultra-effective. Coffee breaks is when you're the most relaxed so using that time and space to a completely different purpose than just slacking around is liking tricking your brain into doing much more right when it's most likely to.

So that's that. Tell me what you think about it. Leave comments below : Shouts of anger, questions, protests, astonishment ... Surprise me :)