Order in disorder

If you are in the business of causing mayhem, this is where you can have your efforts evaluated. Expect to meet The Joker, The Penguin and The Riddler in the waiting room.

And apologies for throwing in two Engrishfunny.com posts in quick succession!

Seize the day – use it or lose it

I’ve just read an (as usual) excellent post by Dave Trott over at CST on the perils of saving something good for just the right moment. To paraphrase: If you have a good idea, use it now not tomorrow, because now is real while tomorrow may never happen.

In other words, imagine that you have a low value project running now and the possibility of a high value project coming up some time in the near future. Imagine, also, that you have just had a spark of inspiration that could be beneficial to either project, but can only be used once. You may be tempted to wait until the high value project comes along to try to gain the best possible return from your inspirational idea. This sounds sensible, but think about it another way: what if the future project never arrives? What if the future project turns out to be low value after all? What if the future project changes slightly so that your inspirational idea no longer fits? Then you get low or zero return on your idea. There are too many unknowns about the future, while there some guarantees about the present.

The present is here and real. You know that you’ll get some guaranteed return for your idea in the current low value project. And on top of that, if you came up with an inspirational idea once, you can do it again. If your idea for the present project is rejected then you still get a chance to apply it to the next project – multiple bites of the cherry.

Carpe diem quam minimum credula postero: “Seize the day and place no trust in tomorrow”. *

Or, more simply, “Use it or lose it”.

* Thanks to one of Dave Trott’s commenters for this full quote.

Pure Engrish

Engrishfunny.com usually elicits the odd smirk from me, but this one had me in stitches.

I can’t even imagine what “Leek Speculation Eggs” might be…

Google Epidemiology FTW

I’m a big fan of Google’s way of doing things. For example, the idea of spending one day a week on personal projects is a brilliant way to tap into the hidden skills and ideas of your staff. I’m also a big fan of data. Well, not data in it’s rawest sense, but the uses to which it can be put. So, really I’m a big fan of analytics. Google is one of the biggest repositories of behavioral data there is – simply because we spend so much of our time online and using Google to search.

Google Flu Trends

Google Flu Trends

One very beneficial graduate of Google’s labs is the Flu Trends product. This measures the prevalance of searches for flu related terms in the US and can estimate flu activity up to two weeks faster than traditional methods. And last week the Centres for Desease Control in the US asked Google to perform a similar analysis of data from Mexico to see if the spread of swine flu was reflected in the data before the media got hold of the story. And it was.

Google Flu Trends Mexico

As you can see from the above graph, there is an unseasonal rise in flu related searches from early April.

The power of this type of analysis is only just being realised, but the sheer amount of data and its range means that it is going to take some impressive analytical minds to design useful products. As this Wired article says, nobody was looking at the Mexico data when it would have been useful.

650mph Car Pancake

I don’t normally like simply pointing you to another blog entry with no narrative or analysis, but there isn’t really much else to say about this one. Definately one for the boys. The video’s about 4 1/2 minutes long but its worth hanging on for the slow-mo.

Mythbusters – what a job!

Reaching 50 million people

How do you show a span of 70,000 years on the same diagram as a span of 3 years? This is actually much more difficult that it might at first seem – especially if you have multiple items with very short spans that you want to show at the same time as a few items with very long spans.

I got thinking about this after reading a couple of factoids about the length of time it took for things like the iPod and Facebook to take off. I started thinking about the length of time it took for other technologies to reach 50,000,000 people,  as this was the number used for the iPod and Facebook comparison. The image below is an attempt to show this information on a single diagram. I have included the rise of the human race, writing, radio, television, the Internet, the iPod and Facebook. I’d like to include more technologies to fill in the gaps in the thousands-of-years range, so I might update this diagram in the future.

Reaching 50 Million People

What was also interesting was the rate a which the reach of technology changed over time. By plotting the log of the age of the technology against the log of the length of time it took to reach 50 million people, I got the following chart.

Access to Technology

Although this isn’t really a formal scientific treatment, it looks like that for technologies that are accepted (i.e. continue to be popular after the initial hype), reaching 50 million people should now take less than a year – and this is only going to get quicker and quicker!

If you want to use either of these diagrams I am happy for you to do so, but please make sure you reference the source.

Keeping Design Simple

A long time ago I was a graphic designer. I was OK at it, and enjoyed it, but it was never going to be a career for me. One of the mantras I particularly enjoyed working to was “Keep It Simple”. I loved the opportunity to design a logo using a single colour, only one or two lines or shapes and some clever typography. Sometimes this was not only appropriate but the client loved it and everyone was happy!

On abduzeedo’s blog he/she (for I know not which) has trawled logopond for a collection of simple, single colour logos as part of a reference collection for a project. You can see the full collection here, and below are some of my favourites.

Brothers Grinn

Siah Design

Million Year Art

Sometimes, we puny humans are completely redundant when it comes to creating great art. Just let nature get on with it and jaw dropping, adjective exhausting, sense overloading pieces of art pop up all around us. Well, after a million years or so.

This site (http://www.earth.uk.net)  is a collection of photographs of cross-sections of agates and other rocks and minerals, highlighting the spectacular formations often rendered on tiny scales. I can heartily recommend browsing though the images – they are also available to buy in large format and mounted.

My top 5 (find them on the site as they look much better on a black background), which I would be happy to hang in my house, are:

1

2

3

4

5

Google search to return related concepts

Google have recently made an interesting improvement to their search product. If you are searching for a fairly clear topic the search results will be returned along with a section with a list of possibly related topics.

In this Google Blog post they use the example of searching for Principles of Physics. Along with the usual results, other suggested searches are returned including “physics special relativity”, “big bang physics” and “physics classical mechanics”.

Although it is not clear in the article, I have to assume that the associated search topics are suggested algorithmically, meaning that Google will be building a database of concept sets that will be improved as people click on the suggested search topics.

The power of this, in the future, will be the ability to measure how “linked” certain principles or concepts are, rather than simple search terms or phrases. This might be incredibly useful for companies trying to understand how their online customers move from idea to idea or concept to concept, with the possibility of finding new areas where they can present their products.

However, well defined links between concepts will mostly be already known, so it will be the unusual links that will be valuable – and these links will take some time to surface. But surface they will, and to the benefit of those companies sharp enough to take advantage.

Who’s Asking?

I have been thinking about how the web (and search engines in particular) is being used to answer direct questions. For example, if you put “how do I hang a door” (rather than “door hang method”) into a search engine, how good are the results in answering the question? The English language phrase “how do I hang a door” is not optimally designed to help a search engine find the best result, whereas “door hang method” might be better. However, as humans, we are not naturally programmed to design optimal search queries. This is an enormous topic and there are dozens of books and research papers on the subject, so I thought I’d look at a specific part of the question: Who is asking when, where, how, which, who and why, and are there any interesting patterns and insights?

Notice that the English language query contains the word “how” whereas the search optimised one doesn’t. It looks like when people are using English language queries they would be more likely to contain one of the “w” question words.

So let’s start at the beginning: Global searches with “why” in them. (click on the image to enlarge)

Search volume for "why" - Global

This chart shows the relative number of searches made with Google for the years 2004 to 2008 that contained the word “why”. [light blue=2008, red=2007, orange=2006, green=2005, dark blue=2004]. The horizontal axis shows the months from the most recent year. These charts are from Google Insights for Search.

You can see that most of these years followed the same pattern with slight dips in the middle of the year and at Christmas. There is an unusual spike in November/December 2007 (possibly the subject of a future post, let me know if you want to know!). The regular dips I guessed must be to do with the usual Western school year – coinciding with the summer and Christmas holidays. I tested this by narrowing the analysis to UK searches only – I could then check the dips against actual academic year dates.

Search Volume for "Why" - UK

Now, this is more interesting. There are very clear dips at the following times:

• Mid-February
• Early-April
• Late-May
• Mid-July to early-September
• Late-October
• Christmas.

All of these dips correspond almost exactly to the dates of the UK School Holidays:

• February half term
• Easter holidays (this has a larger spread due to the shifting of the dates of Easter from year to year)
• May half term
• Summer holidays
• October half term
• Christmas

From this it is easy to hypothesise – from the UK study at least – that it is school students who are asking “why” during term time. It is also clear that more students are asking “why?” – the number of queries containing “why” is higher in 2008 than in 2004. This might suggest one of many things – that students are becoming savvier and discovering that they can get good answers online, that the population as a whole is more “internet enabled”, or that students are asking more questions online because it is easier. In fact there are multiple possible roots to this behaviour – enough for an entire book on the subject!

This analysis is very simple and doesn’t really have any surprises (unless you look at the countries where most of these searches are coming from – check it yourself, but I will probably write about this at some point). For now, I just wanted to show you how powerful free online search analysis tools are.

More next time.

Japanese Binocular Football

Some videos I can watch over and over and still laugh as much as on the first viewing. This always cheers me up!

Linked Data – Making Analysts’ Lives Easier

I do a lot of data collection for various projects. Its difficult. Its difficult not because its hard to find data, or because its hard to convert it to something usable, but because its not linked together.

I have to spend a huge amount of time decomposing diverse databases and other sources into their constituent parts, finding relevant cross-database links, and then recompiling the data into a database I can use.

For example, recently I was looking at takeup rates of various technologies and trying to understand how the speed of takeup was increasing. I needed to know how long it took the telephone to reach 50 million people, how long it took for the human population to get to 50 million people, and how long it took for the written word to reach 50 million people. I also needed to know when these technologies started and targets were achieved so I could analyse how “reaching” a set number of people got quicker as the years passed.

I could find all the information, but that was the problem – it was information. What I actually needed was the raw data. The raw data was around somewhere – it must have been, because someone had written quantitatively about the take up of the telephone for example – but it was just in a place or format that was difficult for me to reach or decipher.

What I needed was the raw data and to have it linked together so that once I’d found the year in which the telephone reached 50 million people, for example, I could simply click through the linked data to find the population of the planet in that same year, or the reach of the railways in the same year.

I had ended up spending 80% of my time collecting and linking the data and 20% analysing it. That should be the other way around. The value of the process is in my analysis, not my ability to find and link together data. We waste too much time redoing the things people have done before and on the non-core aspects of our work. For analysts, productivity could be enhanced by orders of magnitude by making data easy to find and collect.

There is already an infrastructure in place to support this. The structure and protocols of the world wide web can be applied to this problem, creating linked data that spans the entire Internet. Tim Berners-Lee talks about this very thing at TED. As with his original idea for the World Wide Web I think the principle of Linked Data is “vague but exciting” right now. However, with the speed of development of these kinds of ideas increasing all the time it won’t take as long as the World Wide Web to catch on and get some serious interest.

You can view Tim’s talk at the TED site and get some more information.

Tim Berners-Lee at TED (February 2009)

Thinking Deep and Wide

I was talking to one of my collegues today about brainstorming and the process of thinking “wide” and “deep”. This is a way to separate the very different processes involved in ideas-based creative thinking versus focused idea-development thinking.

Wide vs Deep thinking

• Wide Thinking
  Wide thinking is a style of brainstorming and is a process designed to get a group of people (or an individual) to create a list of ideas around a central theme, without immediate criticism and with a focus on quantity and creativeness.
• Deep Thinking
  Once the brainstorming session is completed, work needs to be done on developing the most promising ideas. Deep thinking is the process of selecting a promising idea and developing and exploring it. The focus is on quality, relevence and application.

A lot of this will sound very much like common sense, but it can be useful to see it codified. (Having said this, the strict codification of management theories is not a good idea – every company or organisation is different so you need to bend your management techniques to fit the environment!)

Wide Thinking

Wide thinking for subject: Expand the demographic for Product X

Although the brainstorming process needs to be “free”, it shouldn’t be anarchy. The principle of allowing the participants to be supremely creative is great in theory, but can waste time in reality. The session needs to be run by a strong leader who can nudge the participants back on course if things really get out of hand, without criticising or suppressing the valuable left-field ideas that you are actually looking for. There really isn’t a rule book here – it’s down to experience, a good rapport with the participants and authority. This is one reason why individual brainstorming can be just as good as group brainstorming. There is no reason why a person cannot produce as good a list of ideas as a group – although groups produce more diverse sets of good ideas, they also produce more bad ideas that need to be filtered out.

It is important that the group resists the impulse to examine interesting ideas too deeply immediately, but there is no reason why these ideas can’t be marked as particularly popular.

One of the benefits of this “free thinking” technique  (and one of the reasons why it works) is that it makes us happy – as long as it is boundary free. Boundaries – deadlines, etc – make us focus, and focusing requires an element of fear – fear of breaching the boundary. This is also why the session needs to be well led – the participants need to believe there are no boundaries but of course the leader knows there are – time, subject, decency, etc. 

So the Wide Thinking part should be a happy and carefree process while the Deep Thinking part should be pressured and focused.

Deep Thinking

Deep thinking for subject: Expand the demographic for Product X

Once the brainstorming session is finished you will have a hopefully long list of ideas to explore. At this point you will need to do some filtering – remove blatant non-starters and grade the remaining ideas – and then move onto deep thinking. I won’t go into any depth here as the methods employed in properly considering and developing new ideas could fill a bookshelf. Deep Thinking is the process of taking some of the best ideas from the Wide Thinking process and examining them in depth, with the purpose of creating a new product, method, system, or whatever the original requirement was.

In summary: First of all think wide and free to find new ideas, then choose an idea and think deep and with focus to develop it.

Sixth Sense designer interview

An interview with Pranav Mistry (the guy behind the Sixth Sense device I wrote about in my last post) is now available on the TED Blog: Read it here.

The future of interacting with your environment?

I don’t tend to get too excited about demos of new technology – usually they are straightforward implementations of ideas that have been around for a while. However, this demonstration by Pattie Maes (from the Media Lab at MIT) really made me sit up and take notice.

"Sixth Sense" Device

The individual components of the device are all very well known and their combination has been the subject of much development. To see it working, though, is something else – Pattie and her team (Pranav Mistry deserves a special mention here) have made it “useful”.

From the TED Blog regarding this device:

Sixth Sense is a wearable device with a projection screen that paves the way for profound, data-rich interaction with our environment. Imagine Minority Report and then some.

It’s only 9 minutes long and well worth watching: Sixth Sense Demonstration at TED Feb 2009.

Why “wherefore”?

Nobody uses the word “wherefore” anymore – except in the exotic lexical world of legalese. And with good reason: its real meaning is not always understood.

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

In this very famous extract from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet is not enquiring about the whereabouts of Romeo, but rather lamenting the fact that Romeo is a member of the Montagues. “For what purpose is Romeo a Montague?” is the question she is asking – considering that this is such an obstacle to their deep love for each other, is this difficulty a test to overcome? The answer to her question requires much deeper understanding – simply saying that he was born of his parents is technically an answer, but not the whole answer.

“Wherefore” seems to be a bit more than a synonym for “why”. It is deeper – enquiring as to the whole, entire and complete reason for something being as it is.

Asking “why” will give you an answer to your question. Asking “wherefore” will allow you to understand this answer.

Of course, you won’t find me using the term “wherefore” in real life, but it is a useful way to package up something deeper and more complex than “why” in a single word – you just have to define it first!

More productive meetings

Productive meetings are always difficult to come by and there are lots of techniques to make them more useful.

There is an extension from my last posting that can be used in meetings to make sure things at least get started afterwards (starting something in the right way is half of the solution!).

At the end of the meeting, quickly review the various tasks that everyone has agreed to take on and ask everyone the following question (remembering to take part yourself!):

“What is the one thing you are going to do by the end of the day to move your task forward?”

This is usually enough to get things moving as it has already started the “problem resolution” process in everybody’s minds. The responses could be as simple as “make a relevant phone call”, “mock up an interface design” or “find a website with relevant data”, but as long as they are done by the end of the day then the meeting has already seen benefits.

Step back, zoom in, do something right now.

Baby steps. Eating an elephent one spoonful at a time. A walk of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Reimagining.
All phrases to communicate a single idea – that large, complex problems can be tackled, first of all, by thinking about them in the right way, and then taking things one step at a time. The hardest part, though, can be deciding how to start.

Knowing where to start when trying to answer complex or difficult questions is something that I believe takes experience. Not because you get any more intelligent with age and experience, but because you are more likely to have seen something similar before. For example, with experience you might be able to immediately see how to disassemble a problem into its constituent parts because you dealt with something vaguely similar some years ago. Without that experience you would still be able to do just as good a job (eventually), but in a much more inefficient way.

There is one particular method which I think is essential in problem solving – and it is the very first thing I do when faced with a new problem

Step back. Zoom in.

When you are given a problem to solve, more than likely it will be part of a larger, nested set of problems. For example, “find a way to improve broadband speed” might actually only be part of a wider problem. Maybe the company wants to improve broadband speed because it wants to roll out a new line of business (LoB) application to remote sites. And maybe the reason for the new LOB application is due to some new legislation that is coming in.

So by stepping back you suddenly start to see the problem you have been presented with in context. The problem is actually that new legislation is being implemented and the company wants to make sure it complies. Someone has made a decision to implement some new software to do this – and this may or may not be the right decision, but at least you now understand where it has come from. You can now consider your approach to your own specific part of the problem in a more informed way. In my example, we now have a new question – can we use, for example, a web interface for the new application that would not require expensive upgrades to the broadband infrastructure. If the whole purpose of the process is to comply with legislation rather than increase sales, then expenditure really should be kept to a minimum – something we would never have considered without “Stepping Back”.

After reformulating the problem using all the new information you got by stepping back, you can now zoom in and try to start solving it. Zooming in is the process of identifying small chunks of a larger problem that can be handled discretely. I’ve not yet come across a problem that can’t be broken down into a set of much easier smaller problems. The skill comes in identifying these “sub-problems”, solving them and then combining the solutions to give you an answer to the larger problem at hand.

Sometimes you can do all of this analysis but still end up with a huge pile of questions to answer and a new problem – where to start. It’s possible to end up in a sort of cognitive dissonance where you know exactly what you need to do (pick a question and answer it) but find it almost impossible to do it (choosing which question to start with).

There are a few techniques to help with this problem, but core to them is the grading of all of the individual questions that make up your problem. You might grade them from “easy to solve” to “hard to solve”, or from “needs input from everyone” to “can solve on my own”. However you grade the questions you should end up with one pile that can/should be solved quickest. These will normally be the easy questions, or the ones that you can solve on your own, or the ones that require time-limited resources (for example, an executive who is in the office for rest of the day but will then be out of contact for the next three weeks).
Now that you have the pile of questions that you’re going to tackle first we can implement another favourite technique of mine:

What is the ONE thing I can do RIGHT NOW to move this forward

Look at each question or problem and think of one thing you can do immediately to start to solve it – and then do it. It could be something small and apparently insignificant, but that’s not really important. The purpose of this step is to solve a very small part of the bigger problem right away. And once you have done this for a few of the smaller questions the avalanche will start. You will start to find it much easier to answer the more difficult questions because you may well have gained insight from the questions you have already answered. And you will feel confidence in your solution rising. And the more confidence you have, the easier it will get to complete the solution, and the easier it is to complete the solution the more confidence you will have that you are answering the right questions in a good way. It’s a self fuelling process that can help you substantially when you come across those parts of the problem that are really difficult to solve.

Using these two techniques together in the problem solving process is incredibly powerful. First step back and zoom in. Then think “What is the one thing I can do right now to move this forward”.

Why?

I have changed the title of this blog to “Whys, Wherefores and Whatnots” because that seems to be a better description of what I write about. Have a look at the “Why” page for more info.

The “whatnots” will still be items that have made me laugh like a loon, and I hope they do the same for you a well!

Trunk Monkey – old but very, very good.

This is pretty old now, and I remember first seeing one of the ads a few years ago. A friend pointed me in the direction of this compilation and I laughed as much now as I did then.

Enjoy.

Sir Fred needs to keep his pension, for our sake.

I try not to get too political most of the time – I’m not really a political animal so there are people who can argue the relevant points much better than I can.

This whole issue around Sir Fred Goodwin’s pension stinks. The ex-Chief Executive of RBS is set to receive about £700,000 a year from his pension pot. But it’s not the size of his pension, in light of the failings at the bank, which stinks. It’s the government’s reaction. Sir Fred has had a long career in banking which came to an ignominious end with the near collapse of RBS under his stewardship – mainly due to the strains of having expanded far too quickly in a rapidly disintegrating economy. This is a failing of Sir Fred’s because he is ultimately responsible for the actions of the bank. I doubt that he alone made many of the decisions though. There will be a whole layer of senior management who provided “intelligence” to Sir Fred to help him make these decisions. These people have the benefit of anonymity, even though they are just as culpable, in real terms, for the bank’s demise as its CEO. And it’s not as if he is generally incompetent – if he was it’s very unlikely (although, I agree, not impossible) that he would have risen to a position of CEO of, at one point, the world’s largest company (£1.9tn in assets in 2008). Should he have had some magical device that allowed him to presage the fall of our economies before anyone else? Many, many people have made much more disastrous decisions than Sir Fred – at least the bank is still (just) a going concern.

This brings me back to his pension. The return from your pension is not performance related. This is very, very important so I will repeat it. The return from your pension is not performance related. Your misdemeanours during your working life do not affect your existing pension pot. Would it be reasonable for someone to have built up their pension pot during their working life – having performed in an exemplary fashion for 35 years – only to have it taken away because you made some bad decisions in your final year at work? Think about your own pension. Imagine that the government could half it, or reduce it to 10% of its size because they didn’t like the decisions you had made at work. The numbers are different, but the principle is the same.

There is the possibility that the government may try to change the law so that they can claw back some his pension fund. Imagine that – the government don’t like the fact that the media are making them look bad by jumping on this ill-thought-out bandwagon so they think they will change the law to make them look like the crusading hero, “retrieving the ill-gotten gains of the fat cats”. Hmmm… fat cats, maybe, but ill-gotten gains? No. Sir Fred was simply paid for doing a job. Paid very, very well, with a very nice pension, but no-one complained a year ago when the bank was making enormous profits and making everyone (including the government) look good. And this is a critical point: Part of the reason Sir Fred was in that role was that he was offered an attractive package to take it on, and this package was designed and agreed by a group people who really, really wanted him at the helm. To coin a phrase – either he was actually very good at his job, or he knows where the body’s buried.

Whatever happens, the rules of law (and his employment contract) need to be followed. If they are not then this does not bode well for us. A government that changes laws to suit its own ends… I’ve read about that somewhere.

Machines might get easier to use. Again.

I have believed for a long time that much more work is required in developing new and innovative human-machine interfaces. Keyboards and mice are so… 1980’s. They are particularly inefficiant tools for achieving what you want to achieve – which, most of the time, is not typing large bodies of text quickly. (BTW – Why QWERTY?, look here).

Asus have just released information on their prototype dual-panel touchscreen PC. I really think this is a step in the right direction for notebooks – instead of half of the available surface area being taken up by a physical keyboard (that has only a single use), there is a second touch screen panel. This panel can be configured as a virtual keyboard, a writing surface, or an extention of the display.

More here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10185877-1.html

[Edit]

I have also just found this item on Wired. Another step forward for device usability.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2009/03/touch-book-comb.html

All too common “Not So Common Sense”

A quick scan around the web has confirmed my suspicions – the phrase “Not So Common Sense” is way too widely used to make it a useful name for this blog. So I will be changing it. At some point. It’s not really top of the priority list right now, but I’ll let you know when its going to happen!

Klaus Wunderlich + The Main Attraction + Jimmy Webb = The Avalanches

Sometimes it stuns me how artists get their inspiration. The Avalanches’ “Since I Left You” was one of my favourite tracks of 2000 – the reason why I mention this now is that one of my collegues has just told me where the samples are from:

And

And:

To produce

Genius.

Find a book on what you are browsing

If I’m researching a subject online then at some point I will be looking at a web page and thinking “I’d really like to find a book on this”. The page I’m looking at might have something to do with my original research subject, or, as can quite often be the case, it might be completely unrelated.

Normally I’d look for a set of relevant phrases or words on the page and then go to Amazon to start looking for books that relate to those phrases or words. This can be quite drawn out process going back and forth trying to hone in on the right book.

BookRecs.com

To help me with this process I have created a tool called BookRecs.com. The tool consists of a “bookmarklet” that you can add to your favourites that takes the content of the page you are loking at, looks for possible subject phrases and then presents you with an Amazon search facility with all of these suject phrases available through a handy drop down list.

BookRecs.com is very much in beta at the moment, but does work pretty well with Wikipedia pages (this is the site I was using as a test to help develop the page analysis code) and any other sites that utilise good Meta tag design – sites that are worth using for research will usually fit into this category. It is still in development so please use it – there are more instructions and information on the site – and let me know how you find it. All comments and criticisms are very welcome!

Bill Tancer – not so analytical?

I am reading Click by Bill Tancer, and have just come across (in the introduction, no less) one of my particular bugbears with “technical” or scientific authors. I really want to like this book and I really want to like Bill Tancer as an author because he is writing about a subject that I am fascinated with – the behavior of people measured by their web activity.

My gripe is that he has failed to communicate good analytical practice in his opening anecdote. He was describing how he disagreed with a British psychologist’s findings that the most depressing week of the year was the third week in January – calculated using a formula that took account of credit card debt, weather patterns and failed New Year’s resolutions amongst other things. Bill had recently done some research himself (using search term analysis for “depression” and related terms) and found that it was actually the week of Thanksgiving that was the most depressing.

Now, the problem is Bill only defined his own scope of research – the data from 10 million US internet users. No mention is made of what the British psychologist actually looked at. What were the demographics? Was it an analysis of shoppers, web users or hot-air balloonists? Were his subjects British, American, European, Global? We are not told. If I had to guess using the information to hand (a slippery slope to poor interpretation) then I would say his subjects were probably non American-centric (in fact, I would go so far as to guess they might be British).

So is it any surprise that Thanksgiving was not a spike in the British psychologist’s results? Thanksgiving is a purely American event, and a big one, so it will affect Americans very differently to the rest of us. I would assume that if this test was performed for many different cultures or global groups then the results would change depending on the different pressures and stresses that those groups experience.

Bill puts this anecdote forward as an example of how web analytics might help us understand the way people work online. However, in his telling of it he has missed out absolutely crucial information and has made a sweeping statement on the value of his analysis. To make use of web analytics properly you cannot be this cavalier with the research.

He’s obviously a smart guy, so I’m hoping (assuming?) that he did the required research into the validity of the comparison between his and the British psychologist’s results but has just forgotten to include it in his book’s introduction – it is only an anecdote after all. If he includes the relevant qualification of his findings later in the book then I look forward to reading about them. However, I will now keep that quite nagging doubt at the back of my mind that he missed something important right at the beginning.

I’ll write again when I finish the book. I still have good expectations – Nassim Taleb made a statement at the beginning of “Fooled by Randomness” that irked me (I don’t even remember what it was now) but I enjoyed his books immensely and certainly recommend them.

Why are you at work?

While I was in the shower this morning (one of the best places to think, but most inconvenient places to keep a notebook) I got to thinking about the reasons why we go to work, and whether the reasons could be distilled down to a few snappy items. In the end I came up with the following two, rather obvious, reasons:

• Corporate development
• Personal development

I believe all other reasons for going to work are actually sub-items of these two, admittedly wide ranging, reasons.

The most important consideration though, is that I believe that to be happy in your work you must satisfy both of these reasons for being there. You must feel that you are developing personally while you are also helping your company or organisation become more successful. You might think this is obvious, but there are apparent exceptions to this: journyman workers who are happy not to progress their careers and also don’t care about the success of their employer. I don’t understand these people. I think their satisfaction with life stems purely from non-work activities, which is fine (in fact I think most satisfaction must come from non-work activities) until you consider the fact that you spend 50% of your waking time on a workday at work. Why lose this considerable portion of your life aiming for mediocrity? If you expect to live to 75 and retire at 65 then about 1/5 of your life will have been spent at work. That’s a lot to throw away on clock watching and dodging your boss.

Corporations need to be aware of these reasons as well. They need to balance the needs of the corporation with the needs of the individual – a very well known mantra is “happy workers make a successful company”. If you spend time to find out what drives each of your employees (money itself is not usually the main driver) then you can usually help them progress in those areas and in turn help the company develop as well.

In summary, if you are not happy to be a journeyman employee (I don’t actually know any myself – maybe they are rarer than I thought) then think about your reasons for working where you are. Do you feel that you are developing personally in the direction that you want? Do you feel that you are helping your company develop in the direction it wants? If the answer to either of these questions is “no” then you need to seriously think about whether you need to be doing something else, somewhere else.

Its a scary exercise because you know the results might suggest a big upheaval. But it really is worth it – even to just settle in your own mind that you are doing the things that you want to do for a company that wants and appreciates them.

From coffee to surviving a plane crash

Odd thing, your sub-conscious. In selecting a mug for my coffee in the office this morning I caught myself in full analysis mode. Not a pleasant thing this particular morning as I was still fuzzy from the Ketamine-like come-down from the “Night Nurse” I had last night (feel free to insert all manner of jokes here). There were two mugs to choose from – a squat wide one and a taller narrower one. I selected the taller narrow one without, I believed, much thought. However, while walking back to my office I idly considered my choice: I had chosen that particular mug because I believed that it would hold the heat better. Why had I come to this conclusion? Well, I’m pretty sure I must have done a quick analysis of the properties of each of the mugs and their thermal characteristics. A wide opening at the top will let out more heat to the air than a narrow one. The optimal shape for heat retention for a “body of coffee” would be that which reduces its surface area to a minimum (a sphere would be best, so a mug with diameter similar to height should be optimal). And thermal transfer from the coffee to the environment would be more efficient at the coffee-air interface than at the coffee-porcelain-air interface.

What was interesting about this exercise was that I knew which mug to choose without “thinking”. I hadn’t, of course, analysed anything at all. I went with my gut instinct and thought “that mug is better than this one”. It was only afterwards, and with some effort, that I was able to consciously analyse that decision making process and discover how complex it was. This is only a trivial example, but the idea that we can weigh up much more complex scenarios very quickly indeed, and more often than not make the right decision, is a powerful one. There are three things (amongst others) at work here – novelty of knowledge, recency of knowledge and repetition of knowledge. Remembering unusual experiences is easier than remembering mundane ones, more recent events can be recollected more readily that old ones, and the more times we learn and relearn something, the more likely it is to be remembered. In the coffee mug example, it could be purely due to the fact that out of the 1000 mugs of coffee I have drunk in the office, the ones in my preferred mugs stayed warm the longest and over the years I happened to notice this. The effect per mug would only be small, but multiplied over a thousand mugs it might be enough to nudge my decision in a particular direction.

A less trivial example of this – repetition and recency of information – is in airline safety. When I fly and the cabin crew are going through the safety briefing I have a quick look around to see who isn’t paying attention. These people I mark as “the ones I’ll be crawling over to get to the exit”. The point of the safety demonstration isn’t just to advise people who have never seen it before (there is a chance that the novelty factor alone will help these people remember it). For those of us who have seen this demonstration dozens, hundreds or thousands of times there is no novelty so we need to rely on recency and repetition to remember what the emergency procedure is. If you switch off during the demonstration then you get neither of these effects, and it certainly isn’t novel any more. This means that in the event of some emergency you will have used none of the tools available to you to remember what you are meant to do – it’s no longer novel (because the first time you saw it was 20 years ago), you haven’t seen it recently (because you are reading your magazine), and you haven’t had the benefit of repetition (because if you are ignoring the demonstration now, the odds are that you have ignored it for a long time). You would be statistically more likely to die than me. Which is good news for me, of course.

The point is, by drumming something into your mind you can start to make quick subconscious decisions that may save your life. This is obvious isn’t it? Learning, relearning, training and practice makes you good at something – even a mind-bogglingly remote event like escaping from the burning plane can be made more successful by relearning what you should do in an emergency every time you fly. What it doesn’t give you is flexibility to think – you do what you have learned and if the environment doesn’t fit around this process then you might be in trouble. Flexibility of thought in perilous situations requires wisdom, and that is a whole other kettle of fish.

[Great book on this subject: “The Unthinkable” by Amanda Ripley]

Go with your gut

One of the responses to the Dave Trott’s piece I mentioned in my last post referred to Colin Powell’s “40/70” rule. I checked out his original thoughts on this and they can be summed up as follows:

If you have enough information to give you a more than 40% chance of being right, start to go with your gut instinct to fill the gaps. If you have enough information to give you a more than 70% chance of being right, you have probably waited too long and someone else is already on the case.

In short, if you gather enough information so that you feel like you are doing the right thing, then you probably are.

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Don’t hesitate. Do.

Do it, then fix it.

Dave Trott at CST Advertising talks about the benefits of not waiting until you have perfect knowledge before moving forward with something. Sounds sensible enough, but I fall into this problem myself sometimes – I don’t believe I’ll create the correct product if I don’t have all the information. With hindsight though, it is easy to see that if I do wait until I have all the information and then create this incredible product it is more than likely way above the expectations of the recipient. Either that or someone else has beaten me to the prize by jumping in early with incomplete information and created a product that only just solves the problem at hand. There is a risk with this approach, of course, that with incomplete information you create the wrong product – but it is surprising how rarely this is the case.

http://cstadvertising.com/blog/2009/02/18/do-it-then-fix-it/

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