Lone Gunman

Viral­ity isn’t an indis­pens­able fea­ture of all suc­cess­ful appli­ca­tions, but for those where it can be hugely ben­e­fi­cial there are four core prin­ci­ples that help the viral­ity of an appli­ca­tion, says Daniel Tanner:

• Invi­ta­tion should be a core process, that is essen­tial to using the appli­ca­tion – this will max­imise the chances that your users do invite new users.
• Keep pulling peo­ple back in, rather than let­ting them for­get you after the ini­tial invi­ta­tion, and make this “reminder” process also be cen­tral to the use of the application.
• Be use­ful even to the lone user, because that lone user is the source of all your other users.
• Remove arti­fi­cial invi­ta­tion lim­its, to recog­nise the real­ity that most invi­ta­tions come from a few very active users, and help those users spread the word.

Ten­ner also notes–in passing–the con­cept of the viral loop. Andrew Chen’s take on the loop is the best I’ve read on the topic.

One of the rea­sons the gen­eral pub­lic are slow in act­ing on cli­mate change in the man­ner the situation’s impor­tance demands is our reluc­tance to think too far beyond our imme­di­ate time hori­zon. How­ever this shouldn’t stop us.

That is the sug­ges­tion of Mar­tin Rees, Astronomer Royal, who extols the virtues of long-term think­ing more elo­quently than I’ve heard before:

“As in pol­i­tics,” he says, “the imme­di­ate trumps the impor­tant.” Our future-blindness may reflect a basic lim­i­ta­tion of the brain. “In so far as brains evolved to cope with every­day life on the savan­nah, they evolved in a con­text where you didn’t plan 50 years ahead and you cared about your local com­mu­nity. Although…” A pause. A sip of tea. “Although, it’s odd—I gave a talk at Ely cathe­dral not long ago. The peo­ple who built the cathe­dral had a lim­ited view of the world. Their world was the fens, and they thought it would end quite soon, but nev­er­the­less built this won­der­ful struc­ture which is part of our her­itage 1,000 years later. And it’s shame­ful in a way that we, with our longer hori­zons and greater resources, are reluc­tant to think 50 years ahead.”

via The Browser

Note: The full arti­cle is behind a pay wall. The above quote and the con­text thereof is available.

It’s not sur­pris­ing to dis­cover that in an exper­i­ment look­ing at how taxes and sub­si­dies can be used to influ­ence health­ier food pur­chases it was the tax­ing of unhealthy food that improved choices, not the sub­sidi­s­a­tion of healthy options.

Strangely, though, it turns out that the health food sub­si­dies actu­ally wors­ened choices (the study the­o­rises that the shop­pers used the ‘saved’ money to treat them­selves, while still pur­chas­ing the unhealthy goods).

Taxes were more effec­tive in reduc­ing calo­ries pur­chased over sub­sides. Specif­i­cally, tax­ing unhealthy foods reduced over­all calo­ries pur­chased, while cut­ting the pro­por­tion of fat and car­bo­hy­drates and upping the pro­por­tion of pro­tein in a typ­i­cal week’s groceries.

By con­trast, sub­si­diz­ing the prices of healthy food actu­ally increased over­all calo­ries pur­chased with­out chang­ing the nutri­tional value at all. It appears that moth­ers took the money they saved on sub­si­dized fruits and veg­eta­bles and treated the fam­ily to less healthy alter­na­tives, such as chips and soda pop. Taxes had basi­cally the oppo­site effect, shift­ing spend­ing from less healthy to health­ier choices.

via Nudge

How the art of polit­i­cal rhetoric is regarded dif­fer­ently in Britain and Amer­ica:

In the US, the act of speech­writ­ing has gained an almost myth­i­cal sta­tus. As keep­ers of the president’s words, the speech­writ­ers are at the cen­tre of gov­ern­ment and are objects of fas­ci­na­tion. It is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent in West­min­ster. There are no “speech­writ­ing offices”. There is no offi­cial Down­ing Street speech­writ­ing team. […] There is none of the col­lab­o­ra­tion and, as a result, lit­tle of the pow­er­ful effect. […]

Today, says [his­to­rian Simon Schama], it is “highly aller­gic in our British cul­ture to be extrav­a­gantly rhetor­i­cal”. To turn a fine phrase sug­gests duplicity.

As the arti­cle later states, when it was dis­cov­ered that Gor­don Brown employed the ser­vices of speech­writ­ers for an address to Con­gress in 2009:

The money — indeed, the very exis­tence of such a ser­vice — appeared to come as a shock to us in Britain. It exposed the stark dif­fer­ences between the two coun­tries’ ora­tor­i­cal cul­tures. In Wash­ing­ton, speech­writ­ing is a pro­fes­sional under­tak­ing; the speech­writer is a known quan­tity. Here, the idea that time or money has been spent craft­ing a politician’s pre­sen­ta­tion arouses sus­pi­cion. The real­i­sa­tion that the words are not his own only adds to the sense that they are false.

The arti­cle sug­gests there are three speeches worth remem­ber­ing in con­tem­po­rary British pol­i­tics (Robin Cook’s 2003 Cab­i­net res­ig­na­tion on the eve of the Iraq war, Tony Blair’s 1999 speech on human­i­tar­ian inter­ven­tion and David Cameron’s 2005 Con­ser­v­a­tive Party lead­er­ship pitch) and begins with some suc­cinct speech­writ­ing ‘tricks’:

Ver­bal tricks that make a speech fly: con­tra­dic­tions (Blair: “Sep­tem­ber 11 was not an iso­lated event, but a tragic pro­logue”), oppo­sites (Napoleon: “Glory is fleet­ing, but obscu­rity is for ever”), phrase rever­sals (Obama: “There is not a lib­eral Amer­ica and a con­ser­v­a­tive Amer­ica — there is the United States of America”).

When teach­ing a sec­ond lan­guage, it may be bet­ter to speak in the accent of the student’s first lan­guage rather than attempt­ing to imi­tate the accent of the tar­get lan­guage, sug­gests research look­ing at how accents may hin­der or expe­dite lan­guage learn­ing and com­pre­hen­sion.

The study that dis­cov­ered this looked at how much aural infor­ma­tion speak­ers of var­i­ous flu­en­cies and from a vari­ety of eth­nic back­grounds required in order to under­stand Hebrew pre­sented to them in dif­fer­ent accents:

The find­ings show that there is no dif­fer­ence in the amount of phono­log­i­cal infor­ma­tion that the native Hebrew speak­ers need in order to deci­pher the words, regard­less of accent. With the Russ­ian and Ara­bic speak­ers, on the other hand, less phono­log­i­cal infor­ma­tion was needed in order to rec­og­nize the Hebrew word when it was pro­nounced in the accent of their native lan­guage than when they heard it in the accent of another language.

So it seems that British foot­ball man­ager Steve McLaren was help­ing Eng­lish learn­ers when he gave his infa­mous inter­view in the Nether­lands fol­low­ing his move there!