thoughtcrumbs

You can't do that in Moab

The Delta check-in agent at Pittsburgh's airport was shocked that anyone would want to go to Jordan. For fun. She kept asking if my friends and I worked there or had family in the Middle East. We told her we wanted to go desert hiking. She goes, "You can't do that in Moab?"

We have since returned from Jordan, which is the most hospitable developing country I've ever visited. Every day we fielded dozens of strangers' invitations in for tea, smiled when they'd cheer "Obama" when we told them we were from the U.S., and ate copious mezza of hummous, tabbouli, baba ganouj, foul, and pita. Upon learning that some in our group love the local dish "mansaf," our cab driver on the way to the airport the last night lamented our departure, because he wanted us to come have mansaf with his family. He may also have been hoping to marry Amy to his oldest son, that part was a little unclear.

Petra, the partially excavated city of the ancient Nabataeans, beat Machu Picchu in archeological scope and lack of tourists (at least on the alternate hike into the ruins we took). We hiked and camped in the Wadi Rum desert for three days, with part of the group on camels, and part walking. Our gracious guides at Wadi Rum Adventures cooked feasts for lunch and dinner (including veggie bean dishes for me), and made the sand hiking look effortless. We stargazed and sang Bedouin songs at night.

The snorkeling at Aqaba, along the Red Sea, is some of the best I've ever seen, and Rani, our host at the Bedouin Moon Hotel was incredibly helpful. He called all of the hotels in Downtown Amman before we headed there to work out a deal (which ended up being far cheaper than anything in our Rough Guide). Eilat, Aqaba's sister city in Israel was also gorgeous, but waaay more ritzy. Although the Israeli border guards were pretty jovial when we interrupted their dinner (and again, there was talk of marrying Amy off).

I can't extol the virtues of Jordan enough. People everywhere kept saying "welcome" and parents would nudge their children toward us, prompting them to welcome us, too. It's as if there were some giant tourism campaign and everybody was in on it. Merchants would ask about my family, not in an effort to bilk me or sell trinkets, but because they genuinely cared. Oh, and the whole not having vowels thing was pretty fun, too. Made for some amusing signs.

More pictures on Flickr:

Choosing appropriate stock photos

TurboTax should perhaps choose its stock photo models more carefully. Martha Stewart is the last person I want tax advice from.

Moral condemnation by RSS

From Time's "Why Facebook is for Old Fogies":

We [the middle-aged] are lazy. We have jobs and children and houses and substance-abuse problems to deal with. At our age, we don't want to do anything. What we want is to hear about other people doing things and then judge them for it. Which is what news feeds are for.

Dude, this is a pleasure that knows no ageism. I get plenty of satisfaction judging others in my feed. And yes, if you're reading this, that probably means you.

But once those pictures from last weekend's "summer in February" party come out, you'll be judging me, too. C'est la vie virtual. I still hold that that bikini top was appropriate public attire.

From Sumo to Shanice

Review of Freakonomics over in Reading.

Thinking outside the box

From the profile of urban environmental leader Van Jones in the New Yorker:

When his parents gave him Luke Skywalker and Han Solo action figures, instead of arranging them to fight he would have them run for imaginary public offices.

Keeping up (down) with the Joneses, energy-wise

Social comparison theory got a California woman to unplug her kegerator. She learned through an innovative experiment by her utility company that her neighbors used far less electricity than she did, and so she wanted to keep up (well, down). Last year the Sacramento Municipal Utility District sent 35,000 customers their monthly energy use compared to that of 100 neighbors with similar-sized homes and the same heating fuel, as well as the top-20 most energy-efficient neighbors. A control group got standard statements without comparisons. They found that customers with the custom statement reduced energy consumption by 2% over six months. This graphic says it all.

Ten more cities have picked up on the social comparison idea, and are including bar graphs on paper statements. It would be trivial to include these charts on utility websites and embed them in monthly statement reminder emails for customers doing paperless billing. If you're in Pittsburgh, let Duquesne Light know you'd like to see this!

Like a chain letter, but curse-free

Ping pointed out a cute meme that I'm jumping on.

The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you. This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:

• I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
• What I create will be just for you.
• It'll be done this year. No guarantees when, it will be a total surprise!
• You have no clue what it's going to be. I may draw or paint or knit something. I may bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!
• I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.

The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to repost this, and repost right away. We can all make stuff and make someone's day a little bit brighter! Don't respond if you aren't going to offer the same thing.

Love,
Moira

P.S. If you reply, please e-mail me your address as well, so I know where to send your surprise.

Influencing friends in facebook

Just finished submitting Feed Me: Motivating Newcomer Contribution in Social Network Sites ( PDF). The gist is that we analyzed a large group of newly registered FB users and counted all the things they did (or their friends did) in their first two weeks, and predicted how the newbies would behave three months later (how many photos they'd upload). We found that if their friends are uploading photos, they're more likely to, as well (no surprise). And early photo comments are good. But there are some surprises about tagging in there.

What makes this especially cool is that it's the first peer-reviewed publication to come from Facebook's own server data. We were somewhat skeptical about the company letting us publish at first, but the legal team was totally supportive about sharing knowledge with the world, and we were careful to use aggregate data so as to protect users' privacy. The awesome Facebook Data Team does all kinds of brilliant work, so hopefully this is the first of many papers to come from FB. Yay for science!

The cloning part wasn't creepy

Was anyone else creeped out by this article about cloning pets? It ostensibly portrays a typical American family living a typical life with their two dogs, clones of a deceased pet. They hike, chase each other off-leash, and like "lots of snuggles." So far, so good. We begin to think cloned pets aren't so far fetched.

But there's a disturbing undertone, mostly from a handful of offhand remarks:

• The South Korean geneticist who performed the cloning was fired from his university for claiming to have cloned humans in 2004. However, the owners of the cloned pet aren't concerned. "He's been very open with me about admitting his mistakes. Nobody says he lied about cloning animals."
  
  
• The dog owners are divorced and have a son. Says the husband of his ex-wife: "an excellent genetic donor, by the way."
  
  
• The 8-year-old son is studying high school algebra. The dad brings a notebook of quadratic equation problems in case the son gets bored at the lake.

The science doesn't come across as creepy; the family does.

Who revived the electric car?

An exciting confluence of green auto news this week:

• Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski recently won a contract with Nissan to bring all-electric cars to the state for testing, and is courting a Chinese hybrid manufacturer whose car goes 80 miles per charge (which is roughly twice the average American round-trip commute of 32 miles). Let's hope the power comes from hydroelectric, solar, and other green sources.


• GM closes more SUV plants. Reading the heartbreaking stories about the workers at this plant can't help but make you feel sympathy for those losing their jobs. And several comments on the Kulongoski story expressed anger that the governor was supporting foreign automakers. But Kulongoski hopes to bring manufacturing and final assembly to Oregon, stimulating local jobs, and it's hard to feel bad for GM the corporation when it's still trying to open SUV plants in Russia.


• In better U.S. automaker news, the intrepid band of YERTians (with the Your Environmental Road Trip project, who spent the last year documenting the best and worst sustainability practices across the U.S.) found that a Ford plant in Dearborn, MI, has the largest living roof in the world. The plant's also hoping for LEED Silver certification (as they discuss in YERT's pretty funny video).


• Electric car entrepreneur Shai Agassi will be speaking at this year's TED conference.


• A Massachusetts man recently ran his major appliances for several days during an ice storm with his Prius. On five gallons of gas.

Pro-social teasing and cmc

Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner covers some of the social benefits of teasing in the NYTimes Magazine today: indirect communication of group norms (such as the frat boys who use a nickname to hint that you shouldn't drink *too* much), collective stress release through laughing (even for the target), and flirtation. He frames it in Brown & Levinson's politeness theory, especially the "off record" part of their framework, where you never explicitly say what you mean, you hint.

So what about teasing in computer-mediated communication? Will we ever develop the skills to signal and interpret playful teasing online, or are we stuck in binary world of vanilla literalism and cyberbullying? I don't think that's true, but we already know that people are pretty lousy at interpreting tone in CMC, and there was certainly an element of mixed signals in the Megan Meier case. (Had Megan met "Josh" in person, her feelings might have been less intense than those constructed from text only, and had there been more face-to-face contact between Megan and Lori Drew's daughter, some of the deference signals Keltner mentions (such as blushing and head lowering) might have convinced the Drews to back off. But that's just morbid Monday morning quarterbacking, and this is a pretty extreme case.)

But on to happier topics: Can we detect friendly joshing and flirting online? Sure (to an extent), but what about from people we've never met face-to-face? Do you have to be able to picture the speaker smiling while you read the text or imagine his voice? And what are the mechanisms for social norming (like with the frat house morality tale) online? Do you just monitor your facebook feed to see what's acceptable in your friend circle? Do we have to pepper everything with emoticons? Can we build machine learning tools to detect it automatically, say, so parents or Facebook (barring privacy issues right now) can distinguish between the good kind of teasing and potential harassment? The few politeness detectors out there don't include any of B&L's off-record markers (the on-record markers, like inclusive language or token agreement are hard enough). I'm looking forward to the next decade of communication research as our online behavior norms start to cement and as our tools for analysis get better.

Expectation minimization is the way to my heart

Apple just blew my mind. My laptop video card has been sketchy, not always waking after sleep. So I took it to the Apple store on Saturday for repairs. They sent it off, saying that I should expect it to arrive a week from Tuesday, and I'd need to restore all of my data and software. Bummer.

It just arrived this morning, five days early, with data intact. And no charge. I guess lowering my expectations is the best way to win me over. Now if only Apple made men.

Note to the haters

Gazillions of years ago I wrote about companies that use a human voice when communicating with customers rather than formal legalese. Back then it was novel, all pre-Web 2.0. Google now says cheeky things like "cross your fingers" during server errors. So it's interesting to see how a company responds when it's expecting to get flack, like during a redesign. Facebook uses its blog (in part) for that: here's wunderkind engineer Slee explaining the new Facebook back in July, hoping to prevent some of the inevitable griping when things get moved around.

But I think I saw my favorite example on another site today:

Gourmet dinner in an unlikely space

Last night some friends and I got to be a part of the RV Eatin' project, in which three women serve gourmet meals inside their cozy, brightly-painted RV. All of the food was grown locally, including delicious scarlet runner beans, and the chefs good-naturedly put up with our request for a vegan, gluten-free, and nut-free meal and with the silly insistence of security guards that they move their trailer. Twice. (Which they did with stunning vigor despite its heft and the near-freezing weather). The menu and some pics are available at RV Eatin's blog.

Nobel and ignoble

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on winning the Nobel Prize in Economics today:

For readers of the column, maybe they will read a little more carefully when I’m being economistic, or maybe have a little more tolerance when I’m being boring.

In related news, the annual Ig Nobel prizes for "research that makes people laugh and then think" held its 2008 ceremony last week. The full list of Ig Nobel winners is at their site, with full citations. Selected favorite findings:

• Nutrition: Electronic modification of the sound of potato chips to make them sound fresher.
• Medicine: High-priced placebos are more effective than low-priced placebos.
• Economics: Professional lap dancers make higher tips when ovulating.
• Peace (last year): Airborne chemicals could make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to each other.