All posts by Paul Raven

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The key to ending ageing?

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This week’s inescapable big science story is that of Brooke Greenberg, the teenage girl whose physical and mental development has seemingly  stalled at the stage of an 11 month old infant. In addition to the lamentable tabloid freak-show component to the story, however, is the claim from a researcher that Brooke’s genetic make-up may hold the key to arresting the ageing process.

Walker thinks that Brooke is the first recorded case of what he describes as “developmental disorganization”. His hypothesis is that the cause is disruption of an as-yet unidentified gene, or genes, that hold the key to ageing by orchestrating how an organism matures to adulthood, reproduces, then gradually ages and dies.

Walker believes that Brooke lacks this “regulator” of development – first proposed in 1932 by British marine biologist, George Parker Bidder. Like Bidder, Walker believes that the regulator guides organisms through to adulthood, but also works beyond then to orchestrate ageing and, eventually, death.

It bears repeating that this is one man’s hypothesis rather than a species-wide day-pass to the fountain of youth, but let’s assume for a moment he’s right. The first ethical question here is whether Brooke should be treated as a potential source of human immortality rather than simply as an unfortunate girl in need of a lifetime of care. Personally I don’t see a problem with researching the implications of a condition alongside giving palliative care for it, as discussed in the neo-eugenics post the other day.

The second ethical question – and, to my mind, the much more important one – is whether we’re right to be chasing after human immortality as a goal. It’s a much fuzzier line; while I don’t see any problem with wanting to extend the human lifespan and eradicate the negative aspects of the physical ageing process (a matter on which I am somewhat on-side with the transhumanists), I’m not sure that we’re yet in a geopolitical state as a species where we could cope with radically extended lifespans.

Most of our modern wars revolve around resources, and resources are becoming scarcer because people already live much longer than they did a century or two ago; how much more of an issue will energy supply be in developed nations when the average life expectancy has an extra handful of decades tacked onto it? Will birth rates decline in proportion to increased lifespan, and if not, how will we cope with a population that is both expanding and greying?

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Neuromarketing – time for the revenge of the consumer?

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showroom signRegular readers will be aware that technological marketing is one of my perennial topics here at Futurismic; it never ceases to amaze me how far companies will go to find new ways of selling us stuff more effectively. Neurological research is the cutting edge of the field these days, with Honda kitting out test customers with clothing that reports on their physiological status as they’re given the latest pitch in a gussied-up showroom:

Honda found the results so persuasive that it is remodelling showrooms and retraining staff to tailor pitches according to a potential buyer’s state of mind. “The hypothesis is that if you get the [sales] experience right, you may not need that price promotion to sell a product,” explains Ian Armstrong, manager of customer communications for Honda UK. “Conventional research only gets you so far because it’s rationalisation after the event, and most decision-making is done subconsciously. We set out to measure physical changes people cannot consciously control.”

Honda is not alone in believing brain science can boost the bottom line. A growing number of businesses say that traditional ways of understanding consumers – direct questioning, observing our behaviour – don’t explain why we buy one product over another. And they are turning to neuroscience for the answers.

All well and good for Honda, I guess – though I’d be immensely amused if at the end of it all it was discovered that purchasing choices are largely sub-rational and random. For now, though,  I’m inclined to see the sales floor as the battleground of an arms race. After all, the technologies Honda are using are comparatively lo-fi, the sort of thing that a smart independent researcher could knock up on a budget. So maybe consumer advocacy groups will start their own counter-research programs, offering tactics and training to enable shoppers to spot when they’re being manipulated by environmental factors or neurolinguistic programming techniques, and ways of turning the tables on the salesmen. Knowledge is power, right? [image by mrflip]

Of course it’ll be a while before grass-roots research can match the sort of data that fMRI scans can gather, but if there’s one up-side to the economic slump it’s that people already seem to be thinking far more carefully about what they buy; all the crafty persuasion techniques in the world won’t do you any good in an empty showroom, after all. And just to go all the way with the blue-sky thinking, perhaps we’ll eventually end up in a world where manufacturers realise the best way to sell us something is to have a robust and functional product that people actually need…

… hey, a guy can dream big on a Friday, can’t he?

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Where are the sexy computer games?

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Keeping to the gaming theme, here’s Aleks Krotoski at The Guardian asking a very valid question: where are all the sex-based computer games?

It’s not for want of trying. Brathwaite says that when she landed a job as producer on Playboy: The Mansion, in 2005, she found there were countless games developers building titles around love, intimacy and, well, hanky-panky, but they were lost in an ocean of family values propriety, wandering souls buried under regulations and smothered by distributor blacklists, treated as “specialists” whose products only saw the light in extremely independent competitions. And so, with only the odd interruption of a virtual carnal nature, game controversies are dominated by violence. Depravity just isn’t on the regulator’s radar.

And can you imagine what would happen if it were? Just look at the furore over the scenes uncovered in the code of GTA: San Andreas. For heaven’s sake, they were two consenting (digital) adults in an 18-rated game: why did it end up such an issue that the then senator Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to get it banned? Such top-down puritanism forces creative conformity in games for fear that explicitly including sex scenes would lead to a loss of filthy lucre – when on earth has that been the case?

It does seem odd, but then computer games are a comparatively young medium by comparison to film or literature – perhaps the form just isn’t mature enough to carry it off? If that’s the case, though, developments like the interactive software/hardware combinations that run Lionhead’s virtual boy Milo suggest that the technical capability to make a sex-based game that’s going to inspire more than adolescent sniggering may finally be here. How long it will take someone to think of a genuinely engaging set of game mechanics to go with it is anyone’s guess… but I doubt it’ll be too long, despite the puritanical hand-wringing of career demagogues.

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Electronic Arts invites the pirates to tea

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graffiti pirateIn amongst this week’s headlines of ludicrously disproportionate damages being awarded to the RIAA and assorted governments (including my own) clamouring loudly for the privilege of tucking themselves into the moth-eaten and holey pockets of Hollywood, we find a ray of pragmatic sanity: the CEO of computer games publisher Electronic Arts is openly asking software pirates to redistribute their titles. Why? Because they’ve worked out that it’s easier to make money selling stuff within the framework of a game than it is to sell a game itself.

EA thinks this is the secret to stopping—or at least curbing—piracy: games should be services, not products. Or at least products that should be selling other products. We already knew that EA would like to turn Tiger Woods into a subscription-based product, and Sims 3 is a game that wants you to constantly be creating, downloading, and buying new virtual items. The old business model was selling expansion packs, but that was too complicated: why not cut out the retailers and turn the game into its own store to sell the products?

“I’m a longtime believer that we’re moving to selling services that are disc-enabled as opposed to packages that have bolt-ons…. So the point I’m making is, yes I think that’s the answer [to piracy].” Riccitiello told IndustryGamers. “And here’s the trick: it’s not the answer because this foils a pirate, but it’s the answer because it makes the service so valuable that in comparison the packaged good is not. So you can only deliver these added services to a consumer you recognize and know… So I think the truth is we’ve out-serviced the pirate.”

It’s interesting to see a big games vendor like EA waking up to ideas that industry pundits have been suggesting for years, and I expect we’ll see some of the others abandon their King Canute impersonations when they realise that it works. Going forward, I expect that within a few years it’ll be virtually unheard of to “buy a game”; instead, we’ll subscribe to them, or spend time in them socially much the way we do with Facebook now.

That said, I suspect it’s too late for the major music labels to change course given the huge amount of money they’ve pissed away on trying to defend their old business models from change, but I struggle to sympathise; after decades of them screwing consumers and artists alike, I’m rather enjoying seeing the boot on the other foot. [image by Robyn Gallagher]

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Publishing 101

The would-be writers among you might find the following two items of interest, dealing as they do with the less glamorous aspects of fiction publishing. First up, John Scalzi explains why writers in their thirties are still described as being “new”, even though they’re kind of old by comparison to musicians and actors at similar career points:

1. Writing an entire novel is something most people have to work up to. Because you know what? Writing sixty to one hundred thousand words of fiction is not something most people cannonball through, even if they assure you, with the appropriate amount of false modesty, that they’re really better at long-form fiction. Maybe they are, but they still had a long walk to get there.  I’m better at long-form and it took me until I was 28 before I could do it. Meanwhile I’d been writing short for years up to that point, in the form of reviews and columns and humor pieces and (yes) occasional attempts at short fiction that I mostly abandoned after a page or two. Lots of people in their teens and early 20s start novels; rather fewer finish them.

Elsewhere, Andrew Wheeler takes a more business-orientated look at things as he runs through the essentials of book marketing, starting with something called “channel mix”:

It’s deeply wonky, I know, but at the core of the business of selling books is knowing where and to whom you’re going to sell. A “channel” is a way to sell books, and there are more of them than you think.

It’s easy to get blindered in the book world, and to assume that the big chain stores are the only way books get to readers. It’s more true for fiction than for non-fiction, but there are still more options than you think.

[…]

If you’re an author, your publisher will have a marketer thinking about these channels (or the subset of them that publisher has an effective salesforce to reach), and — if you’re lucky — your editor will also think about this as well. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it; the author is always the best expert on her book, so you can help by suggesting possibilities.

(Authors often have unrealistic hopes, which you should keep in mind. It’s not always the author’s fault — some authors are monomaniacs who think their book on cheesemaking in Scandinavia will be a major Oprah pick, but most are just optimistic people who think that the Society for Shadetree Management would really, really like a new middle-grade novel about Becky Balsam, Forest Ranger if they only took a look at it. So be careful about pushing your suggestions too forcefully. Make suggestions, but also listen closely to what the people at your publisher tell you.)