Month: April 2011

different faces of publicity

Various popular sayings claim that negative publicity is better than no publicity:

  • there’s no such thing as bad press
  • there’s no such thing as bad publicity but your own obituary (attributed to Brendan Behan)
  • the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about (attributed to Oscar Wilde and Joan Crawford)

According to a recent empirical study, negative reviews can increase sales of an unknown product by increasing product awareness.  Persons tend to prefer the familiar relative the unknown.  A negative review’s contribution to awareness can outweigh its effect on sentiment, particularly since sentiment tends to dissipate faster than awareness.[*]

The meaning of publicity and awareness are changing with the fragmentation of mass media and the rise of personal, Internet-based communication.  Mass-media publicity and awareness now do not necessarily delimit meaning.  Instead, mass-media publicity and awareness may prompt Internet search and further inquiry.  Bad publicity can lead some exposed person to find a much wider range of information.  On the other hand, the value of mass-media awareness probably has decreased relative to search-engine findability.  Publicity of the traditional sort is no longer necessary to connect with a large number of persons.

One conclusion you can count on: economic analysis will show that results depend.

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Video of Sokari Douglas Camp’s Masquerader with Boat Headdress (1987), on display at the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC.  In the Kalabari culture of Nigeria, men perform masquerade performances honoring water spirits.

[*]  Jonah Berger & Alan T. Sorensen & Scott J. Rasmussen, 2010.  “Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales,” Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 29(5), pages 815-827, 09-10. DOI: 10.1287/mksc.1090.0557

making data more factually important

Most persons are primarily interested in using data to make their point.  Why persons seek truth non-instrumentally is a mystery from an evolutionary perspective.  That mystery need not serve as the basis for true enlightenment. A better basis for true enlightenment is a norm of credibility through data accessibility: if you use data to make a point, you must make sufficient, high-quality data freely available to analyze that point and related points.  If you don’t, your use of data should be considered pointless.

Open data platforms often have only superficial institutional support and face continual funding battles.  Vertical disintegration in data production, dissemination, analysis, and claim-making reduces upstream data-production incentives.  High-quality data can support a wide variety of insights and values.  Particular interests in it are relatively small.

Data ethics in academic scholarship are slowly developing.  While a small number of scholars do hugely important work in collecting, curating, and disseminating data, their work is greatly undervalued academically.  Data is likely to continue to be greatly undervalued in academic status competition.  A more propitious development is scholarly norms of data disclosure.  Providing data access is slowly becoming a requirement for taking scholarly claims seriously.

Most statistics quoted in general public discussion are uninterpretable or misinterpreted.  Much scholarly work follows disciplinary conventions that support objectively meaningless work.  But if such rhetoric and scholarship helps to generate high-quality data, its net effect on public discussion will be positive.

childless men are pillars of human society

leishmaniasis sufferer offers a helping hand

Humans evolved as cooperative breeders.  A recently published study of two hunter-gatherer societies documents that childless adult males provided necessary food resources to middle-aged breeders. The provisioning was not kin-based but broader, need-based food sharing.  Hunter-gather societies are the social form of all but roughly the last 12,000 years of human history.  Hence, throughout most of human history, childless men have been essential elements of human society.

Who exactly are these heroes of human evolution?  An Ache hunter-gatherer group from the tropical forests of Eastern Paraguay provides evidence.  In the pre-contact year of 1970, that group consisted of 142 adult females, 167 adult males, and 236 children ages 15 years or less (dependent children).  The women generally had better reproductive opportunities than did the men: 69% of women had surviving dependents, while only 54% of men did.  Middle-aged breeding pairs typically had a significant food deficit for themselves and their dependent children.  The childless men who provided the critical help to the active breeders included two men with major skin disfigurations, two mildly handicapped men, three homosexual men, and several men who “had personality traits that reportedly precluded their chance of mating.”

Such men, not the men of heroic legends, are the true heroes of human history.

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Referenced study: Hill, Kim, and A. Magdalena Hurtado, “Cooperative Breeding in South American hunter-gatherers.”  Proc Biol Sci. 2009 November 7; 276(1674): 3863–3870. Published online 2009 August 19. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1061.

The quotation above is from id. p. 3866.  Recent gynocentric scholarship has placed allomothers and grandmothers at the center of human evolution.  But little evidence prior to the development of agriculture supports that view.

historical roots of the Academy Awards

The Holland Brothers opened the first commercial movie exhibition business in a converted shoe store in New York on April 14, 1894. For 25 cents, a customer could view five of the ten, roughly half-minute films available for viewing in Kinetoscopes.  Thomas Edison made the films in his Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey.  The films offered were:

  1. Sandow.  Eugen Sandow was a German strongman.  Probably this 1894 Sandow film.
  2. Roosters.  A cockfight.  Probably this cockfight film.
  3. Bertoldi (mouth support).  Ena Bertoldi was a British vaudeville contortionist.  Film apparently not available on the Internet.  Here’s contortionist D. Odbayasakh performing this move at the opening of the Hamtdaa: Together exhibit of Mongolian culture.
  4. Bertoldi (table contortion).
  5. Wrestling.
  6. Barber Shop.  Probably this 1893 film.
  7. Blacksmiths.  Probably this film, minus the music.
  8. Horse Shoeing.
  9. Highland Dance.
  10. Trapeze.  Probably this 12.5 second film of a Louis Martinelli trapeze performance.

The Holland Brothers movie exhibition venture was immediately successful.  Within two months the Holland Brothers had opened similar businesses in Chicago and San Francisco.  Here’s some of the subjects available on Kinetoscope films, 1893-1895:

voluptuous Spanish dancer Carmencita, French dancer Armand d’Ary (real name Marthe Armandary), Mexican tightrope dancer Juan Caicedo, comic boxers the Glenroy Brothers, further comic boxers Walton (Charles F.) and Slavin (John C.), genuine boxers Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing, Spanish contortionist Louis Martinelli, Gaiety Girls Lucy Murray and May Lucas, the Rixfords troupe of acrobats, Robetta and Doretto in a Chinese laundry, Princess Ali with her Dance du Ventre (belly dance), George Layman (the original ‘man with a thousand faces’), several artists from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show, casts of shows such as Charles Hoyt’s A Milk White Flag, and numerous performing animals

When New Jersey State Senator and Asbury Park town founder James Bradley discussed with Thomas Edison bringing film exhibition to Asbury Park, Bradley objected strongly to the film of the dancer Carmencita.  He was afraid that it would shock modesty and purity.  So arrangements were made to show instead Boxing Cats (see video above).

Don’t underestimate the future of YouTube.