Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Hymn Of Axicom

Give this pretty song a quick listen.

Vienna Teng Aims 05 The Hymn of Acxiom

If you go to YouTube and look at the related videos, you'll see that it has generated a bunch of YouTube covers by school choirs. For obvious reasons, it's popular with choirs - even though all those harmonies in the song are the same person, multi-tracked.

OK, but what's the song about?

Here are the lyrics:

Somebody hears you. you know that. you know that.
Somebody hears you. you know that inside.
Someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to
(say just the right thing and) show that you’re understood.
Here you’re known.

Leave your life open. you don’t have. you don’t have.
Leave your life open. you don’t have to hide.
Someone is gathering every crumb you drop, these
(mindless decisions and) moments you long forgot.
Keep them all.

Let our formulas find your soul.
We’ll divine your artesian source (in your mind),
Marshal feed and force (our machines will)
To design you a perfect love—
Or (better still) a perfect lust.
O how glorious, glorious: a brand new need is born.

Now we possess you. you’ll own that. you’ll own that.
Now we possess you. you’ll own that in time.
Now we will build you an endlessly upward world,
(reach in your pocket) embrace you for all you’re worth.

Is that wrong?
Isn’t this what you want?
Amen.

It starts out like a pretty standard sappy love song. But once you get past the first couple of verses, you might suspect that this might not be a song about hope and love and your precious fragile soul. It gets a lot darker: sounds almost jealous, possessive, sinister. But there's something else in there: formulas, design, need, lust, pocket, your worth. What's all that about?

It's a song about data mining and targeted advertising. Axicom makes software that reads your online email and figures out what you like so that advertisers can show you ads. This song was written by a former Axicom employee.

So, is the joke on the choirs who maybe don't know what they're singing about - they just think it's a love song with pretty harmonies? Or is the joke on audiences who don't have time to figure out what the lyrics are really about and think they're just hearing a pretty love song? Or is the joke on Axicon? Or is it on all of us who are willing to put our correspondence through Axicom's algorithms?

via David Byrne.

The Only Way To Win Is To Not Play At All

When we first tested dietary supplements in animal models we found that the results were promising," says Byers. "Eventually we were able to move on to the human populations. We studied thousands of patients for ten years who were taking dietary supplements and placebos."

The results were not what they expected.

"We found that the supplements were actually not beneficial for their health. In fact, some people actually got more cancer while on the vitamins," explains Byers.

The Market

Atrios:

But, Back In My Day, nobody got paid minimum working for fast food restaurants, at least in my location (Philly burbs). Nobody I knew in high school, at age 16, had any problem finding a job which paid $6-7/hour, including working at fast food restaurants and call survey centers. That's about $12-14, adjusting for inflation.

All of my high-school jobs were minimum wage, or pennies above. Which, at the time was $4.35 or thereabouts. Upstate NY, late 80s. I worked in retail clothing, department stores, fast food places, a mall sit-down restaurant, the local amusement park, mowed lawns, was an under the table janitor, and finally at an ice factory.

It wasn't until college that I got a job that paid more than minimum wage: working as an aide in the RIT computer labs.

Gallo's Poll

Was buying some wine this past Saturday and I had a bottle of J's chardonnay on the counter. The guy who rang up my order told me that the J Winery was just bought by E&J Gallo (the "We will sell no wine before it's time" people). That seemed odd. What would a giant bottom-shelf wine maker want with a relatively small Sonoma winery? Then he said that Gallo is the largest wine maker in the US. Also surprising - I know they're in every supermarket, but so are a lot of brands. "They sell under a lot of brands." Ah.

How many brands?

60 or 70, at least. And all those brands grouped together is probably 1/3 of everything you'll find at a typical NC supermarket. So, yeah, I guess they are huge. And not just on the bottom shelf!