October 27, 2008
Books
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Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
What an awesome book!
I quite literally couldn’t put this down, it was well written, informative and just a compelling read and accessible to all. Whether you are a researcher, a marketer or well a person then this book explores why we make mistakes and why we don’t always make the logical decisions. I’m hoping that now I have more knowledge I can look at some of my decisions based on the transaction and not my emotions.
At one stage Dan Ariely suggests we try to do too much and leave open too many doors, whilst this is probably true for a self confessed Polymath, shutting some of those may be particularly difficult.
Having worked as a researcher at Manchester University, this reminded me of a series of projects we did with Anthropologists, Psychologists and Marketing experts combined looking at influencing decision making. I want to go back now and do some of those again.
My only regret is that I didn’t read this sooner, I’ve had it for a while now but it was packaed away because of our house move… If i’d had it earlier I would have seen how we had ‘taken ownership’ of the house we wanted and how this must have been obvious to the vendor…
October 24, 2008
Random
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What happens when someone’s laid off? Survival mode switches in. Things that were once important aren’t the rules are different the goals are different, the way we think is different.
Does this mean that the Crunch could kill off Open Source.
http://www.internetevolution.com/author.asp?section_id=556&doc_id=166342&
I agree that people contribute because they can afford to, but at the same time this assumes that the only people contributing to Open Source are people who are doing it for free and in their spare time (or work allows a % of time to be spent on Open Source because they could afford to).
I think that the Crunch will see a resurgence of Open Source, the survival instinct is to make do, to innovate, to use the tools available and enhance them where you can… This happened in South Amercia when they had problems a few years back. With Microsoft hammering home their anti piracy in China, they are also driving thousand of people to try something else rather than welcoming them to Windows. I think we can look forward to enhancements and new software coming soon. Hardware might take a hit, as we make do but I think software will fly.
The other reason is that as developers you need to prove yourself, where better (when you don’t have a job) to prove yourself than by contributing to OS and getting yourself some community recognition. When the heat is on, yes it is survival. But if you take the, give me a net not a fish approach then you’ll keep learning, keep conributing then when oppurtunities arise you’ll be the one who stands out. Keeping and building skills is as important to getting food on the table as going out to (job) hunt.
Crowd sourcing… well with companies looking to make layoffs, if they can get their customers to do the R&D then well there’s some savings… the trick is to make make them want to take part. making people want to take part means rewards…. rewards means people bending the rules to their own ends.
October 17, 2008
Random
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As this is Probably Random I should really say something about the latest break throughs in Quantum Cryptography.
As I understand it, it’s more an unreadable communications channel than an encrypted one. Basically there is no way of listening to the channel with out the people at either end knowing. This then allows you to pass encryption keys securely between sites… although with strong public key encryption available you have to ask why?
- Strong public key encryption isn’t as strong as we thought
- They want to use symmetric encryption which is faster
- Why not, we’re scientists, inventing stuff is what we do, none of you knew you wanted microwave ovens until we gave them to you.
- It’s actually an advertising tie in with James Bond – Quantum of Solace
Read more on Quantum Cryptography at:
The BBC
Wired – Bruce Schneier
Remember that this isn’t really related to Quantum computing, although that too is coming on nicely with more accurate reading of qubits and better noise filters.
October 16, 2008
Random
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Crowd Sourcing is basically getting your consumers to develop your products. It’s not a new idea companies have been asking for feedback and suggestions , well forever, but now with the tools avalialable on the Internet, from simple ask a question type http://moderator.appspot.com/ to Biotech research, the ease and speed at which it’s possible means a lot more people are giving it a go.
Crowd sourcing is basically tapping into the fact that people love to create, innovate, compete and collaborate it’s human nature, what has allowed us to build the civilization we have now. But basically ‘Capitalism’ and by that I mean the greedy self centred cause of the credit crunch type Capitalism meant that people patented and copyrighted anything they could so that only they could profit.
The new model is to open these patents and copyrights up, and let people have a poke around. The users of your products and services are the ones who most know how to improve it, it gives you access to a ‘free’ research team of unlimited size who are all looking for improvements and hacks and other uses because they want to!
There are obviously pitfalls which are basically average and extreme.
You get so many ideas that when you try and implement them they cancel each other out to form the grey goo of averageness, or you may (not realise that) all the ideas have come from the extreme minority who have decided to engage with you, building a product which appeals only to the geek.
So your ‘free’ outsourcing will still need those internal checks and balances.
http://studiowikitecture.wordpress.com/
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93495217
http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/
The other thing to do is to search for your product, see what people have done, I mean if you’ve seen the hacks and toolkits available for the Wiimot, that people have made in their own time for fun, it’s truely awesome.
Give people access to the tools and the knowledge and they will build and innovate in ways you never expected. It’s like giving a kid (or me!) a massive box of Lego.
October 14, 2008
Books
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We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity
You may remeber that a while back I said I’d been to a talk at the Birtish Library for the launch of we-think a book about collaboration in modern society. Well I’m finally close enough to the end to write a bit more (yes things really are taking time at the moment!). It’s an interesting book, not a page turning thriller, most of it is the obvious but with some well researched detail. It doesn’t really provide any conclusion but is more the basis of the thoughts for a discussion, which as the book is about collaborating… makes sense.
If you have an academic interest in Crowd Sourcing, collaborative working and projects, or even on organisational structures then there will be something there for you. If what you want to do is leap in and start collaborating, then just go and get on with it I’m sure you can live without it. Interesting but not essential.
Whilst I bought my copy you can get a PDF version of We-Think here, I’d certainly recommend reading at least the first 3 chapters.
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