'Many web workers, having tasted of the A/B apple, can no longer imagine operating in any other environment. Indeed, they begin to look with pity on the offline world, a terrifying place where each of us possesses only one life to live rather than two (or more) in parallel. “There’s this grilled cheese place down the street,” says Jim Kingsbury, marketing VP at One Kings Lane. “They can’t test anything. Should they price the sandwich at $6 or $6.50? What should be at the top of the menu? Those are purely intuitive choices that they have to make.” At one Silicon Valley office, I overheard an employee complain that dating can’t be A/B tested; an online profile can, to be sure, but once you’re in a relationship with a specific person, 100 percent of the “traffic” is on the line with every decision. The testable web is so much safer. No choices are hard, and no introspection is necessary. Why is B better than A? Who can say? At the end of the workday, we can only shrug: We went with B. We don’t know why. It just works.'

'In order to understand the complex range of customer experiences, we end up simplifying the data points, in order to look for trends and averages. This is common in the games sector, as well as other industries. However, it limits us – because we stop looking at individuals, and look instead for common patterns and we can only understand behaviour we can measure. Once the player stops using our game – they become invisible to us. Players adjust their attitude to our game over time: they will in time tire of the repetitive nature of our puzzles and eventually will even cease to value your virtual goods. In short, all players have a lifecycle, which needs to be understood. If we don't acknowledge the player's changing attitude over time we'll start to alienate them. They'll start to see the game experience as a burden, as work, or even something exploitative. This is what I mean by the "Social Game Hangover": it's like recovering from a party where you forget how much fun you had, and instead focus on the dull throbbing pain in your head plus your noticeably lighter wallet. When this happens, who does the player blame? The other players? Themselves? No, the game exploited me!'

'But... but my Klout score is important! No it's not. It's like search engine optimisation, only for yourself. Ignore it. Concentrate on making amazing things, caring about the people around you, and not being a douchebag. If you do that, then you'll soon realise that it doesn't matter one jot what an algorithm thinks of you.'

'Matt Thomson, Klout’s VP of platform, says that a number of major companies—airlines, big-box retailers, hospitality brands—are discussing how best to use Klout scores. Soon, he predicts, people with formidable Klout will board planes earlier, get free access to VIP airport lounges, stay in better hotel rooms, and receive deep discounts from retail stores and flash-sale outlets. “We say to brands that these are the people they should pay attention to most,” Thomson says. “How they want to do it is up to them.” -- When we see ourselves ranked, “we’re trained to want to grow that score.”' -- Have you any wool?

'IT admins, six sigma types rushing to the data bandwagon, ex-BI types, visualization and infographic geeks, analytics geeks, programmers, old-school statisticians, Hadoop wranglers — they all seem to be calling themselves data scientist now. One speaker quipped that the difference between an “analyst” and a “data scientist” is about $40,000. The bigger the market, the bigger the incentive to stop infighting and forge an opaque consensus. Infighting creates a kind of transparency that benefits buyers, by allowing them to play divide-and-conquer games. -- Big Data is unique among recent IT trends in that it is a market and opportunity created by an open source movement. The entire industry exists because of Hadoop, an infrastructure component inspired by Google technology. So there has been a sense of unity around a shared non-commercial mission from Day 1. The consensual label “data scientist” is partly a consequence of a sense that the data scene is a social fraternity rather than a business sector. There is also a pragmatic consensus that the biggest gains will be found by mixing up large datasets owned by different parties (think “mashups for titans”). This is an element of the scene that is rather like the effort to standardize railroad gauges in the 19th century, or containerization in the twentieth century. It reinforces the cultural mission by making standardization and data interoperability a matter of shared interest.'

'... judging by some of our industry’s public discourse, it would seem that large parts of ad- and marketingland are behaving as if they don’t know the difference between effects and effectiveness. Or as if they think they’re in the entertainment business. In which getting people to watch – and maybe ‘engage’ with – our content is the whole end purpose of the enterprise. If there’s one thing digital stuff is good at, it’s leaving behind it a vast trail of data. It gives us more and more things we can easily and immediately count – searches, views, visits, time on page, bounce rate, exit rate, time on site, linking, forwarding, following, referring, clicking, friending, liking, +ing, and so on. All these things are easy to monitor and count... Tens of thousands of this! Hundreds of thousands of that! But counting and analysis are very different things.'

'Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?'

'The technology has power because it addresses psychological vulnerabilities that many of us have. We want connection, but many of us fear the consequences of connection. True intimacy can be very scary. ...this is particularly true of the narcissists: "In a life of texting and messaging, those on that contact list can be made to appear almost on demand. You can take what you need and move on. And, if not gratified, you can try someone else.” This can set into motion a vicious cycle. As Sherry points out: "...if we ask, “What does simulation want?” we know what it wants. It wants – it demands – immersion. But immersed in simulation, it can be hard to remember all that lies beyond it or even to acknowledge that everything is not captured by it. For simulation not only demands but creates a self that prefers simulation. Simulation offers relationships simpler than real life can provide. We become accustomed to the reductions and betrayals that prepare us for life with the robotic.'

"It's a combination of the sublime and the ridiculous." -- Numbers numb -- Praxeological epiphany at 28:22: "I don't think you can use quantitative methods to explain markets... history doesn't repeat itself."

'The study, which is now nearly $10 million over budget, was supposed to have been completed by this past May. Layton continues to gather data, however, insisting that the big breakthrough, or "payoff," is just around the corner. "Baby, this one is the big one, I can feel it," said Stangel, holding a CD-ROM of raw data to his ear and shaking it. "This contains data from control groups seven and eleven, stuff we'd thrown out because it seemed so blue-sky, but we were thinking too hard and not going with our gut. Sometimes, the scientific method can lead you wrong, you know?" "Seven-eleven! Seven-come-eleven!" said Stangel, pausing to let Fancy Nancy blow on the disc. "Daddy needs a new paradigmatic skew!"' -- Numbers numb!

"Politicians are masters in the realm of words but there's another realm that they're not masters of and that is the realm of numbers. There is only one Sorcerer that is both master of the realm of number and the realm of word and that is the Central Banker."

'We tolerate the pathologies of quantification — a dry, abstract, mechanical type of knowledge — because the results are so powerful. Numbering things allows tests, comparisons, experiments. Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually. In science, in business and in the more reasonable sectors of government, numbers have won fair and square. For a long time, only one area of human activity appeared to be immune. In the cozy confines of personal life, we rarely used the power of numbers. The techniques of analysis that had proved so effective were left behind at the office at the end of the day and picked up again the next morning. The imposition, on oneself or one’s family, of a regime of objective record keeping seemed ridiculous. A journal was respectable. A spreadsheet was creepy.' -- Numbers numb.

'Self-monitoring tends to limit our sense of ourselves to the limits of our measuring equipment. So when we use devices to record data about ourselves it seems like we are adding to our self-knowledge, but actually we are subtracting from it, limiting ourselves to what we have been. "For many self-trackers, the goal is unknown. Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask." This strikes me as the saddest and most profound form of alienation humankind has ever known. It seems fueled by the data-driven information economy in which we live; people feel obliged to become more like robots in their effort to better assimilate themselves to the highly tracked, digitized environs. They seem to want to be handled logistically by the “network society”... ...we give up our soul for a spreadsheet.' -- Numbers numb.

Max: "The way Obama attacks healthcare is he looks at healthcare stocks and if they're going up he thinks he's doing a good job, and if they're going down, he thinks he's doing a bad job. Obama is a day trader. He looks at all the policies in front of him and he trades them. He's just nickel and diming trying to end the day with a few more bucks than he started with." -- CHANGE!!!

'Les, one of our support guys, said it best after a week: “That board is like magic.” Our support turnaround time is faster than it’s ever been. Just the simple act of “publicizing” those numbers — not in a cruel way, but a “where are we at as a group?” way — has kept the support process on-task and, I think, made it a bit more like a video game. (It helps that when all the boxes are at “zero”, a virtual bottle of champagne appears on-screen, and a physical one is likely removed from the fridge.)'

Comment: Anon -- 'Will everything in this world have to involve some sort of immediate feedback and/or short term reward? I swear this is why everyone runs out and buys GPS when all they do is drive to the corner store - it turns driving into a videogame. Everyone is already grumbling about the Gen-Y's or whatever they're called. Coddled. "Not everyone gets a medal." Will nobody do things *just because they should*?'

"We live in a bubble of fake bullshit." -- Ergo we must build an even bigger bubble of authentic bullshit.

'A trader describes the tragedy of 9/11 as a blessing in disguise because for some people, it translated into great riches. Brokers celebrated the death and destruction of the Iraq war because "in devastation, there is opportunity".' -- Numbers numb.

Comment: Richard Watson: "The trouble is disenfranchisement. When a student realizes they can't get gold stars because they do not excel at whatever the task at hand is, then they turn away from the system and try to counter it. Counter-cultures develop where the rewards are different and you are rewarded for different actions, and that becomes just as addicting as doing the "right" thing. We all want praise, and if that praise come from negative actions or positive actions, it doesn't take much to get us going down the path that is reinforcing us. ...when you get to start talking about rewarding behavior, alternative systems that reward those who cannot achieve those goals should be put in to place to discourage counter-cultures..." -- Comment: Pete Smith: "We seem to be moving away from a culture of gamers who explore the map to see what they can find, into a culture (beyond gaming) that only undertakes an action for some quantified reward."

'Where is this going? Schell says that the achievements and incentives that have wired us into playing Facebook games compulsively will soon be built into everything. Your toothbrush, for instance, will give you 10 achievement points for brushing your teeth in the morning, Schell said. Then it will give you more points for brushing for the right amount of time. Then it will give you points for brushing every morning in a week. You may also get credit for eating your Corn Flakes. If you take the bus to work, your local government will give you 10 achievement points for reducing traffic. You will get credit for walking to work, as your digital shoes will testify. If you kid gets straight A’s on a report card, he or she will get 2000 points. And the Obama administration will give you 5,000 points for being a good parent. These things are going to make Facebook games seem tiny and just the beginning of a giant wave of game-ification of the world.' -- In Soviet Russia, game plays YOU.

Some encouraging numbers except for the stockholm-syndromed support for the NHS *sigh*

“If you really want to know why the financial system nearly collapsed in the fall of 2008, I can tell you in one simple sentence.” “O.K.,” I said. “Let’s hear it.” “The financial system nearly collapsed,” he said, “because smart guys had started working on Wall Street.” He took a sip of his martini, and stared straight at the row of bottles behind the bar, as if the conversation was now over. “But weren’t there smart guys on Wall Street in the first place?” I asked. He looked at me the way a mathematics teacher might look at a child who, despite heroic efforts by the teacher, seemed incapable of learning the most rudimentary principles of long division.' -- Numbers numb

Numbers numb.

'Twitter works to quantize communication, making the numbers in the audience more important than what’s said. Of course, that has always been true of ratings-driven media, but it hasn’t been true for our conversations. But the genius of Twitter as a potential business is that it turns ordinary people into media companies. It lets us subject our conversations to Nielsen-like ratings, to regard our communications as a product conveying our personal brand. Then we can crunch the numerical data Twitter supplies to tweak our brand, and see what works to improve the numbers, which serve as proxy for our relevance and reach and, by extension, our right to feel important. The quantification disguises the emptiness of the social relations it is supposedly counting... ...we project things that make us feel important and pretend that it is for the benefit of unseen... We get a simulacrum of civic participation minus the trouble of other people and reciprocity and responsibility.' -- Numbers numb

'Let them eat Facebook profiles. -- We won’t put a price tag on ourselves or our friends or our pleasures, but Facebook will happily do that behind our backs, in economic exchanges that don’t include us. ...we have become the stuff being exchanged, both in what we are and what we do online. ...no matter how much we might love attention, we can’t use it to meet our basic needs. Ultimately, we all have to participate in the cash economy. -- In order to reclaim the fruits of our labor and stop working on the digital plantation, we may be forced to become self-consciously mercenary about what heretofore we have been content to share out of a spirit of convivial sociality. We will need to start viewing our social behavior as our intellectual property, our various selves as proprietary content to which we retain the broadcasting rights and which we have no intention of licensing for reuse without our express written consent.' -- Awesome reveal of 'free'

Revealling. Somehow forums seem to best sum up what people really care about.

"When I lived with money, I was always lacking. Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."

Gotham and Sentinel

'The sheer vastness of the data we gather in our attempts to understand the world around us has been challenging statisticians since the earliest censuses. What does it mean when we're told that unemployment has risen by 281,000? Is that a huge number? Or just a big one? The stories are about people, but it is often hard to see beyond the figures. So what if, rather than grapple with endless triplets of zeros, we shrank the world, and all the potentially flummoxing data we mine from it, down to a more manageable size? What if the world were a truly global village of, say, 100 people? What would those faces look like, and who would those people be? ' -- A list of stats follows, including: 'The 80 adults in the village would share a personal debt of £2.4m (£30,480 each, on average). The richest 10 people in the village would receive 30 per cent of the total income. Between them, they would earn more than the poorest 50 combined.'

'Numbers are making their way into the smallest crevices of our lives. Quantitative analysis by its very nature seems remorseless and inhuman. Numbers may be useful for epidemiologists and insurance companies, school systems, the military, and sociology professors, but what have they to do with the fabric of our personal lives? ... two years ago, my fellow Wired writer Kevin Kelly and I noticed that many of our acquaintances were beginning to do this terrible thing to themselves, finding clever ways to extract streams of numbers from ordinary human activities. A new culture of personal data was taking shape.' -- Bunch of old men trying to cheat death by uploading their dataselves to the internets. Call this the Kurzweil-Kelly syndrome. By their numbers you shall know them.

'People don't know what they want – so stop asking them.' -- What gets numbered gets numb.

Happy talk

'Explores the concept and definition of freedom, specifically: how a simplistic model of human beings based on mathematician, John Nash's 'Game Theory' as self-seeking, almost robotic, creatures led to today's idea of freedom.'

'Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance. -- ...people change their behavior—often for the better—when they are being observed... -- We tend to think of our physical selves as a system that's simply too complex to comprehend. But what we've learned from companies like Google is that if you can collect enough data, there's no need for a grand theory to explain a phenomenon. You can observe it all through the numbers. Everything is data. You are your data, and once you understand that data, you can act on it. -- For many Nike+ users, doing their exercise becomes inextricable from measuring it. "Forgetting my Nike+ sensor, or my iPod battery being dead, just takes the life out of my run."'

'There's a certain psychological power to expressing things with precision, to making nuance explicit, even as it renders the powerful prosaic. One girlfriend is a miracle; 20 is a number. Managers measure things in order to incentivize them, yet the very act of measurement cheapens things. As Stalin once said: "One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic."' -- Numbers numb

'Finding meaning in global mass phenomena can be difficult because the phenomena themselves are invisible, spread across the earth in millions of separate places. There is no Mount Everest of waste that we can make a pilgrimage to and behold the sobering aggregate of our discarded stuff, seeing and feeling it viscerally with our senses. Instead, we are stuck with trying to comprehend the gravity of these phenomena through the anaesthetizing and emotionally barren language of statistics. Sociologists tell us that the human mind cannot meaningfully grasp numbers higher than a few thousand; yet every day we read of mass phenomena characterized by numbers in the millions, billions, even trillions. Compounding this challenge is our sense of insignificance as individuals in a world of 6.7 billion people. And if we fully open ourselves to the horrors of our times, we also risk becoming overwhelmed, panicked, or emotionally paralyzed.' -- Numbers numb.

"Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something...My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming." -- Numbers numb

'Turn the world into a game, they argue, and it works better. Give people a competition, and it can transform a dull-but-important task into something exciting. "Games create drama and excitement," as Jane McGonigal, one of the leading thinkers in the field, told the crowd at this year's O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. "We've done that for years with videogames, and now we can apply that thinking to the rest of life." Games can change behavior by taking bad behaviors and making them visible, so we can no longer ignore them.' -- Numbers numb.

'Alfaro's theory was that people were feeling pinched and that using coins, as opposed to dollar bills, made them feel they were spending less. If we want to get consumers going again, Raghubir says, we should hand out lots of change. "If I were President Obama, the very first thing I'd recommend is increase the circulation of $1 coins and consider introducing $2 coins," she says.' -- Desperate times call for desperate half measures

'On April 20th Coca-Cola said it would adopt a “value-based” compensation system for the advertisers that do work for its 400 brands. Rather than paying advertising agencies for hours worked, Coke will pay for results achieved. Assessing a campaign’s value is much harder. Coke, however, thinks it can do just that. Its new model guarantees to cover advertising agencies’ costs, plus a bonus of up to 30%. The bonus depends on a number of metrics, including the agency’s overall performance, and the sales and market share of the products being advertised. Coke insists that its aim is not to cut costs but to inspire creativity and efficiency. -- Ron Baker, author of “Pricing on Purpose”, a book on pricing strategies, thinks service agencies need to grasp that they sell ideas, not time, and that ideas should be generously compensated. Imagine, he says, if J.K. Rowling had been paid by the hour to write about Harry Potter.'

'A few basic things about quantified metrics: #1. They are always stand-ins for more complicated status measures. A single number cannot possibly convey the nuances involved in social status and social hierarchy... #2. Techie/geek/engineer types love quantified metrics precisely because they facilitate comparison. #3. Quantified status metrics spur competition and therefore increase user action [and] reward certain types of behavior... #4. Social status is an under-studied, under-rated aspect of product design and motivation for user action.'

'There may be an evolutionary explanation for this genetic influence and the tendency for some people to be at the center while others are at the edges of the group, according to the researchers. If a deadly germ is spreading through a community, individuals at the edges are least likely to be exposed. However, to gain access to important information about a food source, being in the center of the group has a distinct benefit.' -- But who found the new food source? Popularity = The Looooong Fail

"Traditionally people have used objects and possessions to demonstrate social status. Now our social lives are measured in equally explicit ways. Every social behavior online has a clear, and often public, metric assigned to it: friends, followers, subscribers, etc. And these numbers are worn online like the Rolex watch at a cocktail party. They create anxiety. They create ambition. I'm not sure what the lesson is, but it's fascinating to think that this is the first time humans have seen their effectiveness as social beings measured in such a conscious way. Certainly it's debatable whether or not these numbers measure the quality of your social life, but never the less they create a new kind of status and new pressures and aspirations for our social lives."

"Because these numbers are public, we’re experiencing a kind of follower arms race, where heedless reciprocal following has become the norm and popularity and leader-board sites are de rigeur (I’m still working on getting my douchebag index into the nineties)."

"Do you hate Twitter stats? This will remove them for you." -- Numbers numb

'Ideas you can expect to see coming to the mainstream soon are such wonders as self-diagnosis kits and stress monitors. As we advance in understanding what is useful there will be more and more of these services emerging to aid the masses in acute self-awareness. Potentially scary but with great data, comes greater understanding (or at least that's the theory). The technology is already here.'

'As you can see, the screen is dominated by instrumentation.'

'"Think of a princess, a beautiful princess locked up in a tower. Think about how she must feel, yearning to escape. Now, imagine you are reading a book about that princess, engrossed in what is to become of her. You feel for her, you care about her, you want her to escape. Yes?" she asks. Ah, yes, I suppose so, I nod, wondering where we are going. "You see," she says flashing her trademark, wide-mouthed smile. "Don't tell me youngsters playing a computer game in which the princess is locked in the tower give a stuff if she gets out or not. They don't. They don't because those sort of computer games aren't about empathising with or understanding her plight. She is just there as a goal. The game is all about getting her out of the tower because that means they win. Game over. It's all so meaningless. In the truest sense of the word," she says shaking her head in exasperation. "It… means… nothing," she says slowly, drumming her red fingernails on her desk to emphasise each word.' -- True

"In economics, Money illusion refers to the tendency of people to think of currency in nominal, rather than real, terms. In other words, the numerical/face value (nominal value) of money is mistaken for its purchasing power (real value). This is a fallacy as modern fiat currencies have no inherent value and their real value is derived from their ability to be exchanged for goods and used for payment of taxes. Explanations of money illusion generally describe the phenomenon in terms of heuristics. Nominal prices provide a convenient rule of thumb for determining value and real prices are only calculated if they seem highly salient (eg. in periods of hyperinflation or in long term contracts)." -- Numbers numb

'... a capitalist economy is far too complex for any of its participants to have any exact knowledge, especially about future events, even if markets are perfectly efficient. This means that businesses and investors will quite rationally operate on a wide variety of different economic assumptions—and far from being irrational such divergent behaviour is the essential ingredient of capitalism that makes entrepreneurship and financial markets work. Building on the concept of “reflexivity” popularised by George Soros—that market expectations that initially appear false can actually change reality and become self-fulfilling—Imperfect Knowledge Economics discusses a world in which market participants with diverse views about the laws of economics change macroeconomic conditions by changing these views.' -- '... economists now face a clear choice: embrace new ideas or give back your public funding and your Nobel prizes, along with the bankers’ bonuses you justified and inspired.'

'The CDSs determined the value of the CDOs. And no one is touching CDSs with a thousand foot pole right now, and with very good reason. -- Li came up with an ingenious way to model default correlation without even looking at historical default data. Instead, he used market data about the prices of instruments known as credit default swaps. If your eyes didn't just bulge out of your head and plop on the keyboard, they should have. This genius decided that the underlying value of the loans really was irrelevant: what was really relevant was what the market decided they were worth, on the basis of the value of the CDS insurance hedges against them. The infinitely traded, completely unregulated, massively speculative pool of CDS bets against the CDOs that now contained the entire economy's lifeblood. You can't make this shit up... nobody has any idea what these things are worth. No one EVER DID. ...that's why the credit markets are frozen, and aren't coming unfrozen any time soon.'

'I have been called the devil by strangers and “the Facilitator” by friends. I wrote the software that turned mortgages into bonds. I never would have thought, in my most extreme paranoid fantasies, that my software, and the others like it, would have enabled Wall Street to decimate the investments of everyone in my family. Not even the most jaded observer saw that coming. I can’t deny that it allowed a privileged few to exploit the unsuspecting many. But catastrophe, depression, busted banks, forced auctions of entire tracts of houses? The fact that my software, over which I would labor for a decade, facilitated these events is numbing. Is capitalism inherently corrupt? I don’t think the free flow of goods in and of itself is the culprit. No, it’s the complexity masked by thousands of unseen whirring widgets that beguiles people into a sense of power, a feeling of dominion over the future.'

'Goodhart's Law states that "any metric which becomes a target will over time lose its value as a metric." In other words, the very pursuit of the value renders the value meaningless. And this is the problem with any attempt to express value in a single measure. In truth Shareholder Value wasn't that dumb a measure... However what made the measure so damaging in its effects was the fact that it was pursued to the exclusion of all else. If pursued to its obvious conclusion, it would have created businesses which nobody ever wanted to work for or to buy from.' -- Numbers numb

'In their thirst for feedback, news sites now feature provocative league tables, ranking stories by “most clicked” or “most emailed.” With exceptions, the rankings are dominated by those that encapsulate the weirder, more idiosyncratic aspects of human existence, at the expense of serious but more abstract issues... As newspaper circulation figures fall sharply it’s only logical for publishers to huddle under an umbrella of popular stories. By reflecting the interests of the crowd, they can attract millions of eyeballs and more advertising. This process, in turn, artificially narrows news around a handful of “tent pole” stories... Stories that need to be found, developed and verified by an international network of permanent staff are expensive by comparison. ...journalists have long been “our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems.” New technologies offer a great opportunity but, if mishandled, the future of civil society is in peril.'

On services that... 'attempt to transform everyday life tasks into games by assign values to them and keeping score. ...a world in which collective experience is systematically abrogated, a world in which only competition can “unite” us and corporations reap the profits from our combat. We end up sharing only the ideal of measured achievement: how many more points we can score, how many people are reading our updates, how many more things we can own or add to our list of experiences. Services [that] meet the need we now have to have our social experiences more rigidly structured by an outside party, a referee, some sort of mediator. We seem to have worked ourselves into a corner where we must outsource our ability to be motivated. We need outside parties to generate motivational schemes and point systems to drive us through life activities that were once rewarding enough in and of themselves. ...nullifying the quality of experience and reducing it to a point value.'

"Your stats in a single glance. Ego gives you one central—and lovely—location to check web statistics that matter to you. ...you can quickly view the number of visits to your website (including daily, hourly and monthly numbers), feed subscription totals and changes, and how many people are following you on Twitter." -- Numbers numb

"The National Debt Clock ran out of digits so start following the debt daily on Twitter."

'Asked to compare her work to physics, one quant, who requested anonymity because her company had not given her permission to talk to reporters, termed the market “a wild beast” that cannot be controlled, and then added: “It’s not like building a bridge. If you’re right more than half the time you’re winning the game.” There are a thousand physicists on Wall Street, she estimated, and many, she said, talk nostalgically about science. “They sold their souls to the devil,” she said, adding, “I haven’t met many quants who said they were in finance because they were in love with finance.”' -- 'Nigel Goldenfeld, whose company sells derivatives software: "Because the math is really complicated people assume it must be right."' -- Numbers numb

"In the face of such circumstances many sought refuge in the wild frenzy of a culturally degenerate fantasy world." -- Numbers numb

"26.57 - average age of YouTube uploader"

'Since 2007, presenter and economist Tim Harford has been exploring and explaining the numbers which have contributed to - and have characterised - the global economic downturn. He met the mathematicians at the heart of the City - and found out why some say they are to blame for the financial crisis. He uncovered the flaws of the bankers' bonus system, and discovered a mathematical error which might have led the banks into trouble.' -- Numbers numb. Audio interviews inside.

Numbers numb.

"This year we have lived through something more than a financial crisis. We have witnessed the death of a planet. Call it Planet Finance. Two years ago, in 2006, the measured economic output of the entire world was worth around $48.6 trillion. The total market capitalization of the world’s stock markets was $50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger. The total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40 percent larger. Planet Finance was beginning to dwarf Planet Earth... On Planet Finance, the securities outnumbered the people; the transactions outnumbered the relationships."

$4.28 trillion dollars. -- Numbers numb.

No.

"Paying for goods with notes and coins could be consigned to history within five years, according to the chief executive of Visa Europe. Peter Ayliffe said that, by 2012, using credit and debit cards should be cheaper and more convenient than cash. Some retailers could soon start surcharging customers if they choose to buy products with cash, because of the greater cost of processing these payments, he warned."

"... what’s really brought home for me the reality of “Life as Leveling” is the ascendancy of Facebook and, to a lesser extent, World of Warcraft . Much of the Facebook experience (like World of Warcraft and, let’s not forget, high school) is about status. And status, in this case, is measured in concrete terms not unlike a traditional roleplaying game. I realize I’m sounding pretty negative about this but, mostly, I find this phenomenon odd — and oddly comforting. I mean, at least leveling is a mechanism I understand, unlike a lot of social stuff." -- Hehe.

Cory Doctorow: 'If you understand the statistics of rare occurrences, you get off the plane in Las Vegas and think, "Holy crap, the casinos must have fleeced a lot of suckers to build those," and get back on the plane. But most of us get off the plane, look at the casinos and go, "Think of all the money there is to be won. I’m special, I’m different."'

"Human beings both want to -- and, in a deeper way, need to -- feel a sense of being autonomous. When someone else begins to seduce you into behaving with an offer of a reward, it takes away your sense of being autonomous. Now you are doing it for someone else. External rewards and punishments are counterproductive when it comes to activities that are meaningful -- tasks that telegraph something about a person's intellectual abilities, generosity, courage or values. People will voluntarily perform intellectually arduous work, for example, because it gives them pleasure to solve a puzzle or win a game of wits. It is easy to offer a reward, but it is not easy to help people find their own motivation." -- Numbers numb.

"Those without internet access on their phone will be able to log in to the Spore website on a computer and manually import and export numerical creature codes with which to do battle." -- That means...

Ta. (Requires email signup.)

"Measuring your worth is tough..." -- *nods*

Top 50 most expensive cities 2007

Graphs: "In total, almost 326,000 items have been created and made available for purchase." -- And socialisation IS content creation. It creates culture, community, and trust. How to measure it? Retention?

Graphs: "The graph below shows a break down of the 1.17 MILLION items available for avatar and room (basically the crux of the IMVU environment) customisation - a marketplace over 3.5 times larger than SL." -- 3.5!

"Why is FaceBook doing well? -- Socially-propagating story. The story that is being told in the game is literally being told by the players. As more players come into the story, it gets bigger, fatter, deeper." -- "70% of tween girls prefer 2D over 3D"

Girls blogging: “Girls are trained to make stories about themselves. From a young age they learn that they are objects, so they learn how to describe themselves." Boys posting videos: "are less about personal expression and more about impressing others"