"Angry Birds" behind the red: data misled for 20 years

Tencent Science and technology news March 21, as we all know, the spread of the internet is like a prairie fire, but, it swept the United States speed really faster than radio or television?

I'm afraid the answer is very controversial. But this does not prevent such a concept from spreading quickly on the Internet.

In a recent hundred-page report published by Oxford University, two economists quoted a collection of eye-catching data: It took 75 years for the phone to attract 50 million American users, and the Angry Birds only took 35 days to achieve the same size. Radio and television reached this milestone, respectively, in 38 years and 13. Such precise data seem to be enough to show that researchers have undergone a detailed investigation.

But that is not the case.

"Angry Birds" jumped red behind: a set of false data how to spread 20 years

In fact, this set of data is misleading. First of all, it does not comply with the principle of comparable comparison. The statistics on telephones, radio and television seem to be the number of American households using these technologies, as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau. The internet, Facebook and Angry Birds contain a wide range of users, but it's not clear who they are.

The word "Internet" is inherently problematic. The origins of the Internet can be traced back decades, when military and scientific researchers began to connect computer systems together. But it was not until the advent of the World Wide web that it really attracted a large number of users in a short time.

As for the so-called "50 million": In the middle of the 1950, the total number of households in the United States did not even exceed this data. So to be sure, all the inventions that preceded it will take a long time to reach this milestone. In fact, a more meaningful comparison is to see how quickly a technology can be accepted by a large number of American individuals, not only at home but also elsewhere. In fact, most Americans first contact the Internet at work and then gradually surf the Internet at home.

Of course, the social and technological underpinnings of inventions are different. Scott Stein, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that apps like Angry Birds do make it possible to reach millions of users in cyberspace quickly--because the system provides them with a huge user base. But at the beginning of the telephone system, it was necessary to deploy a variety of infrastructure, the speed of natural slow.

Ironically, the underlying idea behind this picture may not be wrong.

"New technologies are spreading faster than old technologies-but there is nothing special about the Internet in this respect." Gos Comin, an economist at Dartmouth College, says he specializes in tracking the way various technologies are spread around the world. Diegocomin For example, his research has shown that medical breakthroughs such as heart and kidney transplants are spreading at almost the same speed as the Internet.

From this perspective, these data on the infiltration of science and technology, although there is a certain basis, but the basis is not reliable. In fact, various variants of this set of data have been circulating for 20 of years, but you cannot see it in the charts provided by the Oxford Economist's report.

"Angry Birds" jumped red behind: a set of false data how to spread 20 years

Oxford economists say the chart comes from the Citigroup digital Strategy team. Sandeepdave, a member of Citigroup's digital Strategy team, Sandip Dave by e-mail that the data actually came from Kofi Annan (Kofiannan), "So we thought we were using the U.N. report." Unfortunately, I'm not sure which report it is. He added that the author of the chart was not his team.

Is he referring to Kofi Annan, who has served as Secretary-General of the United Nations for nearly 10 years?

In fact, the link Dave provided was not from the U.N. report. The maker of the chart, G. Kofi Annan, is not a former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, but a technician and writer living in the United States.

"People always ask me this question. "said Annan. When he attended the SXSW Interactive conference this week, he said that the chart was collected from various "mashup" materials on the web, and that in fact many of the reports did not provide the same data for the same issue. "Angry Birds" data actually come from Theverge and Engadget blog posts, Annan said.

But in fact, "Angry Birds," the official disclosure of data shows that the application online 1 years after the 50 million downloads. The real 50 million downloads in 35 days is the "Angry Bird Space Edition" that was launched later.

In fact, the "50 million" as a milestone also has an interesting history. Kisler Hannimel Gislehannemyr, a Norwegian computer scientist, says he has been tracking the problem. For the first time, he found that 50 million users were used to compare the spread of various technologies in 2001 years. So, from then on, he began to collect relevant information. In 2003, he also published a special paper on this.

In his view, the first time to use 5000万来 to compare the speed of technology transmission is a 1997 Morgan Stanley Research Report, then the chief author of the report is Mary Mik (Marymeeker), which is known as the "Internet Queen" star analyst. The report contrasts the "number of years that new media attracts 50 million of U.S. home users", which results in 38 years of broadcasting, 13 years on television, 10 years for cable television and 5 years for the Internet.

The report used the same data as Citi's, but replaced "users" with a more rigorous "family". However, Hannimel remains concerned.

"Unlike what I had previously thought, this set of data may not have been completely fabricated, but its origins may not have been strictly used in a variety of terms, and there is a case of heterogeneous comparisons." "he said. As a lecturer at the University of Oslo, he contacted Morgan Stanley, but the investment bank did not explain exactly how it came to this conclusion.

In addition to Morgan Stanley's own data, the report cites two other sources of data, including a close eye on the cable industry's Paul Kagan (Paulkagan) and the Mckain Eriksen (Mccannerickson), which publishes ad spending data twice a year. Kagan admits he provided cable data, but a spokeswoman for Eriksson said she was not sure what data Morgan Stanley was using.

The data soon spread. Hannimel found that the data was used in a report by the U.S. Department of Commerce in 1998 on the "Rising Digital economy" (the emerging Digitaleconomy), which also claims to have cited the Ernst and the Internet shopping report and interactive Agedigital provides articles on online computer stores.

"The popularity of the internet is faster than all previous technologies," the U.S. Department of Commerce said in a report. It took 38 years for the broadcast to attract 50 million people, and television used 13 to reach this standard ... After opening to the public, the Internet reached this milestone in just 4 years. ”

Not only that, the European Commission's report used this set of "50 million" data. Soon after, a Singaporean bank also used the data in its report, but used them to describe Asia. It was not long before the United Nations used the data in its 2000 report-and the source of the quote was not someone else, it was the United Nations Secretary-General, Kofi Annan. The representative of the office responsible for preparing the report said: "The report does not cite specific sources-so it is difficult to determine 15 years from now." ”

This specious set of data has been spreading for decades. In a 2012 white paper published by Intel (updated in 2014), it also contains data from former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.

In Hannimel's investigation, he also listed his own set of comparative data, most of which are derived from the speed at which the U.S. Census Bureau is using family-unit statistics to spread the technology. He wanted to convert the units of the data into individual users in order to achieve a more equitable comparison. He also elaborated various adjustment plans in the paper.

In fact, one of the most important questions to judge a technology's speed of transmission is the timing of the birth of this technology. From this point of view, the Internet seems a bit tricky. Hannimel believes that at least 7 points can be seen as the birth of the Internet: one of the first was Paul Balain, a researcher at Rand Corp., who invented the exchange technology, which was 1964 years old.

He eventually took 1989 as the starting point for the Internet, the year when the first commercial Internet service provider began operating in the United States. By this calculation, the Internet is no faster than the previous technology: his data shows: radio, television and the internet to attract 50 million people to spend less than 10 years.

But if you calculate by the percentage of users in the population, there will be even more surprising results: Internet penetration is even slightly slower than radio and television.

"Angry Birds" jumped red behind: a set of false data how to spread 20 years

Chene Greenstein, a professor at the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University, Shanegreenstein wrote a book on the history of the Internet economy. He says Mick's 1997 report helped people understand what was going on in the world. "Compared to the extreme euphoria of the late 1990, she is actually very down-to-earth." He noted that Mick had often issued a cautionary remark that the rapid growth of the internet would eventually slow.

The report also predicted that the Internet would achieve 50 million users by 1999.

Greenstein that the widespread dissemination of such data once again illustrates the "Internet exceptionalism" – in the eyes of many people, internet companies do not follow the economic rules of other industries.

At the same time, asked if he could provide a data source for the 1997 report, a Morgan Stanley spokeswoman said: "That was 18 years ago." However, no further reply was given. And Mick himself did not respond.

But in any case, this set of data caters to the aspirations of most people. It's too consistent with people's ideas, so there seems to be no need for verification. (Long song)