I’ve done research and read a bunch of online reviews. However, like most significant purchases, I want to test drive some chairs to find the one that best fits my largish frame.

Here-in lies the problem.

Office chairs are commodities. You’ll always be able to buy the exact chair from an online store for a cheaper price than from a retail store. On a purchase like this, the difference could easily be a couple hundred bucks. This is simply down to the economics of virtual stores compared to bricks-and-mortar ones.

The standard wisdom here is to go to a real store, sit in a bunch of chairs and then go home and buy one online for less money.

Zero Intent to Buy

That behaviour–feigning interest at a bricks and mortar store while having zero intent to buy–feels unethical to me. What right do I have to take up the store staff’s time when they have no chance of making a sale?

I’ve discussed this with a few people, and the best counter-argument I’ve heard is that if I never go into, say, the Herman Miller store downtown, then the staff there have absolutely no chance of selling me a chair. To quote my friend’s shopping koan, “you can’t go back to the store if you never go in the first time”. The store also can’t benefit from any positive word-of-mouth I might spread if I have a good experience there.

I should say that there’s a difference between my proposed test-drive, and the passive act of browsing. In that case, you may just be killing time, or otherwise just curious about what a store offers. Me, I’m walking through the door with plans to buy somewhere else.

I’m no saint, obviously, so this is more a theoretical question than a practical one. What do you think?

Instead of trying to drag your customers and prospective customers from wherever they currently live online–Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, community bulletin boards, blogs–go interact with them there.

In 2008, I think my company declined three different projects to promote newly-launched ‘green social networks’.

But what about Apple? They’ve actually built their new social network right where their customers are: inside iTunes.

Why have they launched Ping? Friend-powered recommendations are de rigeur these days, from the Levi’s store that enables you to shop for clothes that your friends have liked on Facebook, to the new Vancouver project Recotype. And, obviously, it seems like a good way to get people to buy more music.

I’ve learned not to boldly predict the success or failure of big tech projects. Thus far, I don’t see much value in Ping for me. I don’t think I have a music discovery problem. Nor do I necessarily see my friends as a good source of music that I might like. But we’ll see.

On a related note, Ping feels shockingly unfinished for an Apple project. There was no Facebook integration available when they launched yesterday–surely an important feature for spreading it quickly. Also, there are precious few artists which you can ‘follow’ on the service. I searched for popular acts like Feist, Vampire Weekend or The Killers and came up empty.

Band News, Not Music Discovery

Here’s what I wish Ping could do for me: index my music collection, and generate timely updates via email and RSS featuring news about those artists. When are my favourite bands coming to town? When are they releasing new songs? Where can I find their new video? iLike used to do an acceptable job of this, but they definitely skewed to the bigger, older performers. Maybe another service has comprehensively solved this problem?

This functionality becomes more and more important as we shift to a ’singles’ music economy, where consumers own songs by many more artists than they used to. It’s possible to keep up with, say, 15 or 20 bands you like, but that doesn’t scale to 50 or 100. Each of those 50 or 100 bands ought to want to have an ongoing relationship with you, and Ping is one place where that could happen. However, I don’t want to use iTunes to get that information, so Apple would have to deliver it in other forms.

In fairness, I also scorn Maxim. I used to read it when I was younger and stupider, but I’ve graduated to the slightly more sophisticated (and, frankly, gayer) Details and Esquire.

I was busy queuing and scorning the other day, clutching a package of tofu burgers, when I got curious about the language on the covers of these magazines. What are, in aggregate, the messages of Cosmo and Maxim?

So, I made some tag clouds. I typed up all the headlines on the covers of three years of Cosmo (2007 to 2010) and Maxim (for obscure reasons, 2005 to 2008), and generated tag clouds out of the results. Can you guess which is which (click for largeness)?

I tweaked the text to merge plurals with singulars, or vice versa, and to combine variations of words like ’sex’, ’sexy’ and ’sexiest’.

Armchair Sociology

Having looked at all those covers, I made some observations. First, about Cosmo:

• In Cosmo, there are more headlines about sexual proficiency than anything else. These usually take the form of “please your man, and get yours, too”. For example, “Be a sex genius! These brilliantly naughty bad tricks will double his pleasure and yours”.
• Nearly ever cover promises a story on sexual positions.
• In the bottom right corner–the least important quadrant of the cover–there’s either a women’s health issue (”Critical new facts your gyno forgot to mention”) or a man problem story (”The silent way he shows he’s whipped”).
• There are at least two numbers, and often more, on each cover. For example, “20 ways to make the good stuff in life even better” or “16 new and sexy hairstyles”. The most common number is 50.
• The word ’sex’ (or ’sexy’) appears at least once on every cover. This is also almost always true for Maxim.
• Celebrity profiles generally promise a story of how the celebrity rose to fame and secured a man. For example, “Anna Faris: The balls-out confidence that landed her the job and her hubby”.
• There are many articles about decoding what men want but aren’t asking for.

Because I’m a nerd with screencast software, I created a short video that scrolls back and forth through the 36 covers I transcribed:

It really highlights the prominence of an article about sex in the upper left part of the cover, and the badge design element in the upper right. It’s also remarkable how precisely positioned each model’s head is. If you watch their eyes, they barely shift from cover to cover.

For Maxim:

• Maxim’s covers are a little more diverse than Cosmo’s, but there are consistent messages about acquiring money (”Filthy, stinking rich: cash so quick it’s like stealing” and plenty of attention paid to stuff, such as cars and gadgets.
• Topics–women, cars, gadgets–are often described as ‘hot’.
• The headlines about the women on the cover are pretty banal and generic, such as “Jennifer Love Hewitt:
  America’s sexiest girl next door is back”.
• Maxim also emphasizes partying, and party travel destinations.
• There are relatively few headlines emphasizing health or improving one’s body. When there are, they’re related to another topic, such as “Wanna get hockey tough? Drop the gloves with our NHL enforcer”.

While the covers’ time period doesn’t overlap exactly, the only women featured on both magazine covers were Fergie, Kristen Bell and Jessica Simpson.

Do the clouds provide any great insights? Not really. They do emphasize just how essential the topic of sex is to both magazines. I was also surprised by how little body-related headlines there are on the covers. The cliche of “a sexier six-pack in seven days” is actually quite rare. What surprised you?

Bonus: Cosmo in the Seventies

Out of sheer curiousity, I dug up about a dozen Cosmo covers from the 1970s, and produced a tag cloud for them:

It’s interesting to see how much fiction was featured on the cover during this period. Heck, there was even a story by Joyce Carol Oates. You may also note the prominence of the term ‘husband’, a word which only appeared on modern Cosmo’s in the context of celebrity profiles. ‘Lovemaking’ is also pretty common–another term that’s gone out of fashion.

I was also surprised by just how risque the 1970s covers were. Consider this cover featuring Renee Russo, for example.

And this cover actually shows a little nipple.

If you’re so inclined, please try the buttons out. I’m going to post something tomorrow which will be, I think, more shareable than this boring note. If you love, hate or are indifferent to them, let me know.

I was reading this Slate article, discussing whether or not children were entering puberty earlier than they used to, when I encountered this paragraph:

With no objective blood test or scan, most experts consider breast budding and testicular growth the hallmarks of puberty’s beginning. Unfortunately, those measures are very subjective—particularly for male children. Pediatricians guess the size of a boy’s testicles by touch and comparison to a rosary-like string of balls called an orchidometer, which is not very accurate.

How about that–not only does this sound like a medical device for measuring flowers, but it also looks like a rosary. To Google Image Search! You can tell me why there’s a hockey team listed among all those rosaries. Here’s what a set looks like:

I searched Flickr for pictures as well. All I found was this photo of sheepish Danish veterinarian, wearing a faux elephant orchidometer.

Wikipedia indicates that it was invented by an Austrian doctor in the 60’s, and “doctors sometimes informally refer to them as ‘Prader’s balls’ (after the inventor), ‘the medical worry beads’, or the ‘endocrine rosary.’”

I was curious about the origin of the term ‘orchidometer’. According to a couple of dictionaries, orchid comes from the Latin orchis, which refers to a, uh, tuberous root. That term in turn derives from the Greek orkhis, which literally means testicle.

And now your Friday is complete. If I’d known about the orchidometer a few years ago, when I was writing a play about balls, I might have included it.

• The number of golfers in the United States has been in decline since 2005. That year, there were 30 million of them. In 2009, there were 27.1 million. As you might expect, the recession is mostly to blame. I hope this trend continues, as golf courses are a scourge on the environment.
• To my surprise, fewer young people are getting their driver’s license than in previous generations. This Ad Age article includes a handy chart that illustrates the decline. They’re also driving less when they do get their license. From the Ad Age piece: “the share of automobile miles driven by people aged 21 to 30 in the U.S. fell to 13.7% in 2009 from 18.3% in 2001 and 20.8% in 1995″. Lots of reasons are cited without much authority: obtaining a license has become more complex, concern for the environment, the Internet (more young people are telecommuting and the like) and the economy are all possibilities.
• In the average day, according to the author of The Female Brain, girls say two to three times more words than boys. The same, as it happens, is true for rhesus monkeys.

]]> http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2010/08/cave-people-get-jobs.html/feed http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2010/08/cave-people-get-jobs.html http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Darrenbarefoot/~3/-BdhqGMpFes/two-unrelated-photos.html http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/2010/08/two-unrelated-photos.html#comments Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:45:31 +0000 darren http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/?p=7640 I was at Terra Breads the other day, and spotted this sign. If you ask me, the diction of the first sentence feels overly precise:

There’s such a thing as being too correct. Their breakfast paninis, however, are tasty.

While at Gnomedex, I noticed that the conference centre had removed their pay phones from their phone nook. I don’t really mourn their loss, as the barrier to entry for a cell phone is so low.

Artisan - The return to handcrafted one of a kind objects, services and activities that express personal style.

Cultural fusion - Proactive interest in experiencing multiple cultures and new culture hybrids grounded in popular and consumer culture. The simplest expressions are in music and food. See, for example, Bollywood or the Kogi trucks in Los Angeles.

Fingerprinting - Search for and articulation of one’s unique identity. Fingerprinting is expressed through an individuals’ collection of unique passion points.

Health monitor - The softer side of wellness is elbowed aside as people turn to science and medicine to answer health issues, from life-threatening to life-enhancing. Think self-treatment.

Hyperlife - Life as a multitasking, multi-sensory barrage. If you’re doing on thing at a time, you’re probably bored.

Memory marketing - Using history as an active resource to take a nostalgic trip through time, recoiling the stuff of our collective past. See, for example, the new 2010 Mustang that feels retro.

Merit badges - The shift in values to collect experiences rather than things; the recasting of social status from what one has to what one does.

Ready, set, go - Innovation plus convenience: the seamless combination is the ultimate answer to soothing the roaring demands of stressed-out. The SmartCup XPress lid is an interesting example of confined macro-trends.

Celbri-Me - Look at me, listen to me, but don’t get too close. It really is all about me. Watch this set of consumers create their own 15 minutes of fame.

The too-long, didn’t-read version: Blogger writes what seems like a positive review of a Fringe theatre show produced by a local company. Artistic director of said company posts a rather catty comment on her review. Mack weighs in, and a long conversation ensues. Brittney did a follow-up interview with the rather loquacious artistic director Jeff Haslam.

You can identify the heroes and villains of this little Albertan farce on your own. I wanted to highlight what seems to be the crux of this situation. First, an excerpt from Brittney’s first post:

I won’t say that I’m a qualified professional reviewer. I’m not. But I’ve been seeing plays since I was little and saw a high school production of Oliver. Since then, I try to go see plays whenever the opportunity presents itself. Although friends of mine are active in Edmonton’s theatre community and can tell you about technical flaws, lighting, sound, direction… I can’t. But I don’t want to. Because, I feel, the average theatre-goer doesn’t necessarily know all that. We just go to things we like. What we hear friends and family speak highly of.

And here’s part of a comment on that post:

I think Haslam is venting a particular frustration many people in the arts industries feel. They are unhappy with the new role bloggers have taken in their business. It is true that most bloggers are not professional reviewers and don’t have the vast experience and training that writers for respectable publications do, however, I think they serve some purpose. They present a view of a regular person and their opinions aren’t useless.

It’s often said that the web is disruptive, and this is a classic example. Artists–the subjects of criticism–have had to re-contextualize their understanding of and response to criticism as the ranks of critics have broadened.

Once, artists lived in a world with only two kinds of critics:

• Friends
• Professional critics published in mainstream media

A Critical Continuum

Now, of course, that dichotomy has become a continuum, with friends at one end, bloggers (and Twitter users and Facebook fans and so forth) in the middle and professional critics at the other end.

Artists should (and many do, certainly) understand that they have different expectations and get different benefits from different critics on this continuum. Friends may provide unfettered approbation, while bloggers can offer anything from friendly word of mouth to professional-level criticism. And professional critics can be hit and miss in their analysis, too.

If artists only expect professional criticism, then they’re not going to know how to react when they encounter other responses to their work. This seems to have been the case with Mr. Haslam.

I regularly write theatre reviews on this site (I used to write theatre reviews for a Victoria newspaper, so I have a little mainstream media cred). I work hard on reviews, because I want to be thorough and fair. I was slightly dismayed then, when I heard from a local director earlier this year that he’d enjoyed a review of mine, but found it “oddly incomplete”. Lo, the tables are turned. The critic gets critiqued.

Read the Body Language of the Blog

But, again, I think this is an example of changing contexts. Not all of my theatre reviews are carefully crafted pieces that seek to emulate the reviews I read in the Globe or the Straight. Sometimes I’ll just write a shorter piece describing my immediate, less-measured response to a performance. Such is the fluid nature of this site–I don’t have many rules.

The lesson? It’s that hoary old friend “don’t comment in anger”. But there’s a subtler lesson as well: consider the context of the critique. Read the body language of the blog (the bloggy language?). Recognize whether the critique is friendly or chilly, professional or amateur. And, of course, be gracious.

This organization is pretty progressive, so the bathroom has automated lighting that comes on when the motion sensor detects I’ve entered. They’ve also got the two-button toilets and fancy hand dryers. It’s all very green.

Too green, actually. Because if you remain still–as you might while, you know, using the bathroom–for more than a minute or so, the motion sensor thinks you’ve left, and plunges the tiny room into darkness. And–insert jokes about male aim here–one really needs to see at that particular moment.

So, I’ve taken to kind of waving one hand lazily over my head, like I’m in a rodeo, riding a bull. I’m also reminded of “Mr. Tambourine Man”, which includes the line “to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free”.

Have you ever been plagued by motion sensors?

It’s from this store (here’s the actual listing), and designed by Frank Viva.

How could it not remind me of Twitter?

inurl:\view\index.shtml

I gather this is a standard URL structure for one or more popular web cam software packages.

The results you get are this random set of views into the world. Here’s a back deck on a lake in Ontario. Here’s a traffic circle in Russia. Here’s the quad at Dartmouth College. Here’s a server room in Italy (that poor plant–hopefully it’s fake).

None of those sound fascinating, now that I look at that list, but your mileage may vary. Disclaimer: don’t hold me accountable if you see anything you didn’t want to see.

Is it ethical to peak into this cameras? A tricky question, because in many cases people want to share this view. For others, though, they may have simply failed to add password protection to their setup. What do you think?

Casual inspection indicates that the image has been Photoshopped. It looks like this photo was edited by Calvin Klein and distributed to the media, as both Mashable and other sites ran the same photo.

I noticed this because I was recently in New York, and was staying across the street from this banner. I snapped a photo with my iPhone:

The photo, like many photos that run in the paper, has been edited for clarity. In particular, Calvin Klein obviously wanted people to be able to scan the QR code in the photo. Yet, clearly, that’s not really what that bit of Manhattan looks like.

Does it matter that the Globe ran it without acknowledging that it was, for want of a better term, a ‘fake’? Does it matter that it’s a piece in the Style section, and not something more insidious, like adding smoke to Beirut’s skyline?

The question, I think, is whether it’s been substantively altered. I don’t think this one qualifies.

The bigger issue, though, is that we need to constantly remind ourselves that every image we see has probably been tweaked and optimized before we view it.

On a related note, I was disappointed by the Calvin Klein campaign. All it did was pop a URL which pointed to a (very slightly NSFW) banal ad. Way to make me work to watch one of your ads. Fool me once, and so forth.

Should you travel to the Big Apple in the near future, you may find the list useful:

On that same trip, I stood behind a couple of men on an escalator. They were strangers to each other, and were just chitchatting about flight connections. One was dressed in a military uniform. When they parted ways at the bottom of the escalator, the other man said “thank you for your service”.

Today I listened to a recent episode of This American Life. In it, a man tells the story of how a flight attendant requested that passengers remain seated so that a soldier returning from Iraq could disembark first. He was going to see his eight-and-a-half month-old baby for the first time.

I’ve witnessed other similar acts of generosity and kindness toward American military personnel. It’s a coincidence, I think, that these three stories happened at airports. I’ve never seen such gestures in Canada, though that may be because we have few military bases in and around Vancouver, and we just have fewer military personnel per capita.

I’m not sure how to feel about this. Should we accord extra respect toward soldiers? And does it matter if they’re being deployed to war zones?

On the one hand, they’re usually underprivileged, under-educated citizens being paid poorly to put their lives at risk ostensibly in defense of their nation.

On the other hand, maybe they’re no or less heroic than firefights, police officers or nurses? Plus, they may be engaged in a war with which you disagree.

Maybe this is just another way of asking “can you support the troops but not the war”, which is a question we talked about back in 2006.

Remember when you could tell a lot about a guy by what cassette tapes—Journey or the Smiths?—littered the floor of his used station wagon? No more, because now the music of our lives is stored on MP3 players and iPhones. Our important papers live on hard drives or in the computing cloud, and DVDs are becoming obsolete, as we stream movies on demand. One by one, the meaningful artifacts that we used to scatter about our apartments and cars, disclosing our habits to any visitor, are vanishing from sight.

I’ve said it before, but in my youth, when somebody greeted somebody else wearing a, uh, Walkman, they’d frequently ask them “what are you listening to?” I regularly encounter people while wearing headphones, and nobody asks me that. Do they already know that my taste in music is abhorrent?

On a related note, I’ve always thought that big public art galleries would be exceptional places to meet members of the opposite sex. There always seem to be lots of people standing alone looking at the art. They’re likely to be interesting people because, hey, they’re in an art gallery. On top of all that, there are conversation starters hung all over the walls. In the context of Oppenheimer’s article, galleries are one of the remaining ‘public’ media consumption channels.

I regularly hear friends say the same thing, to each other and about their own pasts. In fact, “living one’s live without regrets” seems to be a popular cultural trend at the moment.

On the one hand, I applaud this update on “seize the day”. You should ask that boy out or quit the job you hate or travel to India if that’s what you really want to do. And if promising yourself “no regrets” helps, then get on with it.

On the other hand, I want to examine the idea of having no regrets a little more closely. Is it really a good thing?

For example, all of us have hurt others along the way, intentionally or otherwise. You can’t live in society without doing that. When you do hurt somebody, isn’t it appropriate to regret that?

This question of regrets seems to coincide with the philosophical notion that “everything happens for a reason”. That latter phrase is a modern salve, isn’t it? It’s also a get-out-of-misery-free card. If everything happens for a reason, then whatever befalls you is out of your hands, and therefore not regrettable.

But, then, regrets are a weight. They’re ballast that we’re eager to jettison. Is the theory of “no regrets” that you can stop regretting something but still learn from it? As in, “well, I invested that ten million dollars poorly, but I don’t regret it because I’ve learned not to invest in MySpace”.

But isn’t rejecting regret kind of a cop out? As in, “I made this mistake, but I’m not going to bear the emotional impact I caused?”

Is there a healthy level of regret? Should we regret big mistakes for a long time, and little mistakes for a short while, or vice versa? What role might regret or contrition have in our evolutionary makeup? That is, why did we evolve a capacity to regret?

These are incomplete thoughts and fragmentary questions. What do you think about having regrets, or having none?

I wondered how accurate these ratings were. And, of course, I saw a chance to make a chart.

I compared the fflick ratings from the top ten box office films this week to those of another crowd-sourced site, IMDB, as well as two professional review aggregation sites, Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes. Here’s what I came up with–apologies for the goofy X-axis labeling. As usual, cliquer pour agrandir l’image:

I know that’s a pretty small data set, but it’s a start. It’s actually interesting how close the four data sets are. I’d guess that the disparity in Charlie St. Cloud can be explained by two factors: uncritical teenage lust for Zac Efron, and the movie’s newness. It’s also not surprising that the critics are generally less enthusiastic about a movie than the general public. Still, fflick seems to do a pretty decent job of distilling Twitter’s cinematic zeitgeist.

This language analysis is a very deep vein in social media channels like Twitter. Marketers, researchers and hackers across the globe will be keen to explore what people love and hate, whether it’s movies, music or recliners.

Speaking of movies and charts, I love the vote distribution for Eclipse on IMDB.