Urban Studies

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“I Am Wondering If You Would Be Interested In Learning The Truth”

April 24, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of my favorite non-fiction pieces so far this year is “The Secret Life of a Society Maven,” an article in the New York Times by Alan Feuer. Last year, Feuer tracked down his doppelganger, a seeming cash-poor society swell of Austrian descent named Alan Z. Feuer, and wrote an article about this eccentric old word figure. But when the elder Feur died recently, his journalistic namesake learned a more complete backstory, a Gatsby-esque tale of deception and reinvention. An excerpt:

“One day, 20 messages appeared in my inbox: notes from Alan’s friends, who had seen my piece last spring and were writing to inform me of ‘his passing.’ There were links to Alan’s Facebook page and to a guest book on Legacy.com. There I found my counterpart passionately praised, in dozens — hundreds — of posts as ‘the last true society gentleman,’ ‘the Grand Patriarch of New York City balls,’ ‘the Oscar Wilde of our time.’

‘Alan,’ someone wrote, ‘your Waltz will be danced forever in the lives of all those you have touched with the love of White Gloves and White Ties. Rest in peace, dear friend, and save a dance.’

At last, there was only one unopened message in my queue. Saddened, I clicked it. This is what it said:

Dear Mr. Feuer,

Ever since reading your article about the other Alan Feuer, I have thought about writing to you. I had no desire to disrupt his life while he was alive, but since he has passed away, I am wondering if you would be interested in learning the truth about his background.

The writer, I was shocked to find, was the other Alan’s stepniece; she told me she had known him since she was 5. Her letter laid out the family’s relationships — I knew that Alan was estranged — and then concluded on a melancholy note.

While the adult life he described to you was certainly true, his background was far from the one he claimed. If you would be interested in further information about this sad and, I think, somewhat troubled man, please feel free to contact me.

Needless to say, I did.”

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“A Friend Once Called Thurgood Marshall ‘A Tea Kettle Ready To Explode'”

April 24, 2012 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Mike Wallace interviewing Thurgood Marshall during the Eisenhower Administration. Choppy video, but certainly worth it.

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“In 2050, Amsterdam’s Red Light District Will All Be About Android Prostitutes”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Is it possible to reduce STDs and sex trafficking and still make the world ickier? Perhaps. From the Edmonton Sun:

“Sex workers in Amsterdam will have a hard time finding work if two New Zealand academics’ vision of the future comes true.

‘In 2050, Amsterdam’s red light district will all be about android prostitutes who are clean of sexual transmitted infections, not smuggled in from Eastern Europe and forced into slavery, the city council will have direct control over android sex workers controlling prices, hours of operations and sexual services,’ write futurologist Ian Yeoman and sexologist Michelle Mars.

The duo’s paper, ‘Robots, Men And Sex Tourism,’ published in the journal Futures, centres on an imaginary future sex club in Amsterdam called Yub-Yum.

It posits that sex tourists will dish out big cash for all-inclusive robot sex romps.”

Two Short Films By Charles And Ray Eames

April 23, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

“IBM at the World’s Fair,” 1964:

“Tops,” 1969:

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 23, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

taxidermy for suit (bk)

i need a suit. i’m 5’10” and probably a 31″ waist or so. can do work trade (basic carpentry, fix-it type work etc). i also have a taxidermy pheasant i can trade for it. 

A Note From 1902 About A Monkey Dinner Guest

April 23, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 10, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Newport, R.I.–Friends of Harry Lehr deny that he had entertained a monkey at dinner and declare that the story was a fabrication from beginning to end. He and they say that no monkey dressed in evening clothes or as nature has made him ever has sat among his guests.

Mrs. Lehr especially is indignant at the newspapers for publishing such a story and her friends say that they would not be surprised if she should determine to take legal action. It is known that the Lehrs feel keenly the edtorial comments made upon the incident.”

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“They’re Living Twenty Years In The Future For All Practical Purposes”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of our interconnected digital world, answering a Wired query about how he shepherded the Internet from proprietary to public:

“Wired: So how did the internet get beyond the technical and academic community?

Cerf: Xerox invented the Alto machine which was a $50,000 personal computer given to every employee of Xerox PARC — so they’re living twenty years in the future for all practical purposes. They were even inventing their own internet. They had a whole suite of protocols. Some of the students that worked with me in Stanford went to work with Xerox PARC, so there was a lot of cross-fertilization.

It’s just that they decided to treat their protocol as proprietary, and Bob and I were desperate to have a non-proprietary protocol for the military to use. We said we’re not going to patent it, we’re not going to control it. We’re going to release it to the world as soon as it’s available, which we did.

So by 1988, I’m seeing this commercial phenomenon beginning to show up. Hardware makers are selling routers to universities so they can build up their campus networks. So I remember thinking, ‘Well, how are we going to get this in the hands of the general public?’ There were no public internet services at that point.

And there was a rule that the government had instituted that said you could not put commercial traffic on government-sponsored backbones, and, in this case, it was the ARPANET run by ARPA or for ARPA; the NSFNet run for the National Science Foundation, and there were others. The Department of Energy has ESnet and NASA had what was called the NASA Science Internet. The rule was no commercial traffic on any of them. So I thought, ‘Well, you know, we’re never going to get commercial networking until we have the business community seeing that commercial networking is actually a business possibility.’

So I went to the US government, specifically to a committee called the Federal Networking Council since they had the program managers from various agencies and they had been funding internet research. I said, ‘Would you give me permission to connect MCI Mail, a commercial e-mail service, to the internet as a test?’

Of course, my purpose was to break the rule that said you couldn’t have commercial traffic on the backbone.

And so they kind of grumbled for a while and they said, ‘Well, OK. Do it for a year.’”

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A 1974 demo of the Xerox Alto:

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“Neil Harris Has Coined A Phrase For This Fascination With Seeing Things Work, The Operational Aesthetic”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Americans loved gadgets before WWII, but the money wasn’t there to invest in machines during the Great Depression. A good part of the American postwar dividends was spent on machinery to ease life’s toil and just amaze, from kitchen appliances to bowling alley pinsetters. They had utility, but they were also fun to watch. Was our desire to see machines do their magic rooted in P.T. Barnum’s chicanery? Probably not. It’s probably an innate thing. But it’s an interesting theory. From Edward Tenner’s Atlantic essay, “The Pleasures of Seeing Machines Work“:

“The cultural historian Neil Harris has coined a phrase for this fascination with seeing things work, the Operational Aesthetic. One of the pleasures of bowling for postwar generations was the introduction of the automated pinspotter, the Roomba of the 1950s, which helped the sport’s explosive growth in the decade.

Who started it all? Harris has suggested it was none other than P.T. Barnum, whose American Museum in New York was widely (and rightly) suspected of fakery. But that helped build business. Visitors wanted to see for themselves, scrutinize the exhibits closely, and detect just how each illusion was accomplished. Barnum’s success was based not on cynicism about ‘suckers,’ but to the contrary, in appealing to critical intelligence to detect how it all was done.”

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The history of Brunswick pinsetters:

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“The Earth Is A Crumb In A Supermarket Of Resources”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A bunch of rich guys, including James Cameron, Ross Perot, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Peter H. Diamandis, may be announcing tomorrow that they are getting into the business of asteroid mining, extracting precious resources from zooming space rocks. From Forbes:

“Diamandis has been interested in asteroid mining for a long time, and it sounds like this might be his time to put a plan into action. There are staggering amounts of gold in them thar asteroids, even if they are sort of far away.

‘The earth is a crumb in a supermarket of resources,” Diamandis told Forbes earlier this year. “Now we finally have the technology to extract resources outside earth for the benefit of humanity without having to rape and pillage our planet.'”

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Hyperspace, not free of risk, is nonetheless a handy option:

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“Stimulants Do Much More Than Keep Troops Awake”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

No surprise that there’s been a marked spike in usage of stimulants by American soldiers with our military taxed by wars on two fronts for a decade. From “Why Are We Drugging Our Soldiers?” by Richard A. Friedman in the New York Times:

“But there is another factor that might be playing a role in the increasing rates of the disorder, one that has escaped attention: the military’s use of stimulant medications, like Ritalin and Adderall, in our troops.

There has been a significant increase in the use of stimulant medication. Documents that I obtained in late 2010 through the Freedom of Information Act, and have recently analyzed, show that annual spending on stimulants jumped to $39 million in 2010 from $7.5 million in 2001 — more than a fivefold increase. Additional data provided by Tricare Management Activity, the arm of the Department of Defense that manages health care services for the military, reveals that the number of Ritalin and Adderall prescriptions written for active-duty service members increased by nearly 1,000 percent in five years, to 32,000 from 3,000.

Stimulants are widely used in the civilian population to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder because they increase focus and attention. Short of an unlikely epidemic of that disorder among our soldiers, the military almost certainly uses the stimulants to help fatigued and sleep-deprived troops stay alert and awake. (A spokesman for Tricare attributed the sharp rise to ‘the increased recognition and diagnosis of A.D.H.D. by medical providers.’ However, while there is greater recognition of the disorder, the diagnoses are concentrated in children and adolescents.)

Stimulants do much more than keep troops awake. They can also strengthen learning. By causing the direct release of norepinephrine — a close chemical relative of adrenaline — in the brain, stimulants facilitate memory formation. Not surprisingly, emotionally arousing experiences — both positive and negative — also cause a surge of norepinephrine, which helps to create vivid, long-lasting memories. That’s why we tend to remember events that stir our feelings and learn best when we are a little anxious.”

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Brian Eno: 1 Interview + 1 Trailer

April 23, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Jools Holland interviews Eno, 1986.

Have you seen this movie? I’d like to see this movie.

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“We Will Be Able To Keep A Thousand ‘Pictures’ In A Box As Big As A Dictionary”

April 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Picture 3 in the third row from the top looks like a precursor to Shepard Fairey's Obey the Giant.

On the gorgeous, newly redesigned Los Angeles Review of Books site, Hua Hsu writes about the history of office chair designs. In his piece, he mentions the legendary Italian designer Bruno Munari’s 1966 book, Design as Art. An excerpt from the book about the house of the future:

“The private house of the future (some are already lived in) will be as compact and comfortable as possible, easy to run and easy to keep clean without the trouble and expense of servants. A lot of single pieces of furniture will be replaced by built-in cupboards, and maybe we shall even achieve the simplicity, the truly human dimensions, of the traditional Japanese house, a tradition that is still alive.

In the house of the future, reduced as it will be to minimum size but equipped with the most practical gadgets, we will be able to keep a thousand ‘pictures’ in a box as big as a dictionary and project them on our white wall with an ordinary projector just as often as we please. And I do not mean colour photographs, but original works of art. With these techniques visual art will survive even if the old techniques disappear. Art is not technique, as everyone knows, and an artist can create with anything that comes to hand.”

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Munari sharing design lessons with schoolchildren on Italian TV, 1976:

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“Save The Planet? We Don’t Even Know How To Take Care Of Ourselves Yet.”

April 22, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The Earth will be fine without us; we’re only capable of killing ourselves. So, the phrase “Save the Earth,” while driven by great intentions, has always been something of a misnomer. We need to save ourselves from our own destruction. And if we do that, we’ll eventually need to rescue ourselves from a dying sun and other ominous sounds ringing out from the reaches of the universe. But let’s not pretend we’re doing it for someone or something else.

Notes on the topic by the funniest American ever, George Carlin:

Read also:

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“The Little Devices Most Of Us Carry Around Are So Powerful That They Change Not Only What We Do, But Also Who We Are”

April 22, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Connectivity doesn’t guarantee closeness. In fact, we may seem closer together and actually be further apart than ever. From “The Flight From Conversation,” Sherry Turkle’s New York Times essay:

“Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being ‘alone together.’ Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.”

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Turkle, talking to people about how we don’t talk to people:

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“Your Gold Cadillac Is Rusting!”

April 22, 2012 in Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Long before American Idol, K-Tel provided an outlet for those who dreamed of pop stardom. The music industry, which somehow manages to be even worse than Hollywood, is the center of this 1973 board game. Oddly missing from the strategic options: consenting to sex with repellent record execs and banning the drummer from sharing your huge bowl of cocaine.

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 22, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"No, not the bees!" (Image by Kirk Weaver.)

Attn: Nic Cage – Book Proposal

Dear Mr. Cage,

I recently read that you have developed your own school of acting, which you call ‘Nouveau Shamanic,’ and that you would like to write a book in which you explain this style and the philosophy behind it. I know that you are a busy man and may not have the time to make this dream a reality, so I would like to offer you my services. As a professional writer with experience in the media industry as well as a longtime fan of your work who has seen almost every film you have appeared in, I believe I am the right person for this task. I will be able to bring to life your unique voice. Every page of this book will scream with all the vividness of the voice that begged “No, not the bees!” in The Wicker Man, the righteousness of the man who asked “Why didn’t you just put the bunny down?” in Con Air, and the three-dimensionality of the man who made love while firing a sawed-off shotgun in Drive Angry 3-D.

I understand that you have experienced some financial difficulty in the last few years. I assure you I don’t need a dinosaur skull or German castle. The honor of working with you will be enough.

If this letter does not reach you promptly, I will print it out on the reverse side of copies of the Declaration of Independence and leave a copy in every cocktail bar in the French Quarter, as I understand that is the best way to reach you. 

Old Print Article: “Albany Blood Drinkers,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1881)

April 22, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

"It is simply delicious."

If we are to believe what journalism tells us, people in Albany during the 19th century would go to slaughterhouses to drink the blood of freshly killed animals for its salubrious effects. From the September 18, 1881 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“A reporter of the Albany Evening Journal who has visited the abattoirs in that city, writes as follows of the persons who gather there to drink blood:

Several people, as soon as the throat was cut with sleeves uprolled and grasping a glass, hurried over to the hanging carcass and holding the goblets in turn under the ruby stream, filled their glasses and then drank of the steaming liquid. One, a middle aged man, seemed old in the business, for he threw the contents of the glass off at one draught. Another threw some salt in his glass before drinking, while another could hardly make up his mind whether or not to drink it. At last he shut his eyes and then after three or four efforts succeeded in downing about half a glassful. The reporter approached one of the butchers after he had finished dressing the carcass on which he was at work, and asked, ‘Do the same persons come every day?’ ‘No, they come two or three times a week on the average,’ was the reply. ‘Do any women ever come?’ ‘Yes, there used to be one young girl, but the last I saw of her she seemed to be getting fleshy and has stopped coming altogether.’

"It is richer than the richest of cream."

One of the invalids was then approached and asked, ‘How do you like blood drinking?’ ‘Well, I’ll tell you. At first when the doctor told me I would have to drink warm bullock’s blood or die, I told him that I preferred the latter, but I reconsidered my thought and came up to the slaughterhouse. I thought at first I could not touch it, and the sight of killing sickened me. But I soon overcame that feeling, and when I raised the first glass to my lips I spilt the contents over me. Next time I shut my eyes and drank it down. It tasted like rich milk, and if I kept my eyes shut, I would have not the known the difference.’ Another one of the drinkers was asked how it tasted. ‘How does it taste?’ said he. ‘It is richer than the richest of cream. It is simply delicious and a drink not to be compared with any potion extant. It is simply the elixir of life. You can feel its strength as it spreads through your veins. If it hadn’t been for its strengthening qualities I would have been dead three years ago.'”

“Well, Now…Uh…What About The Future?”

April 22, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Marshall McLuhan knew already in 1965 that the world was becoming virtual.

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“Today Odd #s Only”

April 20, 2012 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

During the gas crisis of 1979, American car owners alternated days they could fill their tanks based on whether they had an odd or even number at the end of their license plates. What it looked like in Los Angeles.

“The Human Mind Is Complex Enough To Integrate Hypocrisy And Contradictions”

April 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Racism is not always a black-and-white thing. There are shades of gray in the minds of racists, allowing them to convince themselves that, no, they aren’t bigots. Some can accept people of other races in a lesser social position but not those in a superior one. Others can write off members of another race who’ve excelled as exceptions, while still believing “the rule.” We’re all prone to believe generalizations without holding ourseves to account. From Touré in Time:

“Racism is a mental tumor. It’s an acceptance of stereotypes, of otherness, of fear, of racial hierarchies. It requires embracing the concept of constants about certain racial groups even though there are no biological certainties about the races. Scientifically, there is only the human race. Race as we know it is a social construct and, in the sweep of human history, a relatively recent concept invented in America to justify having both “liberty for all” and slavery. Racism has long had sub-ideas protecting it like bodyguards—the idea that blacks were lesser human beings with inferior brain power and morality and criminal proclivities aided in the perpetuation of slavery, Jim Crow and the current wave of criminalization in which young black men are considered synonymous with criminals—some have captured this via the term “criminalblackman.”

Some people suggest that the multiracial embrace of Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jordan, Will Smith and others portends the end of racism. But this, as the writer Arundati Roy says, is like the President pardoning one turkey before Thanksgiving and then eating another—and America eats thousands. The human mind is complex enough to integrate hypocrisy and contradictions. There have long been extraordinary blacks who succeeded far more than the vast majority and were accepted as special. The racist mind need not hate every black person it encounters, and indeed not hating all may serve as a valuable safety valve, releasing pressure and proving to the mind itself that it is not racist. Few people want to think of themselves as bad or evil.”

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“We’re Geniuses One Day And Absolute Morons The Next”

April 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Howard Katz, in charge of NFL scheduling, has trillions of options to consider when figuring out which matchups will best serve the league during any given season. And no schedule he designs will completely satisfy networks, players and fans. From Judy Battista in the New York Times:

“After recalling what he thought was a coup last year — putting a game between the New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts on the Sunday night opposite the World Series, only to watch the Saints obliterate a Peyton Manning-less Colts team, 62-7 — Katz summed up the snap judgments of the schedule that are as quick to change as a channel.

‘We’re geniuses one day and absolute morons the next,’ he said.

For the networks that pay billions of dollars to carry N.F.L. games, they have been mostly geniuses. N.F.L. games were watched by an average of 17.5 million viewers last season, the second most since 1989, and off slightly from 2010. N.F.L. games accounted for 23 of the 25 most-watched television shows among all programming, and the 16 most-watched shows on cable last fall.

Designing a schedule that generates those ratings, while also guaranteeing competitive fairness, is more complicated than ever, even though a computer program in use for eight years now does some of the work that was once done entirely by hand — spitting out 400,000 complete or partial schedules from a possible 824 trillion game combinations.”

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“Lithium-Air Batteries Borrow Oxygen From The Air As The Vehicle Is Being Driven, Creating An Air-Breathing Battery”

April 20, 2012 in Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

New IBM lithium-air car batteries can go for 500 miles without recharge:

Sweet William preferred a gas guzzler, 1970s:

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 20, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

sparring club opening (medford)

Im looking for fighters who want to train and beat the shit out of each other…period. controlled sparring. must be atleast 18.

“We’re Gonna Have A Fight In This Country…Blood Is Going To Run All Over This Country”

April 20, 2012 in Film, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

There’s a full version online of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1968/72 collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock. Filmed originally as 1 A.M. (as in “One American Movie”), it was planned as Godard’s understanding of U.S. culture during the Vietnam age. (Though perhaps “misunderstanding” would be the more accurate term.) The project went uncompleted, was shelved and later reedited by Pennebaker into 1 P.M. (as in “One Parallel Movie”). A fascinating failure, the film features Rip Torn, Jefferson Airplane, Eldridge Cleaver and Tom Hayden, among others. (Thanks Dangerous Minds.)

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“Human Networks, Like Words In English, Have Long Tails Of Diminishing Usage”

April 20, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"Going viral like this requires massive connections of friends." (Image by Gilberto Santa Rosa.)

Can we, in this wired and connected age, have privacy as well as intimacy? Are we to break free from the shackles of Zuckerberg and allow the rise of networks that afford us more control of our lives? Or will we obediently create the content for channels that others program? From Ben Kunz’s new Businessweek article about the rise of “unsocial” networks:

“For nearly a decade, marketers have been agog over the promise of social networks to provide free advertising, a cascade of word-of-mouth in which consumers act as advocates for a brand or product. The dream is based in part on Robert Metcalfe’s law—the concept by the inventor of the Ethernet that in any networked system, value grows exponentially as more users join. Like the old 1970s shampoo commercial, you tell a customer about your product, and she tells two friends, and so on, and so on, until the world is knocking on your hair-products door. Going viral like this requires massive connections of friends.

Trouble is, Metcalfe was wrong, at least with human networks. In a landmark 2006 column in IEEE Spectrum, researchers Bob Briscoe, Andrew Odlyzko, and Benjamin Tilly showed mathematically that networks have a fundamental flaw if all nodes are not created equal. The authors pointed primarily to Zipf’s law, a concept by 1930s linguist George Zipf that in any system of resources, there exists declining value for each subsequent item. In the English language, we use the word ‘the’ in 7 percent of all utterances, followed by ‘of’ for 3.5 percent of words, with trailing usage of terms ending somewhere around the noun ‘floccinaucinihilipilification.’ On Facebook, your connections work the same way from your spouse to best friend to boss to that old girlfriend who now lives in Iceland.

Human networks, like words in English, have long tails of diminishing usage.”

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“And so on and so on and so on…”:

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