Read my latest for The Independent in full below or by following this link.

The book which gives doctors a checklist for mental illnesses – as made famous by The Psychopath Test – has been updated. But does it really work?

Next month, the latest edition of a book will be published in America that, according to its critics, will give you a starring role in your own private performance of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – by turning aspects of your normal behaviour, such as checking Twitter a little too often, into a new mental disorder.

Many see its publication as part of a continuing attempt to create order out of the chaos of the human mind by updating a set of common criteria for mental disorders that encourages research as well as helping in the diagnosis and treatment of patients.

Yet the debate is so polarised that the American Psychiatric Association (APA) is publishing the $200 fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) into a maelstrom of controversy. Indeed, two of the DSM’s fiercest critics, Dr Allen Frances and Dr Robert Spitzer, are former chairmen of the task forces that composed previous editions.

Now, just two weeks before the new edition appears, the National Institute of Mental Health, the world’s largest mental health research institute, has announced that it is withdrawing support for the manual as “it lacks validity” due to the unscientific basis of its classifications.

The DSM classifies psychiatric disorders and provides a checklist of symptoms for each separate disorder. The first edition was published in 1952 following research by the US military during the Second World War; since then there have been three more revised editions, the last 20 years ago: the fifth is due out on 31 May. The DSM has grown substantially in size: from 130 pages and 106 mental disorders in 1952 to 492 pages and 265 disorders in 1980. And it is expected that the new DSM-5 will be even larger.

An alternative – and free – publication, International Statistical Classification of Diseases (ICD), issued by the World Health Organisation, provides an official international classification system of mental illness that the DSM sometimes borrows. The ICD is used in Europe for clinical treatment in preference to the DSM and without the lurid headlines. The DSM, though, is increasingly influential on our way of thinking about mental health.

For writer and broadcaster, Jon Ronson (pictured right), attitudes to the DSM “have changed”. Ronson’s bestselling book, The Psychopath Test, has helped to bring the DSM to the attention of a UK audience.

“When DSM first came out people were really excited. There was something alluring about it because people loved nothing more than mental health checklists. It was also a change from the pseudoscience that had gone before.”

Now people hate it for the same reason. “They feel that there is an ivory tower elite trying to turn normal human behaviour into disorders and they don’t want to be told what they are feeling isn’t normal.”

The former chairman of the work party for DSM-IV, Dr Allen Frances, was once one of this elite, and he is clear why he is not looking forward to the new edition of the DSM. He believes it threatens to unleash what he has called a “diagnosis hyperinflation” by “greatly expanding the number of people considered mentally ill, and reduces the ranks of the normal”.

“Grief becomes Major Depressive Disorder; worrying about being sick is Somatic Symptom Disorder; temper tantrums are Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder; gluttony is Binge Eating Disorder; and soon almost everyone will have Attention Deficit Disorder.”

For Chris Lane, a case in point is the transformation of Social Anxiety Disorder from something that did not “formally exist” before the 1980s to what Psychology Today called “the disorder of the decade in the 1990s”. Lane is author of Shyness: How Normal Behaviour Became a Sickness, and to write the book he was given access to the DSM archive of unpublished material.

In 2010, more than 24.4 million prescriptions for generic formulations of Prozac were filled in the US alone, yet the two psychiatrists who had first identified Social Anxiety Disorder in the late 1960s, Isaac Marks and Michael Gelder, were adamant in calling it “rare and mostly innocuous”. They were “steamrolled over”.

Dr David Kupfer, chair of the DSM-5 taskforce, unsurprisingly, does not think DSM-5 is about redefining what is normal.

“DSM has been periodically reviewed and revised since it was first published in 1952. The previous version of DSM was completed nearly two decades ago; since that time, there has been a wealth of new research and knowledge about mental disorders that is not reflected in the current [DSM-IV] text.”

In DSM-5, the revisions to autism spectrum disorder and substance use disorders are particularly important, he believes.

However, he accepts that “criticism is an inherent part of any robust scientific discussion”.

“It is understandable that patients and their loved ones would feel impassioned about ensuring that people with mental disorders are diagnosed accurately and correctly. So at every step of development, we sought to make the process as open and inclusive as possible and did so to a level unprecedented for any area of medicine.”

As a result, more than 13,000 comments on the proposed diagnostic criteria were received and reviewed.

For professor Michael Owen this consultation made the process “so conservative” that “many possible changes were not incorporated”. Owen is a psychiatrist and researcher from Cardiff University’s School of Medicine, who has been involved in putting together DSM-5, and has been at the forefront of looking at the genetics behind mental illness.

The polarisation of the debate, he accepts, comes in part “from the fact that in recent years many, milder conditions such as mild depression, anxiety and stress” have come under the “remit of medicine” and without a better understanding of the mechanism of psychiatric diagnosis “the designation of something as a psychosis sometimes seems unacceptably arbitrary”.

“There are better arguments for demedicalising these than for severe disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or autism.”

However, Owen feels strongly that the suspicions of some critics that Big Pharma is somehow “in cahoots” with the APA are wrong. “I saw no evidence of this in DSM-5.”

In fact, he says “we need them if we are to have new treatments. Unfortunately many of the major companies are leaving the neuroscience area because they see it as unprofitable.”

But Peter Tyrer, interim head of the Centre for Mental Health at Imperial College London, thinks there may be some truth to the criticisms of diagnosis inflation. Tyrer jokes that “DSM” really stands for “Diagnosis as a Source of Money, or Diagnosis for Simple Minds”, since all profits go to the APA and it can encourage a tick-box approach to diagnosis.

More seriously, he believes that the problem is that it is a “precocious adolescent” that dominates psychiatric classification.

The issue is that there is “no biological basis” for the classifications so “their status is pretty dodgy”, and this has led, Tyrer believes, “to allegations of over-diagnosis”, reinforced by drug companies pushing for new diagnoses that allow them to promote their products.

In the end, this could be the last edition of the DSM as we will no longer need checklists to define who is not normal.

Although professor T W Robbins, from the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge, believes that the DSM “will still be a useful clinical instrument when DSM-5 is launched”. Indeed without it, he says, there would be “chaos”.

“Much of the future will depend on advances in neuroscience, including cognitive neuroscience”.

“It is particularly important to identify ‘endophenotypes’, which are more accurate descriptions of deficits in such functions as the processing of reward and punishment, the ability to make rational and also empathic decisions, and the ability (in certain contexts) to inhibit inappropriate automatic and habitual behaviours.”

If this happens along with understanding how they go wrong in mental disorders, then the future debate may be less about defining normality, and more about how far should we go.

“It will enable us to detect disorders in the vulnerable, at-risk state and treat or intervene with drugs or cognitive therapy before the damage is done,” says Robbins, “as once things start going wrong they are much harder to treat”.

Read my latest piece for Wired.co.uk in full below or by clicking on this link. The piece also appears in New York’s arstechnica here

Humanity has often looked to the insect world for its technological metaphors, and now for digital inspiration

Swarms. Hive minds. The web*.

It can be hard to avoid talking about our digital culture without using insect metaphors.

Yet for new media theorist Jussi Parikka, it may be more than just a metaphor. Parikka is reader in Media and Design at Winchester School of Art and author of the Anne Friedberg Award-winning Insect Media.

“For me Insect Media started from a realisation and a question: why do we constantly talk about digital culture and networks through insect metaphors?” says Parikka. “Is it just a metaphoric relation? If yes, why do we make sense of high technological culture through references to these small brained, rather ‘dumb’ animals? Or is there even more to this?

Parikka explains that philosopher of communication theory Marshall McLuhan thought about media as extensions of man, but that he sees media as extensions of the non-human.

According to Parikka, the Victorians were the first to spot the relationship between the insect world and the technological one they were creating. Out of this fascination came entomology, the scientific study of insects.

“Victorians were as fascinated with insects as they were with steam,” he says, as they perceived the “parallels, connections and impacts that insects had on human populations and cultures”.

They saw insects as “media machines” that sensed, moved, and indeed communicated in different ways from that of humans. Beehives became a “constant reference” in culture. So the smooth efficiency of the then relatively new Bank of England or the General Post Office was as easily compared to that of “a hive of bees” as are the workings of the internet today.

Other arthropods like spiders were described as builders, engineers and weavers. They were even portrayed as the original inventors of telegraphy, the email of the day.

As a result of this use of metaphor the “ideas of calculation, optimisation and rationality were firmly embodied in the insect world long before the advent of the computer”. So it was only “a small step” to start to see digital culture in a similar way, using the same metaphors, Parikka believes.

“From the perspective of a computer scientist, it is hard not to see ant colonies as massive computation machines, optimising their algorithms, for instance, to find the best food routes.

“After all, insects are hackers and are interpreting the rules to survive.”

However, Parikka began to think that this use of metaphor was more than just a way of our culture perhaps trying to “domesticate these new machines of computation”.

“We need to be aware of the massive amount of things that happen in digital culture which are not human” and instead appear more insectoid.

</d”The speed of the flash crash of the stock market was due to the automated software processes; the speed of the signal travelling through the fibre-optic cable; the distributed calculations and packets firing across the globe as part of internet connection…These are much quicker than us humans.”

It has even been argued that today the best technology can be created only by disregarding what it means to be human, rather than as an extension of humanity.

In robotics, Parikka argues that pioneers such as Rodney Brooks started to design insectoid and arachnoid types of robots as they would be much more efficient forms of machine in, for example, the harsh conditions of space missions.

“Think of it through robotics or artificial intelligence: if you want to design a very efficient robot, let’s say for moving, you do not necessarily make it bipedal, with two legs — or even with two eyes, two ears: instead, it is as if robotics had picked up entomology books and realised that insects do it better.

“In fact, insects give clues as to how to robots may evolve, as there are more efficient ways of using the space with, for instance, six legs; or perceiving space with a different mechanism of vision; or distributing your brain power into a hive formation, rather like crowd sourcing.”

Phil Husbands has “some sympathy” with Jussi Parikka’s argument. Husbands is Professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sussex. He is co-director of The Sussex Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics (CCNR) that takes inspiration from insect behaviour and physiology to help with artificial intelligence, robotic control and control of simulated objects in games.

“We are trying to understand some fundamental things and trying to understand them relative to humans can be very unhelpful,” Husbands says.

By observing the behaviour of ants, including the way they sometimes stop and visually scan the world, scientists at Sussex last year were, for example, able to understand the nature of the special “learning walks” ants engage in when exploring new terrain. Then using these “very efficient and simple view-based methods” they were able to come up with a biologically plausible algorithm that could provide robots with “a highly robust and minimal method for navigation in difficult environments like deep space.”

“If we think like a human then it’s going to be very hard work to solve some of these challenges,” according to Husbands. “Instead ants are optimised for interacting with their environment. Their resources are limited but they are very sophisticated.

“So with a very small brain they can do very simple things in very efficient ways which can then be implemented very economically” in robots and artificial intelligence. “It’s very illuminating and chastening to think about insects,” he adds. “It’s a reminder of a very different view of the world.”

For Michael Dieter, a researcher into media and culture at the University of Amsterdam, the significance of Parikka’s work is that it is “an attempt to historically trace the relationship between entomology, or the study of insects, and the development of modern media technologies.”

He describes the goal of Parikka’s work as “to unsettle our commonplace conceptions of the divide between nature and digital culture when it comes to technology and these small animals”.

What he achieves, Dieter believes, “is to demonstrate that there are significant direct relations between the design of modern and contemporary media and the analysis of insect behaviours”.

Parikka is able to do this by a combination of thinking beyond the human world-view and using the new approach of “media archaeology”, which tries to understand the development of our technical communication systems through the technologies that weren’t followed or reached a dead end.

However, for Dieter the relationships between the insect world and our modern wired world have been “forged by capitalism”, and the economic forces that have driven this are something that Parikka “needs to give further thought to”.

For others the criticism of Insect Media may be more straightforward: digital networks don’t grow — they are built.

In the end, for Jussi Parikka, Insect Media is “is not about predicting the future but more about realising that this is a fundamental link in terms of how we see technology from the Victorians to the current high-tech culture. It is as if the most advanced technologies of today have established a link to the ancient evolutionary force of insects.”

Even if our digital networks are built by humans, they still contain within them the same tendencies as those of the ants or bees.

Indeed, Parikka doesn’t want to stop with insects, as other animals — such as dolphins — could be seen as having their own media or methods of communication that connect with the digital world, almost a kind of “cybernetic zoology”.

Ultimately this is a reminder, he believes, that our digital culture exists in a biological context: “It is completely reliant on natural resources, from rare earth minerals to energy.”

So when “soft technologies” such as pesticides are perceived to be causing the colony collapse disorder that is causing the mass extinction of bees, perhaps we should be “gravely worried about that” for the future of our own hive mind.

“Bees then are the canaries in the mine for our own technological culture.”

Jussi Parikka’s latest article on “Insects and Canaries” is due out in a forthcoming edition of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

*We realise spiders are arachnids, not insects, but the word “arthropod” isn’t quite so snappy.

]]> http://markpiesing.com/2013/05/07/why-we-often-view-digital-culture-through-insect-metaphors-2/feed/ 0 markpiesing Hive_01 Advertisement Advertisement http://markpiesing.com/2013/04/15/predicting-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-has-always-been-a-fools-game/ http://markpiesing.com/2013/04/15/predicting-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-has-always-been-a-fools-game/#comments Mon, 15 Apr 2013 20:53:21 +0000 markpiesing http://markpiesing.com/?p=271 ]]>

Read my latest for Wired.co.uk here in full or by following this link.

From the Darmouth Conferences to Turing’s test, prophecies about AI have rarely hit the mark. But there are ways to tell the good from the bad when it comes to futurology.

In 1956, a bunch of the top brains in their field thought they could crack the challenge of artificial intelligence over a single hot New England summer. Almost 60 years later, the world is still waiting.

The “spectacularly wrong prediction” of the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence made Stuart Armstrong, research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at University of Oxford, start to think about why our predictions about AI are so inaccurate.

The Dartmouth Conference had predicted that over two summer months ten of the brightest people of their generation would solve some of the key problems faced by AI developers, such as getting machines to use language, form abstract concepts and even improve themselves.

If they had been right, we would have had AI back in 1957; today, the conference is mostly credited merely with having coined the term ” artificial intelligence“.

Their failure is “depressing” and “rather worrying”, says Armstrong. “If you saw the prediction the rational thing would have been to believe it too. They had some of the smartest people of their time, a solid research programme, and sketches as to how to approach it and even ideas as to where the problems were.”

Now, to help answer the question why “AI predictions are very hard to get right”, Armstrong has recently analysed the Future of Humanity Institute’slibrary of 250 AI predictions. The library stretches back to 1950, when Alan Turing, the father of computer science, predicted that a computer would be able to pass the “Turing test” by 2000. (In theTuring test, a machine has to demonstrate behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human being.)

Later experts have suggested 2013, 2020 and 2029 as dates when a machine would pass the Turing test, which gives us a clue as to why Armstrong feels that such timeline predictions — all 95 of them in the library — are particularly worthless. “There is nothing to connect a timeline prediction with previous knowledge as AIs have never appeared in the world before — no one has ever built one — and our only model is the human brain, which took hundreds of millions of years to evolve.”

His research also suggests that predictions by philosophers are more accurate than those of sociologists or even computer scientists. “We know very little about the final form an AI would take, so if they [the experts] are grounded in a specific approach they are likely to go wrong, while those on a meta level are very likely to be right”.

Although, he adds, that is more a reflection of how bad the rest of the predictions are than the quality of the philosophers’ contributions.

Beyond that, he believes that AI predictions as a whole have all the “characteristics of the kind of tasks that experts are going to be bad at predicting”.

In particular it is the lack of feedback about the accuracy of predictions about AI that leads to what has been called the “overconfidence of experts”, Armstrong argues. Such “experts” include scientists, futurologists and journalists.

“When experts get immediate feedback as to whether some prediction is right or wrong then they are going to get better at predicting. Without it, everyone is overconfident as they are making quite definite predictions on pretty much no evidence at all.”

It is possible to make better predictions than what is basically just “gut instinct”, he says, if you “decompose the problem by saying we need this feature or that feature and then give estimates for each step”.

Few experts bother to do this, he believes, “as the problem is hard, it is not taken seriously, and perhaps they don’t even realise you could do better by breaking it down.

“So in effect your [own] prediction or an algorithm’s about AI is as good as an expert’s.”

Robin Hanson, however, is not so sure that we should discount expert opinion, as “the more people focus very narrowly on the thing they know about then the more reliable their predictions will be”. Hanson is an associate professor at George Mason University and chief scientist at Consensus Point, a leading provider of prediction market technology based in Nashville, Tennessee.

Too often, he says, experts are being expected by journalists only to comment on “the quick Sunday supplement style stories”, meaning that they too “are more outsiders rather than researchers because these are the not the topics they are really familiar with”.

If you ask those actually working in the field of AI they will say that “in the last twenty years they have seen progress of 5 percent to 10 percent towards the goal” and that means “without any acceleration it might take between 200 and 400 years to achieve the goal”. Some would even argue that progress towards achieving it is actually “decelerating”.

For Hanson one of the best ways to judge the accuracy of an expert is to look at the pundit’s track record. “Prefer people who have made a bet financially rather than just saying something. Don’t just ask what will happen, ask them what has happened.

Another way is to look at the futures market as the predictor. Although there isn’t one for AI, Hanson suggests you “look at the demand for computers and it gives you an idea of what’s coming down the line and what people are putting their money”.

Armstrong reckons it is easy to “tell if a prediction is bad by comparing it with other similar predictions in the past, and if they have failed…”

Other than that, he suggests trying “to take them apart, weaken them, show that they are wrong or irrelevant — and if you can’t, then it is a stronger prediction”.

“Watch out too,” he says, “for whether the prediction is about the behaviour of future AI rather than its inner nature. If it’s about behaviour then it’s a better prediction, as inner nature is a complex philosophical issue and you will never get feedback about whether it’s right or wrong.”

Also, the fewer assumptions a prediction makes the better, such as “AI will be networked or have genetic algorithms”. If a prediction says “specific things” – that AI will emerge in this way or that way – then be wary for that prediction too.

And what are Armstrong’s predictions about the future of AI?

“My prediction is that [AI is] likely to happen sometime in the next five to 80 years. I would give a 90 percent chance [it will happen] in the next two centuries, although there is always the chance that someone could come up with an AI algorithm tomorrow.”

And I guess that’s what’s wrong with more accurate predictions.

</divStuart Armstrong’s, Kaj Sotala’s and Seán Óh Éigeartaigh’s paper on “The errors, insights and lessons of famous AI predictions and what they mean for the future” plus case studies is pending publication in the conference proceedings of the AGI12/AGI Impacts Winter Intelligence conference

]]> http://markpiesing.com/2013/04/15/predicting-the-future-of-artificial-intelligence-has-always-been-a-fools-game/feed/ 0 markpiesing Advertisement Advertisement http://markpiesing.com/2013/04/01/the-webs-oldest-dark-art-can-spam-be-canned-2/ http://markpiesing.com/2013/04/01/the-webs-oldest-dark-art-can-spam-be-canned-2/#comments Mon, 01 Apr 2013 17:36:33 +0000 markpiesing http://markpiesing.com/?p=264 ]]>

Read my latest for The Independent here in full or by following this link. It has also now been syndicated to papers in South Africa, The Gulf States and India.

There are 100 billion spam emails sent daily. But that number is decreasing. Does this signal the end of the web’s oldest dark art?

There are more than 100 billion spam emails sent every day and most of them seem to end up in my junk email. “Beyoncé Knowles”. “Weight Loss Now”. “Great Buy Opportunity”. Their short titles seem to read like a list of my fantasies.

The Twitter spam that turns up is more like my fears: “Someone is talking about you.” Each one tempts you to open it, download an attachment or click on a link.

Spam, of course, is the internet equivalent of unsolicited junk mail – originally sent by email, but now reaching us via tweets or even e-books as well. Even though there has been an “unprecedented decrease” in the amount of spam emails sent since 2011 – by 8.2 per cent – it still accounts for 71.1 per cent of the 144.8 billion emails sent every day, according to the IT firm Kaspersky Labs.

Some analysts have suggested that up to 40 per cent of half a billion daily tweets are spam. In 2012, 19.5 per cent of the world’s unsolicited emails were sent from China, 15.6 per cent from the US and about 2 per cent from the UK.

Just yesterday, a web war between an anti-spam group and a Dutch web host called Cyberbunker was violent enough to slow down the wider internet in an attack described as the biggest of its kind.

The crimes that spam has been accused of reads like the rap sheet of a fairly common criminal: selling dodgy medicines or fake Louis Vuitton, extorting money through requests for help, and stealing your identity by directing you to a website that asks for your personal details – a practice known as phishing. Malware that is often downloaded without you knowing it can turn your innocent-looking computer into an automated spam factory sending out hundreds of spam mails a minute to your nearest and dearest. The only clue: that it has slowed down.

So while some may see spam just as the background noise of the internet, for the security industries, and indeed for many of us, spam is “another problem to be solved and we have to do the best job we can at solving it,” says Don Blumenthal, senior policy adviser at the Public Interest Registry, which manages the .ORG internet domain.

Yet for others, such as new media theorist Jussi Parikka, “spam messages are also like the unconscious of our cultural fantasies”. Parikka is reader in media and design at Winchester School of Art. “From Viagra to instant riches, spam embodies an exaggerated, hyperbolic version of the things we are taught to dream about.”

And according to Kristopher Gansing, artistic director of Berlin’s Transmediale Festival of Art and Digital Culture, “spam has become the essence of human communication as we live more and more of our social life in a spam-like way.

“For me, the ‘I just bought a Soya Latte’ status update is indeed the ultimate spam, especially since it replicates through your social network without any hackers needing to automate it.”

In the words of Finn Brunton, “spam is one of the complex chaotic unforeseen consequences of the extraordinary open system that we have created”. Brunton is a professor of information at the University of Michigan and author of the forthcoming Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet. (due to eb published by MIT Press in May)

“It is one of the constant double-edged swords of the internet that it is brilliantly easy to build new systems and services for, but at the same brilliantly easy to take advantage of,” he says. “So the changing meaning of spam is a mirror to the changing value of the internet.”

According to Brunton, the first proto-spam message was sent in 1978 by the Digital Equipment Corporation to all 593 members of the Arpanet community announcing the launch of their new Arpanet-enabled computer, whether they were interested or not. Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) was the progenitor of the global internet.

Then in April 1994, Arizona-based law firm Canter and Siegel sent its advertisement “Green Card Message – Final One?” to all the members of 5,500 Usenet discussion groups and created the first commercial spam. Or what we today know as spam.

And for Brunton, this was the moment of transition for spam, as the purpose of spam was “all about money now”.

By 2003–4 a motley crew of spammers that ranged from semi-legitimate business entrepreneurs to outright criminals was increasingly being put under pressure by anti-spam filtering systems that used ever more sophisticated algorithms, and by harsher penalties for “spamming”.

“They were being presented with a kind of devil’s bargain, as either they could either go legit and probably out of business, or start to lie about who their spams were from and what they wanted to get round filtering systems and wait for the law to catch up with them”

Then in 2007 the infamous Storm botnet hit, which at its height may have controlled up to 50 million Windows computers and earned its creator, according to research, an estimated $9,500 a day from purchases of the goods it was flogging.

If anyone was foolish enough to open such emails as “230 dead as storm batters Europe” they would find an article to download or a link to a web page, and clicking on either would lead to malware taking over their computer and sending out 150 messages a minute.

The Storm botnet is an example of how “spam was now about building capacity” to “create vast systems where the spammers no longer even have to pay for the electricity” to make spamming as profitable as possible, Brunton says.

For Blumenthal, whether spam is the product of organised crime or an 18 year old in his parents’ basement it doesn’t matter, “if different protocols had been used years ago there may not have been so much spam now. Our standard email address makes dictionary attacks much easier because with @domain you can keep guessing the address and you will eventually get it right.

“In contrast the X.400 protocol would have made it much harder: compare dblumenthal@ftc.gov with s=blumenthal;g=don;c=us;a=telemail;p=gov+ftc;o=wpo;dda. wpmail=HQ01 (dblumenthal).”

Jussi Parikka’s view is that “spam is a good reminder that the internet is a rich cultural sphere of human interaction, and not all sides of it are pleasant. The dark sides of digital culture are insights to the whole cultural logic of our computing technologies such as automation.”

For David Emm, a security researcher at Kaspersky Labs, the future of spam is uncertain because filters can identify 98 per cent of all spam and “the economics of spam are changing – the emergence of Web 2.0 has made it cheaper for them to use legal advertising methods.”

Spam, though, will also take new forms, Kristopher Gansing believes. “With 3D-printing technology becoming more widely available, I can imagine a new kind of physical spam becoming possible – spamming people’s workplaces and private lives with unwanted objects.”

In the future, Brunton thinks that spam will become more personalised and salient. “Personalisation is figuring out how to make a message that is personal enough that filters don’t catch them and that people fall for them, through a kind of lightweight identity theft by building up deep dossiers on individuals and their relationships from what people post online.

“Being salient is about making it almost impossible to tell if someone who is saying ‘I love you’ online is a real person or a bot.”

So it appears that the cat and mouse game goes on.

]]> http://markpiesing.com/2013/04/01/the-webs-oldest-dark-art-can-spam-be-canned-2/feed/ 0 markpiesing Beyonce-beyonce-32688169-1280-960 http://markpiesing.com/2013/03/09/nudging-uk-book-discovery-toward-the-mainstream/ http://markpiesing.com/2013/03/09/nudging-uk-book-discovery-toward-the-mainstream/#comments Sat, 09 Mar 2013 21:32:00 +0000 markpiesing http://markpiesing.com/?p=247 ]]>

This was a couple of weeks ago now….but read my headline story for the New York based Publishing Perspectives in full here or by following this link.

Are you fed with up with the overwhelming choice offered by Amazon, or — as in my case — suspicious of their scarily accurate personalized emails, but just too lazy to go to your local book store (if you still have one)?

Then there is a new app in Apple’s App Store that might be for you, and if there is one term that describes The Nudge List, it is that buzzword of a thousand workshops: discoverability. Although, as it is updated only once a week, there may to a limit to how much you can discover.

“72% of site visitors bought a book directly as a result of reading content on the site.”

Download it on to your iPad, touch the quirkily large lower-case “n” and it’s hard not to be immediately seduced by the simple and colorful space you enter that is in marked contrast to other sites, such as Goodreads. Pictures of the top ten hottest stories in UK books and films as chosen by four or five experienced and independent journalists (and not a computer) tempt you to press again and, in theory, to read an extract from a middlebrow book, watch a video of the writer talking (a feature that even my cynical wife described as cool), and perhaps buy a book to download only on to iBooks. There is, of course, the ever present “share” icon as well, although only by email, Twitter or Facebook.

Perusing the app earlier this month, one finds it is dominated by pictures of a rather rough and worried looking Tom Hanks with a white slogan “No man is an island underneath.” Touch it and you are taken to a blurb about the movie Cloud Atlas, although oddly there is only one mention of the book, which you can buy below for £5.99 (the same price as Amazon). Curiously, though, the video is a trailer for the film and not something more book-related. There isn’t an option to read an extract of the book either on that page.

But there are plenty of options: on the right-hand side of the screen there are six tabs that take you through to channels such as the tongue-in-cheek or stereotypically (depending on who you talk to) named Book Chap and Book Diva, which lead you to further curated ranges of books.

The two men behind the app, Alastair Giles and Simon Appleby, believe that with this app, which is also designed to drive traffic to their site nudgemenow.com, they are very much on to something.

Giles and Appleby are founders and joint MDs of AMS Digital Publishing, a company set up in 2012 set up to promote The Nudge site.

Focusing on “Visual Curation”

As Giles says: “There is nothing else out that gives you curation in such a very visual form, and discoverability is not something that Amazon is any good at.” Appleby goes further to say that “there was a gap in the market for an independent app that offered tailored discoverability.” Although publishers can suggest titles for inclusion, and there are links back to publishers own websites for data collection.

And despite early teething problems with the download speed that led to some negative App store reviews, the app was downloaded 7,000 times in the first seven days so they may well be right. According to Giles, an online survey of early users came back with the statistic that “72% of site visitors bought a book directly as a result of reading content on the site.”

Nonetheless, these two industry veterans admit that with “a tiny budget” and relying on “good connections,” they are “not going to be troubling Amazon soon.”

The link with films does, in Giles’s view, give it another USP, as they believe that “book readers who love films perhaps haven’t been served very well in the past, and it is an audience that film companies are desperate to reach, as 30–40% of movies are based on novels.” Appleby believes this offers a new angle on the age-old debate as to “what is more powerful — book or film?”

To him, Apple’s iOS rather than Android seemed the “obvious first platform for our ‘visual’ approach. Plus, frankly, at the moment, it offered the best penetration and gave Apple the chance to promote iBooks, too.

“We also wanted an app where we could send updates that the user could interact with (at least partially) offline, so we were not creating a ‘web app.’

“While we’re not the first people to use WordPress to deliver content an iOS app, it is a still a little-used technique so there was a learning curve here. The other key appeal is that the content creator only needs fairly conventional CMS know-how to publish a new issue.”

Although biggest challenge for Alastair Giles in launching the app was “going round explaining the app to publishers who are spending a lot of time and money on creating their own websites, twenty years too late.”

Publishers See Positive Potential

For Vicky Palmer, Head of Digital Marketing at Headline Publishing Group, founders Giles and Appleby may well be on to something, as apps like the Nudge List do offer publishers “a great opportunity to share and promote our digital content.” Palmer is “supporting the new Nudge Platform across all formats.”

In particular, she feels, what is really exciting about the app is “the chance to reach new audiences via channels that they’re already familiar with, but with content that is probably new to them.”

It’s also breaking new ground with book audiences as well, “so we’re looking forward to seeing how readers interact as well as who’s using the app, and over time we’ll look to tailor our content to best meet their requirements.”

Cate Cannon, Head of Marketing & Digital Content at Canongate Books, agrees with Palmer that there is a “huge value” to publishers in “curated, intelligent spaces online” like The Nudge List.

“They can only be positive things for books in the download era,” she believes. “Recommendation remains one of the most powerful instigators to buy, and any community that builds an audience and increases valued content and word-of-mouth can only help the discoverability of books online.”

Hannah Telfer, Director, Digital Marketing and New Product Development at Random House, is more cautious about its impact as “it’s still early days.”

“If The Nudge List knows its target audience well, and earns a reputation for consistently introducing them to authors that really satisfy, it will have an important role to play in guiding readers through the sea of digital content they currently face and one that we’ll be delighted to support.”

Nonetheless, she adds, “it’s great to see a new UK channel for discovering both books and experiences around authors and the writing process that can’t be adequately discovered through algorithmic recommendations alone.”

In terms of their future plans, Giles simply says that they have a target of 50,000 downloads in six months and beyond that it is a case of “watch this space,” with an app for Android on the cards if demand holds up, as well as the use of more back-catalogue titles.

Appleby goes further, explaining that they have plans to “partner with many other independent book- and film-focused organizations to grow awareness of the app as a way to reach their audience in an interesting way. We’re not going to be protective over our data with them.”

But maybe they should be careful when my Kindle-loving wife clicked “Buy” for a book on the app and saw the phrase “only to iBooks” after which she switched to her Kindle app on the iPad.

Are you fed with up with the overwhelming choice offered by Amazon, or — as in my case — suspicious of their scarily accurate personalized emails, but just too lazy to go to your local book store (if you still have one)?

Read Editor-in-Chief Edward Nawotka’s accompanying comment piece on Is the Book Discoverability Bubble Ready To Burst?

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