incumbent transition faster to VoIP in Japan than in U.S.

In transitioning from a telephone network to a broadband network, telephone service shifts from a network-specific telephone service to a variety of Internet Protocol (IP) telephone applications. As measured by the share of Voice-over-IP (VoIP) service in total non-mobile telephone service, the telephone application transition is happening faster in Japan than in the U.S.  In Japan on June 30, 2010, VoIP telephone service accounted for 36% of non-mobile telephone service.  The corresponding figure for the U.S. was 19%.

Japan is well-recognized for its advanced development of fiber to the home and its world-leading broadband speeds and bandwidth prices.  But relatively low-performance digital subscriber line (DSL) service is sufficient to support VoIP. The faster telephone application shift in Japan is associated not with broadband speed, but with different incumbent telephone company behavior.

New telephone service entrants in both Japan and the U.S. have predominately used VoIP.  In Japan, the non-NTT share of VoIP service in non-NTT telephone service was 71% on June 30, 2010.  The corresponding figures for non-ILEC telephone service providers in the U.S. was 55%. The behavior of incumbents differs much more between Japan and the U.S. On June 30, 2010, the share of NTT VoIP service in NTT telephone service was 22%, while the corresponding figure for ILECs in the U.S. was 2%.  U.S. incumbent telephone service providers are changing relatively little their existing non-mobile telephone service.

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Data: transition to VoIP telephone service in Japan and in the U.S. (Excel version)

press-release media aggregators

On February 25, 2011, Technische Universität Muenchen (TUM) put out a press release on TUM Professor Erwin Emmerling’s study of the Bamiyan Buddhas’ remains.  Emmerling indicated that reconstructing one of the Buddhas might be possible.  A UNESCO press release three days later highlighted the upcoming March 3-4 meeting at UNESCO of the Bamiyan Expert Working Group.  The UNESCO press release noted in passing:

UNESCO does not favour rebuilding the Buddha statues, but the Experts Meeting will examine other ways to present their remains and niches while maintaining research and preservation in the Bamiyan Cultural Landscape.

A UNESCO press release after the meeting discussed the results of the meeting.  Among those results was this point:

A total reconstruction of either Buddha sculpture is not to be considered for the moment in view of the scientific data presently available, and according to the best estimates of available resources against cost.

The Bamiyan Buddhas are interesting, important historical artifacts.  Whether they can be and will be reconstructed is a technical and symbolic issue largely unrelated to what makes the Bamiyan Buddhas interesting and historically important.

Google currently shows about 195 English-language results for a web search “Emmerling reconstruct Buddha” over the past two months.  The story was covered on CNN;  in the Washington Post, via a report reproduced from Science Now, which published photos included with the TUM press release; in the Omaha World-Herald; in the Guardian;  in the New York Times; in the Boston Globe’s Boston.com; on MSNBC; and in many other traditional and new media news outlets.  Most of the stories add little information beyond the information available in the TUM and UNESCO press releases.  None of them link to those press releases.  Most play up the possibility of reconstructing the Buddhas.

Aggregating content from other organizations has long been a component of the newspaper business.  In the U.S. in the late 1880s, Associated Press wire dispatches made up 80-100% of news copy in mid-western, small-town daily newspapers.  Then and now, major newspapers also often reprint verbatim wire dispatches and lightly rewrite press releases.[*] But unlike in the past, today anyone can aggregate and redistribute content.

To succeed as aggregators today, news outlets have to either acquire personal connections or a highly distinctive news stream.  Those with the best connections to individual persons — through family, friends, affiliations, organizations, and geographic communities — prevail in distributing the same news.  Hence mass-market news isn’t a good business for a large organization in a socially complex society with open infrastructure for news distribution.

The alternative for news outlets is to create a highly distinctive news stream.  That positions the news outlet as a new social connection rather than as an organization playing across existing social connections.  Linking to sources creates context for distinguishing between the linker and the linked.  Without that first step of explicitly linking, news outlets blindly aggregate themselves into an undistinguished mass.

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[*] On the importance of U.S. national wire services in providing content for local newspapers, see Blondheim, Menahem (1994), News over the wires : the telegraph and the flow of public information in America, 1844-1897 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press), esp. p. 195.

women and men communicate differently

Automated text categorization techniques applied to writing style can identify an author’s sex with 80% accuracy for a text set with 50% female-authored texts.  If writing style provided no information about the author’s sex, automated text categorization would have an accuracy of only 50%, that of random guessing. In fact, writing style provides considerable information about an author’s sex. Women and men in general have highly distinguishable writing styles.[1]

Sex differences in writing seemed to be related to other types of sex differences.  Women’s writing style is more similar to the style of fiction, while men’s is more similar to the style of non-fiction.[2] Women read more fiction than men do.  A word-frequency factor analysis of a large corpus of blogs (150 million words) found that the content factors (Religion, Politics, Business, and Internet) characterized male bloggers’ blogs, and (Conversation, AtHome, Fun, Romance, and Swearing) characterized female bloggers’ blogs.[3]  These content differences are consistent with more general characterizations of differences in writing style: women’s writing style tends to be more relationally involved and personalized, while men’s writing style tends to be more informational.[4]  These differences are consistent with biological and comparative evidence indicating that social communication has been more important for females’ reproductive success (Darwinian evolution) than social communication has been for males’.

Taking sex seriously is essential for the best possible understanding of communications industry developments and for the greatest success in providing communications services.

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Notes:

[1] Koppel, Argamon, and Shimoni (2002) classify formal written texts (fiction and non-fiction, including a variety of sub-genres) with 80% accuracy.  Argamon et. al. (2007) achieved the same accuracy for classifying blog texts.  The superb Hacker Factor provides a free, online Gender Guesser that classifies user-provided text.  Automated sex categorization of query logs from web search with 56% male users has achieved 84% accuracy in identifying users’ sex.  See Jones et. al. (2007).

[2] Argamon et. al.  (2003).

[3] Argamon et. al. (2007).  Studying search query frequencies, Weber and Castillo (2010) observed, “men appear to be more worried about deleting their search history while women tend to be more worried about removing their Facebook profiles.”  That’s consistent with men’s interest in a relationally narrow activity (searching for porn to enjoy) and women being concerned about general social status.

[4] Argamon et. al.  (2003).  Argamon et. al. (2007) describes the difference as inner-directed vs. outer-directed and documents a similar difference across age.  Id. argues that a common underlying factor explains both differences.  That seems to me unlikely from an evolutionary perspective.  The age factor may instead reflect increasing social isolation with age in contemporary U.S. society.

References:

Argamon, Shlomo, Moshe Koppel, Jonathan Fine, and Anat Rachel Shimoni. 2003.  Gender, genre, and writing style in formal written texts. Text Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 23, no. 3: 321-346. http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/text.2003.014.

Argamon, Shlomo, Koppel, Moshe, Pennebaker, James W., and Schler, Jonathan. “Mining the Blogosphere: Age, gender and the varieties of self-expression” First Monday [Online], Volume 12 Number 9 (3 September 2007).

Jones,Rosie, Ravi Kumar, Bo Pang, and Andrew Tomkins. 2007. “I know what you did last summer”: query logs and user privacy.  In Proceedings of the sixteenth ACM conference on Conference on information and knowledge management (CIKM ’07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 909-914. DOI=10.1145/1321440.1321573 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1321440.1321573

Koppel, Moshe, Shlomo Argamon, and Anat Rachel Shimoni. 2002. Automatically Categorizing Written Texts by Author Gender. Literary and Linguistic Computing 17, no. 4: 401-412. http://llc.oupjournals.org/cgi/doi/10.1093/llc/17.4.401.

Weber, Ingmar, and Carlos Castillo. 2010. The demographics of web search. In Proceeding of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (SIGIR ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 523-530. DOI=10.1145/1835449.1835537 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1835449.1835537