Progress Daily

If you take Wikipedia as a unit — every page, edit, talk page, & line of code, in every language — that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought (according to Clay Shirkyon & Martin Wattenberg).

Television-watching represents about two hundred billion hours, in the US alone, every year. That’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year. Americans spend 100 million hours every weekend just watching the ads.

Imagine that people replace only 1% of the their TV time with the production & sharing of online content. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. One per cent of that is 100 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

“Gin, Television, and Social Surplus,” by Clay Shirkyon

Katherine Kinzler has demonstrated that preverbal infants as young as 5-6 months of age “prefer” their own native speakers. She found that American infants look longer at someone speaking with an American accent than someone with a French accent, and the opposite pattern occurs with French infants. And when two adults simultaneously offer a 10-month-old the same toy, the baby usually reaches for the one being given to them by the native speaker.

In the ancestral past, neighboring communities were often at war with each other, and the most reliable marker of an out-group member wasn’t what they looked like but how they sounded.

“Babies Don’t Like Foreigners,” by Jesse Bering

Richard Sosis analyzed two hundred 19th-century US communes: 88 religious and 112 secular. He found that communes whose ideology was secular were up to four times as likely as religious ones to dissolve in any given year.

In a follow-up study, Sosis focused on 83 of these communes (30 religious, 53 secular) to see if the amount of time they survived correlated with the strictures and expectations they imposed on the behaviour of their members.

He found that the more constraints a religious commune placed on its members, the longer it lasted (one is still going, after 149 years). But the same did not hold true of secular communes, where the oldest was 40.

Ara Norenzayan has conducted experiments using what is known as the “dictator game,” a test used to gauge altruistic behaviour. Participants receive a sum of money — $10,in this case — and are asked if they would like to share it with another player.

Norenzayan and Azim Shariff primed half of their volunteers to think about religion by getting them to unscramble sentences containing religious words such as God, spirit, divine, sacred and prophet. Those thus primed left an average of $4.22, while the unprimed left $1.84.

An experiment by Jesse Bering subjected a bunch of undergraduates to a quiz. His volunteers were told that the best performer among them would receive a $50 prize. They were also told that the computer program that presented the questions had a bug in it, which sometimes caused the answer to appear on the screen before the question. The volunteers were therefore instructed to hit the space bar immediately if the word “Answer” appeared on the screen. That would remove the answer and ensure the test results were fair.

The volunteers were then divided into three groups. Two began by reading a note dedicating the test to a recently deceased graduate student. One did not see the note. Of the two groups shown the note, one was told by the experimenter that the student’s ghost had sometimes been seen in the room. The other group was not given this suggestion.

The so-called glitch occurred five times for each student. Bering measured the amount of time it took to press the space bar on each occasion. He discarded the first result as likely to be unreliable and then averaged the other four. Those who had been told the ghost story pressed the space bar in an average of 4.3 seconds. That compared with 6.3 seconds for those who had only read the note about the student’s death and 7.2 for those who had not heard any of the story concerning the dead student.

“Where angels no longer fear to tread,” The Economist

Until recently, most “free” commericial products were the result of a “cross-subsidy”: You’d get one thing free if you bought another, or you’d get a product free only if you paid for a service.

The costs of products on the Web are falling fast.

Offering free music proved successful for Radiohead, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails,etc. The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games. Virtually everything Google does is free to consumers, from Gmail to Picasa to GOOG-411.

Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster.

40 years ago, the principal nutritional problem in America was hunger; now it’s obesity, for which we have the Green Revolution to thank. Forty years ago, charity was dominated by clothing drives for the poor. Now you can get a T-shirt for less than the price of a cup of coffee, thanks to China and global sourcing. So too for toys, gadgets, and commodities of every sort.

Digital technology benefits from these dynamics and from the 20th-century shift from Newtonian to quantum machines. We’re just beginning to exploit atomic-scale effects in new materials — semiconductors (processing power), ferromagnetic compounds (storage), and fiber optics (bandwidth).

Last year, Yahoo announced that Yahoo Mail, its free webmail service, would provide unlimited storage.

Storage now joins bandwidth (YouTube: free) and processing power (Google: free) in the race to the bottom. Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.

Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business.

In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (radio & television), or nearly free (newspapers & magazines) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along.

There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, “value-added” subscriptions, and direct ecommerce. Now an entire ecosystem of Web companies is growing up around the same set of models.

The priceless economy can be broken down into six broad categories:

1. “Freemium.” What’s free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version. (Think Flickr and the $25-a-year Flickr Pro.) A typical online site follows the 1 Percent Rule — 1 percent of users support all the rest.

2. Advertising. What’s free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone. Examples: pay-per-pageview banners, pay-per-click text ads, pay-per-transaction “affiliate ads,” site sponsorships, paid inclusion in search results, paid listing in information services, lead generation (where a third party pays for the names of people interested in a certain subject), product placement (PayPerPost), pay-per-connection on social networks, etc.

3. Cross-subsidies. What’s free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another. Expensive wine subsidizes food in a restaurant. In any package of products and services, the price of each individual component is often determined by psychology, not cost. Your cell phone company may not make money on your monthly minutes — it keeps that fee low because it knows that’s the first thing you look at when picking a carrier — but your monthly voicemail fee is pure profit.

4. Zero marginal cost. What’s free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone. (Best example: online music.)

5. Labor exchange. What’s free: Web sites and services. Free to whom: all users, since the act of using these sites and services actually creates something of value. When rating stories on Digg, voting on Yahoo Answers, or using Google’s 411 service, the act of using the service creates something of value, either improving the service itself or creating information that can be useful somewhere else.

6. Gift economy. What’s free: anything & everything, be it open source software or user-generated content. Free to whom: everyone. From Freecycle (free secondhand goods for anyone who will take them away) to Wikipedia, money isn’t the only motivator.

Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). There is a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets.

“Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business,” by Chris Anderson

Within a few months China will overtake America as the country with the world’s largest number of internet users. For the past three years China has also been the world’s largest exporter of information and communications technology. It already has the same number of mobile-phone users (500m) as the whole of Europe.

According to India’s telecoms regulator, half of all urban dwellers have mobile- or fixed-telephone subscriptions and the number is growing by 8m a month. India produces more engineering graduates than America.

The World Bank’s recently released its Global Economic Prospects. Between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, the index that summarises the technology adoption indicators rose by 160% in poor countries (with incomes per person of less than about $900 a year at current exchange rates) and by 100% in middle-income ones ($900-11,000). The index went up by only 77% in industrialised countries (with average incomes above $11,000). Poor and middle-income nations, the bank concludes, are catching up with the West.

The main channels through which technology is diffused are foreign trade (buying equipment and new ideas directly); foreign investment (having foreign firms bring them to you); and emigrants in the West.

In the past ten years the ratio of poor countries’ imports of high-tech products to their GDPs has risen by more than 50%. The ratio in middle-income countries has increased by over 70%. Capital goods (mainly industrial machinery) often embody new technology, and imports of these have increased faster in middle-income countries than in rich ones.

Emerging economies’ share of global trade in high-tech goods rose by 140% between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s.

Relative to GDP, inflows of foreign direct investment to developing economies have increased sevenfold since the 1980s. In some countries, such as Hungary and Brazil, foreign firms account for half or more of all R&D spending by companies.

Nearly half the ($40 billion-worth of) foreign direct investment in China in 2000 came from Chinese abroad. Remittances have doubled in the past ten years and now account for roughly 2% of developing countries’ GDPs — more than foreign aid.

The World Bank looked at how much time elapsed between the invention of something and its widespread adoption (defined as when 80% of countries that use a technology first report it). For 19th-century technologies the gap was long: 120 years for trains and open-hearth steel furnaces, 100 years for the telephone. For aviation and radio, invented in the early 20th century, the lag was 60 years. But for the PC and CAT scans the gap was around 20 years and for mobile phones just 16.

In the World Bank’s database, there are 28 examples of a new technology reaching 5% of the market in a rich country; of those, 23 went on to achieve over 50%. In other words, if something gets a foothold in a rich country, it usually spreads widely.

In emerging markets this is not necessarily so. The bank has 67 examples of a technology reaching 5% of the market in developing countries — but only six went on to capture half the national market.

Technology use in developing countries is highly concentrated. Almost three-quarters of China’s high-tech trade comes from just four regions on the coast. More than two-thirds of the stock of foreign investment in Russia in 2000 was in Moscow and its surroundings. Whereas half of India’s city-dwellers have telephones, little more than one-twentieth of people in the countryside do.

Rich countries spend 2.3% of GDP on R&D, East Asians 1.4%, and Latin America 0.6%. In East Asia and the West companies spend most of the money and do most of the research. In eastern Europe and Latin America the government is the largest source of finance, and in Latin America universities do the largest share of the work.

“Of internet cafés and power cuts,” The Economist

Consumers saved $7 billion by shopping on eBay in 2003, according to a study by Wolfgang Jank and Galit Shmueli (”New Research Finds Consumers Save More Than $7B by Shopping on eBay“).

The researchers measured the money shoppers were willing to pay for a product versus what they actually paid. On average, users paid $4 less, the study found.

Given the huge number of auctions on the site, the savings added up into the billions of dollars.

The researchers used data from a sniping service, Cniper.com, operated by Ravi Bapna.

Sniping services are used by shoppers to help them automatically place bids in an auction during its final seconds. Shoppers set the maximum price they are willing to pay and the technology does the rest.

The researchers found in the 4,500 auctions they examined that users frequently won items before reaching their maximum bid.

“The more you spend on eBay, the more you save,” by Verne Kopytoff

According to “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness,” by Antonio Rangel, Hilke Plassmann, & Baba Shiv, if people are told a wine is expensive while they are drinking it, they think it tastes nicer than a cheap one.

The researchers used fmri (functional magnetic-resonance imaging) to scan the brains of 20 volunteers while giving them sips of wine.

Dr Rangel gave his volunteers sips of what he said were 5 different wines made from cabernet sauvignon grapes, priced at between $5 and $90 a bottle. He told each of them the price of the wine in question as he did so. But he lied. He actually used only 3 wines, and served two of them twice at different prices.

The scanner showed that the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortices (an area of the brain responsible for registering pleasant experiences) of the volunteers increased in line with the stated price of the wine. When one of the wines was said to cost $10 a bottle it was rated less than half as good as when people were told it cost $90 a bottle, its true retail price. When the team carried out a follow-up blind tasting without price information they got different results. The volunteers reported differences between the three “real” wines but not between the same wines when served twice.

Nor was the effect confined to everyday drinkers. When Dr Rangel repeated the experiment on members of the Stanford University wine club he got similar results.

This research suggests that a successful marketing campaign can not only make people more interested in a product, but also make them enjoy it more.

“Hitting the spot,” The Economist

The “curse of knowledge” means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do.

In a 1990 experiment, Elizabeth Newton gave one set of people, called “tappers,” a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called “listeners,” were asked to name the songs.

Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5%.

“Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike,” by Janet Rae-Dupree

Dr Randy Thornhill manipulated pictures to make people’s faces appear more and less symmetrical, then asked volunteers of the opposite sex rank them for attractiveness. Symetery and attractiveness correlated. His later experiments have shown that all aspects of bodily symmetry contribute, down to the lengths of corresponding fingers, and that the assessment also applies to those of the same sex.

Perfect symmetry is hard for a developing embryo to maintain, so one that can maintain it must have good genes (and luck).

Other aspects of beauty, too, are indicators of health. Skin and hair condition are sensitive to illness and malnutrition.

Leslie Zebrowitz and Gillian Rhodes found 9 past studies on attractiveness and IQ, and subjected them to a “meta-analysis.”

The studies’ researchers had photographed people and asked them to do IQ tests, then showed the photographs to other people and asked them to rank the intelligence of the first lot. The results suggested that people get such judgments right often enough to be significant.

Dr Daniel Hamermesh presided over a series of surveys in the USA and Canada that showed that when all other things are taken into account, ugly people earn less than average incomes, while beautiful people earn more than the average. The ugliness “penalty” for men was -9% while the beauty premium was +5%. For women, the ugliness penalty was -6% while the beauty premium was +4%.

He found the figures for men in Shanghai are –25% and +3%; for women they are –31% and +10%. In Britain, ugly men do worse than ugly women (-18% as against -11%) but the beauty premium is the same for both (+1%).

Dr Hamermesh found that those members of a particular (anonymous) US law school rated attractive on the basis of their graduation photographs went on to earn higher salaries. Moreover, lawyers in private practice tended to be better looking than those working in government departments.

Hamermesh’s study of Dutch advertising firms showed that those with the most beautiful executives had the largest size-adjusted revenues — a difference that exceeded the salary differentials of the firms in question. Finally, he found that attractive candidates were more successful in elections for office in the American Economic Association.

Working in Shanghai, where his research indicated the difference between the ugliness penalty and the beauty bonus was greatest, Dr Hamermesh looked at how women’s spending on their cosmetics and clothes affected their income.

The beauty premium generated by such primping was worth only about 15% of the money expended.

Niclas Berggren’s research team looked at almost 2,000 candidates in Finnish elections. They asked foreigners (mainly Americans and Swedes) to examine the candidates’ campaign photographs and rank them for beauty. The more beautiful candidates, as ranked by people who knew nothing of Finland’s internal politics, tended to have been the more successful — the effect was larger for women than for men.

“To those that have, shall be given,” The Economist

Place a rat in a cage with an electrified floor and subject it to repeated shocks; it will show many signs of stress, at first flinging itself against the walls with each shock. But after a while, it just sits there apathetically, showing no inclination to escape from its painful prison. When autopsied, it will be found to have oversized adrenal glands and, frequently, stomach ulcers, both indicating serious stress.

Now repeat the experiment, but with a wooden stick in the cage alongside the rat. When shocked, the rat chews on the stick, and as a result, it can endure its experience much longer without burnout. At autopsy, its adrenal glands are smaller, stomach ulcers fewer.

Put 2 rats in the electrified cage. Shock them both. They snarl and fight. At autopsy, their adrenal glands are normal, and, even though they have experienced numerous shocks, they have no ulcers.

Recently physiologists have uncovered the hormonal basis for such behavior. Animals and people subjected to attack or threat experience “subordination stress,” as a result of which their adrenal hormones go up, along with blood pressure and the probability of developing ulcers. But when given the opportunity to “take it out” on someone else, victims show no sign of stress.

“The Targets of Aggression,” by David P. Barash