by Jeff Stibel
James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds (New York: Anchor Books, 2004) is a fascinating look into the ways in which crowds are better than experts.
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ODesk facts and figures can be found on the company’s website. Both GE and Netflix have extensive materials on their respective websites about the crowdsourced prizes they offer.
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The details and results of Karen Klein’s bullying crowdsourcing campaign can be seen in the Huffington Post in “Karen Klein Donations: Indiegogo Campaign Ended Friday with $703,873,” published on July 20, 2012.
David Carr wrote an article on political crowdsourcing and social media entitled “How Obama Tapped into Social Networks’ Power” for the New York Times on November 9, 2008.
In its December 2012 article, “Crowdfunding Will Make 2013 the Year of the Gold Rush,” Forbes Magazine predicts that crowdfunding in the United States, which raised nearly $3 billion in 2012, will skyrocket in 2013, likely hitting the $6 billion mark by the end of the year.
Kickstarter reported on its website that Amanda Palmer was the first musician to raise over $1,000,000.
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The crowdsourced novel was covered by Time magazine on April 29, 2012, in the article, “Would You Read a Crowdsourced Novel?” by Heba Hasan.
Chapter 8 – Squirts | Profit | Traffic
I first heard of the sea squirt phenomena from Dan Dennett, who also briefly mentioned it in his book Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown, 1991). The sea squirt is explained more broadly in a psychological context in a July 2012 Psychology Today article by Sian Beilock, “How Humans Learn: Lessons from the Sea Squirt.” A contrarian viewpoint, arguing that sea squirts don’t actually eat their brains, can be found at Fast Company in a surprisingly rich April 1999 article by Lisa Chadderdon called “Brainless Fish in Topless Bar.” The counterargument is that a portion of the brain is digested, not literally eaten. Regardless of the semantics, the point is still clear: if something is costly and not useful, it will be selected out (or eaten).
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Proganochelys (Greek for “early turtle”) is the official name of these ancient turtles from the late Triassic period. They look like modern turtles except for their spiked necks and tails.
The relatively lightweight internal structure of sharks makes it easier for them to stay buoyant and means that they require less energy to swim than they would if they had heavier bones. Here, again, we see that evolution favors energy efficiency throughout nature.
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Duke University’s Dan Ariely and his colleagues have shown that people do not behave rationally when things are offered for free. Ariely devotes a full chapter to the topic in his book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). See also Kristina Shampanier, Nina Mazar, and Dan Ariely, “Zero as a Special Price: The True Value of Free Products,” Marketing Science 26, no. 6 (2007): 742–757. For a general interest overview, see Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Penguin, 2011).
Drs. Ilias Leontiadis and Christos Efstratiou from the Computer Science Laboratory at the University of Cambridge conducted the study of free versus paid apps. They surveyed apps on the Android platform, though it’s reasonable to guess that numbers would be similar for all smartphone users. Their research focused on privacy concerns: they found that free apps request more permissions (and are more invasive—such as asking for a user’s friends list and contact info) than paid apps. They concluded that the price of a free app may not be exactly free after all. See Ilias Leontiadis and Christos Efstratiou, “Don’t Kill My Ads!: Balancing Privacy in an Ad-Supported Mobile Application Market,” in Proceedings of the Twelfth Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems & Applications, p. 2. ACM, 2012.
There are many different sources and much folklore for the success rate of a venture fund, just as there are many numbers for the success rates for start-ups and small businesses. Because many of these investors and businesses are private, there is no good source to reference. For the book, I went with a general average, but feel free to review “The Venture Capital Secret: 3 Out of 4 Start-Ups Fail” by Deborah Gage in the Wall Street Journal from September 19, 2012.
See George Nichols’s discussion of Webvan and Peapod’s respective values in his 1999 article “Can Webvan Milk a Profit?,” Morningstar, November 12, 1999. Peapod’s announcement of shipping costs was covered by Barry Janoff, “Peapod Delivers New Shipping Costs,” Adweek, August 22, 2001.
In The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), Clayton Christensen notes the idea that sometimes a company can kill its bigger competitor by doing something less well. He says, “Occasionally disruptive technologies emerge—innovations that result in worse product performance, at least in the near term . . . generally disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features . . . they are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and frequently, more convenient to use.” While price does not work well for start-ups as a competitive differentiator in mature markets (where the product will be seen as cheap), it can be used effectively in the growth phase of an emerging market as a competitive strategy.
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Stephen Budiansky wrote a detailed article called “The Physics of Gridlock” about the science of traffic jams for The Atlantic in December 2000.
Jonas Eliasson outlined the concept of a traffic tax in his 2012 TED talk, “How to Solve Traffic Jams.” Scientific results can be found in his articles, “Lessons from the Stockholm Congestion Charging Trial,” Transport Policy 15, no. 6 (2008): 395–404; and “Do Cost-Benefit Analyses Influence Transport Investment Decisions? Experiences from the Swedish Transport Investment Plan” co-authored with Mattias Lundberg in Transport Reviews 32, no. 1 (2012): 29–48. Also of interest may be one of his original articles proposing the idea prior to the institution of the tax, “Transport and Location Effects of Road Pricing: A Simulation Approach,” Journal of Transport Economics and Policy 35, no. 3 (2001): 417–456.
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Tech bloggers were up in arms about Facebook’s charging $100 to message Mark Zuckerberg. The least alarmist articles were the best ones, including this one by Matthew Lynley: “Mystery Solved: Why It Costs $100 to Send Mark Zuckerberg a Facebook Message,” Wall Street Journal, January 11, 2013.
Google’s financial tables can be viewed at http://investor.google.com/financial/tables.html.
The story of Nick Bergus’s joke about personal lubricant that turned into a Facebook ad was reported by Somini Sengupta in an article entitled “On Facebook, ‘Likes’ Become Ads,” in the New York Times, May 31, 2012.
For an interesting article about more private social networks, such as Edmodo, that cater to educators, see Jason Tomassini’s “Social Networks for Teachers on the Rise As Popular Social Media Raise Concerns,” Huffington Post, January 8, 2013.
Naked Pizza is one of the best recent case studies of a company that leveraged social media with truly astounding results. Read how the founders did it in Fawn Fitter’s 2010 article, “The Sizzling Success Of Naked Pizza,” Entrepreneur, October 8, 2010.
LinkedIn noted on its website in January 2013 that it had surpassed 200 million users. Many of Reid Hoffman’s investments can be seen on his LinkedIn or CrunchBase profile.
Chapter 9 – Pheromones | Language | Mirrors
Most of the discussion of ant pheromones comes from Deborah Gordon’s Ant Encounters: Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
The Vanderbilt study mapping out the ant’s 400 different olfactory receptors was reported by various outlets; see, for example, “Ants Have Exceptionally ‘Hi-Def’ Sense of Smell,” Science Daily, September 10, 2012.
The Language Log at the Universit
y of Pennsylvania notes that the online Roster of Programming Languages lists 8,512 computer languages (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1467). They joke about how someone was able to count all of the programming languages, but there is some truth to their point. I suspect that number, while as good as any, is not terribly credible. The author, Stanford linguist Arnold M. Zwicky, estimates that the number is at least 7,000.
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Ed Stabler’s comments about the demand for linguists were found in “Linguists Suddenly ‘Hot’ Hires in Dot.Com World” published on October 10, 2000, by UCLA Today, which is a magazine for UCLA faculty and staff.
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While the precise time periods are not known, the language acquisition critical development periods are reasonably well understood. Articles used here include: Christophe Pallier, “Critical Periods in Language Acquisition and Language Attrition,” in Language Attrition: Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Barbara Köpke, Monika S. Schmid, Merel Keijzer, and Susan Dostert (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 2007), 155–168; Susan J. Hespos, “Language Acquisition: When Does the Learning Begin?”, Current Biology 17, no. 16 (2007): R628–R630; and Stephen D. Krashen, “Lateralization, Language Learning, and the Critical Period: Some New Evidence,” Language Learning 23, no. 1 (1973): 63–74.
Steven Pinker’s quote comes from The Language Instinct (New York: William Morrow, 1994).
The quote from David Birdsong and the data for the accompanying figure come from his article, “Interpreting Age Effects in Second Language Acquisition,” in Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches, ed. Judith F. Kroll and Annette M. B. DeGroot (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 109–127.
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A portion of this section, as well as section V, comes from prior work, including my previous book Wired for Thought: How the Brain Is Shaping the Future of the Internet (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009), as well as work performed by Jim Anderson, George Miller, Steve Reiss, Dan Ariely, Paul Allopenna, Carl Dunham, Andrew Duchon, David Landan, John Santini, and the entire brain science team at Simpli.
George Miller unfortunately passed away in 2012, but his work can still be found at Princeton: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rit/geo. For more detailed information on WordNet, see WordNet: An Electronic Lexical Database, edited by Christiane Fellbaum with a preface by George Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998).
Steven Pinker’s quote comes from his book How the Mind Works (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997).
The seminal work on spreading activation comes from Allan M. Collins and Elizabeth F. Loftus, “A Spreading-Activation Theory of Semantic Processing,” Psychological Review 82, no. 6 (1975): 407–428.
The ad with the woman stuffed into a suitcase was referenced from Stefanie Olsen, “Automated Search Ads Can Boomerang,” CNET News, September 26, 2003.
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You can learn more about Giacomo Rizzolatti’s research and how he discovered mirror neurons by visiting his academic website at http://www
.unipr.it/arpa/mirror/english/staff/rizzolat.htm. Rizzolatti’s story was retold by Sandra Blakeslee in “Cells That Read Minds,” New York Times, January 10, 2006.
V. S. Ramachandran’s quote about mirror neurons appeared in his January 2006 Edge article, “Mirror Neurons and the Brain in the Vat.”
USC neuroscientist Michael Arbib’s quote comes from James R. Hurford, “Language beyond Our Grasp: What Mirror Neurons Can, and Cannot, Do for the Evolution of Language,” in Evolution of Communication Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 297–314.
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Elkhonon Goldberg’s quotes come from The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger As Your Brain Grows Older (New York: Gotham Books, 2005).
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Devavrat Shah’s critique of Netflix was published in an article by Chris Matyszczyk, “MIT Prof: Netflix Has Its Recommendations Wrong,” CNET, July 11, 2011.
Other info about the Netflix algorithm, including the quote from the Netflix algorithm team, comes from Xavier Amatriain and Justin Basilico, “Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars,” The Netflix Tech Blog, June 20, 2012.
An interesting spin on the Netflix Prize winners and new contest is presented by Michael V. Copeland, “Box Office Boffo for Brainiacs: The Netflix Prize,” CNN Money, September 21, 2009.
The Forrester Research study that estimated as much as 60 percent of Netflix recommendations turn to sales was reported by JP Mangalindan, “Amazon’s Recommendation Secret,” CNN Money, July 30, 2012.
Information on Amazon’s collaborative filtering comes in part from Greg Linden, Brent Smith, and Jeremy York of Amazon.com through an industry report by the IEEE Computer Society, January/February 2003 entitled “Amazon.com Recommendations: Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering.”
Quote from Fortune about the Amazon recommendation engine comes from JP Mangalindan’s article, “Amazon’s Recommendation Secret,” from the July 2012 issue.
An account of YouTube’s switch to Amazon’s algorithms can be found in this article: James Davidson, Benjamin Liebald, Junning Liu, Palash Nandy, Taylor Van Vleet, Ullas Gargi, Sujoy Gupta et al., “The YouTube Video Recommendation System,” Proceedings of the Fourth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (2010): 293–296.
Chris Anderson wrote about Jeff Bezos’s desk in “The Zen of Jeff Bezos,” Wired Magazine, January 2005.
Netflix’s new social media “mirror neurons” were reported on by Xavier Amatriain and Justin Basilico on the Netflix website in an article entitled “Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 Stars (Part 2)” in June 2012.
Amazon’s human “mirror neurons” were reported on by JP Mangalindan in the above-referenced Fortune article.
Chapter 10 – EEG | ESP | AI
The September 2010 article by Kathleen McAuliffe, “If Modern Humans Are So Smart, Why Are Our Brains Shrinking?” in Discover magazine gives an interesting overview of anthropologist John Hawks’s findings about our shrinking brain. It is also worthwhile to look at the following study by two developmental psychologists, D. H. Bailey and D. C. Geary, which is referenced in the article, “Hominid Brain Evolution: Testing Climactic, Ecological, and Social Competition models,” Human Nature 20 (2009): 67–79.
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Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson showed that the industrial revolution brought a twofold increase in wealth: “English Workers’ Living Standard During the Industrial Revolution: A New Look,” Economic History Review 36 (1983): 1–25. Various population sources show a fourfold increase in the world’s population, the effects of which are discussed by Erin McLamb, “The Ecological Impact of the Industrial Revolution,” Ecology, September 18, 2011.
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For a brief but relevant summary of the scientific achievements of Hans Berger, see the National Institutes of Health’s review entitled “Neurological Stamp” at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles
/PMC1738204/pdf/v074p00009.pdf. Berger’s story has been retold by many, most notably in Dean Radin’s interesting book Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (New York: Paraview, 2006), 21–24.
E. E. Fetz reported his findings in “Operant Conditioning of Cortical Unit Activity,” Science 163 (1969): 955–958. For a more in-depth look at brain computer interfaces in general, see Brain-Computer Interfaces: Applying Our Minds to Human-Computer Interaction (New York: Springer, 2010), edited by Desney S. Tan and Anton Nijholt.
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The 60 Minutes segment featuring Jan Scheuermann is well worth watching as is the original BrainGate segment, both of which can be found on the CBS website. Alternatively, you can read a good description of the breakthrough in “Patient Shows New Dexterity with a Mind-Controlled Robot Arm” by Susan Young in the December 2012 MIT Technology Review.
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For more information on any of the brainwave s
ensor companies mentioned in this section, see their websites or search for neurowear.
The full bibliographies for the two articles about Zeo’s headband are as follows: Scott Kirsner, “A Gentler Way to Start the Day,” Boston Globe, March 28, 2005; and David Pogue, “To Sleep, Perchance to Analyze,” New York Times, July 15, 2009.
Tesla’s story was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered in a piece entitled “Tesla’s Big Gamble: Can the Electric Car Go Mainstream?,” which aired September 24, 2012.
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In Homer’s Iliad, Hephaestus was the god of artisans and blacksmiths. He was a smith who made gold statues to serve as his handmaidens, as well as three-legged wheeled cauldrons that traveled to and from the other gods at a nod from him.
Robots programmed for the workplace are particularly interesting. In addition to delivering mail and getting coffee, the HRP-4 can be programmed to recognize co-worker’s faces. The downside is that it costs $350,000. Not to be outdone, the slightly more expensive PR2 can also get you food from the refrigerator. The iRobot Roomba can be found for under $100. A fun overview was provided by Bloomberg Businessweek in “The Robot in the Next Cubicle” on January 14, 2011.
Kevin Kelly wrote a great piece about robots for Wired Magazine on December 24, 2012: “Better Than Human: Why Robots Will—And Must—Take Our Jobs.” The figure that machines have taken all but 1 percent of agricultural jobs is from this article.
This section references Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987).
My previous book Wired for Thought: How the Brain Is Shaping the Future of the Internet (Boston: Harvard Business Press, 2009) provides a more detailed review of Gammonoid, Big Blue, and all the other intelligent, game-playing machines.
The 100 billion neurons theory is extremely well researched and notably quoted in The Scientific American Book of the Brain (New York: Scientific American, 1999). The following journal article does a good job outlining that research, as well as detailing new evidence about the 86 billion neuron theory: F. A. C. Azevedo, L. R. B. Carvalho, L. T. Grinberg, J. M. Farfel, R. E. L. Ferretti, R. E. P. Leite, W. J. Filho, R. Lent, and S. Herculano-Houzel, “Equal Numbers of Neuronal and Nonneuronal Cells Make the Human Brain an Isometrically Scaled-up Primate Brain,” Journal of Computational Neurology 513 (2009): 532–541. Alternatively, The World Book 2001 (Chicago: World Book Inc., 2001), 551, quoted a number between 10 billion and 100 billion. The only safer estimate would have been to estimate the number at between zero and 1 trillion.