Customer ‘service’

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For a start, most companies have a split personality when it comes to customers. On the one hand, C.E.O.s routinely describe service as essential to success, and they are well aware that, thanks to the Internet, bad service can now inflict far more damage than before; the old maxim was that someone who had a bad experience in your store would tell ten people, but these days it’s more like thousands or even, as in Carroll’s case, millions. On the other hand, customer service is a classic example of what businessmen call a “cost center”—a division that piles up expenses without bringing in revenue—and most companies see it as tangential to their core business, something they have to do rather than something they want to do.

James Surowiecki in the New Yorker.

Retiring (but not withdrawing) gracefully

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My friend and Wolfson colleague Malcolm Burrows is retiring from his position as Head of the Department of Zoology in Cambridge, and his colleagues put on a whole day of talks to mark the occasion. Even the Vice Chancellor showed up — to explain how, shortly after her arrival in Cambridge, Malcolm had managed to persuade her to do something she hadn’t wanted to do “without ever raising his voice”. (The visit that resulted from that conversation, incidentally, led to an endowed Chair in his Department.) At the end of her speech, she unveiled the portrait by Tom Wood (who did the National Portrait Gallery’s portrait of David Hockney) which has been commissioned to honour him.

Malcolm is one of the cleverest, nicest and sanest people I know. Unlike many high-profile academics, he doesn’t do histrionics. Yet during his tenure, the Cambridge department became the best Zoology department in the country, and one of the best in the world. Unusually for such a large, high-octane outfit it also seems remarkably friendly. Certainly there was a lovely, affectionate tone to the day’s proceedings.

Malcolm’s speciality is neurophysiology — more specifically the neuronal mechanisms by which a nervous system generates and controls natural movements (top right in the portrait). His chosen animals are insects, including some (locusts) that you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night (bottom right in the portrait). One of his colleagues captured his character neatly when he said that he combined a childlike delight in insects with a very grown-up style of administration. During his tenure, for example, the University’s central authority (the General Board) agreed to write off a huge ancient debt which had for decades “squatted like a huge black toad” on the Department’s back. And, believe me, the General Board didn’t get where it is today by writing off departmental ‘debts’.

It was a really nice occasion which reminded one firstly, of how important people are, even in prestigious institutions, and secondly, what a difference good leadership makes. Most of all, it was reassuring to know that, tomorrow, Malcolm will be back in his lab. He may be technically ‘retired’, but most people wouldn’t guess that.

Before I left, I asked him to pose with his portrait. Here’s the result.

Computers and children’s brains: good news and bad news

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There’s an interesting article in the (open access) journal Neuron which summarises a lot of research on the cognitive and neurophysiological impact of computers on kids. The abstract is here. Christopher Mims has done a useful summary of the main points:

* Video game consoles are going to make your kids stupider in the following way: owning one will significantly reduce reading and writing skills — “more than one-half of a standard deviation in the case of writing,” says the paper. (source) This is not just a correlation: it has been established (in at least this one study) causatively.

* “Action” video games can produce better surgeons (source) and pilots (source). They also enhance top-down control of attention, allow players to choose among different options more rapidly (source), increase short-term visual memory (source) and increase flexibility in task-switching. NASA has even considered using them to treat attentional problems in children.

* Television is a model for what we can expect from games designed both for entertainment and education. Multiples studies have shown that Sesame Street increases language and numerical ability in children, while Teletubbies actually decreases language ability in very young children. Likewise, the “Baby Einstein” products were also shown to make children less capable. After controlling for other factors, amount of television exposure as a young child does not generally correlate (in either direction) with later abilities – unless it’s trading off with other critical activities (like opportunities to absorb language through normal socialization).

* Many educational games have no positive effect on learning when used in an education context, but a handful have been proven to work – especially in the area of mathematical education.

All predictions about the Net are wrong. (Except this one, of course)

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This morning’s Observer column.

If I’ve learned one thing from watching the internet over two decades, it’s this: prediction is futile. The reason is laughably simple: the network’s architecture and lack of central control effectively make it a global surprise-generation machine. And since its inception, it has enabled disruptive innovation at a blistering pace.

This doesn’t stop people making predictions, though. In fact, ever since the web went mainstream in 1993 there has been a constant stream of what computer scientist John Seely Brown calls “endism” – assertions that some new technology presages the termination of some revered practice, not to mention the end of civilisation as we know it. The prediction that online news means the death of newspapers, for example, is almost as old as the web. More recent examples include Wired’s announcement of the imminent death of the web at the hands of iPhone apps and Nicholas Carr’s assertion that ubiquitous networking heralds the end of contemplative reading.

The problem with endism is that it’s intrinsically simplistic…

Welcome to 1938

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Sobering NYT column by Paul Krugman.

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

The president in question is Franklin Delano Roosevelt; the year is 1938. Within a few years, of course, the Great Depression was over. But it’s both instructive and discouraging to look at the state of America circa 1938 — instructive because the nature of the recovery that followed refutes the arguments dominating today’s public debate, discouraging because it’s hard to see anything like the miracle of the 1940s happening again.

Now, we weren’t supposed to find ourselves replaying the late 1930s. President Obama’s economists promised not to repeat the mistakes of 1937, when F.D.R. pulled back fiscal stimulus too soon. But by making his program too small and too short-lived, Mr. Obama did just that: the stimulus raised growth while it lasted, but it made only a small dent in unemployment — and now it’s fading out…

Yep. And there’s no indication that Osborne & Co understand this.