The ups-and-downs of viewership at each moment in your video, compared to videos of similar length. The higher the graph, the hotter your video: fewer viewers are leaving your video and they may also be rewinding to watch that point in the video again. Audience attention is an overall measure of your video’s ability to retain its audience.

It looks like the video has above-average retention for all but 30 seconds–not too shabby! When I investigated that low point, I discovered that there is a span of about 5 seconds around 1:41 during which the frame is devoid of animation–it does seem like a disappointingly boring point in the video. I should trim out those dead seconds. A handy tool indeed!

This visual is brilliant–it sums up capitalism, more or less. See more examples after the jump.


The Kettle
The one that struck me as most clever was the steaming kettle inside a transparent rotating Earth, to show the accumulation of water vapor.

A Still Body Tends to Rest Unless Acted Upon by External Forces

Positive Feedback Mechanisms
I remember learning that methane and water vapor had a substantially greater effect than CO2.

Albedo effect–light particles popping out of the Sun in an amusing way.

Changes in surface water kill plankton and reduce carbon absorption.

Social Disasters
Defense against flooded nations.

Here, a government bureaucrat and a corporate hog work together to create a monster.

The big picture regarding the modern life metaphor.

Watch the video:

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip from Leo Murray on Vimeo.

Objective: Quickly accumulate airline miles to get free airfare.

What I Did:

• Opened Delta Gold AMEX card, received 30,000 bonus miles after spending $1,000 with the card. Annual fee waived for first year.
• Opened Citi Premier Pass Elite card (Expedia), received 20,000 bonus miles after spending $600 with the card. Annual fee of $75 charged.
• Opened Chase British Airways card, expecting to receive 100,000 miles after spending $2,000. Annual fee of $95 charged.

Total Credit Access: $30,000
Total Bonus Miles: 150,000

Coach class round-trips to Europe are about 50,000 miles, so that’s THREE FREE ROUND-TRIPS TO EUROPE!

My credit score dipped from 830 to 760 and is now slowly creeping back up. The average age of my accounts has decreased, but my credit utilization rate is now much lower as well, which will give me a better score as my accounts age. A few weeks of free score monitoring is available from FICO.

The British Airways 100k bonus is a fantastic offer. Next on my list is Citi’s American Airlines card which comes with 25k miles. If you own a small business, you can sometimes open two of each card and double your mileage bonus; that’s one card for you and one for your business. I don’t recommend the Citi Premier Pass Elite card; the rewards are cashed in via Expedia, and there seem to be a number of restrictions on what you can earn miles on, a lower miles-to-cash-value redemption rate, and fewer redemption options.

If you don’t regularly have enough expenses to reach these spending requirements, you can search the web for other spending strategies.

Let me give you his two lines that offended me the most.

“The consumer drove us headlong into the crisis that we face today.”

“This is a tremendous opportunity for the consumer, who drove us into this recession, to lead us right back out.”

WHAT?! This man is placing the blame for the economic recession squarely on the average U.S. citizen?

He goes on to say that consumers have “started to deleverage” and “to remove themselves from the liability and risk.” (A visitor to the comment stream on TED noted that this is an obtuse way of saying that personal bankruptcy filings are on the rise.) Further, “it’s not about the consumer being in retreat; the consumer is empowered.”

Not only do I disagree with the gist of these statements, I find them paradoxical coming from an advertising man.

The advertising industry relies on the premise that the decisions of individual consumers can be influenced through branding and advertising efforts. This is an industry that is eager to take credit for the behavior of consumers. And yet here, we have an ad man claiming that consumers are autonomous, making independent decisions in concert that have tremendous impact on our society. Either he doesn’t believe in his job, or his talk is a fabrication.

The reality is that consumers presently have very little power in guiding culture and the economy. Consumers are presented with a range of lifestyle options and aspirations, and they select from that menu.

With respect to the credit crisis, Congress and various Presidents are responsible for 1) the deregulation of the financial industry and 2) promoting and subsidizing the “American Dream” of home ownership and excessive material consumption. Banks and brokers are responsible for originating and sending packaged loans upstream to unknowing investors without asking where the risk was going. The inefficacy and incompetence of auditors and ratings agencies allowed the credit craze to grow unchecked for a number or years. These stories are well documented elsewhere.

Gerzema’s accusation of the consumer is like blaming a child for binging on cookie dough that was handed out to him by his teacher. Consider this—a third grade teacher diverts the school’s supply of cookie dough to her classroom. She dispenses it freely to her class, and the kids eat as much as they can get their hands on. The next day, all the third graders are out sick, and the lunchroom has no cookies to provide to the rest of the students in the school. Gerzema would blame the third graders for this cookie calamity.

I don’t intend to overlook personal responsibility, but when the average citizen is conditioned to accept homogeneous aspirations, to be intellectually helpless, and to defer to experts and authority, it’s absurd to expect them to make good decisions, especially about things as complex as the assortment of new loan products that were showered upon them. If you hand out easy credit, people are going to take it. How much of the burden do you want to put on individual “consumers” when the powerful corporate establishment is conspiring against them? To blame the consumer is to suppose that across the nation, millions of people simultaneously but independently decided that it was now time to demand a variety of new, easy loan products, and plunge the proceeds into real estate and lifestyle upgrades. In this era, when does the populace ever act in concert, other than as the result of large scale advertising or media events?

Gerzema goes on to say, “This may be a seminal moment in American history. An opportunity for the consumer to take actually take control and guide us to a new trajectory.” He cites some pieces of evidence that consumers are now taking action:

“What you have seen is an uptick in the savings rate. Eleven straight months of savings have happened.”

“Remarkable, in the fourth quarter, spending dropped to its lowest level in 62 years.”

“Visa reports that people are paying with debit cards instead of credit cards. We are starting to pay for things with money that we have.”

The consumer is NOT empowered right now—I think the current crisis represents a low point in consumer power.

Gerzema shows that the personal savings rate turned negative at the peak of the credit bubble. The personal savings rate is defined as the fraction of income that does not go to consumption expenditures. Credit is the tool that allows us to spend more than we earn, and a reduction in the availability of credit will inevitably force an uptick in savings. The consumer has hit a wall—he is broke—and is now trying to climb out of his debt-hole by scraping together what savings he can. Broke consumers can’t spend, so the “lowest level in 62 years” is not surprising. Many consumers are experiencing increased interest rates, defaults, and bankruptcies, so the decline in credit card usage is another symptom of the contraction. None of these facts are evidence of proactive individual choices—consumers are in fact backed into a corner and can do nothing but cling to a few dollars and hope that the recession is over soon. This is empowerment? Now, more than ever, we are prisoners of debt.

Counterpoints are welcome.

• Innovation is required to adapt to nature, to “control” nature and sustain growth path of society
• Innovation gives rise to unknown risks and challenges
• New challenges require further innovation

Problem: volume of challenges is increasing faster than innovation can solve them, except when we have major breakthroughs like fossil fuels, cities, microprocessors, antibiotics, the internet, the human genome.

Paths of innovation become increasingly myopic, path-dependent. The cost of backpedaling and choosing a new innovation path is perceived as far to high, though the unknown consequences may dwarf this cost. It gets more difficult to jump to better alternative paradigms. Like capitalism, innovation requires perpetual growth to maintain our society.

Innovation moves too quickly for our the nature-society interface to stabilize. Introduce a concept of a risk-barrier, similar to the sound-barrier at 768 mph. Before settled culture, humans constantly reacted to nature, facing challenges as they arose; humans acted within existing rules and either survived or didn’t. Now humans change the rules by innovating to circumvent nature in the short-run, while accumulating unresolved challenges–a risk-barrier–in the long run. Now with settled culture we have innovated to avoid constant change.

The world continues to change around us while we innovate to provide our own stasis. This effectively creates a backlog of risks and challenges that are deferred into the future with great consequences that increase in scale the longer they are avoided. Our time-frame of thinking gets shorter because risks are multiplying faster than innovation can solve them, because innovation itself adds new risks. Only major breakthroughs can make net progress in working through the backlog of challenges.

11/4/2009 — An update from Autodata Corp. — In October, 838,052 cars and light trucks were sold in the U.S., for a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 10.46 million units. Over the past decade, the auto industry enjoyed annual sales of about 17 million units, but times have changed. General Motors is now making business decisions with the assumption that 10 million units will be the new “normal” annual rate for a while.

12/6/2009 — An update from Autodata Corp. — November numbers are now available. The SAAR for November 2009 was 10.93 million vehicles.

Legacy costs, and declining revenue due to foreign competition and the recession of 2008-2009 led to substantial losses for the Big Three, and forced GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy. To raise cash, the companies gave up ownership to unions and governments, and sold or cancelled nameplates. The federal Cash for Clunkers program stimulated sales in July and August by cannibalizing September’s demand, which sank to less than half the 17 million rate the industry had enjoyed for the past decade.

This past two weeks, I’ve used:

• a Prius to get groceries and dinner
• a Civic to check out an apartment in SF
• a 328i to check out an apartment in SF and visit Golden Gate Park
• a Nissan Versa to get groceries and go up to Mount Diablo to check for some of this week’s meteor shower action
• a Honda Odyssey to move from Berkeley to a new apartment in SF
• a Mini to get back over to Oakland for a Saturday homebrew BBQ

There are two ZipCar lots within two blocks from my new location in the city. The credit card style swipe is ingenious. I’ve called customer service twice and was able to talk to real human beings right away.

I can roughly quantify the opportunity to save money that I’ve created by switching from my car to ZipCar.

Assuming an average hourly cost of $10 (including SF 9.5% tax and the 10% EVP discount), I’ll save money in any month that I use ZipCar fewer than 50 hours. That seems like more than enough driving for me. The potential savings could be much higher with other people. I had access to cheap loans and cheap insurance, and I did repair work myself, so car ownership was relatively affordable for me. ZipCar is better though, because of the flexibility and simplicity I now enjoy.

A New Kind of Freedom..
For my first ZipCar experience, I made a last-minute reservation for a 2008 BMW 328i named Bui, which was parked at a gas station about a mile away from my house. I was hoping to get a Volvo S40, but someone else snatched the one that was near me before I could reserve it. I was fully prepared to pay the hourly rates for these premium cars, but the Low-Car Diet is covering that cost for now. The nice thing about this BMW was the absence of any exterior markings identifying it as a ZipCar, unlike the cheaper cars, so you can car-share inconspicously if you wish.

I unlocked the car with my credit-card style pass, and hopped in to find that the fuel tank was 100% full. The tire pressure warning light was on, but I ignored it after visually inspecting all the tires. False tire pressure warnings are common in BMW’s, even the brand new cars. So, I took off from Berkeley to San Francisco, where I picked up some friends and then went over the Golden Gate Bridge to Muir Beach. I’ve always thought the 3 Series was overpriced. I still do. Granted, the steering and suspension offer very good road feel. As with most autostick-fake-manuals, the transmission’s response was too slow and ended up hurting my brain. A good bit of power comes in around 4,000 RPM, but the exhaust note is rather light and raspy–kind of like a wimpy Formula One?

We made it comfortably through downtown SF, over the bridge, up into the hills of Marin, and across Hwy 1 to Muir beach. The GG and the shoreline were cloaked in fog, though sunny blue skies were clearly visible to the east. I stayed at the beach for a few hours, hoping to even out my Midwestern-style farmer’s tan by only sunblocking my face, neck, and forearms.

So, my experience was pleasant and painless, although there was one catch. After I dropped Bui off at his parking lot of origin, I returned about 10 minutes later to check if someone had left their sunglasses in the car. No sunglasses, but later in the day I was hit with a $50 late fee. According to the website, I had the car for an additional 10 minutes beyond when I know that it stopped moving. Apparently the cars are equipped with fairly sophisticated brains that log data and allow them to be tracked from headquarters, but I’m not sure where this 10-minute discrepancy came from.