Transcriber: Kanako Funaki Reviewer: Denise RQ
Hello.
Today, I'd like to talk about
how it is that small things matter.
I'm a computer scientist
so I work a lot on computers.
I always check e-mails, Twitter,
Facebook on iPhone,
and also texting all the time.
And my friends tell about me,
"She's a geek."
Maybe I am.
But because of all the work on computers,
I often have a sore back.
So I try to massage it,
or stretch around it,
but it wouldn't work.
And one day, my friend tells me,
"Mizuki, I have a good technique for your back.
Don't massage all over your body,
but rather, ask somebody to press their thumbs
right below your shoulder blade,
and hold them there for a few minutes
and it would work much better."
So I tried and he was right.
It really worked.
These key pressure points
are known to exist in a human body,
and they are called "tsubo" in Japanese.
In biology, there is a concept called 'keystone'
which may illustrate another form of "tsubo".
Back in the 1990s,
a group of scientists conducted an interesting experiment.
They went to the beach
and split the beach into two parts.
From one area,
they removed all of the starfishes
and kept the other one untouched.
They came back after a few months
and discovered that the total biomass of the area
that they took all the starfishes
was reduced to less than half,
compared to the one they kept untouched.
And it was surprising to all these biologists
because the number of species
of the keystone was very small in size,
but yet, they had a huge impact on the entire ecosystem.
These types of species are known as
"keystone" in an ecosystem.
Keystones are the type of species that are
small in their biomass, but yet,
would have a huge impact on the entire ecosystem
when they are removed.
So in the graph you see at the left top corner,
these species are known as keystones,
and you see the starfish over there.
I heard about this theory
from a colleague of mine
about two years ago,
and at that time, I was running a project.
And he asked us,
"Who do you think might be the keystone person
in your group members?"
I thought that was an interesting question so I decided to investigate.
In the group project, there was myself
who was leading the project,
another designer, he is an assistant designer,
another scientist like myself, an artist, and a few students.
And it was not hard to find the keystone person,
but it turns out that the keystone person was the assistant designer
because she was the one who was actually drawing a plan,
making logos,
so making real outcome of the project.
So if she were to leave the project, it would have a huge impact.
So talking of human relations,
these days,
we can visualize human networks
using the information from the web.
Indeed, there is a service called Spysee
that I take part in its development.
It's a service that, given a person's name,
it goes on the web,
and gathers all the information about that person;
and particularly finds
who that person is related with,
and visualizes the human network.
For example, this is the human network of myself found on the web.
You can see who I'm related with on the web.
You can also Google your own name
and maybe you will find
one of your Spysee page on the search results,
and clicking on that,
you'll be able to see your human network from the web.
This service, Spysee, was started in 2008
with about 100,000 people's names registered on the site,
and it gradually increased
the number of people registered
in response to users' requests
to investigate on a particular person.
And we would receive
about 1,000 pages of requests every year,
every day, and over the four years,
we have reached about
more than 1 million people's pages registered.
But what's interesting is
that we also received delete requests
from users who wished not to participate
or be on the webpage
for privacy reasons or for other reasons.
And the interesting question is,
"What would this effect have an effect on our service?"
Do we have a starfish like webpage in our system?
And it turns out that deleting a single page
may have a strong effect on the entire system.
Deleting a particular page,
even if that particular page does not receive many visitors.
This is because deleting one page does not mean
only taking that page out of the service
but also deleting the path to other pages on the site.
And we can investigate
whether a particular page is a keystone or not
by looking at the number of visitors
before and after the deletion of that particular page.
And our empirical studies indicate
that there might be a webpage keystone.
This is how Spysee looked like back in 2008,
when it was launched,
and this is how it looks now.
And this movie shows
how the top page of the Spysee site changed over time.
People might look for the keystone,
but what is equally important
is the mechanism, or the environment,
or the layout of the site
that caused small things
to become a keystone.
The site may not have
a keystone from the beginning,
but it may develop a keystone
throughout its development.
So I would say that any system that is maintained by people
will inevitably become to have a keystone
from ecosystems, human body,
to human relations,
and the web in not an exception.
It is the small things that matter
maybe even more than you think.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)