End of the metaphor?

I’m reading Jeff Jarvis’ book “What Would Google Do?” and have come to the part where he recommends that web content be put in a format that is easily identifiable by Google.

This has a subtle impact on written communication style. Just as speakers of global languages change to accommodate non-native speakers (using fewer idioms or slang, for example) so too are people changing the way they write in order to reach a wider online audience. This online change is very different from George Orwell’s rules on effective writing.

Jarvis recommends that dentists with an online presence not call themselves “smile doctors” or anything apart from dentist. In other words: remove the metaphors (whether they are elegant or not) in order to be indexed by Google. Orwell’s comparable rule was: “Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” Orwell did not recommend against the use of metaphors, but rather recommended being inventive in their use. He never lived to see a search engine.

So now we have another potential point of change for global languages. The desire to optimize search engine results will remove some of the poetry from the everyday written language so that we may reach a wider audience.

Keyboards, convention, efficiency and luck

When Christopher Sholes designed the QWERTY keyboard layout for early typewriters, it was partially to separate the keys of letters commonly used together and thus prevent key jams, which had a secondary effect of slowing down typists once key jams were no longer a problem.

But still, the QWERTY standard is seen on almost all English language keyboards even though it is not the optimal placement of keys. Rather than learn a new arrangement, like the Dvorak keyboard, most people prefer to stick with what they know. (The world’s record for fastest English language typing is held by Barbara Blackburn, using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. She had a peak speed of 212 wpm.)

So while most of the English language world uses a substandard keyboard layout what impact does this have on typists of other languages? Is it possible that some languages, purely by luck of letter frequency, use the QWERTY keyboard more efficiently than English language typists?

I looked at the languages for which I had data: English, French, German, Spanish, Esperanto (why not), Italian, Turkish and Swedish and mapped letter frequency to the QWERTY keyboard. A screen shot is below.

Doing a true comparison of keyboard efficiency in different languages calls for typing speed tests (of letter, not word speed), but lacking these data I made some assumptions. To compare the effect on different languages, I assumed that the Dvorak model was ideal and measured the degree to which the foreign languages followed that model of putting high frequency letters in the middle row and weighted to the right hand.

And the winner is… Esperanto. Yes, by chance, this artificial language should have a faster typing speed than the others. Losers in the speed contest are German and French, both of which have their highest frequency letters in the top row and to the left. That’s the power of convention and luck on efficiency, whether on keyboards or in business.

Then again, maybe we shouldn’t focus on typing fast but rather on writing thoughtfully and well…

Business aesthetics

Aesthetics are growing in importance, or perhaps rather, the loss of aesthetic appreciation is waning. Even aesthetics of products that are mostly visual and not very functional, such as Philippe Starck's "Juicy Salif" lemon squeezer, shows that aesthetics themselves can sometimes be the point. The lemon squeezer is apparently poor at squeezing lemons and is primarily to be appreciated as a way to "start conversations". It sold well and lived up to its description.

Similarly, a business may have aesthetic appeal that is broader than the design or use of its products and relates to a larger impact it has on the world.

But there has to be strength of both artistry and finance. Dotcoms for example, did not have an enduring aesthetic. Their value came mostly from potential financial upside and much secondarily from their output. Once the upside disappeared much of the excitement disappeared with it. Older, stodgier, more established companies that worked on similar issues did not reap the temporary benefits of the dotcoms.

Industries that meld aesthetic appeal with financial upside include environmentally friendly technology (health, social and climate benefits / upside tied to high oil prices), pharmaceuticals (health and lifespan benefits / upside tied to waning regulatory regimes that protect drug patents), architecture and urban development (comfort of the local population / upside tied to real estate market). If the importance of the financial upside gets too extreme and is lost, these industries may also lose some of their aesthetic impact.

The classical music cost disease

A paper from William Baumol and William Bowen “On the performing arts: the anatomy of their economic problems” (1965) showed that while productivity improvements have been made in many other fields there cannot be productivity advances in the performing arts (a string quartet still requires the same number of performers today as it did centuries ago). Baumol and Bowen show that since the performing arts could not realize greater efficiencies, their cost rose over the centuries in comparison to other things.

But today the paper seems to be incomplete in that Baumol and Bowen did not expect performing arts output gains outside of live music. Today it is no longer only the process (playing the music live) that the audience pays for. Productivity has come from other developments such as the sale of recorded performances, performing for larger paying audiences and even quality improvements in instrument components. Additionally it may take musicians less time to learn new music by using technology including computerized note recognition and the ability to hear different recorded versions of a piece at a whim. There may be even more room to improve the learning process.

That being said, classical music today is a money-losing endeavor reliant upon donors and sponsors in addition to ticket sales. What had been the popular music of a century or more ago was the favorite musical type of only 30% of the American public back when Lincoln Center was built in the 1960s and the current favorite music of only 3% of the public today. I believe that some of this problem is related to the fact that classical performers today have found limited success in creating new powerful works and in evolving the performance experience itself. Some steps in that direction have been taken by performances such as those put on by Sympho.

Otherwise, the music exists as if in a museum but with pieces that are preserved not necessarily being the best ones available and the method of their current display influenced by the practicalities of the past.

This is one example of the type of problem we work on at Inticiti.

New attraction to the humanities

I have enjoyed reading the recent defense of the study of philosophy and the humanities. In a New Generation of College Students, Many Opt for the Life Examined Stanley Fish’s blog from earlier this year has a different take.

It is heartening to me that these days more students are choosing majors in the humanities. One discipline of the humanities -- history -- has fascinated me since I majored in the subject at Cornell. Over the years I’ve found that you can have nice conversations about many things with people when you travel but if you discuss history, it is easy to get into an argument. Each country puts its own slant on the history taught in elementary and secondary school, stressing, ignoring, changing and reinterpreting events along with the times. And not everyone studies history at university, where there is more likelihood to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.

Many people have asked me how I made a transition from history to technology and business but for me this was never an issue. Many of the big problems in the world today are at some point a disagreement about the interpretation of a common history. Taken with that view, technical questions seem smaller.

In a time when we see worried articles stating that for example, US universities have too few engineering students and that many engineering graduates from emerging nations are not adequately equipped to work upon graduating it is intriguing to see articles like those cited above.