Note: an experiment with Storify export

memeorandum with color annotation

One of my favorite sites for seeing what’s hot in the political blogosphere is memeorandum. Fortunately, it’s a favorite haunt of Andy Baio, too. Baio is a writer and tech entrepreneur in Portland, OR. He’s fashioned a cool toolthat illustrates the political leanings of the blogs featured in discussion on memeorandum.

Research (Glance and Adamic) in the early days of blogging suggested very little cross-linking. In other words, liberal blogs rarely linked to conservative ones (and vice versa). This current visualization reflects linking behavior in the context of featured stories on memeorandum. In other words, what stories are the bloggers talking about?

The brighter the color, the more frequently they only cover stories by their counterparts…

Seeing each site’s potential bias provides the context for understanding how news is spread. Right-leaning blogs are eager to point out new evidence that George Zimmerman was hurt the day he shot Trayvon Martin, but left-leaning blogs aren’t covering that story. Likewise, only left-leaning news sites appear to be covering the news of Ted Nugent’s threatening remarks to the president, but conservative blogs aren’t. This visualization also makes it easy to spot outliers, the sources that are breaking away from their past behavior to link to something beyond their usual circle.

Some of the color choices may raise a few eyebrows; CNN, for example, shows up as pale red. Others will cause nary a blink of the eye, such as HotAir (red) and ThinkProgress (blue). Others, like Shakesville and Ezra Klein, have no highlight.

The tool is open-source, free and available for Firefox (requires GreaseMonkey) and Chrome. Baio launched the project in 2008.

Gabe Rivera is the founder of memeorandum, which is part of his stable of aggregators: Ballbug (baseball news), mediagazer (media news), Techmeme (tech news), WeSmirch (celebrity news).

:: wiredpen permalink
:: Talk to me on Twitter!
:: Follow me on Facebook
:: Circle me on Google+

I hate articles like this one from @TheAtlantic: is.gd/qvLQ1f LinkBait headlines (Is Facebook making us lonely) 1/2—
Kathy E Gill (@kegill) April 19, 2012

(cont'd 2/2) Poor analysis (1940 v 2010 data not per capita), research alluded to in generalities, correlation implied (!= causation) ARGH—
Kathy E Gill (@kegill) April 19, 2012

I’m going to take only one example:

A 2010 AARP survey found that 35 percent of adults older than 45 were chronically lonely, as opposed to 20 percent of a similar group only a decade earlier. According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject, roughly 20 percent of Americans—about 60 million people—are unhappy with their lives because of loneliness. Across the Western world, physicians and nurses have begun to speak openly of an epidemic of loneliness.

First: The AARP Magazine study found that “A little over one-third (35%) of the survey respondents were categorized as lonely.” Not chronically lonely. Lonely.

Second: The AARP write up of the study used the adjective “chronically” but it also linked to the (very thin) primary source. Both characterizations cannot be correct; I would err on the side of the summary of the report rather than an article that merely references it. If I were writing for The Atlantic, I’d talk to AARP and get the complete study report and figure out how to let my readers know I’d read it. (Note: no out-bound links in Atlantic essays.)

Third: The AARP comparison was not between “similar groups” as Marche declares. AARP says the 2010 survey result was compared to “a similar survey a decade ago.” A similar survey implies that the questions were different. There is no information given about the GROUP in the prior survey.

Fourth: Missing from Marche’s essay is this interesting tidbit. Feelings of loneliness, per the AARP survey, declined with age. That is, fewer people who were 70 reported feeling lonely than people who were 45. So how much of any possible “increase” in people feeling lonely is simply the baby boomer bulge? In fact, Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone, 2000) has argued that boomers are less socially engaged than prior generations. Putnam said that years before Facebook was birthed, much less years before boomers found the digital social network.

Fifth: Is it possible to get any more weasely than this? “According to a major study by a leading scholar of the subject…” Well, yes it is. Marche goes on to assert that 20% of us are unhappy because of loneliness … but there is no trend data to put the percentage into context (and deflate the implication that the number is on the rise). Any measure of loneliness over time would be hard to fashion into a trend because the UCLA Loneliness Scale is on its third version (1978, 1980, 1996). Moreover, there is nothing in this cursory summary of research that explores demographics.

Sixth: the 2010 AARP study was conducted by Knowledge Networks using an online survey. No where does the study summary say that the instrument used was the UCLA Loneliness Scale.

Seventh: in 2010, many of us were still reeling from the recession brought about from the collapse of financial and real estate markets. In 2000, many of us were riding an economic boom. Look at income for the 2000s; to say it stalled is being kind. Ya think these economic conditions might have an affect on people’s general outlook and stress, both of which must relate to feelings of depression, despair and loneliness?

Eight: he paragraph closes with a claim (no evidence) of an epidemic of loneliness, a claim that’s even more weasely than the one in point five. This is argumentation?

I’ve written about 4.5 words for each one of Marche’s. See why I’m only picking one paragraph?

* * *

OK. I have to pick one more.

JOHN CACIOPPO, THE director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago, is the world’s leading expert on loneliness. In his landmark book, Loneliness, released in 2008, he revealed just how profoundly the epidemic of loneliness is affecting the basic functions of human physiology….To Cacioppo, Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. “Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” he writes. “But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” [The quotes are from p 260 of Loneliness, written by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick]

Here’s Cacioppo on the Internet, from the University of Chicago website:

Onto this landscape, social media erupted—Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn—exerting an influence more complicated, Cacioppo says, than some people might think. “If you’ve got a disability and you can’t get out, social networking is a great boon.” People who use the Internet to generate or enhance in-person relationships also benefit, he says. But when others use online connections to substitute for face-to-face ones, they become lonelier and more depressed. Lonely people are likely to use the Internet as a crutch, the nonlonely as a leverage. “So,” Cacioppo says, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

It’s not the tool. It’s why and how people use the tool.

Go back and read the headline, please. Which argument is it (Marche) making? Tool or human agency?

There’s nothing in that University of Chicago essay about an “epidemic” of loneliness. Nor does the word appear in the 2008 book he co-wrote, Loneliness (thank you Amazon “search inside this book”). In 2009, Cacioppo said that there was a “worldwide epidemic of disconnection” in an article for Psychology Today entitled Epidemic of Loneliness.

Finally, Marche does not define what he means by “loneliness.” It’s not straightfoward. From the NIH (2009):

Following Weiss (1973), it has become common to distinguish emotional and social loneliness (Drennan et al. 2008; Dykstra and Fokkema 2007; Perlman 2004; Van Baarsen et al. 2001). Emotional loneliness is missing an intimate attachment, such as a marital partner, and is accompanied by feelings of desolation and insecurity, and of not having someone to turn to. Social loneliness is lacking a wider circle of friends and acquaintances that can provide a sense of belonging, of companionship and of being a member of a community.

* * *

Some other interesting findings about circumstances of loneliness:

Older adults reported lower rates of loneliness than those who were younger (43% of those age 45-49 were lonely compared to 25% of those 70+).  Married respondents were less likely to be lonely (29%) compared to never-married respondents (51%), and those with higher incomes were less likely to be lonely than those with lower incomes.

Lonely respondents were less likely to be involved in activities that build social networks, such as attending religious services, volunteering, participating in a community organization or spending time on a hobby.

Almost half (45%) of those who had lived in their current residence for less than 1 year reported feeling lonely.

As I poked around, trying to find substance for the claim of an epidemic, I read this personal essay from a woman in the UK:

There is some evidence that the stigma against loneliness has increased in the past 50 years. If you read what is written about loneliness in the Forties, there’s not a lot of disdain and alarm.

But in more recent decades, loneliness changes shape — it becomes a disease, a short-coming, a flaw.

Now there’s an interesting line of thought. In our increasingly mediated world — where our lives have become like the movies — we are bombarded with images of smiling, happy people in the company of other smiling, happy people. Picture perfect bodies, skin, hair, tans. Yet more of us live alone than 20 years aog. More of us live further away from our families of origin. Each of these external factors can contribute to stress.

* * *

It was the technological backlash embodied in the headline that set me off … and I don’t even like Facebook!

I can certainly understand the belief that more of us might be lonely today than in my parents’ generation.

But I’m not going to blame it on technology.

My (belated) entry in the March Carnival of journalism. The theme: how do we measure impact?

Just as we need to be careful what we wish for, we must choose carefully before establishing metrics. From The Guardian‘s Simon Caulkin (emphasis added):

What gets measured gets managed – even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so…

Quality guru W Edwards Deming went further, putting ‘management by use only of visible figures, with little consideration of figures that are unknown or unknowable’ at No 5 in his list of seven deadly management diseases. Henry Mintzberg, the sanest of management educators, proposed that starting ‘from the premise that we can’t measure what matters‘ gives managers the best chance of realistically facing up to their challenge.

What matters? What is the role of journalism, our purpose, our challenge?

I don’t think that America’s news media have been given the gift of the First Amendment so that moguls can negotiate monopoly rents into millionaire status. I don’t think that America’s news media have been given the gift of the First Amendment in order to glorify celebrity culture (think Kim Kardashian, for example).

I do think America’s news media have been given the gift of the First Amendment to speak truth to power, to give voice to the powerless, to act as a watchdog on public institutions — all things that matter but that are hard to measure and even harder to monetize.

Two recent stories brought this point home to me.

First, the #STOPKony campaign.

The virality of the questionable video is unquestionable. On March 5, only 58,000 viewed [1] the Vimeo-hosted video. The next day, the number was 2.7 million. The third day (March 7) it was 8.2 million.

Cynics (count me in this group) see the $15 million raised from this campaign as a testament to the need to use any means to trigger donations so that those who run Invisible Children can continue to fight for their cause. After all, most of the organization’s budget goes to overhead, filming, salaries and travel (“we are an advocacy and awareness organization”) not aid to Africa; to arguments for militarization, not humanitarian intervention.

Yes, the group raised awareness of problems in Africa by appealing to the white man’s burden. It also tapped into the click-as-substitute-for-action movement honed to a fine edge by Facebook, lamented by Malcolm Gladwell. But more importantly, it’s generated a lot of money for the principals to travel around the U.S., talking to college students, cultivating a community with the power to launch a viral video overnight. Thus the story, many said (the younger you are, the more likely you were to believe this), may have not have been accurate but it matters and as a result did more good than harm [2]. Just look at at the inches of newsprint, minutes of air time that have been devoted to the plight of Uganda!

Second, Mike Daisey.

I saw Daisey’s show when he was in Seattle last year. I have visited Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Japan, but not mainland China. Even though I live on the left coast, have had students from China and have read Chinese-American authors, I know that my perceptions about Chinese culture and commerce are simplistic.

So I’m not surprised that my crap detector remained dormant as I listened to his (supposedly) personal stories. His fabrications fit the frame that I use to view “things Chinese.” But because the frame was skewed for at least one reporter living in China, we all now know about the fabrications, the deliberate lies to both America and This American Life [3].

Yes, Daisey raised awareness of problems in China. He did so, however, by linking Apple and Foxconn together like a horse and carriage, even though Foxconn makes products for every major computer electronics firm: Amazon, Cisco, Dell, HP, Intel, Microsoft … the list goes on. However accurate his story, many said, it matters and did more good than harm. Just look at the inches of newsprint, minutes of air time now devoted to working conditions at Foxconn!

In both cases, brilliant marketing and an exaggerated (to be kind) narrative raised awareness of something the protagonists believed was an under-reported issue.

In both cases, the story was also the vehicle for the storyteller’s livelihood.

In both cases, the medium was initially non-traditional. outside of what we think of as the “news media.”

These examples raise more questions than they answer.

How can journalists legitimately spotlight under-reported stories? How do we chose which issues to spotlight, and how do we carve out the time in an business climate squeezed by forever lost monopoly rents? How do we get attention in the attention economy without resorting to hyperbole? Is it proper for a journalist to become central to the story? How do we build networks like those of Invisible Children? Should we? Where do we cross the line from “speaking truth to power” to becoming advocates? Should we?

And how does “but it matters!” coexist in an environment where assessment is measured in large part by short-term page views and click-throughs?

Postscript: this is part one of a two-parter. While sitting in a hearing convened by the Washington News Council on Saturday, I started thinking differently about the word impact, moving from “measure” to “assess,” from numbers to fairness, from bottom line to social impact.

[1] “Views” are measured as someone hitting “play” not necessarily watching ’til the end
[2] To be clear, I do not ascribe to this view.
[3] Even on stage, first person memoirs don’t get to play loose and fast with facts. It’s not a biopic when the storyteller is the protagonist!

:: wiredpen permalink
:: Follow me on Twitter!

Has old school political machination met its match with digital networking?

According to Tom Baxter, the bill was initially designed “to prevent the release of the personal information people give to obtain hunting and fishing licenses.”

A good ol’ boy bill, in other words.

What Sen. John Bulloch (R) did not tell his colleagues when he brought the bill up for  final vote: the bill had been seriously revised by the conference committee, a rewrite expansive enough to slide an 18-wheeler through, sideways. The new bill would have given the state ethics commission the authority (1) to seal the records of some cases involving politicians, effectively hiding them from the public, and (2) to waive late fees for politicians and lobbyists who don’t meet state reporting requirements.

When the modified bill came up for a vote on the House side, Rep. David Knight (R), like Bulloch in the Senate, kept  his lips sealed with regard to the changes. Reportedly, he also refused to take questions from his peers.

The re-written bill met a crushing the defeat, 143-25 (11:08 pm).

What happened in the hour between Senate passage and the House vote?

According to the AJC:

Within minutes of the Senate vote, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had posted what happened on Twitter and Facebook; good-government lobbyists in the hall figured out what was going on; political bloggers picked up on it.

According to Baxter:

What was happening, pretty much in real time with the vote, was the spreading awareness across the House floor of Twitter dispatches by the AJC’s James Salzer and Peach Pundit’s Charlie Harper (and perhaps others I’m not aware of). The measure had been put in the internet sunshine, and the reaction was very speedy.

What I could find to document those two claims:

• Peach Pundit (2,389 followers) has one tweet that was shared twice; it contained a link to what Harper had written about the vote, which has lots of comments. Harper’s timeline shows no tweets about HB 875.
• According to Twitter, Salzer’s (203 followers) tweet was not shared.
• Nothing I can find on the AJC Facebook page.
• Jim Galloway (6,544 followers), another AJC journalist, filed an alert on Twitter that was shared four times.
• Thomas Adams shared a not-recorded-by-Twitter retweet of PeachPundit.

There was other opposition that AJC and Baxter did not mention: Debbie Dooley, a coordinator for the Georgia Tea Party Patriots, “frantically” lobbied against the bill.

I think it’s pretty safe to say that had there not been a heads-up in the digital information space that the bill could well have sailed through the House as easily as it did through the Senate. Would there have been enough post-session grief for the governor to decline his signature? Who knows.

What a despicable way to get to sine die:

• First, ”[t]he chairman of the ethics commission, Kevin Abernethy, said he was never consulted on the bill.”
• Second, neither legislative leader told his peers about the substantive changes in a very minor bill.
• Third, the bill languished for a month after being passed by the House, and then the Senate voted on it twice the last day of the session!

Chalk one up for the good guys, and, perhaps, another one for social. And let’s not forget the political reporters on the scene, reporting the news that needed to be shared.

Cross-posted at TheModerateVoice; follow me on Twitter!

For searches, start with advanced search.

The pattern for the search-based feed is

• http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=search%20term
• http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=search%20terms

You can copy and paste the relevant search terms from the URL of the search query if you are using a complex search. For example, here is the URL for @scobleizer (from this account) and Google (all of these words): https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/google%20from%3Ascobleizer

The feed for this search:

• http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=search%20google%20from%3Ascobleizer
• http://search.twitter.com/search.rss?q=search%20google%20from%3Ascobleizer

For an RSS feed of an individual’s timeline:

• http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/userID.rss
• Example: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/kegill.rss

If you want to keep a record of your (or someone else’s) personal favorites:

• http://twitter.com/favorites/userID.rss
• http://twitter.com/favorites/kegill.rss

Finally, to create an RSS feed for a Twitter list, this is the syntax:

• http://api.twitter.com/1/userID/lists/Twitter-List-Name/statuses.atom
• http://api.twitter.com/1/kegill/lists/seattlewomen/statuses.atom

Read the article at Storify! No embeds in WP.com sites yet. (I need to migrate!)

And which I can’t embed cuz I’m on WP.com and TheGuardian doesn’t have shortcodes.

The world has changed a lot in my lifetime. I typed on an IBM selectric when I was in journalism school. Shot stills with a heavy 35mm Nikon. Used xacto knives and wax to paste up newspapers and magazines … and that was cutting edge because it was cold type!

This is part of TheGuardian’s ongoing series on Open Journalism.

:: Talk to me on Twitter!
:: Circle me on Google+
:: Like me on Facebook

According to the Congressional Research Service, the Research Works Act (HR 3699, emphasis added) would have prohibited

a federal agency from adopting, maintaining, continuing, or otherwise engaging in any policy, program, or other activity that: (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any ["research funded in whole or in part by a federal agency"] without the prior consent of the publisher; or (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the author’s employer, assent to such network dissemination.

The proposed legislation contradicted the National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy (2008) which requires that NIH-funded researchers submit their manuscripts to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central “no later than 12 months after the official date of publication.”

This boneheaded effort is the polar opposite of the tact being taken in Europe, where 19 research libraries are making 5 million digital objects freely accessible.

In the most amazing example of flip-flopping that I’ve seen lately, the bill sponsors — Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA, elected in 2000) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY, elected in 1992) — issued this statement (emphasis added):

As the costs of publishing continue to be driven down by new technology, we will continue to see a growth in open-access publishers. This new and innovative model appears to be the wave of the future… The American people deserve to have access to research for which they have paid. This conversation needs to continue, and we have come to the conclusion that the Research Works Act has exhausted the useful role it can play in the debate.

Useful role in what debate?

Academics from around the world have been protesting:

More than 7,400 researchers, including several in Canada, publicly declared they would not publish in Elsevier journals or peer review papers for those journals, or do editing work for them as part of a “Cost of Knowledge” boycott launched in January. The researchers normally provide those services for free to scieintific journal publishers.

Others opposing the legislation: the American Library Association (ALA) and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Late last year, danah boyd ranted against the “corporatization and manipulation of the knowledge” (and indirectly indicted the tenure process). The comments on her post are are worth reviewing. Like this one:

The choice is simple either you are for promoting scholarship and knowledge as a public good or you are trying to privately benefit from locking away knowledge. So be honest, when you say, it’s about tenure, what you really mean is it’s about my own personal monied interests (my mortgage) and be honest that that is what you are picking.

At the same time that Reed Elsevier backed off the federal legislation, it pledged to lower prices for mathematics scholars:

Our target is for all of our core mathematics titles to be priced at or below US$11 per article (equivalent to 50-60 cents per normal typeset page) by next year, placing us below most University presses, some societies and other commercial competitors…. To make clear that we are committed to wider access, we have made the archives of 14 core mathematics journals open, from four years after publication, back to 1995, the year when we started publishing digitally. All current and future papers featured in these journals will become free to read, for subscribers and non subscribers alike.

Is the leopard changing spots or tossing the dog a bone?

I think it’s the later.

This isn’t the first time major publishing interests have tried to block open access to taxpayer-funded research. In two successive sessions (2008 and 2009), Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) introduced the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, reportedly at the behest of the Association of American Publishers.

From 2002-2011, Reed Elsevier executives contributed $306,550 to House candidates. Of this $13,000 went to Conyers. Over the same period, Maloney took in $41,050 ($11,00 – 2004-2007; $13,550 – 2008-2009; $16,500 – 2010-2011).

However, Elsevier money doesn’t explain Issa’s support for the bill. Inexplicably, Issa claimed the bill did nothing to block open access:

@timoreilly I understand your question, but
HR 3699 does nothing to cut off access to federal funded research data. #opendata #openscience—
Darrell Issa (@DarrellIssa) January 05, 2012

We’re seeing yet another information industry, structured in a monopolistic or oligopolistic fashion, struggle with the destabilizing effect of Moore’s law and its cousins: every year, processing power gets cheaper, data storage gets cheaper, bandwidth gets cheaper. The fixed costs of the publishing system cannot be spread over a predictably comfortable number of printed units. Instead, every copy after the first one can be had for free. That’s the nature of a public good, not a capitalistic one.

I called this a short victory lap for a reason. This bill represents a skirmish in a long war that has no end in sight.

Note: Rep. Maloney has been a sponsor of three bills that were signed by the President in her almost 20 years in the House; Rep. Issa has none to his name for his 10+ years. thomas.loc.gov – multi-Congress search

Reed Elsevier owns Lexis Nexis and Variety magazine; Elsevier publishes 27 scientific journals, including The Lancet, and owns 15 book imprints, including Academic Press and Morgan Kauffman. I authored a chapter in a MK book being published this spring; I agreed to write it more than a year ago, before I realized the connection.

Image: Open Access UK

:: wiredpen permalink
:: Follow me on Twitter!

Their origin is a legend, passed along by Cicero. Greek poet Simonides (c.556-c.468 BC) demonstrated a feat of recall that jumpstarted the theory. He had attended a banquet, where he presented a poem. Afterwards, he went outside, which saved him when the roof collapsed, killing the other guests. Simonides was able to identify the bodies by using visual recall, who sat where during the banquet.  

[Simonides] inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty [of memory] must select places and form mental images of the things they wish to remember and store those images in the places, so that the order of the places will preserve the order of the things, and the images of the things will denote the things themselves, and we shall employ the places and images respectively as a wax writing-tablet and the letters written on it. (Cicero, De Oratore, II, lxxxvi – translation: Sutton & Rackham, 1942).

Even though I learned about mnemonics when I worked with the Dale Carnegie program in the 80s and 90s, I wasn’t curious enough to ask how Carnegie developed the tips we taught our students. Given my fascination with the brain (I have been reading and thinking about about the brain for at least 20 years), I’m a little surprised at my ignorance.

How did I discover it today?

I’m reading Connectome: How the brain’s wiring makes us who we are by @SebastianSeung. He was on the Microsoft campus last week, and Mike snagged a signed copy of his book. On page 87, while discussing synaptic chains, he writes:

The ancients already knew the paradoxical fact that remembering more information is often easier than remembering less. Orators and poets exploited this fact in a mnemonic technique called the method of loci. To memorize a list of items, they imagined walking through a series of rooms in a house and finding each item in a different room. The method may have worked by increasing the redundancy of each item’s representation.

This explains why teachers often use seating charts; we can (relatively) quickly associate a name with a physical space. The more tricky task is linking the name to the visual quirkiness that is a person, especially if we encounter said person in another environment.

When I was 17, I was in a contest (I represented 4-H; my antagonist was a guy from the FFA) to learn the names of a bus load of high school kids en route from Georgia to New Orleans for a national conference. I unconsciously learned the names in association — pairs of students, what they were wearing, where they sat on the bus. As I recall, I “won” the contest — but I don’t remember if the recitation of names occurred before we piled out of the bus at the end of that first day’s journey or if we had to name everyone at the dinner that night. If it were the later, I’m doubly impressed with my younger self!

One of the promises of the Dale Carnegie course is an improved ability to remember names. Students learn how to fashion mental pictures (association) and the importance of repetition. Carnegie suggests several repetitions on initial introduction, along with fashioning an exaggerated picture to associate the name. Baker, for example, is easy. Here’s the picture I would draw for students as I demonstrated the technique:

Hi, my name is Kathy Gill. To help remember my name, visualize a tawny cat leaping onto a table top. On the table top, there is an open fish bowl. The tawny cat reaches her paw into the fish bowl, trying to catch a fish for an afternoon snack. Cat = Kathy. Fish = Gill.

We also taught ordered associations, creating vivid memory pictures in a 1-2-3 order and then tying the things to be remembered to the associated story.

1. Run
2. Zoo
3. Tree
4. Door
5. Hive
6. Sick
7. Heaven
8. Gate
9. Wine
10. Den
11. Football Eleven
12. Shelf
13. Hurting
14. Courting
15. Lifting
16. Licking
17. Leavening
18. Waiting
19. Pining
20. Plenty
21. Dueling Gun

For example, “run” represents this picture: A thoroughbred race horse is thundering down the track, dirt flying, stirrups bouncing. What you want to remember is perched in the saddle atop this half-ton beast. Contrast that with leavening, number 17, which is freshly kneaded bread dough, slowly rising in the oven; what you want to remember pops out of the dough. Not nearly as active or colorful, that picture.

It’s probably not a surprise that the first 10 are easier for me to remember today than the second. First, the rhyme is better. Second, so is the imagery, at least for my brain! And except for teaching the class, I have rarely tried to remember more than 5-6 items. That, too, explains why the higher order numbers are harder for me to envision today, a lack of repetition.

The key lesson: vivid stories are more memorable and repeating the associative pattern facilitates recall.

These two mnemonics reflect one of the theories in Seung’s book: that repetition strengthens (thickens) the ties between neurons and thus improves access to the memory.

Another technique we learned in the Dale Carnegie course was a memory stack; we demonstrated this technique in the introductory, get-you-to-sign-up-for-the-class, workshop.

Think, for a moment, about the 13 original colonies. Can  you name them? More importantly, can you name them in the order in which they signed the Declaration of Independence?

It’s been more than 30 years since I learned this, and probably 15 since I taught the course, but the memory stack is so vivid that I can still answer “yes.”

1. Imagine a delicate china plate, thrown into the ground, standing on edge
2. Stuck through its middle is a large #2 pencil
3. Precariously balanced on the pencil is  a Jersey cow, bell dangling
4. Sitting cross-legged between the cow’s horns is King George, wearing a huge crown glinting with precious gems
5. He has a cut on his forehead, from where the crown slipped while he got himself onto the cow, and the cut is connected with a band-aid
6. The weight of the crown is giving him a headache, so he is holding a mass of ice to his head
7. Embedded in the mass of ice is a carousel merry-go-round
8. As the merry-go-round spins round-and-round, it expels a cargo liner headed south
9. Teetering on the bow of the cargo liner is a gigantic smoked ham…
10. … wrapped in the sheet music to “Carry me back to Old Virginia”
11. The ham is the foundation for the Empire State Building, which is wobbling (sea legs) as the ship cuts through the sea
12. Balanced on the pinnacle of the Empire State Building is another cargo liner, but this one is headed north
13. On the back rail of the northbound cargo liner, talons clasped, is a Rhode Island Red rooster, crowing as the sun rises

    The states: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island

The more vivid the pictures (and the verbs), the easier it is to recall the stack.

Each examples demonstrates the counter-intuitive truth: it’s easier to remember “more” than “less.” Rote memorization — whether you’re trying to remember that list of states in chronological order or the things your S.O. wants you to pick up at the grocery store on the way home from work or, especially, the words of a speech — is notorious for letting us down.

Seung is on an ambitious journey to understand why this is so, from the somewhat straightforward calculus of how memory might work to the not-at-all-straightforward understanding of how genes and experiences interact to shape individuals, making me and you.

Highly recommended. Here’s his 2010 TED Talk:

:: wiredpen permalink
:: Follow me on Twitter!
:: Cross-posted at TheModerateVoice