thoughtcrumbs : january 2000

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.