Sentiment analysis on sentiment analysis
Ok – this is clever. He does a roundup on people’s responses to the recent NYT article on sentiment analysis, which I picked on in yesterday’s linkfest.
Author: Scott Berkun
The explosion of innovation books
Nice bit of research on the spike in numbers of books with the word innovation in the title.
Based on some Lexis-Nexis research they found:
- Between 1970 and 1980, there were exactly 55 articles that mentioned the term
- Between 1980 and 1990 this grew to 993
- Between 1990 and 2000 this grew to 3,575
- And from 2000 to 2007 the figure stood 4,583!
A small percentage of this is attributable to the general spike in book publishing, but that trend is nowhere near as sharp as the one suggested by the data above.
Which is again why I advocate people stop using the word, especially if they’re trying to achieve whatever it is they think it means.
Wednesday linkfest
Here are this week’s links:
- Sentiment Analysis (Can computers interpret feelings?) – This is dumb. There, I said it. First it will never work for similiar reasons to why AI mostly doesn’t work, but more importantly, why not just let someone who’s not a moron interpret why consumers are outraged instead of inventing a technology that will do a suckier job and cost more? If the average person isn’t great at figuring out what other people mean or are feeling, what hope do computers have?
- Multitasking muddles brains (see also the mediocre multitasker)- Evidence from an admit-idly small study that yes, multitasking is bad. But it gets better, as the researchers were hoping to figure out what “gifts” multitaskers had that others do not. Turned out no only couldn’t they find it, their research suggests multitaskers perform worse at many tasks.
- Coach seats make us hate each other – The design of everyday things applied to one reason people are so grumpy on airplanes.
- Learning UX from games – This really should be titled ‘learning UX from good games’. It’s amazing how many $60 XBOX games have horrible out of box and first 20 minutes of gameplay experiences.
- Wide screen vs. Full screen – Wonderfully concise example rich explanation of how much gets lost when they “modify a movie to fit TV”. Lots of famous directors give commentary.
Do boycotts ever work?
In response to my recent debate inducing post, Why the Whole Foods boycott is stupid, where I offered that boycotting someone for having an opinion isn’t that bright (though is within our rights). In response I got an email from Steven Levingston at the Washington post.
He informed me they asked an expert on boycotts to give an opinion on the Whole Foods issue, particularly the merits of boycotts: Whole Foods Boycott: The Long View
Unlike my post, it’s grounded and informative. It’s definitely worth a read – the author is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and unlike myself, has more than just opinions and rants to offer.
He provides some nice context to the history of American boycotts, and why they work and often don’t, and how they can have an impact long term even when they fail in the short.
Why Google won’t create the next twitter (a critique)
Sloppy logic is fun to throw around and there are certain popular patterns of slop thrown around when talking about innovation.
CBS wants your PM hero story
A journalist for BNET, part of CBS Interactive, is looking for a great short story on dealing with things going wrong on projects.
She wants:
First person stories about how you recently saved a project by tackling a deadline problem, scope bloat, budget issues, key person quitting, etc.
Since she seems cool I offered to throw it out to you guys and see what good tales you might offer about how you overcame a really tough situation.
Leave ’em in the comments. I suspect you should keep it to a few paragraphs max :)
What I learned at FOO Camp ’09
For the fifth time I managed to get invited to O’Reilly’s FOO (Friends Of O’Reilly) camp, an unconference weekend event held at O’Reilly’s headquarters in Sebatapol, CA. ~250 people are invited to camp out on the lawn and spend a long weekend discussing anything anyone wants to talk about. Big schedule boards are put up Friday night, with room for 8 or 10 to happen concurrently, and anyone can organize a session on anything. No restrictions. It’s that simple.
I’ve written up notes from past years and here’s what I wrote in my little Moleskine this year:
- There’s a reflexive beauty to how FOO works that matches how many of the people invited to FOO probably work in their lives and explains their success: Get smart motivated people together and get the hell out of the way.
- I learned from Andy Baio that what makes analog things, like printed books or hand written letters, both great and bad is they don’t scale. And I realized why I prefer analog to digital is it’s easier for analog things to carry personal meaning (and I want a meaningful life) than digital things.
- I love Jessica Hagy’s work even more after hanging out with her. She’s in possession of a most dangerous mind and will take over the world shortly if she has not already (she’s smart enough that you’ll never know it was her). Plus I learned she’s going to have a show here in Seattle sometime soon.
- The most under-appreciated skill in the modern world is someone who can explain the complex in simple terms without trivializing it. I can divide all the people I’ve met (at FOO) into two piles: those that look to simplify and those that don’t. The problem is many in the second pile think they’re in the first pile.
- I realized the creation of government policy is a design problem, yet politicians have even less awareness of design thinking and creative process than they do about new technologies.
- I’m retroactively disappointed Dan Myer was not my teacher in high school. Can we clone this guy? Plus he backed up my arguments (in a session on education) for smaller class sizes by mentioning a study that showed teachers often rarely leave the front of the room, even when class sizes are small enough to allow this.
- I learned ‘urban and discriminating’ can be a euphemism for being gay, or at least for a person who buys lesbian beer (which apparently I do).
- My trick of ‘sit at picnic table offering free beer at start of event as way to build a crowd and meet people early’ has worked 3 for 3 now. We are simple creatures, even at FOO.
- I got to meet Beth Goza and Beth Robson who I’d heard about for years but never really got to know until this weekend.
- Brewster Kale explained why we need a PBS for the internet age, a Frontline quality dissection of current events but one built to allow the crowd to contribute, shape and respond. In the same session, everyone in the room was surprised to learn about CRS, great research funded by tax payers to help Senators make decisions that is not shared with the public.
- The key word that separates great conferences from the rest is mastery of the many intangible factors that create vibe. (I think Sara Winge eluded to this at a session on great conferences)
- I had my first attempt at drunken tweeting. If you had any doubts, this ensures I will never run for president.
- I find it ironic that even the tech-elite stop using their gadgets when you get them around a fire at night. Fires and booze are the first and best social mediums.
- Even at FOO there should be a blowhard gong in every discussion session that people can clang on anonymously when someone doesn’t realize they are not currently the smartest nor most important nor most interesting person in the room. It’s not entirely their fault as in their worlds they’re the CEO/founder/rock-star/center of attention, but at FOO some don’t realize nearly everyone in the room is the same kind of person in their world.
- I was reminded again of the several thousand reasons I’m lucky Mary Treseler is my editor at O’Reilly.
- The last and largest scribble in my notebook says only one word: TRANSCEND.
Going to FOO is a creative and inspirational highlight for me every year. Thanks to Tim, Sara, Marsee and everyone for preserving an amazing tradition and having me along for the ride.
Video: extended Q&A at RIM in Waterloo
From awhile back here’s a video of an experiment in public speaking – instead of doing the same song and dance, I offered to the crowd of ~100 people that we just do a big extended Q&A session. It worked out well as the crowd was lively and asked good questions.
Since it was at at the Waterloo UX meeting, topics ranged from innovation, what makes for the best project managers/leaders, UX advocacy, fuck-you clauses in work contracts, politics and more.
Scott Berkun Talks to Waterloo UX Group about Innovation (click for full-page video) from henry chen on Vimeo.
Hating vs. Loving: a personal note
A book that changed my life in 2002 is Living, Loving and Learning, by Leo Buscaglia, which taught my hard-ass, repressed tough guy soul that I was doing things that made me, and those around me, unhappy. My big crime was being more comfortable hating than loving.
Any time you hate something there is a choice. You can focus on the hate, and outrage, and self-righteousness, or you can find the opposite of the thing you hate, and focus on loving that more.
If you betray me as a friend, I can fixate on my anger at you, or I can think about all the friends I have who have never betrayed me, and go thank and honor them. Why focus on how much you hate a book, when you can just as easily go back and remember and share other books that you love? If the friend or book disappointed you so much, why are aren’t using that as fuel to go back and appreciate the good you now realize you’re lucky to have? (An authorial gripe is it’s fine if you hate my books and write negative reviews, but please at least mention a better one so people can get what they were looking for?).
Hate is easy. Destroying things takes much less work than making them, always has and always will. Hate is also less fulfilling and isolating than love, since all it says is what someone or something is not, instead of what it is or could be. Boycotting and banning are attempts to stop something, and stopping bad things is good – but these activities always make me think why not use that energy to go support and promote something good that deserves move love?
In many cultures hate and judgement are safer to express than love (e.g. American men prove we’re close friends by finding funny/mean insults for each other, rarely ever saying out loud how much we care about each other). It’s common in repressed, dysfunctional families or organizations for anger and criticism to be confused with love when it’s the only thing that the parents or leaders provide – anger is still a kind of attention. Kids are genetically programmed to believe their parents love them, so if all they get is negative attention when young, they equate that with what should have been love (and often wander through life confused about what a healthy relationship is like). In some workplaces the dynamics are not that different. If all you know are negative kinds of expression, that’s all you’ll express even when you’re trying to love, and on it goes.
What I got from Buscaglia’s book, which I’d never believed before, was that people who can love more openly, especially in the face of those quick with sarcasm like myself, are the bravest and most positive forces our species probably has (I foolishly assumed they were weak, but yet why did I have so much fear about resistance do doing what they did?). You’ll always find many people happy to hate in the open, but you can’t negate hate with hate. But every now and then you can turn it around, or slow hate down, with the genuine positive expression of love. Only when hate is out of the way can progress start to happen.
I’m not saying not to express hate. I’m still angry now and then. It’s therapeutic, it’s fun and can be a way to bond with someone for the first time – but I’m careful not to let myself end with anger alone. If I hate something, once I’m done tearing tearing it to shreds even if just in my own mind, I force myself to look for something with the opposite traits of the thing I hated and show it some love. I can’t express how profoundly this has changed my life for the better.
[This is one of the 30 essays on philosophy and life found in Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds]
Good, evil and technology: a fun philosophical inquiry
Flipping through old essays I found this one from 2005 – it’s one my favorite but most overlooked essays.
Good, evil and technology: A fun philosophical inquiry
Much of my recent ranting on social media is tied to this sort of philosophical questioning, as the making of good tools shouldn’t be confused with doing good in the world.
If you like my stuff, and are interested in tech, I think you’ll like this:
Wednesday linkfest
Here are this week’s (health care free) links:
- The parts of news you don’t usually get – This is so unbelievably awesome. Explains my gripes with television news, and in some respects, twitter, digg and social media.
- The Inner workings of Antikythera – The first lecture i did at Google about the Myths of Innovation talked about an ancient Greek computer that had computer tech lost to us for hundreds of years, called the Antikythera. This is an explanation of how we think it worked.
- Book signing gets bloody – Things go very strange and wrong at this book signing. Lots of pictures of blood. Not for everyone. I was too curious not to read it the whole thing.
- Innovation and resistance in religion – In the universal theme of how innovation and tradition will clash by definition, here’s an interesting article about Lutherans and gay-marriage (also see my earlier post on innovation vs. tradition)
- Guide to fails in Star Wars design – Bad things happen when you apply basic design questions to a set of movies you fell in love with as a kid. Very funny.
5 myths about health care around the world
I’m not trying to be a healthcare reform clearing house, but a few articles I’ve found are much more useful than boycotting. They inform, or at least pretend to inform. Of course you can boycott and inform, but as best I can tell that’s not what these guys have been doing.
First up is this article, What’s wrong with Whole Foods, which presents a much clearer argument against Whole Foods, beyond just the behavior of the CE0 (It’s a crazy looking website, but the article is well written and somewhat referenced, minus the typos). Interestingly, the author of this article doesn’t recommend a boycott either.
But more important is this one, Five myths about health care around the world (Washington Post).
I’m not an expert and can’t verify these claims. But among other good stuff in here:
2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.
Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation’s 200 private health insurance plans — a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn’t like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.
In France and Japan, you don’t get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as “in-network” lists of doctors or “pre-authorization” for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment — and insurance has to pay.
Which in all is a nice set of informed counterarguments to claims made by Mackey. Which is what I’d have loved to see boycotters passing out, attached to a copy of the WSJ article.
This article also hits on some things I mentioned in HealthCare as an innovation problem, namely informing us about alternatives so we can better see what we have and don’t have in our current system compared with what’s possible.
And lastly is this one from the NYT, which takes a look at the statistics for the uninsured in America: The Uninsured. It’s an editorial, but has references for most of the numbers they quote.
Why boycotting Whole Foods is Stupid
I’ve been forwarded a few emails about the Whole Foods Boycott, a movement in response to Whole Food’s CEO John Mackey’s Wall Street Journal article.
I’m tempted to find the nearest boycott and ask everyone who is so enraged if they actually read his short article. I doubt they have. It’s well written, expresses a clear opinion, and even if you disagree with him he does have some interesting ideas. (Even if those ideas read as callous, self-interested or misrepresentative of the data – note added 8/26).
Why is it in this country when someone expresses an opinion we don’t like, the answer is a boycott? A boycott is a ban and bans on other people’s opinions are can be stupid and childish. It’d be one thing if he was breaking laws, treating people cruelly, or doing something evil. But Mackey having an opinion you don’t like is not a crime. Honestly, adults banning anything from other adults can not come off as all that smart. If you want to protest, or voice an opinion, great, but you don’t need to boycott an organization to do that.
Instead of a boycott, I want passionate respectful disagreement. I want to see people treating other people’s ideas with respect in exchange for our right to do the same. I hope to see people offer superior arguments, and use intelligent persuasion,
Wednesday linkfest
Here are this week’s links:
- The project management cartoon generator – you’ve seen this cartoon a zillion times. Now you can make your own version.
- Kill your darlings – Nice article by book cover designers on ideas they had that were rejected.
- Men meet more then women? – It’s sketchy data (can’t we have a rule that if you quote a survey you must provide a URL to a detailed description of how it was conducted?), but this NYTimes article reports on a study showing men average more meetings per day than women.
- Lessons from Microsoft Bob – Really wish there were more of these lessons learned things written by folks who were there. The gossipy thing near the end is Melinda French, who was the General Manager for Bob, was dating Bill Gates at the time and would eventually become Ms. Gates.
Redesigning this website: feedback?
With a new book on the way it’s time to redesign this website, a site still working the same basic layout its had since 2003 (!). I’ve gotten many miles out of the current incarnation and uber-simple layout, but there’s enough content and traffic, over 850 posts, 50+ essays, 5400+ comments and 20,000 RSS subscribers, to merit some smart improvements.
I’m working with Architexture, a great little Canadian firm on my side on the continent, to bring things around into 2009.
Things are already plugging along, but I wanted to open the floor and see if there are things that have always bugged you, or wished I had, and see if I can make it happen.
The primary goals are:
- Keep the simplicity and content-centric design
- Freshen things up visually
- Make it easier to find popular posts/essays/etc.
- Improve the sales path for books and speaking engagements (how I pay for all this)
- Provide a way for readers to submit/vote on what I should blog about next
But the floor is open. Any feedback, complaints, or suggestions are welcome. Or if the above sounds good to you, please leave a short comment so we know we’re on the right track.
Thanks for all the support over the years – in return we’re working to make this site suck less :)
The Kindle’s place in Innovation history
My innovation hype detector went off in this NYT piece on the Kindle. The offending quote is as follows:
Today’s idea: The advent of e-books and Google’s online book archive mean “2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.”
Anyone who makes a quote like this should be expected to spend at least 60 seconds reviewing the history of books before uttering a phrase such as “…the most significant since”, don’t you think?
Frankly it’s a stupid comparison. The Kindle is, or is not, awesome based on how it makes reading easier or better, which I’m pretty sure it does. Why drag Guttenberg into this yet again?
Here’s a quick run through of book innovations history to help frame the kindle:
- Movable type – Gutenberg should be taken down a few hype notches. China had working presses for centuries before he was born (around 1000 AD). It just never took off, in part because written Chinese language has hundreds of characters, compared to Germans 26.
- Gutenberg – Deserves credit for the Western, as in European, printing press. He made several very clever enhancements never seen before, but did not invent the book nor the press. He was also not much of a philosophical hero or idea liberator – as best we can tell he was just a fine craftsman mostly failing to make a living printing bibles.
- The invention of cheap paperback books, Penguin makes books cheap enough for the average citizen (1935). This was a revolution in the U.S. as in made books cheap, portable and part of middle and lower class culture.
If anything I think paperback books are the best comparison as they were a revolution in distribution, access, convenience and portability much like the Kindle is. They also revolutionized the business model for authors, publishers and bookstores, much like Kindle will if it’s success continues.
Quote of the Month: Use the difficulty
“I was rehearsing a play, and there was a scene that went on before me, then I had to come in the door. They rehearsed the scene, and one of the actors had thrown a chair at the other one. It landed right in front of the door where I came in. I opened the door and then rather lamely, I said to the producer who was sitting out in the stalls,’Well, look, I can’t get in. There’s a chair in my way.’ He said,’Well, use the difficulty.’ So I said ‘What do you mean, use the difficulty?’ He said ‘Well, if it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it. If it’s a comedy, fall over it.’ This was a line for me for life: Always use the difficulty.”
Michael Caine, interviewed by NPR’s Terry Gross, from her book All I did was ask
Wednesday linkfest
Here are this week’s links:
- 50 great examples of infographics – Curiously enough, these excellent, cool, examples are surrounded by annoying animated internet ads.
- Secrets of Amazon.com sales ranking – Some details I hadn’t heard before about how the rankings are computed (weighted over time).
- How Twitter’s staff uses twitter – In the irony department, here’s all kinds of data about how tame the use of twitter is among the people who work at the company.
- How to think constructively about healthcare – Great charts and data about how U.S. health care compares to other nations. (Hat tip: Cesar)
Healthcare as an innovation problem
I’ve been loosely following the healthcare debate in the U.S. and there are some obvious points for innovation gone wrong. It’s not Obama’s fault, at least not yet, as the system he is working in is designed to make innovation quite difficult. Big change of any kind, for better or for worse, is extremely hard to do as power is divided across so many people, with so many entrenched and selfish interests.
Given what I know about innovation, if I were tasked with the challenging of reforming U.S. Healthcare, the last thing I’d do is try to overhaul the entire system all at once. It’s too big, too complex, and has too many built in defenders of the status quo to ever pull off. It would also be much too hard to get right in one shot.
Instead I’d do the following:
- Inform the populace of examples that already exist that we can emulate. Innovation is less scary if people can see and talk to others who are already doing something. Which U.S. states or countries are closest to what Obama wants to do? I have no idea, yet I’ve followed the high level debate points so far. Many of the criticisms hinge on the belief what Obama wants to do can’t be done, yet somehow most developed nations in the world do provide a form of universal health-care. We are ignorant of how else this can work and it’s a flaw in American culture that we’re ignorant of other successful ways governments can run. I want to see a chart comparing the U.S. to Sweden, Japan, Canada, Germany, etc. so we know how else this has been done, and can learn from them.
- Run a pilot program so the risks are smaller. Pilot programs are the only way to take risks in a safe way and avoid criticisms driven by fear (see idea killers). If you take a small group, and apply the changes there, and observe the results, you create a way to learn from mistakes in the small, prove the core principles and gain support from people who say it can’t be done. It’s much easier to get support for a pilot project than for the real thing. You often can do it in some form with a minimum of approvals. Do a small one, show it worked, then repeat on a bigger scale until you have enough evidence to make your case.
- Insure more people every year instead of all at once. Another way to minimize risk is to grow the system over time. This is a form of pilot program – piloted over time. Instead of radically overhauling the system, increase coverage to 5% of the uninsured in 2010, learn from how that worked, then expand to %15 etc. By making changes incrementally there is less to fear and less risk of abuse, bloat, and mismanagement. And it reduces the costs risks many complain about.
But the problem with my advice is the U.S. government is not designed to make this kind of thing easy. Budget cycles and Senate processes do not encourage experimentation, and the momentum required to get any legislation passed at all is so complex and momentum bound that once in motion there likely will not be a second chance – you get one bullet to spend during a term as president, if that at all.
Many corporations suffer similiar systematic problems – there is so much required to even get an idea on the table, that big ideas become brain dead easy to kill if that’s what you want to do, which most people who already have power and seniority tend to want to do.
As is often the case for me in American politics, I’m worried less about which side wins whatever battle, than I am about the low quality of discourse and discussion. It’s hard to sort our how much the headlines reflect what is actually going on, but stupidity and arrogance are harder problems to fix than innovation. Whether at work or a town hall meeting, when many arrive with decisions already made, or with the goal of silencing others, there’s not much room for progress to happen.
Thursday linkfest
Here are this week’s links:
- The problems of Virtual teams – Some research showing how problems are more frequent on virtual teams than local. It’s a small sample size, but first research I’ve ever seen asking this question.
- Letterman top ten – Dear God this is funny. It’s silly and stupid, but perhaps so am I.
- Orwell vs. Huxley – Fantastic cartoon that captures so many of my opinions on technology, the world, and the future. (The winner, between Orwell vs. Huxley is Neil Postman). (Thx to Ario for the link).
- Photo blog of abandoned things – It is what it says. Amazing photos of large, abandoned man made things from around the world.