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Faces, particularly eyes, naturally attract human attention. One aspect of the biological machine of faciality is eye structure. Compared to other primates, humans have more salient eyes:

the human eye lacks certain pigments found in primate eyes, so the outer fibrous covering, or "sclera," of our eyeball is white. In contrast, most primates have uniformly brown or dark-hued sclera, making it more difficult to determine the direction they're looking from their eyes alone. … Humans are also the only primates for whom the outline of the eye and the position of the iris are clearly visible. In addition, our eyes are more horizontally elongated and disproportionately large for our body size compared to most apes.

Experimental evidence indicates that a chimpanzee’s gaze direction responds primarily to a person’s head movements, while human gaze tracks another’s gaze direction. But if the objective is to indicate direction, the advantage of using eye movement rather than head movement isn’t obvious.

Eye contact, however, has more subtle value in communication. Seeing someone’s head move doesn’t mean that she knows that you were looking at her in a situation in which you would track her change in gaze direction. Eye contact generates common knowledge of gaze direction (you both know that you’re looking at each other, you both know that you both know you’re looking at each other, etc.) and common sense of whether a change in gaze direction would be tracked (nervous distancing or needed shift in attention?). Just looking at each other’s head doesn’t work this way, because head orientation doesn’t imply eye orientation in humans and other primates.

Making sense of presence is probably more valuable to humans than to other primates. Across species, a larger neocortex, both in absolute size and relative to total brain volume, is correlated with greater social complexity (pdf link). Relatively salient human eyes, like the relatively large human neocortex (particularly prefrontal cortex), support sense of presence. Direct gaze is a powerful way to produce sense of presence. I relay to you fourth-hand a plausible reported fact: “human infants look at the face and eyes of their caregiver twice as long on average compared with other apes.”

Given the importance of gaze to humans, a video viewer’s ability to discern the whites of the eyes of persons on a video might be a useful measure of video quality with real human relevance. My video of the JDRF Spin to Win has little interest other than the eyes, faces, and expression of the participants. Viewing the video on YouTube, the faces are distorted and whites of the eyes are barely discernable. But viewing the video on Blip.tv, you can see whites of the participants’ eyes much more clearly. The point is not simply that Blip.tv offers better quality video than YouTube. High-density, huge-screen television offers much better video quality than either. People want to see the whites of others’ eyes. That is a human-relevant measure of video quality.

Note: Technical discussion of video quality problems here (see especially comments) and here.

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While human brains and computers are often considered to be general purpose technologies, like any real technology, brains and computers have physical structures and operating designs that generate constraints and imply trade-offs across tasks. A computer program cannot easily read an image containing distorted text, but a human can. Thus requiring blog commenters to pass a CAPTCHA lessens automated blog comment spam.

Distributing computing between humans and computers is an important aspect of efficient problem-solving. Amazon's Mechanical Turk provides a general marketplace for distributing computation to persons. Luis von Ahn is designing games for humans that produce both fun play and symbolic work that computers perform relatively badly. Some examples are the ESP Game, which generates image labels, and Peekaboom, which generates descriptions of objects within an image.

Sensory form is an aspect of distributing computing between humans and computers. Consider, for example, women-oriented social drama programming. Prior to the widespread availability of television, such radio programming was highly popular. This type of program shifted almost completely to television when television became widely available. With the exception of sensory modes, the radio and television programs were formally quite similar stimuli. Why did persons prefer the audio-visual mode (television) over the audio-only mode (radio)? A plausible explanation, it seems to me, is that the bodily cost of making sense of conventional drama via the audio-visual experience of television is less than that of making sense of the same drama presented solely through the audio channel of radio. Put differently, image computation was shifted from persons to television studios.

The Internet, by connecting huge numbers of persons and computers, enables a tremendous possibilities for distributing computing among persons and computers. Tim O'Reilly declares:

As the symbiosis between humans and computers becomes deeper, and at a larger scale, we're going to see problems that were formerly construed as "hard AI" suddenly broken, not because computers themselves have become intelligent, but because humans and computers have gotten better at working together.

Getting humans and computers to work together better requires more thinking about what computers do well, and what humans want to do, and do well.

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A product sure to make you smile. The more you eat, the better you feel. Now I know how my friend Jon achieved his championship form.

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Last Sunday a Galbi Think web 2.0 social interacter sent me this email:

Ok! so you're supposed to be this hotshot economist and analyst. So tell me this, a communication policy should serve to protect cultural values, provide information and safeguard public interests. After all these years, we are now being ruled by the influence weilded by six media giants, and the world of communication is at their mercy. Communication is important because it affects economy, awareness, social behaviour etc. It affects every sphere of life. But it is being used by governments for their own strategic purposes and it is being maipulated by business to advance the interest of the enterprise. The US Government wants to eavesdrop on its own public, Bell South wants to limit the internet's openness... and media giants want to keep participation marginal

So why not have no policy at all. What happens then.

I responded:

Thanks for your comment. I don't think that having no policy at all is possible. If it is possible, I have no idea what happens then.

A lot of great things are happening in the communications industry. You might check out, for example, MySpace, youtube, and Second Life.

Perhaps the helpful, active, and interactive interacters who visit this blog could provide a better response. Offer your help as a comment for free.

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A lot of interesting thinking and experiments are now going on concerning presence in communication. Mike Gotta’s post entitled “Presence: Complex, Pervasive And Evasive” highlights the business case for presence. Which industry structure do you think is better for private investment, competition among many firms, and innovation: an industry in which firms compete to supply a commodity service like per-minute voice communication, or an industry in which firms compete to provide a “complex, pervasive, and evasive” good? My economics training suggests the latter!

Person-state definitions, attention management, and impression management are aspects of presence that shouldn’t be over-emphasized and that are probably better hidden in the design of services than presented as tasks that users must manage. In person, too active impression management goes by the name of being a phony. That would be a horrible insult to be associated with a Telco 2.0 service.

Moreover, as Craig Roth insightfully notes, if Captain Picard doesn’t have effective interruption management technology, businesses today probably should be cautious about the prospects for developing it.

A service designed for persons to use to broadcast a text message answering one simple question, “What are you doing?” produced this message:

oooooh la la! Biz is looking like a well-dressed handsome man! ^_^ Ready sweep Livvy off of her feet...again! [Twitter]

That’s not literally state information, but it does make for a strong sense of presence.

A more propitious direction for presence is better communicating persons acting in the world, expressing themselves where they are. Georgia O’Keeffe beautifully conveys this idea:

I have picked flowers where I found them.
Have picked up sea shells and rocks and pieces of
wood where there were seashells and rocks and pieces of
wood that I liked.
When I found the beautiful white bones
on the desert I picked them up and took them home too.
I have used these things to say what is to me the
wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.

[from exhibition catalogue, 1944]

Perhaps countries where persons have less experience using old-fashioned phones, and less experience using old-fashioned cameras, will more quickly embrace new communication possibilities.

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To help persons find information about communication regulations around the globe, I've set up a Google custom search that covers about 380 websites of national communications regulators, government websites, and intergovernmental organizations. These websites are not all in a common language, some are not limited to communications regulation, and some relevant websites may be missing. Nonetheless, this search might be a useful starting point for pulling up some information about regulatory approaches to particular problems.

I've also set up a search covering U.S. state regulatory commissions and associations of state regulators. Many persons outside the U.S., and some within the U.S., do not realize that state commissions play major roles in communication regulation in the U.S. Regulatory geography and jurisdiction are important issues that deserve more serious attention than they typically receive.

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Mobile phones have experienced astonishingly rapid take-up in low-income countries. For example, the number of GrameenPhone mobile phone subscribers in Bangladesh grew 105% in 2005 and recently surpassed 10 million subscribers. The telephone coverage rate in Bangladesh, however, is still only 12%. Coverage rates and demographics imply that, globally, almost all mobile subscriber growth in the future will come in low-income countries.

Low-income persons need financial services as well as communication services. Because low-income persons often lack physical security in their living quarters and in person, they particularly need a way to store money safely and to have controlled access to it. Low-income persons also need to monitor their balances regularly and the capability to transfer money among persons and make necessarily payments at the most favorable time.

Mobile phones can be a valuable tool for providing financial services to low-income persons. In South Africa and Botswana, one-third of people who do not have a bank account have access to a mobile phone.[1] Low-income persons often use per-call phone rental and pre-paid services. However, mobile devices typically also support customer authentication and billing technologies. These technologies are valuable for providing financial services.

WIZZIT, a mobile banking service provider that began operations in South Africa in December, 2004, has already acquired more than 50,000 mobile banking customers. WIZZIT has sought to make its service attractive to low-income customers by having no minimum balance requirements, no fixed monthly fees, and lower over-all cost than established banks. In its employment policies and its marketing strategies, it has explicitly reached out to low-income persons.

A recent survey found that low-income WIZZIT customers are enthusiastic about this banking service. The survey results suggest considerable substitution from bank and ATM use to WIZZIT’s mobile banking service (see Report (pdf file), Table 3). The survey also showed that a large share of low-income WIZZIT customers were using advanced services on their mobile phones: 62% keep a diary, 64% play games, and 34% receive multimedia messages (p. 6). Those figures appear to be roughly similar to the use of advanced mobile services in high-income countries around the world.

The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), the United Nations Foundation, and the Vodaphone Group Foundation sponsored the survey and report. A footnote included in the report declares that the project partners “intend to make the full data set publicly available via the Web” (p. 6). That’s an excellent idea that seems to have not yet been implemented. Carefully reading of the report raises some definitional questions about the published statistics. Public access to the raw data would foster better understanding.

While the WIZZIT banking service seems to have been designed with great attention to using appropriately technology to serve its customers, the WIZZIT website seems to have been designed mainly to impress managers and funders. It's too much like glamorous brochureware and does not provide enough support for user contributions and sharing. Check out the WIZZIT users’ comments and questions posted at the World Resource Institute’s WIZZIT page. Unlike the WIZZIT website, that page readily supports user feedback. Web 2.0 is also valuable for low-income persons!

[1] Based on FinMark Trust surveys (FinScope), as reported in Mobile Phone Banking and Low-Income Customers: Evidence from South Africa (2006) [report (pdf)].

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3G mobile video calls seem to be a flop. What’s the problem?

One view is that 3G video calls are useless except in a small number of circumstances. Luca Filigheddu reports:

I quote what Mauro Sentinelli (former General Manager of Tim and "deputy chairman" at GSM Association) told me a few months ago: the target users for the mobile video call services are grandfathers who want to see their grandsons and married (or not) couples who live far away. This is because it's one of the services that you don't really need since it doesn't really solve a particular need.

Perhaps the problem is poor understanding of critical user needs:

I just need to get the information I'm looking for, nothing more. Yes, the experience of seeing a pretty girl on the other side is nice, but useless.

Useless?!!! Leaf through the pages of popular magazines. Look at the advertisements. Can there be any doubt that a large share of human beings like to see pretty girls and, to a lesser extent, pretty boys?

You might figure that the ultimate evolutionary reason for the demand for images of attractive persons is just a corollary of the demand for porn. Right, and the ultimate evolutionary cause for all human behavior is just a corollary of the demand for porn.

Taking seriously the value of presence in communication provides more insight. A common topic of gossip is how people look. Hot or Not has been a huge success. This is not just about vulgarity, cruelty, and tastelessness. Images of attractive persons more readily attract attention than images of unattractive persons. The value of these images arises in part from sense of presence of someone understood to be a person like oneself. That’s not the same as the value of porn.

What about problems of privacy, user shyness, and lack of suitable opportunities for use of mobile video? A huge number of videos on youtube suggest to me that these issues are greatly overblown.

The gap between the potential and realized value of mobile video seems to me to be an effect of legacy concepts of a phone and well-ingrained behavioral routines of phone calls. Traditional phones physically bridge the ear to the mouth. Persons are used to the idea of holding a device up to the side of their face and listening and speaking through it. To be successful, mobile video calling, or picture-sharing in-stream of a mobile audio call, requires a much different device form and physical routine of use.

A simple muscular model for audio-visual communication is pointing and speaking. With respect to visual communication, changing forms of digital cameras are starting to teach persons relevant gestures. Unlike film cameras, digital cameras have zero marginal cost per image. They also can be made in small, convenient shapes for one-handed use. So rather than holding a camera up in front of your face, hoping for a good shot, point-and-shoot can be a casual hand gesture. The shape of most digital cameras suggests considerable conceptual and behavioral inertia. The most important implication of “camera phones” may be to help to change the concept of camera shape and the gesture of camera use.

Audio communication also shows seeds of more propitious device forms for audio-visual communication. Washington, D.C. now requires drivers to use handless mobile phone headsets. I regularly see persons walking down the street, apparently just talking to themselves. Actually, they’ve got a small headset around one ear, and another part in their hand or pocket. They’re talking on a mobile phone. Getting them to capture and view images with a device in hand still represents a significant design challenge. But mobile headsets are probably helping to open up practical device design possibilities.

Perhaps mobile video calling has flopped because the design of the devices has made them unlikely to be used. These devices do not seem to have provided a “see what I see” experience. As far as I can tell, devices that support mobile video calling are designed to be used like desk-top video conferencing systems. In desk-top video conferencing, the environment is typically irrelevant and rather boring, and the camera is focused just on the user’s face. Mobility allows users to move into novel, interesting, communication-relevant circumstances. Mobile video communication should exploit this central aspect of mobility.

Companies developing mobile video communication need to work closely with communication experts. Smart researchers at IBM Research have garnered some insights on new communication services by studying their colleagues’ use of experimental services. But the learned in this field must confront the painful truth: the foremost communication experts are 16-year-old girls.

Forget about grandfathers and married couples. Any new communication service needs to succeed with girls. The youtube founders understood this truth. Early on, they desperately sought to attract girls to their service. Attracting girls isn’t easy. Great guy humor isn’t good enough. While I cannot offer a lot of empirical support, I strongly believe that succeeding with girls is possible. In any case, that is the fundamental challenge for new communication service providers.

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I am pleased to report that the Carnival of the Bureaucrats continues to expand.

This month's Bureaucratic Hero is Grigori Perelman. Until recently, Mr. Perelman worked for the Steklov Institute of Mathematics. Mr. Perelman's insistence on excellence, dedication, an ethical work environment, and no money makes him eminently worthy of being honored with the prize of Bureaucratic Hero of the Month. Unfortunately, Mr. Perelman has recently suffered some career setbacks (see video below). Excellence is often not appropriately honored. I hope that this prize will encourage Mr. Perelman's institutional supervisors and bureaucratic colleagues to recognize the true merits of Mr. Perelman's work.

Honorable Mention goes to Anthea Norman-Taylor, a middle manager in the musical entertainment industry. Ms. Norman-Taylor recently shared this keen insight:

it's important for kids to do boring things too. Because if you can find excitement in something boring, then you're set up for life. Whereas if you constantly need entertainment, you might have a problem, because life is full of things that aren't entertaining. [quoted by her husband in Johnson, last paragraph].

Not just kids, but also bureaucrats around the world can draw deep inspiration from this important wisdom.

Additional qualifying and meritorious submissions:

Meetings are a major activity in a bureaucracy. David Maister offers a useful procedure for calculating the IQ of a meeting.

The Engaging Brand offers a 12-step program for promoting organizational elimination.

Tracy Coenen at Sequence Inc. reports that the IRS is using outside debt collectors. One has to wonder whether these debt collectors will be able to maintain the IRS's standards of bureaucratic action.

Ian Welsh at the Agonist offers insights into measurements for management:

As manager you probably don’t really know what your employees are doing. You probably don’t really understand what is required to do the job well. However unless you’ve beat them down too hard, or you’ve got a crew of reprobates, most people want to do a good job. Most people want to be able to say “damn, we’re good!” Don’t treat them like untrustworthy children, and you may find that they’re on your side and that measuring only the bottom line, on the minimum, is sufficient. When you go to war with your employees and try and measure every specific behaviour, generally both sides lose.

Aleksandr Kavokin at rdoctor.com offers a Carpal Tunnel Syndrome Quiz. He notes: "working in an office you becom prone to carpal tunnel problems. SInce majority of bereaucrats do, watch your health."

Bill Losapio reports that government inefficiency occurs. He explains:

Even if government folk have the absolute best of intentions, (many of whom indeed do), they are stripped of the only real tools – price, profit, and competition for scarce resources — they need to understand where money is best used. Instead, they take money by force and divvy it up according to factors like population, demographics, and financial need, not to mention political uses like bribery and extortion (don’t fool yourself – it happens all the time). Often, the assumption is that people in government mean well, so whatever they do surely should have more of our tax money (“Hey, they won’t cut corners, ya know? They’re not worried about profit.”).

Along with his submission to the Carnival of the Bureaucrats, Mr. Losapio remarked:

[author works for a defense contractor and has received at least one pen/pencil set from his employer ;)] Discussion of bureaucracy and the need for it to be minimized (despite the fact that many folk rely on it for their livelihood)

While some might question Mr. Losapio's conclusions, his credentials for a qualifying submisson are clearly valid.

Generative Transformation (GT) revisits leadership and concludes:

Become self-aware and impeccable with your word/thoughts/actions and leadership shall become you. Make self-awareness and integrity your life practice and the world is yours.

I can't offer you a way to win the world here at purple motes, but I hope you've enjoyed this month's Carnival of the Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival regulations. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

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