By the time I first spoke to Ran Zilca, he already had hundreds of social-science research years at his disposal. I mean, Lew Goldberg was probably in textbooks that my parents used in college (and will be in textbooks that my grandkids use, too). Although Jason Rentfrow came on the scene about a half-century later, he’d made his mark with some terrific articles; I was amazed at how he investigated complex real-world behaviors while remaining deeply rooted in theory. And Dan Levitin seemed to pick up his Ph.D. in neuroscience in between his lives as a musician, author, producer, and techie. So I was walking into an all-star team of psychologists.

This was quite a contrast to the situation at my old company, where I was the chief psychologist behind personalDNA. There, I was the social scientist. Whatever I said about the readiness of a test, the accuracy of feedback, or the presentation of information was accepted, because while what the programmers did was a mystery to me, what I did was just as much a mystery to them. Here, everyone is a scientist. We don’t all run around in lab coats, holding test tubes up to the light (at least not on Thursdays, when I’m typically in the office), but at the same time, we do like to make graphs, run analyses, quantify things that seem abstract, and corroborate our assumptions. And if you’re a scientist, all of these things seem like great fun.

Applying these tools to human behavior is endlessly fascinating to me. When I teach statistics, I get really excited when I present social science as a concerted effort to explain what people do. Anyone can describe the behavior of others on a case-by-case basis, but we need statistics to explain that behavior systematically, and to make the most accurate predictions of other behaviors. Social psychology is really only about 125 years old, so we’re really just getting the hang of finding causes of behavior and thought. When I think of all of the variability in people’s actions and cognitions, and how little of it we understand, I can’t help but get excited about discovering just a little more of what motivates, elates, frightens, changes, moves, hurts, satisfies, and generally affects people. I’d be terrified if we could ever explain or predict all of human behavior, but for now, I get excited by exploring bits + pieces of it.

And that’s what drew me to signalpatterns. Somewhere in what people express is some sign, some signal, that indicates a lot more about them than we can notice at first blush. And detecting those signals– and relating them to other signals, from other people– can help people gain insight into themselves. Ran, and the crew he’s assembled, had some interesting ways of fostering this process, so when he asked me to sign on, I was thrilled. So here’s to detecting signals, and making a small dent in understanding who we really are.

-David

Don’t we all remember that Friday when OpenSocial was announced. People sat and watched the hour-long campfire 1 video, held meetings, made calls, sought further input… When the smoke cleared it was certain that this is going to be big and important - some day…

The business practice of engaging with a small set of partners and announcing an alliance is a legitimate one. However, an alliance is not a consortium, and it has little to do with standards and with being open. In fact, a standard is agreement among competitors.

For OpenSocial to be open, it should be open with “write permissions” not “read only”. Back in the day when I was still a speech-processing research guy at IBM labs I participated in IETF and W3C standardization activities. What I’ve experienced is companies opening up their internal APIs or technology, and then having to go through revisions of it for their competition before a widely accepted (and then hopefully adopted) outcome is finally reached.

We all love Google, and for good reasons. They changed great and fundamental things about the web, and they introduced a new standard of web ethics and practices - Google is king. OpenSocial is clearly a significant and important development towards a more open web, but the way the OpenSocial move was carried out is not in line with Google’s do good spirit.