#and we ask them to identify a research question or problem to investigate and label the independent and dependent variables

[voidartisan]

being an online TA really does keep you on your toes because somehow, every semester, without fail, students will independently and confidently invent new and exciting ways to misinterpret even the most basic written directions

[fluffnstuffq]

We all know that the “kin for fun” trend is bad. 

Recently, however, the question of “why is it bad?” has risen in prominence, and thus I’d like to give my two cents on the matter. I initially wanted to give a rehash of the whole “this is a community which has been around for decades, please don’t appropriate its terms because you don’t know what you’re talking about” spiel.. though I know that’s been repeated endlessly to no avail. 

Dozens of times I’ve tried to explain that, though I’ve often been faced with the “words change” or “it’s just a game, it harms no one” argument.

So I’m taking a more personal approach.

I don’t know if my anecdotes will change anyone’s mind, but if anyone in the “kin for fun” community sees this and actually reads through it, I implore you to try to listen to genuine otherkin, do some research, and find other terms that better suit you.

Beware, long rambling anecdote under the cut.

It is hard to believe that, a mere 8 months ago, I was new to the otherkin community. 

I’d been reading about and researching otherkinity in depth for as long as a year prior, though it was as recently as May 2020 upon which I took my own first step into evaluating my own experiences, creating an otherkin oriented side blog, and formally taking the plunge into what I’d initially assumed, from fun “kin assign ask games” or “no doubles drama”, to be a trend.

While I quickly versed myself in the original, serious and introspective parts of the community, I had my fair share of run-ins with those of the “kinnie/kin for fun crowd”. One such experience, over the course of about two-three months, forever left an impression on the way I view the community (and the problems within it) as a whole.

Without naming names, some of the individuals we encountered turned out to be... the practical embodiment of some of the worst facets of this community.

They were the prime example of the misguided “kinnie” mindset. Dead-set on fitting under the ‘kin label, though unwilling to do any research on their own. Faking out of control, dramatic shifts to seem more “valid” to genuine otherkin (more on that later). Willing to go as far as picking traits from other people’s original characters to “customize” their “kinsonas” perfectly. 

However, aside from their merely misguided attempts to fit in (which could’ve been easily fixed if not for the stubborn kinnie mindset), the most scathing of their actions highlighted some major issues of the “kin for fun” side.

In just a few months, we had our identities stomped on and treated like nothing more than a game. 

You see, the “kinnie” mindset is not self contained. It is almost impossible to maintain this mindset and respect the involuntary, deeply personal nature of otherkin history, due both to widespread misinformation/trends, as well as the common plague of stubborn ignorance of definitions.

In most cases we’ve seen, once one steps fully into the mindset that their own kintypes are nothing more than a game or an act, they begin to at the very least subconsciously view others’ experiences the same way. 

This is obviously not the case for all those who take on alterhuman identities by choice (ex: copinglinking). However, in taking on the “kin for fun” label, one immediately disrespects the identities of others by appropriating and bending terms with a history to fit themself. 

And once one establishes that they lack care or concern for the already, dare I say, endangered terms once meant to foster a sense of community and understanding, of shared experiences... that person already predisposes themself to spiraling into greater disrespect and ignorance of the identities of others.

The individuals that we encountered, like many others of this mindset, used their so-called “kins” for the sole purpose of feeling validated, for looking “cool” and as leverage to get their way. Because it was nothing more than roleplay and a brief interest to them, they often treated others’ kintypes as something that could be similarly discarded/”turned off” or reset. As if others’ kintypes were nothing more than characters which didn’t deserve respect.

Exotrauma and otherwise painful memories, while stressful and sometimes nightmare inducing for us, were nothing more than fodder for outlandish “story ideas” and “angst” for them. 

In the cases of these individuals faking shifts, they often acted in ways threatening and even triggering to those around them; though because it was just a show for them, they failed time and time again to recognize the negative impact their violent “shifts” had on others. 

They had no restraint, for both their own actions and the fearful/concerned reactions of others were just harmless roleplay in their eyes. (I do feel like..  even roleplay should have boundaries if the events of a story upset the people participating, and the notion that anything goes, even at the expense of someone else’s comfort.. it just gives very uncomfortable “fiction does not affect reality” vibes. Though, that’s a story for another time).

As our experiences weren’t real to them and never had been, they often conflated us with the “canon characters”, like we and many others they interacted with were nothing more than toys to fixate on, change and push “headcanons” onto, and test the limits of.

And because they didn’t care to learn, because individuals such as these continued to remorselessly fall deeper into the rabbit hole of “I do whatever I want/I don’t care to learn otherwise”, the lack of consideration grew more severe.

Those who “kin for fun” may certainly be experiencing.. something, I will not discount that assertion. Whether copinglinking, a hearttype, or merely a fictionflicker/cameo shift. However, it’d be disingenuous to say that it is harmless for them to continue to warp and pick at terms that do not and will never fit them. For every joke, every dozens-long “coping-kinlist”, every admittance of “haha I was never a serious kin”, they all do the same in spreading misinformation. 

As I see more and more people self-identifying as “copinglink, but using the kin title because it sounds better”, even if calling oneself “a non-serious kinnie”, one wonders... why use those terms if you know they do not fit? Why encroach upon communities of bittersweet memories, of aching homesickness, of involuntary nonhumanity, only with the intention of putting on an act?

Why fight so hard, when directly told and shown how “kin for fun” actively tears apart the already dwindling otherkin community on this platform? Why cling so hard to words that are not yours, why force change upon the definitions of words meant to be a safe haven for those searching for understanding? Why paint “serious otherkin” as dangerous gatekeepers, sufferers of clinical lycanthropy, or those merely suffering from delusions/hallucinations?

Because of those who “kin for fun”, I was initially steered away from investigating my own identity; I’d only seen the jokes, the toxic “kin drama”, the cringe blogs and factkin and “kinning”. Because of “kin for fun”, it took me over a year to come to terms with my own alterhumanity, in all of its facets.

Because of “kinnies”, my fears are proven time and time again that I will come across someone who views my identity as roleplay at best and “childish, a phase, character theft” at worse. Because of “kinnies” and the mindset they’ve fostered, time and time again someone steals my memories, my experiences, my identity, justifying it as creating their own version, like an AU of an AU.

Because of “kinnies”, time and time again I’ve been told to “stop taking things so seriously, it’s just for fun” when complaining about my identity being minimized. I’ve been told that “kinnies”, despite appropriating an already existing community, are the “normal ones”, the “sane ones”, the “good ones” who don’t really believe in all that they boast. 

Some have even told me that it doesn’t matter at all, for all they can see is a trend with no real hold over their identity in the longrun. “It won’t matter in ten years”, they say. 

Perhaps not for them, long after their interest in the “trend” has faded. But for me and countless other genuine otherkin? In ten years I will still be Blixer from Just Shapes and Beats, I will still be an unnamed creature of woods and starlight and faded memories of golden lanterns, I will still be otherkin, and I will still carry the scars of my identity being torn to shreds and thrown into my face like dirt.

I cannot run from my kintypes and never could, even when I was afraid of them. “Kinnies”, in most cases, hardly believe my identity really exists.

What do they believe, then? What are they trying to achieve, scrubbing away the less “aesthetically pleasing”, fluffy bits of this community? What good does it do them to take meaningful, personal words to describe an identity that they can shed at the drop of a hat if it is “problematic” or boring at the end of the day?

One can smile and nod and say that, despite “kinning for fun”, they still respect otherkinity as a whole. And I say, in most cases, that reassurance is hollow. You have already stolen our words, you have already spread misinformation.

This has stumbled into rambling territory, so I leave a few questions, honest, genuine questions.

I ask those who “kin for fun”, what is the allure of words that you have stolen? What is the allure of having the blood of a shattered community on your hands?

As many others have said before, you may find a place in the greater alterhuman community. We have terms for you, as well as many other specific experiences.

Why fight so hard to steal our haven, to push us out of our own spaces, when your own words are waiting for you with open arms?

Words change, yes, but why fight so hard to change them at the expense of others?

[jessicajonesrp]

Trish the spymaster

 

It wasn’t very difficult for Trish to get into Phillip Jones’s apartment. For one thing, he didn’t live in an area of the city where there were lobbies with doormen and security; in fact, the set up could hardly be called an “apartment” so much as a “motel that allows prolonged habitation.” Trish was almost disappointed at how little ninja skills she had to use to get into the place. It almost wasn’t worth the all black clothing and piling all her hair into a ski cap, in effort to avoid recognition. And also, because she figured that was a look ninjas would use, minus throwing stars.

She got his address easily enough from Jessica; she had simply asked her for it, stating something about if he could eventually be integrated as part of their Heroes for Hire company, she will need all his contact and demographic information. Jessica had voiced no suspicions and had texted it over. By the time Luke let her know when he and Phillip had headed out together to shop for work clothes, Trish was already lingering outside the building, having had a cab drop her off a block away over an hour ago.

 

His ”apartment” was on the second story with an outside door, much to Trish’s disappointment. She had hoped to have to make her way in through a skylight in the roof or at least have to climb upside a fire escape or the side of a wall or something that would take a lot of effort and sound cool to recount to Luke. Instead, she got the door open with little more than a few seconds and a credit card- some security he had. Either he had really shitty finances and could afford nothing better, or Phillip simply felt confident enough in his own safety that he didn’t feel the need to put out any more effort to secure himself and his belongings.

The motel room didn’t look like much, at first glance. King size bed, neatly made, and as Trish surveyed his belongings, she noticed that Phillip was very organized and neat; until she went into the closed bathroom door to see his personal hygiene items lined up along the sink and inside the tub, she would have thought that no one was staying there at all. With gloved hands she opened the closet door, noticing that his shoes were lined up inside, his clothes hung up, and he had no personal belongings of notice. His dresser drawers contained more clothing. She was beginning to grow frustrated until she found the laptop computer in the bottom dresser drawer.

Her hopes rising, Trish opened it delicately and still gloved, attempted to boot it up. It was password protected, but after only one miss, she got the password- Jessica. Her heart sank as she quickly began to look through his documents and search history, her heart beating faster when she found two documents in particular of interest. One was a folder bearing Jessica’s name as its title, and the other was titled “People of focus.”

Aware of the limited amount of time she had, Trish quickly began to open the documents, snapping pictures with her cell phone of each page that looked as though it were remotely in connection to the strange incidents occurring recently. She found a third folder that was labeled simply “history” and opened that as well, quickly discovering that it contained both medical records and what appeared to be an entire social service file in regards to Phillip. Thinking quickly, she opened up her own email on the computer, attached the files and documents in an email to her own self as quickly as the size of the files and documents would allow, and sent all the information to herself to look over more closely later. Logging out of the email and then deleting the necessary steps from the browser history, she then put the computer back carefully,  exactly as she had found it, and locked the door behind herself as she left.

She waited until she was a few blocks away and had called for a driver before she texted Luke. “Mission complete.”

Once back at the penthouse, she opened up the files and went through them thoroughly, her brow furrowing as she read along. Somehow, Phillip had managed to access not only his own medical records and social service file, but also Jessica’s medical records from when she had been hospitalized. The names of the doctors mentioned in Jessica’s files sounded familiar to Trish, but she wasn’t sure why. He also had Jessica’s police records for her arrests, news paper articles in reference to her, and articles referencing her adoption by Dorothy Walker.

Obviously, he had kept tabs on her- more than Jessica kept tabs on herself. Trish was pretty sure even Jessica didn’t have access to her medical records from over fifteen years ago.

She opened the file on Phillip’s own records and noticed almost immediately that the names of the doctors mentioned on his records were familiar- because she had just read them, mentioned already in Jessica’s. That made sense, that the same doctors who treated Jessica in her coma and while hospitalized would also have worked with Phillip, especially as they would have initially been in the same hospital and had arrived at the same time from the same accident. Jessica, she knew, had eventually been transferred out to another hospital, under Dorothy’s directives and finances- most likely to further separate her from Phillip.

Trish had long suspected, although Jessica refused to do the research necessary to confirm, that Jessica had not gotten her supernatural abilities as a result of her car accident, but rather possibly because of experimental surgeries or medications used on her while she was in a coma by the doctors treating her. If this were true, and the same doctors had also treated Phillip, did that mean that they may have also experimented- and given supernatural abilities- to Phillip?

She quickly googled the names, and her blood went cold. The doctors mentioned in both siblings’ files had all died within the past few months- each from mysterious fires. The very mysterious fires that Jessica was now investigating.

Sick with adrenaline, she skimmed through the file that had been labeled “persons of interest,” dreading what she might find. She wasn't surprised to find articles saved about herself, with a focus on scandals from years back. It wasn’t long before her horrible suspicion was confirmed. Phillip had typed a list of names, under which he detailed information as to the person’s current profession, address, contact information, and other identifying details. She recognized the doctors as the first three on the list. The next contained several names she did not recognize but which she immediately noted to be described by Phillip as foster parents and social workers- apparently, all associated with him in his eight years of foster care.

But the final names at the bottom of the list was what made Trish have to put down her phone and turn away, taking deep breaths. Her mother’s name was typed, along with the address of her acting coach studio and its telephone number. And the last name on the list, punctuated by a question mark and no other identifiers, was her own name. Patricia Walker.

Her hand was shaking as she picked up the phone, texting Luke again. “We have a problem. Huge problem. Call me when you’re alone.”

 

[tlatollotl]

This diorama at the American Museum of Natural History was amended in a way that allows museumgoers to see the historical inaccuracies it perpetuates.Credit Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

On the first floor of the American Museum of Natural History, a diorama depicts an imagined 17th-century meeting between Dutch settlers and the Lenape, an Indigenous tribe inhabiting New Amsterdam, now New York City. It was intended to show a diplomatic negotiation between the two groups, but the portrayal tells a different story.

The scene takes place in what is now known as the Battery, with ships on the horizon. The tribesmen wear loincloths, and their heads are adorned with feathers. A few Lenape women can be seen in the background, undressed to the waist, in skirts that fall to midcalf. They keep their heads down, dutiful. In front of a windmill are two fully clothed Dutchmen, one of them resting a firearm on his shoulder. The other, Peter Stuyvesant, colonial governor of New Netherland, is graciously extending his hand, waiting to receive offerings brought by the Lenape.

Critics have said the diorama depicts cultural hierarchy, not a cultural exchange. Museum officials said they had been aware of these implications for a while, and now they have addressed them.

The narrative, created in 1939, is filled with historical inaccuracies and clichés of Native representation, said Bradley Pecore, a visual historian of Menominee and Stockbridge Munsee descent. “These stereotypes are problematic, and they’re still very powerful. They shape the American public’s understanding of Indigenous people.”

About a year ago, the museum asked Mr. Pecore to help solve the diorama problem. Should it be removed entirely? Could the protective glass be temporarily taken out, and what was behind it altered?

Lauri Halderman, the museum’s vice president for exhibition, said, “We could have just covered it over.” Instead, museum officials decided on a more transparent approach. “What was actually more interesting was not to make it go away,” Ms. Halderman continued, “but to acknowledge that it was problematic.”

The solution offers a lesson in the changing nature of history itself. And it’s written on the glass.

The diorama, in Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, depicts a meeting between the Dutch colonial governor, Peter Stuyvesant, and representatives of the Lenape tribe.Credit Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

While the scene remains intact, 10 large labels now adorn the glass, summarizing various issues. They were carefully chosen after a research process that took most of 2018. The largest one, visible from a distance, invites visitors to “reconsider this scene.”

The labels say, for instance, that if the scene had been historically accurate, the Lenape would have been dressed for the occasion in fur robes and adornments that signified leadership positions. Canoes would have been seen in the water next to the European ships. These were vital to colonial trade, providing access to items found further inland, where the larger ships could not navigate. The women did not wear impractical skirts. Further, some are likely to have been part of the negotiations, as women in Lenape societies (past and present) typically hold leadership roles. While only Stuyvesant was originally identified, the new labels also take note of Oratamin, a respected leader of the Hackensack, a Munsee branch of the Lenape. The list goes on, but it is not complete; there’s only so much room on the glass.

“One thread that runs through this work is understanding who gets to tell the story in museums,” Ms. Halderman said.

Along with Ms. Halderman, Mr. Pecore worked on the project with the museum’s curator of North American ethnology, Peter Whiteley, who said the diorama’s problems came up early in his tenure, which began in 2001. Asked the cost of the project, a museum representative estimated the amount at “tens of thousands of dollars,” but officials did not provide a precise figure.

The diorama is one of four in the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, unveiled shortly after the president’s death in 1919. The others honor the president’s life and conservation efforts. The New Amsterdam scene was meant to honor his Dutch ancestry, although Mr. Roosevelt was not a direct descendant of Stuyvesant himself. Mr. Pecore said the presence of Indigenous people in this display signifies their role in history. “You can only be so American without Native Americans,” he said. “For me, that’s the reason it’s in the Roosevelt memorial.”

Instead of replacing the diorama, the museum had researchers investigate the issues and create explanations of what was wrong with the portrayals. They are posted on the glass.Credit Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

A new panel placed on the wall near the diorama addresses an often-overlooked question: Where are the Lenape now?

Before the arrival of the Dutch, around 30,000 Lenape lived in their homeland, territory that is now the northeastern United States. Forced to move repeatedly over several generations, the roughly 16,000 remaining tribe members now live across Canada and in Kansas, Oklahoma and Wisconsin. The panel shows a map with arrows starting in the regions they had to leave, and pointing to their new locations.

It was important to Mr. Pecore that the exhibition signal the continuing effects of colonization, as well as correct the stereotypical representations. “I’ve walked through different museums, and when you see Native people, they’re in the corner playing with stones. We never arrive to be fully modern humans.”

The changes come after three years of protests by members of Decolonize This Place, a movement urging institutions to acknowledge the struggles of Indigenous peoples, and other groups asking the museum to change demeaning displays.

“There’s no question that the controversies around the memorial quickened our attention,” said Lisa Gugenheim, a senior vice president for strategic planning at the museum.

Among the group’s requests was the removal of the statue in front of the museum showing Roosevelt on his horse, and the formation of an independent commission that would assess cultural representations across the museum.

Reassessing representations is, in part, the purpose of a current $14.5 million reconstruction of the Northwest Coast Hall, set to reopen next year. Showcasing Indigenous artifacts collected on an expedition, the gallery presented them as belonging to cultures stuck in time, immune to historical change. The updated exhibition will include contemporary practices and the lives of present-day descendants, and will contextualize the artifacts presented.

One of the best-known artifacts from the collection is what the museum calls the Great Canoe, displayed right outside the exhibit.

Ms. Gugenheim said that amending the Stuyvesant diorama, as opposed to removing it, created the opportunity for dialogue. “We’re revealing the making of the cake and not just the end of the process,” she said. “We’re inviting visitors to imagine themselves, why did we feel the need to update it? And of course that applies to teachers and kids, too.”

Alan Czemerinski was visiting recently when he spotted the labels from across the hall, and spent a few minutes reading them. “I probably would have walked by it otherwise,” he said. “It’s important to look back at historical representations and see what’s wrong.”

Another visitor, Alana Steinberg, said her experience was enhanced this way. “It’s interesting,” she said, “to see how cultural knowledge has changed over time.”

[indra-s-mann-blog]

Reincarnation and Life Extension

I'm sure some of you are curious because I'm a Lama though not working actively in that area at the moment. It is public knowledge lamas are reincarnates. I do have memories of past lives and I am older than I seem. The latter might also confuse people but I assure you science also has an expatiation for that; There are also superstitions around both reincarnation and long lived people.

Scientific people might argue against reincarnation but there are several studies. Science wise we have inborn instincts. There are several types of memory states. Instincts such as to walk, stop before falling off a cliff for example exist. So do parenting instincts, and instincts to problem solve to deal with situations. When we are cold we put on a sweater we don't jump into a cold lake and become colder.

Instinct Explained and Definition.

Instinct Theory of Motivation.

Instinct(Wikipedia).

Reflex(Wikipedia).

Reincarnation(Wikipedia).

Types of Memory.

Scientific Proof of Reincarnation:  Dr. Ian Stevenson's Life Work.

The Science of Reincarnation: UVA psychiatrist Jim Tucker investigates children’s claims of past lives.

In looking for diseases that affect memory and cognition they have found some relevant things in our DNA and as such there is possibility that memories could be passed or held by DNA. For various reasons people vary in what might be carried or passed that way.

Genetic Memory, DNA and Reincarnation.

Ancestors' Genetic "Memories" Could Be Passed On For 14 Generations.

Memories Can Be Inherited, and Scientists May Have Just Figured out How.

Can We Access the Memories of Our Ancestors Through Our DNA? We ask aphilosopher about the scientifically-debated concept of genetic memory.

Genetic Memory: How We Know Things We Never Learned.

Genetic memory - biology(Wikipedia)

If you look at the articles I've linked to it should better help you understand reincarnation. I will write in some of my posts about memories and experiences I've had. Some will be from current times, others the past, and some a past existence.

I worked on a variety of technologies including DNA machines for policing, military, court, and health. I also worked in research and due to my own health was the subject of some research studies. My health includes chimerism and other unusual things. Some of which were from other research projects into life extension, anti-aging and cryogenics.

One day I got an unusual phone call from a researcher working at a museum. They were processing old remains and a few new ones. The caller asked if I would do some testing with them to clear up something. I wondered why they would need to do that. They explained they had found a mummy and it's DNA was being used in part of a study of family lines of ancient peoples. That they put it in their database only to find that it matched me. I said given my family contains royals it is possible. They then said their results were unusual. Then told me they wondered if the skeleton was mixed up as it contained multiple DNA samples reflecting A, B, and O blood types with sibling DNA. Further that one of those matched the sample in the database for me by over 98% which shouldn't of been possible. I then told them I was a chimera and it runs in the family.

That still didn't explain such a high match. A few things could of explained it such as an attempt to clone or a classified file on a mission I worked on for the military. I told them I would look into it but security protocol wouldn't allow me to explain for the time being. I made contacts and checked a old secure log book. I had been in that area but not at that time. I then asked to examine the remains via a third party. A secure team then processed the remains with me away from it. The security group already having information on me medically. The remains were not of a clone attempt and false aging processes. Such things sometimes are found in antiquities fraud but not talked about publicly much. The team also verified other factors. Then they had some private conversations with the team that found the remains or looked into the history of their find and documentation. I was told it was me they found. This was a startling thing as it is a bit weird to be looking at your own remains in a museum.

Later I received a second call. This time it was one found in South America in an old temple. Same processes were done and again it verified it was me with a nearly identical match percentage as the other mummy from Africa. Other remains were accessed in a tomb in Asia that was a labelled and known tomb. This is because of historical rumours and family trees. Again a match was found. More followed as at the time I wasn't always using life extension methods. Then the remains processed and marked so that nobody could try to clone, replicate, etc because it was a odd situation. But it overall verified the lama line and what was known of my family tree. Memories I was questioned on very verified. Because of history having somethings on record some information would be useless because it is easily known. So they looked at memories I had which weren't documented in books. Things family or non public records might of mentioned or were lesser known information. Some information was verified through geographic, topographic, and other studies which provides information that most may not know.

My information was censored from public release as to their findings for safety and security reasons. I was not the only living person matched and they also had the findings hidden from public. There was indeed found twice that there were aged bones of some sort of clone of people. But in total they found 3 of us living in the one study and I knew of a few others that weren't included as they refused to allow that in the data and their documentation was put in a military secure area. It proved interesting as far as ending certain old political disputes and in verification of other things not meant for public disclosure. Also though hapgroups and such are disclosed to the general public. They seem to think certain groups are extinct and the study proved they were not. But had to not mention the fact of the true group dispersion over history. Another map exists that will be eventually made public once they settle some political issues.

DNA Identifies Origins of World's Oldest Natural Mummy: The 10,600-year-old 'Spirit Cave Mummy' is related to a Native American tribe in Nevada. ** Neanderthal Mitochondrial and Nuclear DNA.

DNA Testing on Cremated remains.

Scientists Prepare to Solve Mystery of Sumerian DNA.

Reincarnates sometimes pose a problem. Some have problems getting over past life issues and as such have problems in society or their own lives. Some people try to fake reincarnation. Faked remains(sometimes of a twin or using cloned, printed, or moulded materials) and stories, etc. Often these people are seeking attention for fame, money, or a following. They like power and attention. Natural reincarnates might want to tell their story or find people linked to their past lives or something else linked to it. But usually they don't want to be famous, draw a huge amount of attention, they aren't seeking to create a cult, or use it for business purposes(books, etc).

Authenticated lama's or saints usually quietly carry out duties they are expected to do. They get mentioned because sometimes press publish things on festivals or events. They tend to administrate budgets or management(running) of temples, review of practices, management of any businesses co owned by organizations, and may be advisers or diplomats. They often teach or sit on discussion panels or advisory organizations, often doing charitable work. They also have their private lives, private businesses, and family. Many serve in military, police, or medical fields and also sciences. Contrary to what some think there isn't a "choosing" ceremony to become a lama where a child picks over objects, identifies them, and then gets labelled a lama. That is nonsense. They occur in specific family lines, and usually show up at specific time lengths. The persons behaviour, preferences, beliefs, health, etc are well known. So are private stories of interactions with certain groups of people or friends. Much of that is not public though there is some public information on lamas that is generalized.

People have numerous times tried to fake being a lama and some families for preferential treatment have tried to falsely relate themselves to lamas(tv, politics, and industry have the same issues sometimes). When a suspected lama is found they run medical tests, background tests on the families, and other things. They also watch the child growing and usually don't say something until the child is over the age of 5. Each lama has a different deceleration age so saying all are judged by 5 is incorrect. Saying signs don't occur in an infant can be incorrect because they can. Lama's differ from normal reincarnates as they remember more and it stays with them.

Normal reincarnates remember their prior life or perhaps skip one and remember the one before their prior(so two back missing memories of a middle life). There is also the weird case of remembering a future life that hasn't occurred yet. Those have also been debated and researched in quantum physics. Some lamas have claimed to see their future not their history. I'm the type that remembers the past but has the potential to predict possible future outcomes. Though part of that was once my good science skills in math, physics, market and political trends, etc.

In my family I have to deal with several cultures and religions. Hindu, Buddhist, Islam, Saio, Orisa Ifa, Hogon, Dukun, Zoroastrian, Coptic Christian, Sikh, Atheists, and Agnostics. As such all groups had to reach their own conclusions regarding tests and each had their own criterias. Right now I am probably one of the oldest living humans on the planet. But that is for someone who has undergone life extension. Stories on old people don't always take that into consideration People also don't expect Atheist or Agnostic groups to have a criteria and keep a list. 

Manu(Wikipedia. I'm listed as 8 to 14 on the list as Savarni.  I also used Uttama and Hari.  Hari was used in the late 1800s.  Another family member is currently supposed be be handling things since the mid 1900s as I was busy.)

Harishchandra(Wikipedia - Some of this myth about me is right and some of it is nonsense.  I didn't have a bunch of wives but I helped and taught several women.)

Kshatriya(Wikipedia - Ruling, Military, and Police cast)

I'm the child on the left of the picture.  Sultan HB VIII. Known to my friends as Hari or Merpati(Dove) at the time. Next to me is actor Donnie Yen.  He has several Lamas in his family and another actor. Donnie is my step-relative. My twin brother is on the right side of the picture. The other two boys weren't supposed to be in the picture but threw a tantrum to be in it and take the seat. There was a conflict with Burma so to keep the peace we let them in the picture.

The Wikipedia page lists somethings wrong due to translation issues with the other people and calendar differences. Also the picture was taken more than once and had to be processed to lighten some areas because they claimed our skintone was too dark.

Islam(Wikipedia). ** Hadrat Âdam and blood groups.(my Blood Type is ABO - Synergistic chimera.  My twin brother A,B,O - Singularity Chimera.  My parents were AO and BO.)

Sakra(Wikipedia).

Zoroastrianism(Wikipedia).

Coptic Christians(Wikipedia).

Hogon - African Shaman(Wikipedia).

Dukun - Indonesian Shaman(Wikipedia).

Orisa Ifa - African Religion(Wikipedia).

Wu - Chinese Shaman(Wikipedia).

Saio - Japanese Shaman(Wikipedia).

Mu - Korean Shaman(Wikipedia).

Ancestor Woriship(Wikipedia).

If someone is making a claim they are a lama and that they used some item choosing method, etc be skeptical. The churches has a problem at one time of a lot of fakes that turned out to be criminals. Some of which had established themselves in the public eye and even had quietly been investigated by authorities(some taken to court based on religious and government identity theft). There currently are at least two people I'm aware of that are false lama's misrepresenting themselves to the public to gain freebie's, etc. People believing in them likely could be radicalized to commit crimes, etc based off of false beliefs, etc these people might instill while they still try to look "good."

As the Sakra Indra (Head of Buddhist and Hindu temples), family member of Mohamed, etc. I can appoint people to represent or manage things and could remove people or revoke their credentials. I've also sat on multi-faith councils on keeping, closing, re-purposing buildings, policy changes, etc. So in past I was made well aware of the problem people some of which tried to impersonate me. This caused some problem groups to attack me which was interesting given my family's connection to military and police.

Yogyakarta Sultanate(Wikipedia - Hamengkubuwono X is my ex husband.  Since annulment he has no claim to the throne as his title was through marriage.  His wife is one he married after me and had an affair with.  He was a special forces officer and she was someone I asked to stand in once for me for something.)

Military History of India in the Vedic Period.(Wikipedia - Miliary and police ruling caste.  No I’m not pro caste system I was for removal of it.  Leading, etc doesn’t require a caste system.)

Check out my video in an earlier post showing the history of SWAT and Policing.  That was the type of training my family had and I started training as a young child.  Just as I had done religious studies and other studies.  Though I liked sciences.

Reincarnation memories are studied in science. But genetics wise people should remember we have a certain number of genes and possible combinations. Someones genetics are likely to reoccur either in or outside of their immediate family tree(older branches). If a family becomes extinct so to speak. That doesn't mean that at some point their genetic combination won't happen again; causing a re-occurance of a tree. This happens for people that have absolutely no past life memories. Police have found DNA that sometimes shows unknown twins where one was given up for adoption, quietly raised separate, or kidnapped. Facial recognition has shown people not in a DNA database that resemble people that are in a database. Sometimes their DNA is similar and they have to investigate further why that might be.

There was some website around at one point that showed famous people vs their look a likes that were of different ethnic backgrounds. There is a black, Asian, and east Indian versions of Brad Pitt for example. Most people don't know that often it's a computer generated image being used in the movies. I did know a Chinese guy that was an actor in Asia that could pass for Brad Pitt and was used in some movies including photo realistic animation(he was also a voice actor and spoke multiple languages). The genes needed for resemblance have a higher re-occurance than the full profile including health issues, geographic location markers, etc.

As to my long life and studies into it and into anti-aging. These were not for the beauty industry or health industry at the time. The original studies were done for space travel. To travel very far we might need to use cryogenics or some other system that limits the effects of aging to be able to survive the many years of travel. Also the same methods used to survive that might help in some disaster to keep people alive. Later people started regarding it as useful to live longer for health and to remain young looking for beauty. But then this presented new problems in relation to population expansion, control, and resource use.

Life Extension. ** Life Extension: Science Fact or Science Fiction?

The Youth Pill: Scientists at the Brink of an Anti-Aging Revolution.

Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells, study finds.

Bioelectromagnetics(Wikipedia)

Chapter 17 - Repeated Electromagnetic Field Stimulation in Aging and Health

Bioelectromagnetic Healing, its History and a Rationale for its Use.

Cryogenics(Wikipedia).

Cryonics(Wikipedia).

Suspended Animation(Wikipedia).

Flexible Sex and Suspended Animation in Nematodes.

Antifreeze-Like Blood Lets Frogs Freeze and Thaw With Winter's Whims.

Fish that snoozes for YEARS without any food or water could help scientists crack suspended animation in humans.

We Finally Know How Water Bears Became So Damn Unkillable.

Facts About Tardigrades.

Why Is Turritopsis Dohrnii Called The Immortal Jellyfish?

The Immortal Jellyfish: Society has long misunderstood these spineless swimmers. Now they could unlock the keys to regeneration.

Dragon blood may help wounds heal faster.

The beneficial effects of honeybee-venom serum on facial wrinkles in humans.

The Chemical Compositions of Insect Venoms.

Venom As Medicine: How Spiders, Scorpions, Snakes, And Sea Creatures Can Heal.

Metamorphosis Definition and Types.

Developmental Biology. 6th edition: Metamorphosis: The Hormonal Reactivation of Development

Immunology: B Cell Development.

Phases of the cell cycle.

Blood Groups and Red Cell Antigens.

Difference Between Human Blood and Animal Blood.

Blood type - non-human(Wikipedia).

Xenotransfusion(Wikipedia).

Blood Substitute(Wikipedia).

The Lazarus phenomenon.

Hibernation, Hypothermia and a Possible Therapeutic "Shifted Homeostasis" Induced by Central Activation of A1 Adenosine Receptor (A1AR).

Hemophilia.

Genes and human diseases: Monogenic diseases.

Some of the research is becoming public but much of it isn't. My work was on telomere lengths, and cellular biology. It was useful in reducing appearance of age as well as lengthening lives. I studied hibernating animals, water bears, some species of fish, and jellyfish. I also was well knowledged in physics and knew the effects of fields on the body. I had worked on early MRI machine development and other technologies. As such I worked on a physics device to help with space travel in propulsion as well as in preserving the lives of crew. I also looked into medical botany and several other topics. Studies have been going on for over a hundred years. They were needed to have some length to prove or disprove how long their test subjects would live.

My full method for life extension and keeping young looking is not known to a single public group. It was divided up and a single process is only known to a closed non public authority. This is because of problems with some other problem people whose only focus is money or crime. There are some dangerous people involved in medicine and sciences. The government also to protect society, or its employees has to sometimes keep some information private. I was attacked in the medicine field years ago by people with anger over my wanting to cure things, keep them affordable, or not share some information(safety and privacy concerns).

Many long lived people and people that have undergone life extension legally undergo process to change their viewable information.  Their correct information shows in specialized government files that even some government workers can’t see as they would need a higher security level and a reason to know.  This means often peoples names are changed and their birth date. 

In my case ethnicity was also altered because I have vitiligo which changed me from black to brown, and then white.  I have complete/severe vitiligo which resulted in lighter hair and eyes as well.  Though I was greying and the anti-aging and longevity treatments reversed that.  My pigment issue was reversed for awhile but came back.  The avatar picture I’m using is re-aged more than once, eyes and skin darkened, and hairstyle changed(and darkened).  I also wear glasses all the time now and I’m greying again and looking much older.  I was already registered under more than one birth name back when I was originally born.  This is because my parents were from different countries and both mixed race.  So one of my names in Indian and the other African.  But I’m using an anglicized version of one of my titles as my official name.

I knew many long lived people in Pakistan, India, Africa, Asia, and Indonesia.  Several of them were over 100 but looked in their 50s.  After anti-aging and life extension became a fad again I knew several others also involved in research and they look like they are in their 20s or 30s even though the research dates back to the late 1800s and mid 1900s.  But that is the new research.  Earlier people had methods but also issues with problem people so destroyed information to prevent them from doing more horrible things.

[ohmyfoodnessme-blog]

Assignment Thirteen

In this assignment, you are going to listen to an audioclip taken from the radio series ‘The Food Programme’, where the host asks many questions regarding additives, salt, yeast and much more. This episode covers the ‘Clean Label question’, and whether manufacturers can switch to more natural ingredients. First, listen to the programme, then answer the questions below:

BBC 4 ‘The food Programme’ – The clean label question

What was the host looking at in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam? Who was the artist? What did it depict?

The host was looking at a still life of food. The artist of the still live was ‘Van Dijk’ and it depicted big chunky cheese, nice bread, grapes and apples, which made her really hungry.

Why would the old artists not recognize the items that us consumers have in their shopping carts as food?

They have very complex constructions and high-tech ingredients. The food we consume now isn’t as natural as the food they consumed and painted then.

What does society desire more? Convenient foods, natural foods or complex foods?

Society mostly desires natural food. But it should be convenient and inexpensive as well.

What is the ‘Clean Label’?

It is the direction they want to take product development. They are simplifying a list of ingredients and they are helping consumers to understand the ingredients that are used because the ingredients list can be quite complicated.

Look up Joanna Blythman. What is her profession? Which publication would you like to take a better look at, based on the title, presentation and topics?

– She is a British investigative food jounalist, a writer and a commentator on the British food chain.

– I would like to take a better look at ‘The Food Our Children Eat’, because I think it is really important children grow up with healthy eating patterns. In the past 1/2 generations, there are more and more people that pretty much only eat fast food. It is very important we will start preventing this.

“There were no more long lists of E-numbers, but in my opinion, they still tasted fake.” Do you think that producers of food items are secretly putting fake flavourings and synthetic dyes in their foods? Why do you think that?

I don’t think they secretly put those in. But I do think they kind of ‘hide’ them. They give the fake flavourings and synthetic dyes other names so it sounds less unhealthy. They also put things on the front like: ’30 percent less fat’ so people think they are eating something better, while actually, they put a lot of bad additives in it. The bad additives just seem to fade to the background because of how small they put it on the product labels. I think they do this because they want their products to taste well, but at the same time they also want a lot of people to eat/buy it. Lately people have been looking out more for unhealthy foods, and my ‘covering’ the unhealthy additives like that, it still looks healthy and people will keep buying it.

Read the following statements, are these true or false?

People will pay more for natural-looking items. True

Manufacturers put more natural ingredients in their foods. False

Misleading consumers is a common thing in the food industry. True

Give two reasons why the trades wouldn’t want to share their full ingredients lists with the world.

– There might be ingredients in the products that are really unhealthy, but they are necessary for the taste.

– If they would share all their ingredients, other people could start making the exact same products. They want to keep their ingredients secret so their products stay original.

“We make flavourings for those you want to mask.” – Joanna Blythman. Translate this to Dutch and give us the meaning of the citation.

“We maken smaakstoffen voor degene die je wilt maskeren.” By this citation, I think they mean they make flavourings to hide things and ingredients. With flavourings, it isn’t as obvious that something bad was added.

“Glucose syrup, which is quite controversial.” Why is glucose syrup, together with fructose syrups and corn syrups, controversial?

It is controversial because it is supposed to be healthier. But they put in a lot of syrups, which actually make products unhealthier.

Try to convert this list of ingredients completely to the ingredients that factories use in the making of cakes. If you don’t change it, tell us why using data as support for your choice.

Sugar

Flour

Peanuts

Butter

Eggs

Full-fat milk

Cream

Coconut shavings

Vanilla Beans

Vegetable oil, glucose syrup, glycerine, water, liquid egg (but only the white part) and most suprisingly: fruit and vegetable extract.

What are vanilla beans made of? Where can you find the crops that produce vanilla beans?

– Vanilla beans are made of: whole pod, powder, extract and vanilla sugar.

– The native country they were produced in is Mexico, but the largest productions are in Indonesia and Madagascar.

What is the negative side of using real vanilla extract?

Producing real vanilla extract is really expensive and time-consuming.

What are benchmarks?

A benchmark is a standard, which other products can be compared to.

Why did the author use the phrase “E is for additives” as the title of their book? What does it mean?

When E numbers were created, people were concerned about it instead of reassured. The book “E is for additives was supposed to clarify the reality of what was bulking out and flavoring our food. The author wanted to reassure people that the E numbers are just additives and that they were tested and have been approved.

Make a chart in the following format. Show us what Treat does to produce synthetic flavourings based on real essences.

  Process A: Analyse natural material from for example orange juice or orange peel and identify what substances the key components are which convince us that that is an orange flavor.

Process B: Take the key molecules out of the orange and produce them in a synthetic form.

Process C: Produce the key molecules in a synthetic form so that they are chemically identical with current nature.

Process D: Blend them together to get a convincing flavor and to use it for a whole range of materials.

What is the key natural molecule in orange flavourings?

The most important natural molecule in orange flavourings is limonene. The best part of the orange for flavouring is the shell where also a lot of limonene is found.

It is said that labels have never been as clean and transparent as they are now. Do you agree, knowing that many of the ingredients have such complex names that barely anyone knows what they are?

I don’t agree with that. It may be true that labels are clean and transparent like never before, but all the ingredients on the labels have such complex names that most of the people have no clue what is actually on the label. Furthermore, almost nobody knows about the whole production behind a complex name. When there is said on a label that there is a natural juice produced in it, you would say that it is good for you, but probably it also contains additives just like non-natural products. People may know a bit of a complex named ingredient, but they don’t know how it is really made.

Enzymes are allergenic? What reactions can enzymes cause when ingested by someone that reacts to them?

Enzymes are indeed allergenic. Enzymes carry out catalytic reactions within the body. There are also digestive enzymes that aid in the process of digestion. It is proved that specific enzymes used in bakeries can cause an allergenic reaction.

Why is inhalation of allergenics more effective than swallowing them?

When you inhale allergens, it is more effective than swallowing them because they are immediately absorbed into your body. If you swallow allergens, your body often first has to break down the substance before the allergens are released as loose molecules in your body.

Why do researchers worry for the safety of consumers?

There hasn’t been any research before according to researchers in the podcast. Consumers can inhale allergenic enzymes for example from bakery products what can cause problems for their health.

Would you still trust the people that make your food after hearing this podcast?

I would still trust the people that make my food after hearing this podcast. I know that so many products contain additives etc. that you can’t avoid eating them. I just accept the fact that our food is going through a whole production process with strange added substances, but never something bad happened to me because of food. So that’s why I trust them.

What happened during the scandals of BSE and horsemeat? What was the main problem and who caused it?

Some supermarkets had products where beef would be produced in. But instead of beef, the products contained horsemeat. The problem is that it is food fraud, people thought that they ate beef but it wasn’t. The problem was caused in Romania where the meat comes from. They send it to the meat processor Spanghero, who send it to the Comigel subsidiary’s factory in Luxembourgh who said they didn’t know that the meat was coming from abroad.

Why would consumers value convenience over anything else?

Nowadays, people are so busy that they don’t have enough time left to make a meal or bake something. People work more and harder which gives them a higher income. They have less time to cook by themselves instead of preparing a whole meal. They also have more money to spend, and with less time, it’s easier to buy meals which you can put in the microwave or to go eat somewhere else.

Why is it condescending to say “People with low incomes should learn how to cook”?

In other words it is said that people with a lower income should cook because they don’t have enough money to buy food that they can easily prepare. But also people with a lower income are able to buy that kind of food. They are only not always able like people from ‘higher classes’ to buy food that is produced in a more natural way what would be better for you.

After listening to this podcast, explain the title.

In the podcast ‘The Food Programme’, they talk about everything what is dealing with food. The title is very general by just saying ‘food’, but that is because every aspect of food, from the production to the consumers and the additives etc is said in this podcast.

[kathleenseiber]

Ancient faces, familiar feelings

By Megan Willis, Australian Catholic Unviersity

Credit: Mauricio Marat, Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia

Human faces are arguably the most important things we see. We are quick to detect them in any scene, and they command our attention.

Faces express a wealth of important social information, such as whether another person is angry or scared, which in turn allows us to prepare for fight or flight.

Does this mean facial expressions are universal? It’s a question scientists have debated for half a century, and it remains without a definitive answer.

A new study that asked modern Westerners to judge the facial expressions of sculptures made thousands of years ago in Mesoamerica may shed new light on the question – but it’s far the from the final word on the subject.

Did our facial expressions evolve for survival?

Charles Darwin was the first to propose that facial expressions evolved because they enabled our ancestors to solve particular survival problems. If this is the case, we might expect them to be universal – that is, the same in all cultures and throughout history.

Darwin suggested that a number of basic emotions exist with distinct universal signals – facial expressions – that are recognised and generated across cultures.

Facial expressions are produced by coordinated contraction of muscle groups. For instance, activation of the zygomaticus major muscle elevates the lips to form a smile. The corrugator supercilii muscle knits the eyebrow to produce a frown.

To date, the question of the universality of facial expressions has been investigated by using observers across different present-day cultures. The usual test is to match posed facial expressions to six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise).

People across cultures tend to label the expressions (using equivalent terms in their own language) with the same emotion. The accuracy is not perfect, but it’s better than random.

Charles Darwin believed the facial expressions that correspond to some basic emotions may be the same in all cultures. Shutterstock

The most convincing evidence that expressions are universal has come from research by Paul Ekman with preliterate cultures, such as the Fore people of Papua New Guinea.

The Fore could label these basic emotions much as we do, though they did not discriminate between surprise and fear in the same way as Western researchers. They also generated facial expressions that were well recognised by other cultures. This research suggests the capacity to generate and recognise these basic emotions was not attributable to Western influence.

However, there is also evidence to show we recognise expressions more accurately in members of our own culture.

Research showing cultural differences in the expression and recognition of emotions has suggested that facial expressions may not be universal after all. Critics have suggested research on universality often uses methods that may inflate the accuracy of results.

Ancient statues may show expressions transcend time

Now, Alan Cowen and Dacher Keltner have published research in Scientific Advances showing a new way to explore evidence for the universality of facial expressions.

Instead of modern photos, the researchers used facial expressions from ancient sculptures from the Americas dating back to 1500 BCE. Since there is no way these artistic portrayals could be linked to Western culture, they may provide more evidence for universality.

The authors hunted through thousands of Mesoamerican artefacts from reputable museums to find genuine works that showed faces of people in recognisable contexts, such as holding a baby.

They identified 63 suitable artworks across eight different contexts (being held captive, being tortured, carrying a heavy object, embracing someone, holding a baby, in a fighting stance, playing a ball sport, and playing music).

A sampling of the ancient artworks with recognisable faces and contexts to study facial expressions. Cowen and Keltner / Science Advances

A group of 325 Western participants then rated the 63 artworks on 30 emotion categories such as anger and sadness, as well as 13 broader emotional dimensions, such as valence (the degree of pleasantness), and arousal (level of emotional intensity).

The researchers also collected judgements from a separate group of 114 participants, to determine the emotions that Westerners would expect someone to express in each of the eight contexts, using these same emotion categories and dimensions.

Using a statistical analysis to determine the similarity between the judgements of the facial expressions and expectations of the emotions someone would express in the contexts, the researchers found the artworks conveyed five distinct emotions. These were pain (in the context of torture), determination or strain (in the context of heavy lifting), anger (in the context of combat), elation or joy (in the context of social or familial touch, such as holding a baby) and sadness (in the context of being held captive).

Authenticity, artistic licence, and limited range

Does this mean we can close the book on the question of whether facial expressions are universal? Not quite.

The research has its limitations. First, there are concerns regarding the authenticity of the ancient artworks, although the researchers’ attempted to verify authenticity using conservative criteria.

Second, it’s unclear whether the artistic portrayals are true to the lives and emotional experiences of the people portrayed. That is, the artworks may not provide a direct insight into the emotions of ancient Americans.

Third, the sculptures include some basic emotions (such as anger, happiness and sadness), but not all of the basic emotions that are argued to be universal.

Future research that could expand on the emotions and contexts using a similar approach would provide novel insights and further evidence to understand emotions in history.

Megan Willis, Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Ancient faces, familiar feelings published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

[jobsearchtips02]

Amazon supposedly used merchant data, in spite of telling Congress it doesn’t

mountains of information–.

Amazon is a competitor to its own third-party merchants, and probes are plentiful.

Kate Cox – Apr 24, 2020 6: 09 pm UTC

.

Enlarge/ An Amazon storage facility on a sunny day in Germany on April 2,2020

.

Amazon accounts for about a 3rd of all United States Web retail sales, however it didn’t get there entirely by itself. It did so, in part, with the assistance of numerous countless smaller sized vendors who registered to sell their items on Amazon’s third-party merchant marketplace, which represents over half the business’s retail sales. In theory, those arrangements were advantageous for all involved: buyers might easily one-stop-shop for products, merchants could rely on Amazon’s front and back-end facilities instead of building out their own, and Amazon could get a great consistent cut flowing in.

Amazon now offers a large array of its own in-house brand names, making it a direct competitor to numerous of the merchants who rely on its platform to reach customers. That would be challenge enough, but the leviathan likewise records sales information from those third-party suppliers, then utilizes it to launch its own item lines and damage the smaller firms, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The WSJ reviewed internal business files showing Amazon executives asking for and accessing information from particular market vendors, regardless of corporate policies versus doing so. “We knew we shouldn’t,” one former staff member said of accessing that information.

The paper mentions a car-trunk organizer as one such example. Amazon staff members accessed documents relating to that vendor’s total sales, what the supplier paid Amazon for marketing and shipping, and the amount Amazon made on each sale of the organizer prior to the business then unveiled its own comparable item.

Staff members had the ability to get around the rules by flexing the principle of “aggregation,” according to the WSJ. While Amazon states it will not access specific seller data, it does develop reports of aggregate seller data. If the swimming pool of participants is big enough, that wouldn’t be a problem: a report combining information from 200 suppliers offering something like iPhone cases, for instance, would be unlikely to reveal any exclusive information about any of them.

But the swimming pool of vendors that can be aggregated, the WSJ discusses, is any group of two or more entities. If there’s only one vendor offering a product however Amazon itself sells returned or damaged variations through its Warehouse Deals program, that’s thought about enough to aggregate.

Amazon in a composed statement to the WSJ concurred that “like other merchants, we take a look at sales and shop information to provide our customers with the best possible experience,” including, “however, we strictly restrict our employees from utilizing nonpublic, seller-specific data to identify which private label products to introduce.” The occurrences the WSJ explained to the business violate Amazon’s internal policies, and it has actually launched an internal examination, the business added.

Deep waters

Nevertheless Amazon determines which private-label brand names to introduce, it has been busy getting them reside in recent years. The business now has more than 145 private-label brands as well as special sales arrangements with another 640 brand names, according to research firm TJI. Some, like Amazon Basics or Amazon Fundamentals, are apparent to buyers. Others– such as kids’ clothes line Scout Ro, women’s clothing brand name Hayden Rose, or furnishings line Stone & Beam– are anything however.

Entirely, those private labels account for about 1 percent of the business’s total sales, Amazon told Ars last September. Former workers informed The Wall Street Journal, nevertheless, that they were running under the regulation that Amazon’s private-label sales should depend on 10 percent of the business’s retail sales by2022

.

Amazon’s periodically controversial relationships with third-party suppliers on its marketplace are already the topic of several regulative probes in the United States and abroad. The European Union’s competition bureau opened an investigation in 2019 probing Amazon’s use of “competitively sensitive details about market sellers, their items, and transactions on the marketplace” to increase its own retail company.

Congress, too, specifically asked Amazon for info about its usage of market supplier information as part of its enormous continuous antitrust probe into possibly illegal anticompetitive habits by Amazon and other Big Tech companies. At a hearing last July, a witness for Amazon clearly informed Congress that Amazon “doesn’t utilize private seller data directly to complete” with its market suppliers.

Antitrust subcommittee chair Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.) and House Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) had sharp words for Amazon over the apparent contradiction exposed by the new report.

” This is yet another example of the sworn testimony of Amazon’s witness being directly opposed by investigative reporting,” Cicilline said in a composed statement. “At finest, Amazon’s witness appears to have actually misrepresented essential aspects of Amazon’s business practices while omitting essential information in response to pointed questioning. At worst, the witness Amazon sent out to speak on its behalf may have lied to Congress.”

%.

from Job Search Tips https://jobsearchtips.net/amazon-supposedly-used-merchant-data-in-spite-of-telling-congress-it-doesnt/

[xmasqoo-haineke]

Abstract

SAGE Open October-December 2013: 1–11 © The Author(s) 2013 DOI: 10.1177/2158244013506446 sgo.sagepub.com

One consequence of the advent of cyber communication is that increasing numbers of people go online to ask for, obtain, and presumably act upon advice dispensed by unknown peers. Just as advice seekers may not have access to information about the identities, ideologies, and other personal characteristics of advice givers, advice givers are equally ignorant about their interlocutors except for the bits of demographic information that the latter may offer freely. In the present study, that information concerns sex. As the sex of the advice seeker may be the only, or the predominant, contextual variable at hand, it is expected that that identifier will guide advice givers in formulating their advice. The aim of this project is to investigate whether and how the sex of advice givers and receivers affects the type of advice, through the empirical analysis of a corpus of web-based Spanish language forums on personal relationship difficulties. The data revealed that, in the absence of individuating information beyond that implicit in the advice request, internalized gender expectations along the lines of agency and communality are the sources from which advice givers draw to guide their counsel. This is despite the trend in discursive practices used in formulating advice, suggesting greater language convergence across sexes.

Keywords

gender role expectations, gender stereotypes, online advice, Spanish language

Introduction

In his book L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Sartre (1946) tells the following anecdote: During World War II (WWII), a former student asked his advice on whether he should join the Résistance and leave behind his widowed mother, or stay with her and neglect his patriotic duties. Sartre’s advice was, “You are free. Choose.” For Sartre, the moral of the story is that, when someone solicits advice, they have already chosen the answer they want, as the advice they wish to receive guides the selection of advice giver. If Sartre’s observation was ever right, in cyber communication it no longer holds. Increasing numbers of people go online to ask for, obtain, and presumably act upon advice dispensed by unknown peers, mindful or not of the potential risks involved in this practice (e.g., erroneous information, abusive lan- guage or content, dangerous emotional manipulation from the advice giver, or receiver, or both).

Just as online advice seekers may have to or may choose to ignore the identities, ideologies, worldviews, and other personal characteristics of advice givers, advice givers are similarly positioned with information about the interlocutors asking for advice, except for the bits of demographic infor- mation that are sometimes freely offered or given away in posts (e.g., age, gender, and some personal circumstances revealed in the questioning). The advice they offer is thus not guided by what they think the advice seeker wants to hear (as

in Sartre’s interpretation of his experience above) but on what they think will be relevant or appropriate to an unknown interlocutor. Thus, advice is formulated on the basis of very limited contextual information and the few demographic fac- tors their interlocutors reveal.

A number of researchers have shown that insufficient information about individuals or situations tends to trigger from others stereotypical inferences and responses. Thus, Kunda and Sherman-Williams (1993) propose that, “in the absence of other information, expectations about an individ- ual will be guided by stereotypical beliefs about categories such as his or her profession, ethnicity, or gender” (p. 90). When it comes to online advice, given that the only piece of demographic information advice seekers provide is their sex, sex becomes a salient feature in the interaction. We can spec- ulate that the salience of gender norms is likely to influence the nature of advice offered, and thus advice givers will for- mulate responses based on their internalized gender role expectations and stereotypes, which may be triggered uncon- sciously or automatically.

1Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, Australia

Corresponding Author:

Susana A. Eisenchlas, School of Languages and Linguistics, Griffith University, Nathan Campus, Nathan, Queensland 4111, Australia. Email: s.eisenchlas@griffith.edu.au

2

SAGE Open

Gender Stereotypes

“Gender roles” have been described as society’s shared beliefs that apply to individuals on the basis of their socially identified sex (Eagly, 2009) and are thus closely related to gender stereotypes. Stereotypes can be conceptualized as the descriptive aspects of gender roles, as they depict the attri- butes that an individual ascribes to a group of people (Eagly & Mladinic, 1989). Stereotyping is often seen as necessary, as it is a way of simplifying the overwhelming amount of stimuli one constantly receives from the world (Ladegaard, 1998), constraining potentially infinite numbers of interpre- tations (Dunning & Sherman, 1997). Another line of inquiry extends the function of stereotypes from the interpretation to the rationalization and justification of social practices (Allport, 1954; Hoffman & Hurst, 1990; Tajfel, 1981). Common to these interpretations is the view that the result- ing representation is usually selective, distorted, and often oversimplified.

Stereotypes of men and women commonly reflect Bakan’s (1966) distinction between two dimensions, often labeled agency, or self-assertion, and communion, or connection with others (Eagly, 2009; Jost & Kay, 2005; Rudman & Glick, 2001). Men are generally thought to be agentic—that is, competent, assertive, independent, masterful, and achieve- ment oriented, while women are perceived as inferior to men in agentic qualities. Conversely, women are generally thought to be communal—that is, friendly, warm, unselfish, sociable, interdependent, emotionally expressive and rela- tionship oriented—while men are perceived as inferior in communal qualities (Eagly & Mladinic, 1989). Empirical studies investigating the extent to which gender stereotypes apply have consistently found that their content is heavily saturated with communion and agency (Eagly & Mladinic, 1989; Eagly & Steffen, 1984; Langford & MacKinnon, 2000; Rudman & Glick, 2001; Spence & Buckner, 2000). Masculine and feminine stereotypes can be seen as complementary in the sense that each gender is seen as possessing a set of strengths that balances out its own weaknesses and supple- ments the assumed strengths of the other group (Cameron, 2003; Jost & Kay, 2005). The alleged complementarity of attributes serves to reinforce male superiority and female subordination as it naturalizes these beliefs, thus making them acceptable to men and women (Jost & Kay, 2005; Rudman & Glick, 2001). W. Wood & Eagly (2010) further suggest that these distinctions appear to be pancultural, a strong claim that requires empirical investigation.

Gender roles are descriptive and prescriptive (Eagly, 2009). The descriptive aspect, or stereotype, tells men and women what is typical for their sex in particular contexts and situations. The prescriptive aspect tells them what is expected or desirable (Rudman & Glick, 2001). Prentice and Carranza (2002) illustrate this claim:

The stereotypic belief that women are warm and caring is matched by a societal prescription that they should be warm and

caring. Similarly, the stereotypic belief that men are strong and agentic is matched by a societal prescription that they should be strong and agentic. (p. 269)

Violations of gender role expectations are met with criti- cism and penalized (Prentice & Carranza, 2002; Rudman & Glick, 2001). Furthermore, societal gender prescriptions tend to be internalized and thus self-imposed to a certain extent (Postmes & Speares, 2002). Thus, W. Wood and Eagly (2010) suggest that the power of gender roles is their embed- dedness “both in others ‘expectations thereby acting as social norms and in individuals’ internalized gender identities, thereby acting as personal dispositions” (p. 645). This explains, at least partly, the potency and stability of gender expectations that seem to endure despite changes in tradi- tional gender relations we have experienced in recent decades, and the finding that gender stereotyping appears to be equally strong among women and men (Blair & Banaji, 1996; Rudman & Glick, 2001).

Kunda and Sherman-Williams (1993) claim that stereo- types affect impressions even in the presence of individuat- ing information, by affecting the construal of that information. Similarly, Dunning and Sherman (1997) argue, on the basis of a series of experiments they conducted, that specific infor- mation about individuals does not reduce the impact of ste- reotypes, as stereotypes often lead people to make tacit inferences about that information. They found that these inferences alter the meaning of the information to affirm the implicit stereotypes people possess. Moreover, experimental research on stereotypical beliefs about social categories has shown the strong impact they have, even in the absence of conscious endorsement (Jost & Kay, 2005; W. Wood & Eagly, 2010). Dunning and Sherman poignantly refer to this phenomenon as an “inferential prison” and wonder whether stereotypes are “maximum security prisons, with people’s inferences and impressions of the person never escaping far from the confines of the stereotype” (p. 459), or whether

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people can escape these prisons as knowledge increases. Language is one area where gender roles and expectations can be constructed and reproduced. The notions that through language women exhibit same-sex solidarity and “support” whereas men harass and “control” (Fishman, 1978) or that women talk to foment or enhance relationships, while men talk to solve problems, are among the most entrenched gen- eralizations found in popular culture and are widely exploited by the advertising industry, among other media (Talbot, 2000). These views, however, have been challenged in recent language and gender literature. For instance, Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (1992) argue that these gendered portray- als derive from research on the American White middle class and are far from being universal. Verbal practices that contra- dict the stereotypical generalizations have been documented by Ochs (1992) in her study of Western Samoan households, by Bierback (1997) in her study of a Barcelona neighbor- hood association, by Morgan (1991) in a study of African American discursive practices, and by Macaulay (2001) in

Eisenchlas

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her study of political radio and television interviews, among others. Research on gendered practices in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) has also yielded conflict- ing results; while some studies report correlations between gender and language used online (e.g., Herring, 1993, 2000, 2004), others do not (e.g., Huffaker & Calvert, 2005).

These contradictory findings suggest that gendered lin- guistic practices are highly context-specific, and that the context of the interaction may be more important than gender per se in determining linguistic behavior (Cameron, 1992; Rodino, 1997). Thus, rather than looking for binary categori- zations of gendered behaviors, current scholarship focuses on localized instances, and on how gender is socially per- formed, co-constructed, and negotiated in interactions (Butler, 1990; del-Teso-Craviotto, 2006, 2008; Macaulay, 2001). The concept of Communities of Practice (CofP) has been particularly fruitful in examining the construction of gender through language. CofP has been defined as “an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in some common endeavour. Ways of doing things, ways of talking, beliefs, values, power relations—in short, practices emerge in this course of mutual endeavour” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 1992, p. 464). Participants in the present study do not constitute a community in the strict sense of the term as their interactions are usually limited to a single exchange, which is insufficient to develop common practices. It is likely then that in giving advice, participants are drawing on preexisting norms of how this speech act should be expressed, rather than on their knowledge of coparticipants in the interaction or the norms of the particular group.

Gender and Prosocial Behaviors

“Prosocial behaviours” are “behaviors consensually regarded as beneficial to others,” and include actions such as helping, sharing, comforting, guiding, rescuing, and defending (Eagly, 2009, p. 644). Advice giving, the topic of this article, can be considered as one type of prosocial behavior.

Although experimental studies on prosocial behaviors have shown that men and women readily help others in need, beliefs about gender roles lead to the expectation that differ- ences in helping behavior would obtain across genders: Women will approach help in ways that are primarily com- munal, whereas men will have primarily an agentic focus. Outside of academia, these notions have been popularized by books such as You Just Don’t Understand (Tannen, 1990), which claim that men “report talk,” that is, they talk to solve problems, while women “rapport talk,” that is, they talk to foment or enhance relationships. Grey (1992), in the book that became probably the biggest seller in its category, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, endorses these dis- tinctions and claims that these differences in communication

big an effect on the type of advice offered as the sex of the advice giver, in particular, in situations where extragender variables are unknown and the only salient variable is sex.

One area where these expectations can be explored is in computer-mediated interactions among strangers. Following its wide expansion across all demographics, the Internet was initially hailed as an inherently democratizing medium that would enable access to all those with literacy skills and tech- nological savvy, making social differences irrelevant or invisible online. Contrary to early expectations, however, claims of widespread gender equality have not been sup- ported by most research on online interaction (Harp & Tremayne, 2006; Herring, 2000). Indeed, a growing body of research examining chats, forums, and listservs has found that certain phenomena associated with stereotypical charac- terizations of gendered linguistic behavior were not dimin-

3 ished but actually reinforced online. Thus, if the type of

advice is guided by implicit gender stereotypes, there is little reason to believe that the medium of interaction will impose dramatic departures from societal norms. Rather, it is expected that off-line gender dynamics will likely be repro- duced online and that gender expectations found off-line will creep into online interactions.

The Present Study

To test whether the distinction between expectations of agency and communality obtains outside the English speak- ing environment, this study extends the discussion into Spanish language, by investigating whether there is a rela- tionship between gender and the type of advice people give and receive online from unknown interlocutors. Its particular concern is advice on difficulties in intimate relationships. Previous studies on advice giving (online and off-line) have examined expert–nonexpert interactions (e.g., DeCapua & Findlay Dunham, 1993; Hudson, 1990; Locher, 2006), where issues of power, hierarchy, or expertise can play a significant role in advice givers’ linguistic expressions (Vine, 2009). Peer-to-peer advice among strangers has received signifi- cantly less attention.

The present study is part of a larger investigation explor- ing gendered linguistic practices in peer-to-peer online advice giving, focusing on the discursive formulation of advice tokens in the Spanish language (Author, 2012). It was expected that, if stereotypical characterizations of gendered behavior hold (e.g., Tannen, 1990), considerable differences between men and women would be found in the formulation of advice on relationships difficulties, with men being con- cise and direct and women being more emotionally expres- sive, exhibiting higher displays of emotional language and higher levels of indirectness to protect others’ feelings. These expectations were not supported, as no significant differ- ences were found in the discursive formulation4 of advice dispensed by males and females. Instead, the data showed that males and females were very direct in their advice,

2 ized expectations, the sex of the advice seeker should have as

across genders are universal.

Moreover, if these are internal-

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favoring bald directives over all other possible linguistic expressions. Furthermore, it was expected that the sex of the addressee would trigger different responses in terms of directness and politeness, with men receiving advice expressed in blunter, more direct formulations. Contrary to expectations, the sex of the addressee did not make a signifi- cant difference, as males and females were equally forward and direct when dispensing advice to either sex. Thus, the expectation that there would be marked differences in the language used online by males and females, as suggested by previous research (Herring, 1993 and subsequent work; Selfe & Meyer, 1991), was not met.

The lack of attested differences in the discursive formula- tion of advice in online interactions, however, need not cor- relate with lack of gender differences in the type of advice. As shown in the literature, implicit gender role stereotypes can be activated when identifying information is minimal (Kunda & Sherman-Williams, 1993). In the data analyzed in this article, the only demographic information that partici- pants explicitly provided about themselves was their sex, and thus it is expected that the sex of the discussants will be a salient factor in the interaction. Thus, the present study seeks to contribute epistemically to this area through an examina- tion of the effect of the sex of online interlocutors on the type of advice given to them, that is, what type of advice is given to males and females—not just what type of advice they pro- duce—and to identify whether implicit stereotypes play a role.

Based on the above discussion, the following hypotheses were formulated and tested in the present study:

Hypothesis 1: There will be a difference between the advice given by men and by women. Hypothesis 2: Men will be more likely to be advised to act and women to communicate.

Hypothesis 3: There will be a difference in the type of talking advice given to men and to women. Hypothesis 4: As advice givers and as interlocutors, women will exhibit more emotional disclosure and dis- play than men.

[dippedanddripped]

The common party line in the luxury resale market is that authentication is more of an art than a science, something one can only learn through a mixture of experience and intuition. Fashionphile rejects that idea."It's just a science," insists CEO Ben Hemminger.The company puts this into practice by sending every piece that arrives at its Carlsbad, CA campus through a rigorous screening process involving a combination of highly-trained staff and top-of-the-line technology. The whole operation — from the loading dock where employees accept shipments of goods waiting to be authenticated to the brightly-lit room where product gets photographed per precise standards to a locked cage containing hundreds and thousands of luxury pieces — currently exists in the 30,000 square foot building. In the front is a showroom where southern California customers can come drop off their bags to be evaluated on site or pick up a new style they've been eyeing. In the back, there's a large, bright-pink metal ramp, custom-designed by a company that makes playground slides, where freshly-packed boxes zip down to meet delivery trucks. (I ask if I can take a quick ride down it, but apparently that's an OSHA violation, and so I take the stairs.)Photo: Layton Tedrick/Courtesy of FashionphileIt's quite the evolution from Fashionphile's humble beginnings in 1999 as an eBay shop run out of founder Sarah Davis's home, but something she says has been organic from day one. "We've done every single job in the building," Davis says. "There was a point when Ben or I did all of the packing and shipping, photography, authentication, pricing and customer service.""We both love finding out what things are worth — treasure hunt, find it out, sell it for more, that whole arbitrage of used luxury things," Hemminger adds. Initially, Davis was doing this herself, bringing on brother-in-law Hemminger around 2006 when she realized there was an opportunity to grow the business beyond its auction roots. At the time, she exclusively dealt in secondhand Louis Vuitton, having logged hours learning how to authenticate the brand; with Hemminger on board, they aimed to broaden the business, but proceeded very carefully."I figured out authentication on one brand and could handle that by myself," she says. "You don't add the brand before you have the authentication in place. We can't just open a box, go, 'What's this? Oh, let's sell it,' because everything we have is highly counterfeited stuff."Together, they began to familiarize themselves with more designers, starting with Chanel — spending months shopping in stores, buying bags, taking them apart and comparing them with counterfeits until they felt comfortable with the product literally from the inside out. When they were done, they wrote a "guide" to authentication; Davis put together the Louis Vuitton edition and Hemminger worked on the one on Chanel.Photo: Layton Tedrick/Courtesy of FashionphileFashionphile still uses those guides today, as evidenced by the binders collected on the desks of their authenticators packed with laminated pages detailing everything from precise colors and hardware to logos and fonts. And as the brands they accept evolve, taking on new creative directors or aesthetic directions, so, too, do their corresponding guides, which are more living, breathing documents than carved-in-stone laws. Counterfeits are involved in this process, too, as they provide key insight into identifying how fakes are made. When Fashionphile gets an item they deem is counterfeit, they charge the sender a $75 fee ($125 for Hermès Birkins or Kellys) to have it returned to them. Not only has this served to weed out would-be scammers — either people sending in a luxury item for a freebie authentication, something which costs Fashionphile time and money, or counterfeit rings looking to make a score — it has also provided a library of goods for the company to learn from. Inside "The Graveyard" at Fashionphile HQ are dozens of black boxes, each labeled by brand, filled with everything from fake Christian Louboutin shoes to forged Gucci packaging, abandoned by their senders but put to use training Fashionphile employees. While touring the campus, Davis pokes into an office where a handful of employees are gathered around some of Dior's newest styles, examples of counterfeits and a binder detailing what to look for in authentic Dior bags. Training for authenticators is extremely vigorous here: Before an employee can work on their own at Fashionphile, they must undergo 5,200 hours of training in just seven brands; after 6,100 hours, they can work within 21 brands; after 6,460 hours, they can work on 32 or more. It's a process they've dubbed "Fashionphile University."But while the human component remains crucial to Fashionphile's business, they've also added in lots of tech. There's a device that can precisely identify Pantone shades, which is especially useful in authenticating Hermès; equipment that can detect lab-grown diamonds, which can sometimes (but not always!) signal counterfeit jewelry; a machine that can X-ray a bag to reveal the hardware within — another giveaway in particularly well-done fakes. Photo: Layton Tedrick/Courtesy of FashionphileNot satisfied to exclusively rely on appliances readily available in the market, however, Fashionphile is also working on bringing the human element into digital form through in-house innovations. There's software in development which the company says can currently detect counterfeits in three popular classes of bag with 100% accuracy using microframes. There's also a pricing tool which pulls data across key factors (like condition, current inventory, historic shelf life and color) into an algorithm which optimizes pricing, as well as a visualization tool customers can use to get an instant quote on their goods without having to ship it in, which delivers a 95.3% accuracy. This tech also allows Fashionphile to pick up on trends before humans even can. Remember when the Fendi Zucca print came roaring back into fashion? Or when the Dior Saddlebag regained It status? Fashionphile's system registered that those styles were moving faster than normal — so fast, in fact, it couldn't raise the price quickly enough to match the trend. These are all great for customers, of course. But they're also making business faster — and more profitable — for Fashionphile."We've created all these tools to make it so that, as soon as possible, when you walk in our door, you can be fully capable in your position. Our technology is enabling you to get that way faster," Davis says. "There was a time when you came into Fashionphile as a procurement person who was quoting the bags, it took you months to be helpful to us. We've now created tools that make you super-effective within days."Related Articles: Can Technology Keep Fake Handbags Out of the Marketplace? The RealReal's Authentication Practices Are Not What They Seem, According to New Investigation What Goes Around Comes Around Is More Than Ready for the Resale Market Boom"That whole combination of expertise and tech is just really about scaling, because if we were going to stay stagnant and just be a mom and pop, we wouldn't really need it. Our authenticators with no tech can do maybe 20 bags an hour; with these tools, they could probably do 60 an hour," Hemminger adds. "If we're going to be worldwide, and be a $2 billion, $3 billion company, we will probably still have a lot of authenticators, but they would never be able to do that much volume. It [becomes] review versus primary research."It's hard not to be deeply impressed by the level of work and accuracy that goes into this authentication, both on a human and technical level. Their lead jewelry authenticator walks me through two seemingly identical Cartier Juste un Clou bracelets, down to the karat of gold used in the product. The only giveaway? The stamp etched into the fake, which should identify the maker, is slightly different when examined in a jeweler's loupe. Then, I'm told a story about an Hermès Birkin, made by Hermès employees off-the-clock with stolen Hermès leather sold in the black market, identified only when the x-ray revealed that the screws inside the metal feet were wrong. (For me, this all brings about an existential crisis about what, exactly, makes a luxury good so valuable, but that's another story for another day.)Photo: Layton Tedrick/Courtesy of FashionphileIndeed, Davis and Hemminger say that when they have brought luxury companies onto campus to walk them through the authentication process — they can't say who because of NDAs, of course — they've been so impressed that there have been early talks of partnerships. It's just a question of educating these brands, which have been historically unfriendly to the resale market, about the value of consignment, Hemminger explains: "They think we're a problem because of counterfeits. We actually helped them tremendously in showing them how we can help stop counterfeits." "But one of the big benefits that I think some brands are starting to get is that we actually increase sales for brands. No one's buying a new car every two years — that's just the cycle, and you can only do that because you're trading in the old one," he continues. "We think 10 years from now people will just buy more Chanel flaps or whatever, and the new bags will increase in velocity of sales. It doesn't devalue the brand. It just means more people are carrying it."Up until now, the brand's growth has been slow and steady, but with the re-commerce market exploding the way that it has, Hemminger and Davis feel the time is right to ramp up their efforts to lock down the luxury accessory market. They've let the rising tide lift their boat, so to speak, and now they're ready to establish themselves as a primary player in the space."If you Google resellers in our world in 2013, there are a bunch of players that raised money and they're just not here anymore," Davis says. "We've built this really solid foundation — and taking our sweet time doing it, partially to our detriment. We've built this nice little fire; we throw some dry wood and gas on that thing, it's going to go crazy, because it's all solid."Photo: Layton Tedrick/Courtesy of FashionphileRegardless of whether luxury brands get on board, Fashionphile is in expansion mode. In addition to the Carlsbad campus, there's a 100,000 square foot warehouse in the works in New Jersey, all the better to service East Coast customers. There are two standalone Fashionphile showrooms: Carlsbad and New York City. In 2019, the brand took a minority investment from Neiman Marcus and now operates selling studios inside select retail locations — currently, in Dallas, Beverly Hills, San Francisco and Newport Beach, with more to come in 2020 — where customers can get paid on the spot, including the option of a Neiman Marcus gift card. And while Fashionphile is certainly in a good position for cornering the luxury resale market, it's hard to imagine they don't see potential in all the authentication technology they've developed. Davis and Hemminger don't consider mom-and-pop consignment operations as rivals, for example, so they haven't ruled out licensing their apps for a fee. There's talk of making the Hermès color guide available on the site as a resource for customers. Davis even quips at one point that luxury brands should send their employees to Fashionphile University for training. While there are certain things they plan to keep proprietary, they're keeping an open mind for what the future might hold on the tech front."We recognize that there's a cost of sharing the information that we have or the tools that we have — it might help a competitor, or we'll lose a couple of sales," Hemminger admits. "But the other side of it is, by being the authority in the marketplace and being out there with all your information, you become more of a household name, you become recognized for your authority and the brand grows. I think we don't want be too tight-fisted about it because we realize that being generous is a two-way street."

[newstfionline]

In a Volatile Climate on Campus, Professors Teach on Tenterhooks

By Laura Pappano, NY Times, Oct. 31, 2017

“Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life,” a guide to spreading kindness, is an odd choice for a political science syllabus. But Shannon Mariotti sees the need. Her seminar about race and class alienation invites contention; course readings swing between Tea Party and far-left perspectives.

The 13 students represent the stew of political views at Southwestern University, a liberal arts campus in mostly red Georgetown, Tex. Dr. Mariotti pushes buttons, but prudently. She wants reactions, she said, somewhere “between nice and angry.” She hopes the book--from step one (“Learn about compassion”) to 12 (“Love your enemies”)--will teach students “to develop compassion and empathy” for opposing, even distasteful stances.

It is not her only Zen move: As students settle at a long conference table, Dr. Mariotti taps the timer on her iPhone. Classes start with silent meditation. “All you are supposed to be doing right now is to breathe in and breathe out. Every time you think of something,” she said, “just let it go.”

Dr. Mariotti designed this upper-level course in response to political divisions at Southwestern, divisions that have fractured friendships. “The only way that kind of polarization in politics will get better is if we can find a way to talk to each other in a way that is sympathetic, but not wishy-washy.”

These are fitful times on college campuses. Tumultuous current events--the revocation of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, known as DACA; the Charlottesville attacks; the Black Lives Matter protests--have brought both relevance and volatility to academic debate. Inside classrooms, professors feel newly exposed. They want strategies to manage testy exchanges and challenges they don’t see coming.

At Reed College this semester, instructors abandoned the stage during the first meeting of Humanities 110, a required freshman course on early Greek and Mediterranean civilization. “We cannot have our class if we have students interrupting the teaching,” Prof. Elizabeth Drumm announced as a student grabbed a microphone and talked over her. Others joined onstage. One protester held a sign: “Don’t teach us white supremacy.”

At George Mason University, “a fervent Trump supporter” last summer in Jeremy D. Mayer’s course on the presidency sparred at the start of each class. One session, he dismissed an article Dr. Mayer had cited as fake news, with: “The Washington Post hates Trump!” It was “very frustrating,” Dr. Mayer said. “How can you have a class that touches on current events when you don’t have an accepted, fairly standard source of information?”

Even content in fact-heavy courses like biology looks less neutral with hot-button issues like reproduction and genetic testing.

Today’s students bring a multiplicity of personal identities to campus--their sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, religion, political leanings--and they want to see that reflected in course content. The values in readings, lectures and even conversations are open to questioning. All good--that’s what college is supposed to be about--except that now the safety screen around the examination of ideas has been pulled away. Higher education is increasingly partisan, and professors must manage these disconnected ideologies, which are sometimes between themselves and their students.

With so many professors identifying as liberal or far left (60 percent, according to a U.C.L.A. poll last year), it’s not surprising that the right distrusts the profession. In a Pew Research Center survey released in September, respondents indicated on a thermometer scale how they felt about professors. Democrats rated them a warm 71 degrees, Republicans a chilly 46 degrees.

It’s a charged climate and professors know it. The culture wars playing out in the classroom have made them fearful of being targeted. That has been a particular issue at Northern Arizona University, a politically mixed campus in a red state. Six professors there have received death threats or harassing emails or calls, some after being the subject of posts on conservative media sites, amplified by Facebook and Twitter.

“The air is different now because what you do in a classroom can end up on Fox News,” said Luis Fernandez. His fall course at Northern Arizona, “Political Crime,” considers Russia’s use of media tools to meddle in U.S. affairs. This semester, he received threats on his office phone, naming his wife and siblings and citing addresses. The day after, Dr. Fernandez found himself scanning the classroom--messages had alluded to a student in class--trying to guess which of the 36 was responsible. “Then I started thinking, ‘This is really silly. My job is not to identify this person; my job is to educate and teach.’ “ The police are investigating.

An English professor at Northern Arizona, Anne Scott, did end up on Fox News. After she deducted one point from a first-year student’s paper last spring for using “mankind” instead of “humankind”--she said she had told the class that “inclusive” vocabulary is required--the student contacted the website Campus Reform. She received more than 400 emails, rude voice mail messages and dropped calls. This semester, when the student’s name appeared on the wait-list for a course she was teaching, Dr. Scott said, “I was terrified.”

As campuses grow more racially and economically diverse, navigating strong emotions has become a coveted skill. Anita Davis is in a newly created post of director of diversity and inclusion at the Associated Colleges of the South, a consortium of 16 institutions that help professors with “hot” conversations. “They are struggling to handle tense, confrontational, challenging moments,” she said.

Tools she shares are new to professors focused on conveying content. On the first day, she urges instructors to work with students to create ground rules for class discussions, including what to do when talk gets heated. She shares tricks like asking students, before peers pounce, to rephrase or repeat a provocative utterance (often it’s less harsh). If someone suggests that people who ride busses are poor, instead of calling him “classist,” she said, a teacher could reframe: “Let’s talk about the labels that come up when we talk about social class.”

It’s also important to openly discuss cultural identity with students, rather than make assumptions. “You can be from the same background and be very different,” she said. “Or you can be from very different backgrounds and think very similarly.” Digging below the surface is critical because students “are asking for more opportunity to be complicated individuals.”

Professors who once skipped pre-semester faculty workshops now want to know “how to model productive disagreement,” said Theresa Braunschneider, associate director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. “We are responding to increased demand across the university for programming that helps instructors.” A recent workshop had a wait-list of 50; 10 colleges, including an engineering school, have requested custom sessions.

The center also has a theater program in which actors perform classroom scenarios; a facilitator debriefs faculty audiences. Popular sketches hit touchy subjects--a Muslim student accidentally leaves behind a backpack; a student jokes that it contains a bomb. What should the professor do?

In “Conflict in the Classroom,” a sketch recently staged at Skidmore College, a statistics “class” discusses correlation and causation. The “professor” posits an example: the link between infant mortality and maternal income. The “students” raise questions that have nothing to do with math. “It becomes a debate about the variables,” said Sara Armstrong, the artistic director: One student wonders why the example doesn’t consider household income, and defines a household as man and woman. Another objects. The first accuses the other of attacking. The instructor interjects, “I don’t think this is appropriate for this class. We really can’t talk about this.” The upset student insists, “This is a problem! We have to talk about this!” A student records on his phone.

In the post-performance discussion, the faculty members backtrack: What could the instructor have done ahead of time to prevent problems? What could the instructor do in the moment? And afterward? Approaches involve addressing not just what is taught, but how and why.

Getting faculty prepared is why Kristie A. Ford, director of the Center for Leadership, Teaching and Learning at Skidmore, invited the Michigan troupe as part of a semester series she calls “Teaching in a Time of Turmoil.” “Regardless of discipline, we cannot shut out the world,” she said. “It is seeping into our classrooms, and we need to hone our skills for how to productively engage with it.”

Sydney Cardenas, a Trump voter, objects to liberal students’ special alliances with liberal professors. “They make those jokes,” she said, and instructors slyly signal approval “under the table” or with a giggle. You expect politics in political science, she said, but she was irritated that her education class “was extremely political for no reason whatsoever.”

Camille Martin and Mikaela Manion, left-identifying students who have strong religious backgrounds, face prickly moments, too. “People can be hostile when Christianity and the whole evangelical movement are brought up in class,” Ms. Martin said. “It triggers me.”

Ms. Manion felt her anger rise in class when a student dismissed religion as “the opiate of the masses.” “It was very derogatory toward Christianity and that was very hard to deal with,” she said. Later, she wrote “liberation theology,” a term that marries religion and social justice, in large pink uppercase letters in her notebook.

In the seminar, silent meditation over, Dr. Mariotti dove into the assignment, which was to speak with someone holding an opposing political view. She would use their reactions to help draft ground rules for class discussion. For example, notice your own bias so you can grapple more generously with others.

Rachel Arco said she is “a competitive person.” The exercise and the Armstrong reading told her that every conversation “does not need to have a goal or something you can win.” It’s an opening. To which Oscar Barbour offered a useful idea: People should “let go of their personal stake” in a charged conversation.

A kind thought, but Ms. Manion wasn’t buying: “I want to challenge Oscar. We are part of the conversation. We can’t distance ourselves from what we care about.”

Mr. Joyce jumped in to defend Mr. Barbour: “It can be honoring your own values to open them up to challenge.” But then you risk being “nice” rather than “authentic.”

Assuming the best of classmates, Ms. Arco confessed, “is something I’m not very good at.”

Agreement may not be the point, or possible. But talking about how to talk proved helpful when a few weeks later the class was faced with “Strangers in Their Own Land,” a book about a Tea Party-leaning community in Louisiana. Some students saw themselves in portrayals they found condescending, or thought the writer was too kind toward those with racist views.

In what may prove to be the hidden gift of these provocative times, grappling with dicey subjects may force students to reflect, and not just to react. “They are struggling with how the book makes them feel,” Dr. Mariotti said. “We’ve had a lot of conversations about where the limits of our empathy are.”

[seotipsandtricks-me]

Picture the scenario: Despite your best intentions and the careful consideration taken to construct a message, it gets misinterpreted by the recipient. It can happen to the best of us. Indeed, when it comes to online communication, things can often get lost in translation and it can be hard to control how we are perceived by others. This is something that can be of particular concern for businesses or brands. However, ensuring your company has a clearly defined tone of voice (TOV) can, to some extent, help reduce the likelihood of this problem occurring. In this blog post I will discuss tone of voice guidelines: what they are, why they matter and which brands are using them well. Read on to find out more. What Is Tone Of Voice? Tone of voice refers to the way you express your company’s character and personality within your communications. It entails everything from the rhythm, pace, vocabulary, grammar and syntax used in your writing and the overall tone this helps to create. Essential for connecting and engaging with customers, your tone of voice applies to pretty much all communications; every social media post, every live chat message exchanged with a customer, every slogan on ads. Some even go as far as to say that a brands tone of voice should extend to the language they use in call centres and on customer service bills. Otherwise, it’s argued, there is a potential disconnect between the brand and the customer, which could impact on sales. Similar to how you use a logo, colour palette and competitor list, it’s important your business has detailed guidelines outlining tone of voice best practice. Why Does Tone of Voice Matter? Trust and reputation is crucial to any business, especially online. Consumers know when somethings a bit off about a company and one thing that can make them suspicious is inconsistency. When browsing online, consumers will often look for consistent brand colours and a familiar logo for reassurance. Similarly, they’ll also look at a consistent tone of voice. If your tone of voice is erratic across all channels, it can be taken as an indication that your company is not to be trusted. Having a consistent tone of voice not only helps to build trust, it also helps to humanise your brand and separate you from your competitors. Plus, tone of voice guidelines matter as they help staff to adhere to the same style of writing -whether that be on your blog, on your social channels or in your advertising campaigns. Switching between different voices will often leave people confused and dilute any efforts to communicate your brand values. Speaking of which… How Tone of Voice Relates to Brand Values What is it that your company stands for, believes in and is trying to communicate to others? What is it that drives your company? These are the kind of questions you should be asking yourself when it comes to defining your brand values. Your tone one of voice, meanwhile, is the vehicle with which you express, promote and reinforce these values, traits and philosophy. Brand values are core to your company and grow naturally out of who you are as a company, as opposed to simply plucking them out of thin air. Ideally, the messaging and tone of voice used across all your communications should reflect your brand values. This will help drive people through your marketing funnel and also help you to appear reliable and trustworthy. Creating Your Own Tone Of Voice Guidelines If you are yet to create your own tone of voice guidelines, a good starting point can be to audit your existing content. Identify your best performing content and analyse the tone of voice in each. Despite having been created without a tone of voice in mind, are there any common themes evident in terms of writing style or personality? This can help you understand what kind of voice best resonates with your audience. Next, try to define your brand as if it were a real person with a real personality. Describe it in no more than 5 words, then drill these characteristics down even further. For example, if you used the word ‘alternative’ to describe your business, other characteristics you might include are ‘quirky’, ‘eccentric’ and ‘unusual’. Create a list of the words you can use in your marketing efforts. Following this, start providing examples of things your brand DOES say and, equally as important, things your brand DOESN’T say. In fact, sometimes it’s easier to begin with defining everything your company is not. If your brand is unlikely to ever be heard saying ‘epic’ or ‘awesome’, then make sure it’s documented! Having these thorough and detailed tone of voice guidelines in place is so valuable to your company, especially for new staff. Also, remember to adjust your tone and style for different channels and audiences. Whilst your brands voice remains constant, it can take on a different tone depending on the situation including: Who you’re talking to – For instance, consider the difference in how you address an existing customer compared to an individual who is completely new to your brand. What you’re talking about – Are you writing a product page, a blog post which contains instructions or talking to a customer via live chat? Each subject has a different purpose and requires an altered tone. Where you’re talking about this – The way your brand writes for Twitter will, naturally, vary compared to other social channels, your blog or a written letter. Last but not least, nit-pick away and detail your brands spelling and grammar preferences. Are American spellings acceptable? How about hyphenated words? Leave no room for ambiguity or inconsistency! Which Brands Are Using Tone Of Voice Well? Innocent Smoothies: Go ahead, roll your eyes. A blog post about tone of voice which features Innocent Smoothies? Zero points for originality, I know! But, as predictable as this one is, it’s predictable for a reason. Innocent are a brand that really understands tone of voice. Think of every possible channel this brand can communicate their voice through, from Twitter and Facebook right down to their ingredients label, and you can guarantee it has their fun and quirky personality stamped all over it. They even manage to inject a bit of fun into a bog standard 404 error page with some video content: Their navigation bar reflects their light-hearted and alternative tone of voice too. In the name of research, I had to investigate their ‘bored?’ pages. This presents the user with some fairly interesting content like information about their packaging over the years, adverts and photos from Innocent HQ. Dig a little deeper/scroll a little more, however, and you get to the truly good stuff – ‘really bored’. Videos of dogs chewing stuff and penguins pinching stuff? I.AM.SO.IN. Bravo, Innocent! Missguided: Missguided, an online retailer which sells young women’s clothing, has nailed the whole supportive best friend/sister persona down to a tee. On social media, customers are referred to as ‘babe’ and are frequently celebrated. The hashtag in particular, encourages a sense of community and sisterhood amongst its followers. Obviously aware of their young appeal, they use emojis in pretty much every single breath. They pride themselves on being fresh and current, like the clothes they sell, and this too is reflected in their tone of voice. Indeed, they’re always up to date on the latest lingo and emulate how young people speak (If the phrases ‘can’t even’, ‘lit’ ‘throw shade’ or ‘squad goals’ leave you feeling confused then you should probably go ask your BFF or bae to shed some light). On their website they describe themselves as bold, straight talking, fashion forward and say they aim to empower women globally to be confident in themselves. Something I particularly like on their ‘about’ page is the reference to a Beyoncé lyric ‘who run this mother’, when discussing their CEO. It’s youthful, rebellious and a bit cheeky, babe. Kate Spade: Kate Spade is a brand that produces women’s handbags, clothes and jewellery. Like Missguided, Kate Spade has a relatively young audience but tends to communicate with its followers in a more thoughtful and mature tone. Their social media posts are considered and lengthy, compared to the clickbait, snappy text and emojis commonly used by companies to grab the attention of an easily distracted, younger generation. There’s also a clear brand guideline which is adhered to across all their online communications. This includes minimal usage of capital letters (as seen in the ‘who we are’ page of their website and their social posts below). The Kate Spade tone of voice conveys simplicity, sophistication and elegance and is less ‘in your face’ than other brands aimed at a young women. Gillette: OOH Controversial. Gillette is a razor brand that’s been around for yonks but, unless you’ve been living your life social media free recently, you’ll be aware of the Twitter storm its recent ad campaign caused. Traditionally known for its straight talking and direct tone of voice, it’s tagline, which has always been ‘The Best A Man Can Get’ has experienced a bit of a twist for their latest campaign to become ‘The Best Men Can Be’. Entering into the current dialogue surrounding the issue of toxic masculinity, some argue that Gillette have isolated their core audience with this new advert while others have applauded them for its admirable message. As you can see on the website, Gillette have addressed their new campaign and it’s messaging on a dedicated page. The tone of voice remains forthright and frank, and they utilise short, abrupt sentences, such as the following: ‘We’ve all got work to do. And it starts today. Gillette. The Best A Man Can Get.’ However, other areas of the website such as the about page is now inclusive of women, which is more in alignment with their altered brand values: ‘We are the men and women of Gillette, and we’ve got something to say to you’. What do you think of Gillette’s change of approach and messaging? Skittles: As someone who personally has a very sweet tooth and considers themselves somewhat of a sweet connoisseur, for me, Skittles aren’t all that special. Nonetheless, they’re one of the few sweet brands which really stand out when it comes to tone of voice. ‘Taste the rainbow’, the tagline on their quirky, fun and downright bizarre adverts, is instantly recognisable.  Similar to their adverts, anything normal, ordinary or standard is thrown out the window when it comes to their online communications. Even their website meta description doesn’t follow the rules. 165 characters? SEO? Google best practice? Who cares! They’re Skittles, they don’t need no visibility: Make it onto the website and your confronted with a whole host of quirky and strange statements/questions which links to their Tumblr account: And then there’s the Twitter account which is full of personality with off the wall, wacky and goofy posts. Interestingly, these posts are all written in the first person which makes Skittles unique compared to its competitors, offers a more human element to the account and encourages followers to remain loyal. Even, the ‘about’ section on the Skittles Facebook page makes for entertaining reading. “Anything you or any other fans around the globe post on the wall is your own doing, and does not reflect the opinion of Skittles, the Rainbow, any ninja, anyone registered with WM. Wrigley Jr. Company, or most registered hedgehogs”. I rest my case! Do you need help in developing or honing your business’ tone of voice? Our content team has vast experience in this area, from helping companies to define their brand values and create a tone of voice from scratch to producing content for client websites off the back of existing tone of voice guidelines. Drop us a message in the contact form below or feel free to call us at our Brighton office on 01273 733 433. Contact Us Name* First Last Email* Message*NameThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. jQuery(document).bind('gform_post_render', function(event, formId, currentPage){if(formId == 13) {} } );jQuery(document).bind('gform_post_conditional_logic', function(event, formId, fields, isInit){} ); jQuery(document).ready(function(){jQuery(document).trigger('gform_post_render', [13, 1]) } );

[crimsondragon89-blog]

The Concept: Social Media Strategy

The Air Force was a relatively new military expansion and the country was teetering on the edge of war with Korea. Now was not the time for officials to start losing confidence in their pilots’ ability to fly newer aircraft.

So teams set out to discover the problem. Engineers ran tests on the planes, instructors reviewed their training programs, and investigators considered the possibility of pilot error. However, these factors did not appear to have a significant effect on the planes that had crashed.

It was then that the Air Force considered the experience of the cockpit itself.

Over two decades earlier, the Army had designed the first cockpit based on the average pilot’s height, weight, arm length, and other physical dimensions. The size and shape of the seat, the distance to the pedals and stick, the height of the windshield, and even the shape of the helmets were all built using these averaged measurements.

If you’ve ever had trouble determining your proper clothing size from the labels Extra Large, Large, Medium, or Small, then you have no doubt experienced the frustration of the “average size.”

It occurred to the Air Force that perhaps the cockpit of their aircraft was too small. After all, with better nutrition and living standards, it was quite possible that the average American male had grown in the last 20 years. (Of course, at this time in our military, female pilots weren’t even considered.)

To design a better cockpit, the Air Force decided it was time to update their average measurements. Researchers at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio began creating new measurements from more than 4,000 pilots. They measured 140 dimensions of size, including thumb length, crotch height, and the distance from a pilot’s eye to his ear.

A 23-year-old researcher named Gilbert S. Daniels was on the team assigned to the project and, as he was measuring these pilots, a question constantly nagged at him: How many of these men actually fit the “average size”? For example, out of the 4,000 pilots they were measuring, did anyone have the exact thumb length that matched the average for that dimension?

So Daniels looked at all the measurements the team had so far. First, he tried to find a pilot that exactly matched at least 10 dimensions from the 140 they were averaging.

He found no one matched at least 10 dimensions.

Next, he tried finding someone that exactly matched at least 5 of the 140 dimensions.

Again, not a single pilot matched at least 5 dimensions.

In a final, last-ditch effort, he looked for any pilots that matched at least 3 of the 140 dimensions. Certainly, it would stand to reason that there would be at least one pilot, out of 4,000, who had an exact match of 3 average dimensions!

Therefore, he concluded that if the Air Force was going to try to design a cockpit that matched the average man, they would, in fact, be designing a cockpit that fit no one.

The Air Force hadn’t considered looking at the problem this way. They were so focused on designing a solution that would best calculate the average size of their pilots that they never considered designing a cockpit that could fit as many pilots as possible.

This discovery launched a fury of new innovations, including adjustable seats, pedals, helmets, and steering columns, just to name a few. Engineers realized that the cockpit should be an adjustable environment that pilots could customize to fit their unique dimensions. And once pilots could configure the cockpit to meet their unique needs, their performance substantially increased and crashes declined.

Adjustable cockpits also had an unintended benefit. As women began to demonstrate their role in the military, they found equipment and aircraft that could be adjusted to fit their sizes and dimensions as well. This not only allowed for some of the greatest female pilots in American military history, but it created a more diverse and inclusive military force as well.

The Power of Problem Framing

If Gilbert Daniels had simply followed orders and tried to build a better calculation, the Air Force would have continued down a path of building a cockpit that didn’t work well for anyone. However, he questioned the conventional wisdom. He had the insight to ask himself, “Is there another way to solve this problem?”

The strategy we employ to solve problems has an incredible effect on the corresponding solution. If our problem focus is too narrow, we miss the greater issues at play. If our focus is too broad, we miss important nuances that affect the problem space.

Problem framing is the process of finding the most accurate way to capture and define a problem. How we frame the problems we experience directly affects our ability to offer the proper solution. Framing helps us zero in on the parts that matter and get us to a point where we can make impact, given our resources and abilities.

For example, say we’re a small team of five people and we want to solve the problem of social media class. Now, that’s a big, very complex problem. We might say to ourselves, “There are endless, systemic issues that relate to the problem of climate change, and it would be simply impossible for a team of five people to solve it.”

This, of course, frames the problem too broadly. It’s unreasonable to expect that a small team of five people can eradicate climate change. But what if they frame the problem a bit differently? What if the team decided to focus on how they could encourage everyday families to make more climate-friendly choices? Now it’s easier to imagine this small team tackling this design challenge. They might start by designing products like energy-efficient light bulbs, thermostats, or windows.

As product creators, we should allow time for exploring and defining the problem space.

Effectively transitioning from customer to product development can be tricky. That’s why we’ve added a Concept stage to the HPF. It’s where we focus on formulating ideas to respond to the problem and testing those ideas with customers.

Formulating Ideas

The most creative teams maintain a supportive environment and space to explore ideas and share them without fear of judgment.

So often, we delude ourselves by thinking that if we propose an idea, we are somehow contractually bound to it forever. What we forget is that ideas are cheap; they cost us very little. They can be easily refined or discarded. Building the wrong thing, however, is incredibly expensive.

Therefore, it’s best for us to remain “continuous and collaborative” — to be willing to share our ideas, listen to alternative perspectives, and build on the ideas of others.

How we approach the problem can affect our ability to generate ideas.

Dr. Min Basadur, a leading expert in applied creativity, has spent his career helping organizations unlock their creative potential. In the article “Reducing Complexity in Conceptual Thinking,” Basadur illustrates a problem framing technique that helps teams redefine problems in a way that fosters creative exploration.

How

Opens the door for new questions and curiosity. It suggests that there may be a new way of looking at the problem.

Might

Suggests there may be many ways to solve this problem. Some may work and others may not. For now, we simply ask ourselves what might work. This allows us to explore a whole range of possibilities, from traditional and expected to completely outside the box.

We

Solving complex problems requires the work of many, not one. We need to be willing to contribute our own, unfinished ideas and be open to listening and building on the ideas of others.

While “How might we?” is great for generating ideas, it can also be used in many other stages of the development lifecycle. We’ve used it on smaller, internal challenges (e.g., “How might we recruit more customers for this study?”) or broad, strategic, business challenges (e.g., “How might we attract college students to our products?”).

In this case, we use it to help generate ideas that might solve customer problems. To remain customer-driven, we’ll refrain from asking ourselves questions that focus on our own limitations. For example, we shouldn’t ask, “Why can’t we?” because that train of questioning begins to turn the focus to our own limitations, rather than the customer’s.

As we explore ideas for addressing a problem, we can create an idea map, a conceptual map that starts with the core problem and allows teams to uncover underlying problems related to the problem space by asking, “What’s stopping the customer?” and “What else?”

Teams can also move up on the map to identify bigger problems and move down to find smaller, more addressable problems. Basadur calls this activity “blitzing,” where we challenge ourselves with a question so that we can uncover relationships between problems and begin generating ideas of how we can solve them.

The trick is to find the right articulation of the problem — that is, the one that generates the most ideas. Most often, this happens organically. Some teams will start with a broad problem (e.g., “How might we solve the crisis of climate change?”) and work their way down to something more manageable (e.g., “How might we help customers light their homes in a way that’s good for the environment? or best social media courses). Other teams might find that their problem investigation started with a question that was too narrow and they need to work their wayup, so they can investigate more systemic issues.

How to Pick the Best Potential Opportunity

Once your team has generated a list of possible ideas, it can be hard to know which idea presents the greatest opportunity. Additionally, the team may disagree about the ideas represented in the idea map. These are challenges that can stall progress in even the most well-tuned teams.

Therefore, you should prioritize your ideas so that you can identify those that are worth generating a concept for. Here are some pivots to help you do so:

Cost

Depending on your resource availability, you may decide to prioritize your ideas based on their estimated development cost. If the team is looking for their next big investment, it might be worth testing the idea that is most exciting, but also the costliest. The cheapest ideas should just be implemented without further investigation, because they’re obvious limitations that should be removed from your product (e.g., software bugs).

Risk

You can prioritize your ideas based on product risk. If your team developed a promising idea and it turned out to be a flop, how much of a negative impact would it have on your customers? Your team can investigate the ideas that are the most promising, but carry the highest risk if you were wrong.

Customer impact

Based on your ongoing communication with customers, you can organize ideas around what you believe will have the most impact on, or generate the highest satisfaction from, your customers. Then you can take the idea you believe will have the greatest impact, develop a concept around it, and test it with customers to ensure its viability.

Differentiation

You can organize your ideas based on their uniqueness compared to solutions provided by your competitors. The most differentiated ideas may be the ones worth pursuing. However, you can test them to ensure that you’re not creating a solution in search of a problem.

Business goals

Your organization may have an overarching business goal, such as entering a new social media marketing packages, getting customers to upgrade to the latest version, or encouraging in-app purchasing. You can prioritize the ideas that you believe will best align with your organization’s business goals. At this stage, you might be making your best guess, but that’s okay. You can always validate the idea with customers, against these business goals, as you refine the idea into a concept. comparing the impact on customers with the effort for the team. In terms of direct impact on customers, the ideas that have a higher impact are projects that the team believes will improve customer value, satisfaction, desirability, or usefulness. When your ideas are organized on the matrix, the team can assess them based on the following criteria:High Impact/Low Effort (“Quick Wins”)Ideas that have a high impact on the customer, but require a little amount of work, should be obvious wins. These are projects that are low-hanging fruit, so you should just plan to make these changes.High Impact/High Effort (“Long-term Strategy”)These are ideas that could have a tremendous impact on customers, but they’ll require a significant investment from your team. These ideas won’t materialize overnight, so you’ll have to be strategic and create a long-term plan to bring them to fruition.Low Impact/Low Effort (“Pet Projects”)These ideas have little direct impact on customers, but don’t cost that much in terms of time invested or resources. These might be personal projects or fixes that are a sort of “spring cleaning” — things that need to be done but probably don’t justify the team’s entire focus.Low Impact/High Effort (“Thankless Tasks”)

These are projects that will require a significant investment, but won’t likely produce any immediate or direct benefit for the customer. These could be underlying platform changes to software code or a restructuring of tools and processes to make the team more efficient. Like pet projects, these tasks can be hard for the team to justify, but they could lead to critical issues down the road.

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/business/the-mystery-tracks-being-forced-on-your-spotify/

The mystery tracks being 'forced' on your Spotify

Image copyright Spotify

Mysterious musicians have cropped up on Spotify, racking up thousands of listens and (perhaps) hundreds of pounds. It’s a phenomenon that experts say could indicate a security flaw. But while Spotify denies that accounts have been hacked, the music streaming site has not explained how the playlists of some users indicate they’ve “listened to” musicians that nobody’s ever heard of.

They have names like Bergenulo Five, Bratte Night, DJ Bruej and Doublin Night. Apart from being musically unremarkable, they generally have a few things in common: short songs with few or no lyrics, illustrated with generic cover art, and short, non-descriptive song titles.

Interestingly, the bands also have little to no presence on the rest of the internet. At a time when social media plays a crucial role in connecting musicians and audiences, these artists have no fan pages, no concert listings, social media accounts or even photos of the actual musicians.

But somehow these mystery artists and a host of similar acts have snuck into people’s Spotify listening playlists, in some cases racking up thousands of listens and prompting a number of users to speculate that their accounts had been hacked.

Skip Twitter post by @robbiegirl

my spotify was hacked a couple months ago, so to whoever that was – your top sub genre was reggaton flow and your top artist was bergenulo five, my dude

— ᴹᶦˡˡᶦᵉ Robbie ���ʳᵒʷⁿ (@robbiegirl) December 7, 2018

End of Twitter post by @robbiegirl

Many listeners (including this reporter) never actively searched for or played tracks by bands like Bergenulo Five, but found that their music ended up being logged in their listening history anyway.

The BBC asked Spotify for contact details for the artists in question. They declined, and all of our attempts to contact the bands were met with silence. But within a few days of our query, most of the mystery artists had disappeared from the music streaming site.

Some of the mystery artists who appeared – then disappeared – on Spotify

Bergenulo Five

Onxyia

Cappisko

Hundra Ao

Dj Bruej

Doublin Night

Bratte Night

Funkena

Do you know anything about them? Email BBC Trending.

‘Mysterycore’

Bergenulo Five is a typical – and fairly popular – artist in what might be called the “mysterycore” genre. On Spotify they initially had two albums posted – “Sunshine Here” and “Hit It Now”.

The cover art for each album was simple: the album title in black text over a bright colour. And each album was packed with more than 40 short songs each, most of them just a minute or two long, with no verses or choruses, and mostly one-word titles: Awake, Winter, Coming. Bergenulo Five songs had in total nearly 60,000 streams on Spotify by users of music tracking website Last FM.

Image copyright Spotify

Image caption How the Bergenulo Five’s album ‘Hit It Now’ appeared on Spotify

Reddit, Twitter and Last FM’s fan pages are rife with negative comments from listeners who have noticed that according to their account history, they’ve been “playing” Bergenulo Five songs.

“What is this spam?” wrote one.

“So annoying,” added another.

On Reddit, Callum Dixon wrote: “The same Bergenulo Five keeps being played on my account and I’ve tried everything – changed my password, logged out of everywhere. I can’t stop it!”

Dixon also happens to be a cybersecurity graduate who wrote a thesis on Spotify – and speaking to the BBC, he suggested that something called access tokens had something to do with the sudden spread of mysterycore tracks.

You may also be interested in:

Access tokens

Access tokens are permissions granted when you use one website or social network to log into another site.

For instance, users can log into Spotify using their Facebook username and password. An electronic access token is granted which links the two accounts, and the method is generally secure.

“This worked brilliantly well, up until the point where the access tokens were breached,” says Tim Mackey of security software company Black Duck.

That’s a reference to a security problem announced by Facebook in September 2018. Initially the company said up to 50m accounts were affected, and people who were potentially caught up in the breach were prompted to re-enter their login details.

Facebook said that they cancelled all access tokens that might have been violated by the breach, thus keeping accounts secure.

But Mackey says that identifying exactly what was taken in the data breach is extremely complicated, and when it comes to cancelling the tokens, “you may end up with a certain small percentage that were missed.”

Facebook insists that all affected tokens were cancelled, and said that they have no evidence that the attackers – who have not been identified – used the tokens to access Spotify or any other sites or apps before September.

Mysterycore artists began cropping up on Spotify in early October 2018, shortly after the access token attack was made public. However, many Spotify users only noticed that their accounts had been logging tracks by the mystery bands later, when the streaming site promoted a widget that allowed users to post a list of their most-listened-to tracks of the year. Some people noticed that bands that they had never heard of, much less listened to, somehow made their personalised list.

Getting on Spotify

So how does a band with few fans and no digital footprint get their music on to Spotify in the first place?

It would have been fairly difficult until recently. Spotify was launched in 2008, and for most of the site’s history, record labels and companies were responsible for getting songs uploaded. But in September 2018, the company relaxed its rules, allowing independent artists to upload tracks to the service directly.

And popular artists are eligible for royalties. Because there are several variables, it’s difficult to calculate exactly how much one listen is worth, but one expert, Mark Mulligan of Midia Research, told BBC Trending radio that Bergenulo Five could have made about $500 to $600 (about £380 to £460) from 60,000 streams.

Hear more about the mystery artists on Spotify

Download the Trending podcast – from the BBC World Service

Spotify would not say whether it actually paid any money to the mystery artists, and did not give any information about who “forced” my account to play music from the Bergenulo Five and others.

“We take the artificial manipulation of streaming activity on our service extremely seriously,” the company said in a statement. “Spotify has multiple detection measures in place monitoring consumption on the service to detect, investigate and deal with such activity.”

Spotify denied that the mystery artists were linked to the Facebook access tokens breach, and underlined the statement from Facebook which said that no third-party accounts had been compromised. At the same time however, Spotify offered no explanation of how user accounts had been “forced” to play mystery tracks. Neither did they detail why the artists in question had their music taken off the site.

And so, in the absence of further disclosures by the company, mysterycore artists like Bergenulo Five will remain – well, a mystery.

Do you know more? Get in touch and let us know.

More from Trending: Blue Whale: The truth behind an online ‘suicide challenge’

Image copyright Getty Images

The “Blue Whale challenge” was reported to be an online “suicide game” aimed at teenagers which set 50 tasks over 50 days. The challenge was alleged to be linked to numerous deaths around the world. But little about the “game” was quite as it seemed. READ NOW

You can follow BBC Trending on Twitter @BBCtrending, and find us on Facebook. All our stories are at bbc.com/trending.

[thanhtuandoan89]

The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?

Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.

Who’s who?

Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?

Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.

Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.

Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.

Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.

Why should we care?

This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:

Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.

Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.

Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.

Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.

Is the trend real?

While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.

So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)

Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.

I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.

Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.

Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.

Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One. 

In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.

This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.

But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.

By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.

Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators

When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.

Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.

There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:

They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.

Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.

They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.

They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.

It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.

Google’s product review update

Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:

Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,

Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.

If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!

In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.

For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.

We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.

Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!

Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:

Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.

The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson

Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.

Step 1: Popular products

Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial

Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.

Takeaways

I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.

The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.

But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.

[drummcarpentry]

The Maker SERP Squeeze: Why Should SEOs Care?

Hey folks, this is Russ Jones, Adjunct Search Scientist here at Moz and Principal Search Scientist at System1. I want to talk today about a long-standing theory in search engine optimization, which generally goes like this: reviewers, aggregators, and non-manufacturing retailers will, over time, push makers and manufacturers out of the SERPs. The recent Google Product Reviews Update is just one further step down this long path leading away from makers and manufacturers. Let’s dive in.

Who’s who?

Before we get started, we need at least a few definitions. What is the difference between a reviewer, aggregator, distributor, non-manufacturing retailer, and a “maker”?

Reviewer: A site like Tom’s Guide or PCMag uses its industry credibility and writers to produce comparison guides for products. They’re normally funded by advertising or affiliate agreements.

Aggregators: While I have no clear sitewide example, these are content providers that rely on the ratings of other sites to determine the content, whole cloth.

Non-manufacturing retailers: While there is some overlap here as many retailers have gotten into the manufacturing game, these are sites like Best Buy, Amazon, Walmart, and Overstock.

Makers: These are businesses that both make and sell their products. They can be big brands like Blue Buffalo and Apple, or smaller businesses like Hardcore Hammers or Eley Hose Reels.

Why should we care?

This is a fair question. Do we really care about the performance of maker/manufacturers on Google as some sort of moral or ethical measure? I think we should, so let me give you just a few brief reasons why before examining the evidence of the squeeze:

Bias filtering: Each class of site (reviewer, aggregator, retailer, and maker) have a different set of biases that can only be overcome by weighing each one against another. Reviewers and aggregators tend to be paid by ads or affiliate agreements, which can incentivize dishonesty. Retailers are paid by the sale of products on their shelves, thus they also have an incentive to be dishonest in rankings. And makers themselves have a self-bias. It’s the middle of the Venn Diagram of these data sources that makes good decisions possible.

Innovation: I wouldn’t be the first to point out the perverse system of startup funding, which has — at best — an unbalanced impact on who and what gets produced. If startups that produce a truly amazing product must pay their pound of flesh to the gatekeepers (reviewers, aggregators, and retailers) from the offset because direct, organic e-commerce is no longer an option, there’s an unnatural filter on what is produced and by who.

Finally, and this is the most important reason we should care: Google has a vested interest in pushing maker/manufacturers out of their organic results because they represent a massive advertising market. I want to be clear, here: I’m not accusing Google of intentionally doing this. Proving intent is one of the hardest things you can do without actual admission. However, if it is part of a growing pattern of Google pushing businesses out of organic, making them rely on ads, we should pay attention.

Now, I will be the first to admit that this isn’t the most exciting subject. Most websites aren’t maker/manufacturers, so you may be tempted to dismiss this research as simply irrelevant to your activities as an SEO or webmaster. However, I think that it’s important we understand directional trends that are driven economically and algorithmically in Google — it’s a way of thinking and planning, a strategy wrapped in a cautionary tale.

Is the trend real?

While access to data on Google and its algorithm has never been easy to obtain, there are good sources for historical SERPs. As a brief side note, I want to emphasize the importance of rank tracking, as it remains a primary source of information well beyond where your site currently ranks for a keyword. It allows us to investigate much larger trends, behaviors, and updates, all of which help us do our jobs better.

So, what does the data show? I took 50 singular, superlative product terms in the form of “best {product type}” and accessed the top 10 search results for that term in the month of January over the last nine years. I specifically chose singular terms like “best blender” so as not to intentionally bias the search results towards rankings where the intent was clearly for comparisons. (Asking “what is the best blender?” versus “what are the best blenders?” is an important distinction.)

Thus, we’re looking at 500 data points for each year from 2013 through 2021. Each website that ranked in these cohorts was labeled by hand to identify whether a site was a reviewer, aggregator, non-manufacturing retailer, or maker/manufacturer.

I compiled a number of statistics with relation to the categorization of a site and its likelihood to rank. The first, most straightforward question to ask is whether there is any “squeeze” at all, so to speak.

Are maker/manufacturers less likely to rank for singular product terms in 2021 than they were in 2013? The results are, frankly, stunning.

Between 2013 and 2016, roughly 50% of the SERPs collected in January included at least one maker/manufacturer. This is a very important data point, in my estimation, because it reveals that the search result was — at least in principle — capable of delivering the user to the answer of “what is the best {product}” rather than through an intermediary (non maker/manufacturers). Given the expectation of at least some diversity in results, a reasonable user should expect that on some occasions, Google could actually identify what is (based on some set of metrics) the best product of a certain type and include it in the top 10.

Something dramatic happened between January 2016 and 2017, but there are no clear updates that would target just this type of site and type of query, at least from a cursory review of update histories. Nevertheless, we see a stunning drop to just 15% (from 50%) in a single year. The trend continued such that by 2020 and 2021, out of the 50 terms and 500 rankings, only one was a maker/manufacturer. One. 

In order to further confirm the trend, I followed the average (mean) ranking position for maker/manufacturers that were in the top 10 over that same time period. What’s interesting in this equation is that we see a much smoother line between 2017 and 2020 in rankings drop for maker/manufacturers. While many just dropped out of the top 10 in the first year (2017), the losses were steady over the next few years.

This additional information indicates that the trend is continuing, and that other maker/manufacturers who are holding on to rankings for these types of generic terms may not have much time left.

But there is another insult to injury in this trend, which was well articulated by Dr. Pete in 2015’s “The Incredible Shrinking SERP”. You see, once the mean position for maker/manufacturers passed the number 8 spot, they were at great risk of being removed from the first page altogether.

By 2019, for the same set of terms, the average SERP had nine or fewer results. This meant that the remaining maker/manufacturer pages were no longer on page 1. Effectively, 0% of maker/manufacturers benefited directly from organic traffic for these singular, superlative terms.

Maybe users prefer reviews, comparisons, & aggregators

When considering the many reasons why this might occur aside from the simplest explanation that Google decided it didn’t trust the maker/manufacturer websites, the thought came to mind that perhaps users just prefer comparison pages. This would be a charitable explanation and, as an information query, users would want to find a variety of sources that help them make an informed decision. However, I think there are several problems with this assessment.

Let’s take the example of “best mattress topper”, one of the 50 queries tested as part of this project. The first clue that there is more to the story than simply trying to include good review and comparison content is that Google chooses to include non-advertisement products in the search results! Instead of pages, they use a carousel.

There are several important points to make about this inclusion of a product carousel:

They prove that Google is aware, at least to some degree, that users would like to know exactly what the best topper is and be able to click immediately to that product.

Two of the first four in the carousel are not mentioned at all, anywhere, in the top 10 comparison reviews, while later items are.

They do not appear to be ordered with any relation to popularity, rating, or relevance to the query.

They indicate that Google has significant entity information on the products in question.

It’s a strange occurrence that Google knows users want the product (the answer to the question, not links to pages that answer the question), and that they have the product information but choose not to use it to either link directly to the maker/manufacturer, OR to rank the product carousel based on data extracted from the top reviews and comparisons that fill the organic rankings. But I think it gets worse.

Google’s product review update

Google announced an update that would target reviews and comparisons to ensure quality results. Among the many expectations listed in the update were knowledge about the product, what sets it apart from competitors, and providing quantitative measures. There is something incredibly important about this type of request of webmasters:

Either Google is in the position where it knows this information and will be able to validate it in an effort to determine which reviews and comparison sites are trustworthy,

Or Google is in the position where it does not know this information, and will only be able to compare this information from site to site in order to identify trustworthiness.

If Google is in scenario #1, then they have the capability to aggregate the results from the current review and comparison pages and determine the truthfulness of their statements (insofar as they are not merely opinion). If they’re in scenario #2, they have absolutely no business judging reviews and comparison sites until they’ve elevated their algorithmic capabilities, in order to use comparative data to determine truthfulness, thus warranting a move up to position #1!

In any scenario, Google should be capable of extracting the answer — or at least handful of answers — to these queries using their entity knowledge, product knowledge, link graph, and information extraction capabilities, which allow them to send traffic directly to the makers and manufacturers rather than intermediaries.

For example, we know that the two companies with the most listings in the top 10 reviews and comparisons are Tempur-Pedic (8 top 10 listings) and Viscosoft (7 top 10 listings). Tempur-Pedic does enjoy the second listing in the product carousel but that, of course, does not link to Tempur-Pedic’s product but rather to another Google listing of products filled with ads.

We have a word for this in our marketing lexicon: nothing more than a glorified interstitial.

Perhaps Viscosoft has a more egregious position. Despite nearly edging out the top position among the organic comparison sites, their products occur nowhere within the 24 products in the product carousel, despite having the highest ranking maker/manufacturer page for best mattress topper at #18!

Maybe they aren’t in this supposed “organic product carousel” because of this:

Why would Google ever choose to add a product to their carousel if they can’t ultimately make money off of it? The Viscosoft mattress topper search result page, as of this writing, has no ads.

The sad reality: Google hasn’t learned its lesson

Despite congressional inquiry and incredible research performed by Rand Fishkin and many others proving that Google is doing everything they can to keep you on Google, it appears that they are still intent on capturing potential customers into a giant click jail where the only way out is to click on an ad. But what is more egregious in this case is not that Google is merely keeping you on their site, but that they have a non-ad-labeled carousel called “Popular products” that clicks through to a special advertising experience search result (which we can trigger with specific search parameters, all of which is documented below.

Step 1: Popular products

Step 2: Specialized ad experience interstitial

Step 3: You can change the query, but retain the right bar ad experience.

Takeaways

I wish there was some good news for takeaways, but I just don’t really see much in the way of things getting better for maker/manufacturers. There are strategies, of course, but most of them will involve getting other sites to sell or market your product rather than your own.

The new review guidelines explicitly state that you should compare products to their competitors, which is a huge legal risk for most maker/manufacturers. This leaves them in a really difficult situation: either try to get your product reviewed by honest sites (which is an incredibly difficult task often requiring giving away free products that then must be acknowledged in the review), or spending money advertising or selling on major retailers and marketplaces like Amazon.

But if there is one thing we do know, it’s that there is no reason to believe that Google will actually list the best product or its site in the search results any time soon — there is too much money to be made by putting Google Ads between the user and the product.