I remember many years ago learning to surf in Hawaii with my daughter. (Well, she learned; me, not so much). We got some instructions on the beach, then, into the water we go. Our instructor pushed us into the waves, and my daughter, a gymnast, popped right up onto the board and was surfing the first time.
I just couldn’t get it. Kept missing the wave, or losing my footing. And getting more and more frustrated and unhappy with each attempt.
At some point, I had the thought: why are you so unhappy? You’re in the water in one of the most beautiful places on earth, the sun is shining and you’re having fun with your kids.
Sometimes, you just have to enjoy “being in the water”, and let go of the immediate need for success. Trust the process.
Going through a bit of that with The Hawaii Project now. The first rush of the launch is off, and while things are going ok, customer acquisition is not going the way I want it to, and attempts to generate press aren’t hitting yet.
Sometimes, you just have to enjoy being in the water. I’m working my dream project, I have the freedom to chase it on my own terms.
Enjoy being in the water. Keep pushing, don’t be satisfied, but enjoy being in the water.
(The Hawaii Project finds great books you’d never find on your own. Check us out: http://www.thehawaiiproject.com)
The Water Knife is an extremely interesting near-future, post-apocalyptic take on the water problems faced by the American Southwest.
Angel Velasquez is a Water Knife – a vicious and not-quite-amoral enforcer who helps Catherine Case control the water supply from the Colorado river, on which everyone downriver depends. Lucy Monroe is a Pultizer-nominated investigative journalist poking all the wrong people in Phoenix and California. Maria is a desperately poor migrant who’s made her way to Phoenix. When Angel is sent from Vegas to Phoenix to get his hands on some water rights, their paths collide in a brutal and violent exploration of what people will do to each other because of poverty, desperation,extreme conditions or just plain evil.
While The Water Knife lays this water shortage at the feet of man’s development and climate change, it turns out this isn’t the first time the Southwest has undergone drought. In fact drought led to the migration and eventual disappearance of the ancient Anasazi, the creators of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. That drought created enormous social upheaval, migration and violence (a subject I covered a bit here and here, including extremely brutal mass killings and cannibalism).
The Water Knife is a great read, no matter your point of view about climate change, urban development or water usage in the California and the southwest. It recalls the best of William Gibson’s cyberpunk masterpiece Neuromancer (is Catherine Case named after Case, the anti-hero of Neuromancer?). It’s an all-too-plausible extrapolation of the challenges facing California (often mis-reported as saying California will be out of water in a year). It’s a classic sci-fi/noir with a Southwestern flair. It’s an exploration of whether mankind is inherently evil, and a reminder that civilization might be a thin veneer over our violent natures. And it’s a fast, enjoyable read.
Bacigalupi’s characters occasional veer a little to close to stereotypes (the bad guy redeemed by a woman, the muckraking journalist), but those are minor quibbles. Great read, and thought provoking.
If you’re wondering what to read next after The Water Knife, head over to this page: http://www.thehawaiiproject.com/what-should-I-read-next-after–The-Water-Knife–46654. And in the non-fiction category, consider Cadillac Desert, a history of water in the southwest which features prominently in The Water Knife.
Not long ago, I returned from a fantastic trip to the Southwest with old friends. We hiked and explored many of the key ruins of the Anasazi (or Ancient Puebloans, as is the currently accepted term) — Mesa Verde, Hovenweep and Chimney Rock, one of the northernmost outposts of the Chacoan empire. You can read more about our trip here.
Inspired by our trip and on the recommendation of my friend Thomas, I went after House of Rain, by Craig Childs, to gain more perspective on what we’d seen. House of Rain is ~500 page exploration of the world of the Anasazi. The Anasazi built a vast empire in the American Southwest with a complex culture, amazing cliff dwellings and stunning pottery, only to mysteriously disappear from the scene around 1300AD. Childs set out to explore, and perhaps solve, this mystery.
Awhile back there was a management school of thought called “Management by Walking Around”. Childs is from the “Archaeology by Walking Around” school. His (and others’) theory is that the Anasazi were an inherently nomadic people, in spite of the magnificent cliff dwellings they built. And his further assertion is that you can only really understand them by following them through the terrain. If you’ve ever been in the southwest, you know it’s a bleak, harsh, byzantine, but ultimately stunningly beautiful land, filled with mountains, rivers and a maze-like set of canyons littering the landscape. House of Rain is Child’s travelogue as he explores the vast landscape of the Southwest, mostly on foot and often at real personal danger. He starts at Chaco Canyon, the epicenter of the Chaco culture, then moves north to Colorado, east to Utah, South to Arizona, and eventually into Mexico. Along the way we’re treated to equal parts nature travelogue and deeply scholarly archaeology.
Childs is a modern day Indiana Jones — one moment he’s swimming a flash flood in Chaco Canyon, the next exploring the evolution of pottery patterns over time in a museum. One of the more recent discoveries is that the Chaco empire built roads in the desert running fifty miles or more in a straight line, connecting settlements with both roads as well as mountain-top signal fires straight out of a scene from the Lord of the Rings movie. Childs walks these roads and explores the canyons, and the beauty and desolation of the Southwest comes to light.
Along with his athletic explorations, Childs brings a deep knowledge of the scholarship of the southwest to bear on his tale. As he travels the southwest, he’s moving both through the migration paths of the Anasazi as well as moving through time. The Anasazi periods have very distinct pottery styles that identify region of origin, time of origin, even individual potters. Childs tells the story of the evolution of pottery and architecture over time and shows how it documents the migrations of the time. Materials sampling of pottery and human remains show pots and human remains that came from hundreds of miles away.
As the drought of the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries made life ever more difficult for the Anasazi, migration and social upheaval increased greatly. It’s well documented that were mass murders, religious warfare and ritual cannibalism during that time. Childs relates the studies of Ernandes, that have shown a corn-only diet can lead to malnutrition, and in the extreme to OCD, aggression and even mystical states of ecstasy. It’s considered a possibility that the corn-only diet of religious priests may have led to documented mass sacrifices amongst the Aztecs, Toltecs, and the Anasazi. To quote Childs:
Ernandes did not leave the Southwest out of the study, mention-
ting a fervor that swept the Anasazi landscape. Terribly disfigured
human skeletons have been found from that time, bones polished by
cooking, heads severed. The authors of this study believe that corn
could have been a factor — that dementia could have occurred on a
cultural level.
(The upheaval of the Southwest during this time of drought is an interesting phenomena given the drought that’s occurring today in the Southwest and California in particular.)
Childs book is a fascinating exploration of a little-known time and place in the history of the Americas. And if you live anywhere in the southwest, it’s right under your nose. As for Child’s solution to the mystery of the disappearance of the Anasazi? Well, you’ll have to read the book.
So, I’m currently reading The Water Knife, an extremely interesting near-future take on the water problems faced by the American Southwest. (The ancient Anasazi has the same problems but that’s a different blog post). Post-apocalyptic climate change fiction with a healthy dose of William Gibson-esque cyberpunk. Great read, no matter your point of view about climate change. Shortly I’ll be done with it, and facing the inevitable “what should I read next” question.
Well here at The Hawaii Project you know we’re all about great book recommendations, finding great books you’d never find on your own. We’re excited today to introduce a new feature, “What Should I Read Next”. Now, to be honest, this has been done before. But not well. Let’s show you in action how different and better our results are.
The most well known approach is Amazon’s “Customers who bought this also bought that”. For the Water Knife, Amazon tells me
buy other books by the same author (BORING! + I’ve already read his earlier books!), or
get Seveneves by Neal Stephenson (a space disaster movie, nothing to do with climate change, and so well-promoted, if you read Science Fiction you’ve heard about this book already).
Goodreads at least doesn’t show me books by the same author, but does show me 4 or 5 space operas with nothing in common with The Water Knife. None of these recommendations is really very interesting or relevant.
We’re recommending Rivers, by Michael Farris Smith. (“In the tradition of Cormac McCarthy, Larry Brown, and James Lee Burke, Rivers is an enthralling, darkly beautiful novel set in Mississippi against the backdrop of a series of devastating storms that pummeled the American South in the years since Hurricane Katrina. In the near future, a climate shift has caused massive damage to the Southeastern United States…”).
Now we’re talking. A near future climate change adventure story. Spot on. And totally generated by the system, so this same quality of recommendation is available for any book, without human intervention.
And we’re recommending Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Thomas Sweterlitsch, a near future cyperpunk post-apocalyptic novel you probably haven’t heard of, but which is getting nominated for awards and getting rave reviews from other authors. And we’re recommending Jonathan Lethem’s near-future classic, Gun, With Occasional Music — it’s not just new books, or books we want to sell you, it’s the right books.
So much more interesting and valuable.
What makes our approach different? The Hawaii Project is unique in that it identifies what books the influencers and tastemakers are writing about, and so we can identify when two books are written about together — a very strong signal that the two books are related to each other. We also take into account what the book is about, rather than simply whether people who bought this also bought that — a very weak signal that the books are related.
This is the second post in our continuing series on how and why The Hawaii Project recommends great books, and more broadly the key ingredients in a good discovery or recommendation system.
In our last post, we argued that the “ratings & review” model for decision making and discovery is corrupt and broken.
Today we’ll explore the limits of another common approach, Social Discovery.
Social Discovery is in use across the web. TripAdvisor will tell me if one of my friends has stayed at a hotel I might be considering. Spotify will show me a continuous stream of what music my friends are listening to. Quibb is doing interesting things with social news reading. This approach can be quite helpful — if for nothing more than a bit of reassurance that the thing in question doesn’t suck.
And yet…..
Let’s have a look at my Spotify page and what my friends are listening to.
Foo Fighters (not interested). Radiohead (know all about it). Counting Crows (meh). Buffalo Springfield (nope). Sara Bareilles (nope). Epic Score (no clue who this is, and no context so I’d have to listen). Knowing what music my friends are listening to satisfies a certain voyeuristic tendency, and showing off what music I am listening to feeds my vanity and helps establish a “personal brand”. But it’s not that helpful for discovery — my friends don’t listen to the kind of music I do! (which is why Spotify leans harder on the personalized Browse feature for discovery).
What is a “discovery”? The key ingredients of a discovery are that it is personally relevant, interesting and surprising. That music above might have been interesting but it wasn’t relevant. Current discovery systems often don’t deliver on these key requirements.
In the context of book recommendations, if I read the first Game of Thrones book, Amazon’s “people who bought this also bought that” algorithm will happily tell me I should read the 2nd book in the series. Probably relevant but hardly surprising. Not a discovery. And the Goodreads model of “your friends read this so we’ll tell you about it” fails the “relevant” test. In large measure, my friends don’t read what I read.
It’s like the GEICO commercial: “Huh. did you know you can save 15% in 15 minutes?” “Everybody knows that!” (perhaps relevant but unsurprising). “well did you know the ancient pyramids were a mistake?” (the surprise). Discovery systems need to create that feeling of serendipity, creating that emotion of “wow, I never would have found that on my own”, and today’s engines often don’t.
Social discovery works when:
my social graph and I have high alignment in interests, and/or
the investment required to evaluate or consume is low.
Many services piggy-back their social networks off Facebook. That’s pretty much guaranteed to produce a social graph not aligned with my tastes. Just because I work with you doesn’t mean I like your movies, books or music. Quibb works because they are doing professional tech news, and the network itself is curated and piggy backs on Twitter. The graph is much more aligned to my professional news interests than my Facebook friends, and the news they read/share is therefore highly likely to be relevant. And the feed is high enough velocity the articles will likely be a surprise (that’s why they call it “news” folks — it’s new!). Further, it’s low-investment to take advantage of the articles. I just scan the headlines and click on what is interesting.
Spotify’s “social discovery” may not be highly relevant, but it does satisfy the second point — it’s low investment to taste some of that random stuff my friends listen to — I just push the play button and it’s free.
Social Discovery also requires the “velocity” of activity to be in a fairly narrow range. If the velocity is too low (I might only stay in a hotel a few times a year), the recommendations stream is too old or empty to be relevant. If the velocity is too high (say, Facebook posts), the stream rapidly becomes too big to manage and the items stop being interesting (sound like your Facebook feed?).
Lastly, socially-driven recommendations tend to be static. That recommendation for Book 2 of Game of Thrones is never going to change. If I go back to the Amazon page for Book 1 a year from now, I’ll get no new fresh insight — it’ll still be recommending Book 2 to me, although I knew that a year ago. What you want is a surprising recommendation, so if you come back a few days later you can get new ideas, and one you wouldn’t have thought of on your own.
If socially driven discovery systems have these challenges, what’s the alternative?
I am a big fan of curation. There are people (curators) who spend their time looking for interesting things and writing about them. Robert Scoble for Startups. Maria Popova for intellectual ideas and books. Jason Hirschhorn for Media. Pitchfork for Music. Aggregating their streams can produce something that is satisfies our last two requirements: that the items be interesting (because they’re curated) and surprising (because curators are always writing about something fresh and we’re aggregating those interesting items into a time-based stream that’s constantly renewed). But that aggregation won’t be sufficiently relevant. Not everything a given curator writes about will match your personal interests.
If we take those streams and layer on top of it a “picker” that grabs the personally relevant things, you will get a much more interesting, high quality stream of discoveries. I call this approach “Personalized Curation”. That is the approach we’re taking to book recommendations on The Hawaii Project, and you can see similar approaches happening in Music (Shuffler.FM and Apple Music), News (Flipboard, Quibb) and other areas.
Personally Relevant. Interesting. Surprising. Deliver on all three and you’ll get and keep your audience.
A personalized stream of Books & Articles from The Hawaii Project
