Why do people fake their online influence? Dan Howe, who once experimented with follower gaming, explains.
Faking influence in order to alter public behaviour is a very old marketing tactic. As far back as the 1930s, it was routine for promoters to hire good looking young people to wait outside concert halls for lead operatic sopranos, both encouraging actual theatre goers to join the mob for autographs and to stage a good shot for the press.
Similar activity persists today, with shops like Abercrombie & Fitch purposefully maintaining a queue out front in order to keep up the appearance of popularity and companies like HP turning the popular kids on US campuses in to paid brand ambassadors.
While it is generally accepted practice, openly discussed and debated in the media and among marketers, when it comes to applying the same principles online, you tend to get awkward silence from industry professionals.
Last year, PR Week broke a story about Covert PR, a firm apparently offering the services of “posters” to submit online comments to mainstream media websites to “help sway and nudge the debate” in favour of its clients.
Going to the doctor and worrying about cybersecurity
For most people, going to the doctor means thinking about co-pays and when they’ll feel better. For me though, it means thinking about those plus the cyber security of the computer systems being used by the medical professionals.
I’ve spent more time than usual visiting doctors recently. I broke my hand – sure I’ll tell you how. It was a hit-and-run accident with a woodchuck.I was riding my bike, the woodchuck ran in front of me, I ran over him, and he fled into the woods, leaving me lying on the ground moaning in pain. Okay now that we got that out of the way…
So the emergency room doctor ordered a CT scan (to check for a concussion and the presence of a brain) and various x-rays. I thought about the computer controls while in the CT scanner, but what was really interesting was when the hospital emergency room digitized the results and gave them me on a CD to provide to the orthopedist.
Before going to the orthopedist, they had me fill out a bunch of forms online. As I provided the detailed medical information, I wondered how secure the web interface is, and whether someone could attack the medical record system through the patient input interface.
Newspaper Extinction Timeline
Tap or click to view a larger version.
Which raises the question: Why are they here? If you’re here just to get reelected, you’re worthless to the country
Ezra Klein interviews Tom Coburn:
EK: It seems your view is that just as the market needs to have faith in your demographics and in the flexibility of your labor market and the competitiveness, it has to have faith in your political system’s capacity to deal with long and short-term threats. Do you see any reason for the market to have that faith right now?
TC: No. One of my biggest worries is what happens if Romney wins and Republicans control both chambers, do they have the courage to do what it takes to fix the country? It’s kind of their last chance. If they’re given the favor of control and they don’t act on it, why should you ever trust them again? You shouldn’t. It’ll be the death knell of the Republican Party. They controlled it all for four years under Bush and grew the government. They created a new entitlement with no revenue. Went against the very tenets of what they said they believe.
One of the reasons I wrote the book was to show a whole lot of people how many stupid things we do. I don’t really blame presidents too much. You gotta get appropriations. I say the problem is not that we don’t get along. We get along too well. Government is twice the size it was 10 years ago. The president can’t spend the money if we don’t appropriate it. So it’s not a president problem. It’s a congressional problem.
Accidentally Released – and Incredibly Embarrassing – Documents Show How Goldman et al Engaged in ‘Naked Short Selling’
A quick primer on what naked short selling is. First of all, short selling, which is a completely legal and even beneficial activity, is when an investor bets that the value of a stock will decline. You do this by first borrowing and then selling the stock at its current price, then returning the stock to your original lender after the price has gone down. You then earn a profit on the difference between the original price and the new, lower price.
What matters here is the technical issue of how you borrow the stock. Typically, if you’re a hedge fund and you want to short a company, you go to some big-shot investment bank like Goldman or Morgan Stanley and place the order. They then go out into the world, find the shares of the stock you want to short, borrow them for you, then physically settle the trade later.
But sometimes it’s not easy to find those shares to borrow. Sometimes the shares are controlled by investors who might have no interest in lending them out. Sometimes there’s such scarcity of borrowable shares that banks/brokers like Goldman have to pay a fee just to borrow the stock.
These hard-to-borrow stocks, stocks that cost money to borrow, are called negative rebate stocks. In some cases, these negative rebate stocks cost so much just to borrow that a short-seller would need to see a real price drop of 35 percent in the stock just to break even. So how do you short a stock when you can’t find shares to borrow? Well, one solution is, you don’t even bother to borrow them. And then, when the trade is done, you don’t bother to deliver them. You just do the trade anyway without physically locating the stock.
Darell Issa Puts Old Leaked TPP IP Text Up For Discussion
We’ve written a few times now about Rep. Darrell Issa, and the Madison platform his office has set up to allow for crowdsourcing opinion on legislation and other government documents. He originally used it for his OPEN Act, but then later posted the text of ACTA as well. His latest move is to post the leaked text of the US’s negotiating position on TPP. This is the same text that leaked out last year. It would be nice if the USTR did something like this itself with the latest text, but that’s not how USTR Ron Kirk works. To him “transparency” is only sharing the text with big industry special interests, and declaring it a matter of “national security” if anyone else wants to see it.
Life lessons for the office
Clayton Christensen achieves the difficult feat for a tall, broad man of being at once imposing and humble. When I visited him last autumn at Harvard Business School, he laid out with quiet authority his latest thoughts on disruptive technology, the concept that justly made him famous in the mid-1990s. But he also took time to chat about his son’s college basketball team, a poster of which hangs on one wall of an office full of family photos and memorabilia.
While he places great value on his family and faith – he is a devout Mormon – his research and teaching have dominated his public story. Until now, outside the Acknowledgements section, he has never tried to put his personal and professional lives in the same book.
An Extended Interview With Steve Coll
New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll’s last two books, Ghost Wars and The Bin Ladens, were, as he puts it, big projects about closed institutions—the Central Intelligence Agency and the Middle East’s most famous family, respectively. His latest peek behind tightly drawn curtains, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, is a detailed examination of the influential Irving-based oil corporation. ExxonMobil is famously reticent about its operations, and, as Coll explains in this interview, penetrating the company’s official PR line proved challenging, even for an experienced reporter.
Reporting on Exxon can be so difficult—the company is famous for being secretive and cultish. Can you talk a little about the difficulties of reporting this book?
I found Coll’s Ghost Wars to be an excellent read.
The “Greatest Films of All Time”
I am faced once again with the task of voting in Sight & Sound magazine’s famous poll to determine the greatest films of all time. Apart from my annual year’s best lists, this is the only list I vote in. It is a challenge. After voting in 1972, 1982 and 1992, I came up with these ten titles in 2002:
Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog) Apocalypse Now (Coppola) Citizen Kane (Welles) Dekalog (Kieslowski) La Dolce Vita (Fellini) The General (Keaton) Raging Bull (Scorsese) 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick) Tokyo Story (Ozu) Vertigo (Hitchcock)To add a title, I must remove one. Which film can I do without? Not a single one. One of my shifts last time was to replace Hitchcock’s “Notorious” with “Vertigo,” because after going through both a shot at a time during various campus sessions, I decided that “Vertigo” was, after all, the better of two nearly perfect films.
Civil War Re-enactors; a Photo Project
Thought I would share a new personal project of mine. I found it interesting that most of these men look at their reenacting not as a hobby, but as a lifestyle. This could be the beginning of a bigger project about re-enactors, but for now it’s this… Hope you enjoy!