facing the swarm: the coming obsolescence of the big idea

Educated people in business love The Big Idea. Generally this is a heroic idea that will change everything. I am falling out of love with the Idea of The Big Idea. I think the problems were face as a species are so complex, are so wicked that just a few Big Ideas won't do.

We need a swarm of lots of Small Ideas small ideas. Micronotions that propogate across the memescape. Like any small, fast-breeding creatures, many are poorly adapted for their environment and doomed to die but many will reproduce and mutate and colonise.

Of course, careers are not built on small ideas nor are awards won. But the world is changed by small ideas.

I call for a profligacy of conceptulets.

Think small!

muhammad yunus - strategic doer

MY: See making money is an exciting thing. You can find a lot of pleasure in making money. Changing the world is the most exciting thing in the world. We have to make a decision that I will not live my life in a way that will take away the enjoyment of life for another person - that simple decision, that's all.

AD: It's a powerful thing that you are talking about. I mean I am just thinking probably one of the most popular shows on television round the world is called "Who Wants to be a Millionaire", it's about the desire for money.

MY: There should be another show, "Who wants to change the world?" But that show you are not promoting, because those who made the "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" makes million out of it.

I absolutely love this interview with Muhammad Yunus. A high-point of my year. As I read it, tears of joy are streaming out of my eyes.

There are many smart people in the world. But very few genuinely strategic doers. People who not only see the fine grains of detail but the big picture, the whole globe floating in space. And who not only see it but choose to act in a positive way to change it. Whatever your feelings about Grameen Bank, Yunus counts as one of those strategic doers.

PEITSD

Have you ever met a victim of Post ERP Implementation Traumatic Stress Disorder?

How can you tell if someone has PEITSD? Here are the signs:

• A belief that IT salespeople are liars and only want to get as much money out of you as possible.
  
• A belief that all IT consultants are sadists and only want to get as much money out of you as possible.
• A disbelief in RoI figures based on headcount reduction through efficiency gains.
• A morbid fear of consipulation*.
• An overwhelming sense of process-based persecution.

What other symptoms have you noted?

*consipulation = consultation + manipulation

book review: sharepoint roadmap for collaboration

I have been recommending Michael Sampson's book Sharepoint Roadmap for Collaboration to everyone I know who is working with Sharepoint (and that's a lot of people). It's a down-to-earth, practical guide to using Sharepoint to support (rather than hinder collaboration). I prefer it to Seamless Teamwork because that book was mostly aimed at end-users of Sharepoint rather than us poor bastards collaboration experts who have to manage the overall implementation*. This second book is much more for us.

One gripe: No pictures. Not a single one. Something for the visual thinkers in the next book please Michael.

*Apparently SP 2010 will solve all the problems that have bedevilled previous releases. My advice: Trust but verify.

blokes n babies

We have an ergobaby carrier and at the moment it's not only handy for supporting the young chap in strolls & promenades, but also strapping him to my torso seems to be the one thing that settles him down from hardcore tantrum mode.

However the marketing to men for the ergobaby is wetter than the contents of a straining nappy. Pictures like this with effete male models really aren't winning me over. More meatless SNAGs than a vegan sausage sizzle.

May I offer up this alternative aspirational image instead?

master chefs or drama queens?

The TV sen-sa-shun of 2009 has been Masterchef. And to begin with, I was a fan. I like food (as even a cursory glance at my waistline will evidence). And I like the notion of the Australian public being turned on to food. The three grumpy, chubby judges seemed OK as well. N.B. The one thing that annoyed me was the music. They might was well have had signs saying "applause" or "cheer" or "boo". It had all the subtlety of a chicken vindaloo. Try too hard to be dramatic.

So Masterchef begat Celebrity Masterchef and a few weeks ago I was watching the celebs ham it up in some kitchen somewhere. One of the grumpy, chubby judges was exhorting the contests: "This is the most important day of your life!!!"

And I thought: Hang on. Some of these people have had kids. Some of these people have buried loved ones. They've hit sporting heights or wowwed tens of thousands of people in a stadium somewhere. And this is the most important day of their lives? What drugs are you on chubby, grumpy man?

And then it struck me that Maserchef might actually be harming our appreciation of food. Because food should be enjoyed in a context. The best meals have a culinary component but they also have a big human aspect too. Banter + Grub = Awesome. Grub on its own = Food wanker. The music had infected the rest of the programme.

And in focusing too much on the grub, Masterchef is in real danger of making cooking a bit stressy & tedious. So you can't make a ****ing Croche en Bouche? Who cares? Can you slap down a nice cake & tell us a funny story & make us feel loved? Yes? Then we'll come back to your table.

Preparing food should be a pleasure. It should not be stressful. Unfortunately the currency of a TV show like Masterchef is drama & stress. Fine in its place. Just don't mistake it for culinary reality.

book review: opening up - remain in light?

I read Opening Up by Andrew Rixon (words) & Simon Kneebone (pictures). about a month ago. It's an immensely charming book that applies the world of fairy tales to organisational life & personal development. I have a lot of time for both author & cartoonist but I also have a challenge for them.

Fairy tales are not all nice. Many pre-modern fairy tales are dark & shocking affairs to modern eyes & ears. People die horribly. People do terrible things to each other. Virtue is not always rewarded. Evil is not always punished. Life lessons are not always learned with a happy smile.

As uplifting as Opening Up is, I was left feeling as though I had been told a version of the world that was not quite true. The world is full of chiaroscuro and we cannot always remain in the light.

I would suggest Neil Gaiman as a contemporary writer who understands the power of fairy tales. And I would challenge Andrew & Simon to encompass both the light and the dark in their work.

finian

pay for play

Some of these discussions around "earned media" vs "paid-for media" remind me of sex (I'm a man, everything reminds me of sex).

• Earned media is presented as inherently better than the paid-for kind at a moral level (as opposed to just a financial one) in much the same way that "earned" sex is inherently better than the paid-for kind*.
• Men who pay for sex do not necessarily do so out of desperation. They may want sex but not a relationship. Is deceiving someone that you want a relationship with them when really all you are after is the sex more moral than paying some for it? Isn't a honest transaction better than a fraudulent relationship?
• A lot of earned media seems to consist of stressed journos recycling press releases - like a relationship where one partner trades security for sexually satisfying the other?
  
• As the cliche goes "You always pay for sex". What are your actual costs with with not seeking paid-for advertising?
  

*I don't particularly want to get into arguments about the morality (or otherwise) of prostitution but it exists in many cultures and it seems to fulfill a basic human need. However it doesn't seem like an appealing career choice.

has marketing eaten social software?

First off, let me say some nice things about the people that put on the Social Media Club in Sydney. They volunteer their time. They put on very professional events that attract a lot of people. They are kind to animals and help old ladies across the road. The first session was especially good because they had a bloke from a marketing agency and they also had Leslie Nasser - who is not a marketing guy but did something cool online.

Now I am not a marketing guy. But I am interested in social software (blogs, wikis, Twitter, etc) and I am interested in people who are doing cool stuff online (regardless of who they work for). And I don't feel there's anything at the Social Media Club for people who aren't in PR or marketing agencies. Now that may be who its intended audience, in which case they ought to change the name to make that clear - the "Social Media for Marketers Club" is nicely unambiguous.

However if it does go down that path then it risks being less interesting as a result. It's like a "Television Club" that only discusses ads or a "Telephone Club" that focuses on call centres. There is a whole world out there and there are plenty of people in it who aren't after a "social media expert" title.

So I'd encourage the organisers to broaden the kind of presentations they have and possibly experiment with the format as well. One or two people on stage separated from everyone else feels very traditional, very old media (as another Gavin mentioned). How could it be done differently?

intelligent design?

Intelligent Design is best understood as a failure of the imagination. We look at the world and see something with order. Jungles with thousands of species existing in equilibrium. Coral reefs, polar icecaps, rolling hills. The idea that is could have been shaped by forces without intention is ridiculous to us. Someone must have built it. Someone like us but bigger.

Because order only comes from intention, doesn't it? The world is a machine, fashioned by the Great Engineer.

Could the tents of Organizational Design be a similar failure of the imagination? Are our organizations more like machines or jungles?

social software measurement as asymmetric warfare

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the Sydney Social Media Club where there was much discussion of measurement by Paull, Jye & Matt.

After the event, I was pondering this well-known story:

Two campers are walking through the forest when they suddenly encounter a grizzly bear. The bear rears up on his hind legs and lets out a terrifying roar. Both campers are frozen in their tracks. The first camper whispers, "I'm sure glad I wore my running shoes today." "It doesn't matter what kind of shoes you're wearing, you're not gonna outrun that bear," replies the second. "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun YOU," he answers.

When you are asked to demonstrate the ROI of social software, all you have to do is prove that SM delivers the benefits of traditional media at a lower cost - because it seems that most marketing is a cost of doing business rather than a generator of sustainable growth.

There's a problem here however: What if it doesn't? If you compare Twitter to TV using TV's metrics then TV is probably going to win. TV's metrics have coevolved with the medium over decades. It's a fixed match. TV is wearing the running shoes and you're looking like a tasty snack for a Mr Grizzly. Julian does some very interesting crunching of Twitter reach numbers and concludes: Knowing this is great for planning but who is going to take back a reduced number when traditional media agencies are still talking inflated reach into the 100,000s?

In making this move, I would suggest that the SM crowd risk doing a Mullah Nasrudin:

Nasrudin found a weary falcon sitting one day on his window-sill. He had never seen a bird like this before. "You poor thing", he said, "how ever were you allowed to get into this state?" He clipped the falcon’s talons and cut its beak straight, and trimmed its feathers. "Now you look more like a bird", said Nasrudin.*

Even by calling it "social media", we clip its talons. As this article by Malcolm Gladwell explains, if you are a David and you play by Goliath's rules then you then he will squash you. If you are engaged in an asymmetric struggle then you need to choose your turf and your weapons - not let them be chosen for you.

Some hypotheses (which may well be wrong because I don't work in marketing):

• Social software is that it allows you to do multiple things at once - customer service AND promotion AND sales AND research. Organisation with a combined approach to selling, marketing & service would be more open to social software plays that offer an integrated approach to the customer (not that are necessarily many of those about).
  
• Social software is speed. Measures around "time-to-market" and "response time" become critical here (which are more associated with new product development & customer service than advertising).
• Social software is cheap (unless someone is greedy) - "cost per message" anyone? This means that you can run multiple experiments in a short period of time at low cost. Iterating TV spots is not cheap.
• Social software is interactive - you'd expect that cross-selling/up-selling metrics might be relevant here.
  

Of course, these measures don't help you persuade people that Twitter is better at TV's job than TV is - but should you be trying to do that in the first place?

There are two other riffs in my head:

• Marketing & media as ecology (with prey, predators, parasites, symbionts).
• Measurement as social proof.

But those will be other blog posts.

*Thanks to Dave for introducing me to this story.

Story Week Tuesday: Little Triggers

So we looked at how people responded to a story told by Obama back in StoryWeek. What did people think about Tuesday's story? Here's a quick recap:

... we organised a workshop, it was really high pressure and done at very short notice. It ended up being a success, but the CEO was there, and I thought it was one of those things where the team had all sort of pulled together, and it could of fallen over, but it didn't. At the end of the workshop, it had all gone well, there was a perfect window there for the CEO to come up to the team and say "Good job". I don't know the CEO at all, but it was a perfect opportunity for him to go and get some easy PR, or even at least say good stuff, and pass it on. But he just left. I mean, he may have had a thousand other things to do, but it was one of those things.

So how did this score?



Well overall it wasn't as memorable as the Obama story - although people did find it more believable. However as with Obama, there was a definite split in terms of who found this story memorable. For Obama it was country of origin. For this story is was around gender.


The ratings given by men (n=27) & women (n = 24) are almost mirror images of each other. Which is interesting because we know that the CEO is a man but we don't know the gender of the storyteller or any of the other characters. For women this story is far more memorable. Why*? Is it because women have been in this situation more often? Is it because they empathize with the characters more? What do you think?

BTW the Wordle clouds are here and here if you are interested.

*More women gave the Obama story 6 out of 6 for memorability but the other pattern of responses wasn't as stark as this.

gigadread

Katie Chatfield recently asked Where did the future go?

She was following up on Bruce Sterling's closing speech at Reboot 11 - Sterling also runs a blog on related topics courtesy of Wired.

Some reflections & responses:

• The talk was a half-digested stream of ideas - some awesome, some dumb, some both.
• Many of themes that BS touches upon mirror the obsessions of early 90s CCRU (incl. Mark K-punk Fisher & Steve Hyperdub Goodman). Cybergothic, inhuman technology, undead capitalism, the swarm. CCRU's ideas were heavily influenced by Deluze & Guattari, Jungle and the writings of... cyberpunk authors such as Bruce Sterling.
• "High-Tech Gothic" is a great phrase but it applies more to system than to individuals. Zombie banks. The financial system as out-of-control Frankenstein's monster. Financiers as parasitic vampires. Capitalism has reached its Gothic phase. It is epitomised not by Steve Jobs but by Dow Jones Index or a CDO contract sitting in someone's email - something that may once have had its origins in human behaviour & needs but no longer "human" or "alive" in any meaningful sense.
• "Dark euphoria" is another great phrase but it feels wrong. We're not entering a period of euphoria or depression but dysphoria. You can try to cushion the dread rush with shopping at the endless sales ("For a limitless time only") or alcohol or religion (Islamic, Christian, Environmental) but it just won't go away.
• Gen X are not goths - but I can see how we may look that way to Baby Boomers who salved their dread of nuclear war with the bounty of consumer culture. What happens when the cure becomes the new disease?
• "Favela Chic"is a great way of both celebrating & critiquing "open source" culture. Everybody code before the police come! No civil rights. No protection.
• The "great grandfather" crack is misplaced. Consuming less than we do now does not make us dead. It just makes us thinner. Bruce Sterling or Mr Creosote?
• The final point about keeping a small amount of good stuff and getting rid of the rest is a very sensible idea of which I am a massive fan.

marrickville week (4)

Source: ABS Census Data

marrickville week (3)

Source: yewenyi


Source: OZinOH


Source: lucid7

marrickville week (2)

Source: Marrickville Image Library

marrickville week (1)

This is the street where I live now. On the downside, there is no baker's cart plying its wares every morning. On the upside, I don't have to shovel up the horse dung from the baker's cart every morning.

Source: Marrickville Image Library

man week (6): little acts

Men like doing stuff. We are creatures of action. However in my case, "stuff" consists of sitting in front of the TV promising to fix the busted tap in the laundry (I will, I will).

So with all this Man Week stuff, I'm curious as to how this all plays out into action. We bare our souls and have our group hug and it's all like an episode of Thirtysomething but online.

So I'm interested in what happens next. Not big things. Just little things. I can think of a few off the bat.

man week (5): brutal

Man Week is leading to some darned interesting blogging. One theme that crops is violence. Mostly men being violent to each other via bullying (the issue of men being violent to women crops up less in the writing so far). And it's true. Men - esp. young men - are brutal. And this cuts both ways - the most frequent victims of violence are also young men. This happens at all levels of intensity. I have never murdered anyone. I was bullied at school and I also bullied others. I still feel I am a very angry man but not an especially violent one*.

So if my child is a son, what can I do? I think role modelling is really important. But what does that mean? I can't see myself beating people up in front of him. How I control my temper is going to be important. As will be my assertiveness. One of the most painful lessons in life for me has been the need to meet conflict directly rather than avoid it. I would rather he learned that lesson early.

But beyond that I'm not sure. Mark Pollard mentions martial arts and I would love a son to take up one of these sports - because they are about control & discipline**.

Any ideas bloggerati?


Source: Economist

*We all have emotional motors that power us though our lives. I would like to say I am driven by a desire to better the world or by an ambition to be the best at whatever I do but if I'm honest with myself it's just non-specific rage - as destructive as it is creative. My tombstone will probably have "What are you looking at, breather?" carved on it.

**May be we should bring back national service. And the death penalty. Hang on...

Man Tag

• Oscar Nicholson
• Zac Martin
• Luke Naismith
  

man week (4): gay

I'm not gay. I checked when I was about 20*. All the stuff above the waist on the other person was fine but there was some extra equipment down there that seemed a little superfluous. I think the technical term may be "cock block".

Reflecting on this experience makes me wonder how difficult it must be for a closeted gay man trying to fit in. Going through the motions. Doing something that's not quite right.

For a few years I was a volunteer at the Ankali Project where I was often "token straight guy". One thing that I think separates gay men from straight men is that you have to choose who you are. Now I don't mean that people "choose" their sexuality because I don't think that's true. Rather being straight is the default option in our society. Coming out as gay requires that you set yourself apart. You have to make a choice about your identity and how you present that publically.

Beyond all that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy interior design stuff, I think that's a key lesson straight men can learn from our non-straight brethren. Understand that you own who you are and that default behaviours are not the only way of being a man.

*At the time I thought I might be uncomfortable with my sexuality. It was more a case of being uncomfortable with myself.

Man Tag

• Daniel Oyston
• Stuart French
• Mal Damkar
  

man week (3): bodies

It's still Man Week. I'm struggling a bit. I don't want to turn this blog into some pale imitation of All Men Are Liars. So each day will be a brief vignette. Make of them what you will.

I once considered becoming a masseur. So I spoke to this guy that was quite experienced in the industry and was connected to a yoga studio I was involved with. He was a big guy. Brick s***-house. Tats. Very macho. Ex-motor mechanic. He had been a petrolhead who loved to strip down & rebuild cars. He'd got bored with that game and decided to do something else with his hands. Massage, obviously. Another set of machines to fix. The switch from mechanic to masseur made complete sense to me.

He said it was a tough game for straight guy. Straight men don't necessarily want other straight men touching them. And if women interpreted any move as being sleazy your name would be mud. But many of his clients valued his strength. They weren't going to get some light backrub. Their muscles were going to be well and truly moved.

Man Tag

• Scott Drummond
• Jye Smith
• Julian Cole
  

man week (2): being a dad

So Mark Pollard has written most excellently about being a Dad. And as it's Man Week it would be churlish not to write about my own experiences of impending fatherhood.

Basically it's all a bit scary. And oddly detached. The Mum, she's feeling it. That child is an overpowering biological reality for her. For the Dad, not so much. Not our insides being rearranged by a baby. Not our hormones driven from pillar to post by a new life.

For men it's all a little more... conceptual. They say the two events that propel you into adulthood are the death of a parent and the birth of a child. And they are right.

So that's it. You are a grown-up. Which frankly isn't so terrible. I've been a grown up for a long time. Not a particularly successful grown up but an adult nonetheless. And I'm ready to be old. Because the older you get, the less you have to worry about what other people think. I now have the freedom to be an embarrassing Dad. Uncool in every way.

My child has given me this wonderful gift: adulthood. A role of both short-term necessity and ultimate obsolescence. I need not be the oldest teenager in town. Call that music? Hah!

Thank you.

Man Tags

• Geoff Brown
• James Dellow
• Cory Banks

Come on lads. Blog it like you mean it.

do i think you're sexy?

Gav starts talking (un)sexy:

But let me tell you a little secret. This sort of social media (and almost every aspect of social media) is just not sexy. It doesn’t have the glitz and glamour or even the spotlights of advertising; and there’s not the breathtaking scale of large format outdoor advertising.

Now let me share something with you here that I have mentioned before. There are two kinds of sexy in the world.

The first is simply being desirable. Being the bright, young, slinky, shiny thing. And here Gav is right. I don't think social software is that bright or shiny or slinky.

But the second kind of sexy is slightly different, less discussed but far more important. It's all about making others feel desirable. Healthy sexual relationships are built on mutual desire and it's terribly important for all of us to feel desired*. Some of the most charismatic people I have met make you feel like you are at the centre of their attention. Can this be faked & abused? Of course. But its power cannot be denied.

And this is where social software can be sexy. Because by listening to people, by making them feel wanted and important, we make others feel sexy. Of course we can finish this process by either discarding our conquests or trying to develop something deeper. The choice is open but it has consequences.

Given the choice between being desired and making others feel desirable, I would always go for the latter (but then with a face like mine I would say that).

Go forth and make the world a sexier place.

*Coincidentally I was going to do a session about this at BarCamp Sydney 5 but I had to have a little nap instead. The doctor has told me that I can't have too much excitement.

man week (1): having a dad

I have just been informed that its Man Week by both Gav Heaton & Mark Pollard. Obviously my testosterone-fuelled machismo has conditioned a Pavlovian response to the term "man" with the linked term "Matt Moore" in their minds (in a purely heterosexual way of course). So this week I will blogging about being a man.

Let's cut to the chase. I'm not actually that comfortable with some aspects of being a man in either English or Australian culture. The blokey, beery, laddish stereotype that some men espouse ain't me. I tried it when I was younger but I was a total failure at being a lad. "Cor, er, look at the, er, tits on that. Anyone read the Times Literary Supplement this week?"

I don't like sport. My Mum is more of a sports fan than I am. Please don't make me watch the footie*. Please don't ask me what team I support. Because then I'll have to break your clumsy yet charming attempts at male-bonding & socialising by telling you the truth.

A big reason behind this is probably my Dad. If you're going to write about being a man, you have to write a little about fathers.

Papa was a rolling stone. Wherever he laid his hat was his home. And when he died, all he left us was alone.

My Dad isn't a rolling stone. He's a very gentle man with a very warped sense of humour (something inherited by both my brother & I) who takes his responsibilities seriously. He is happy with his homebrew, his cycling, my Mum & writing puppet shows for the local church. Despite a spell being a stoker in the navy, he's not especially macho. Nor is he especially interested in sport.

According to all those dramas about men in traumatic relationships with their fathers, where that which needs to be said remains unsaid, I should have terrible difficulty relating to him. But I'm not sure I do. We are different people but we share so much. I have grown to appreciate everything he's done. I think this is true of many father/son relationships (another, fictional Gavin & his Dad come to mind). Many of us do want our Dads to be proud of us. And I hope that many of them are.

A brief intermission from Tricky:

...strong enough to take a life.
Are you strong enough to take care of one?

Now that's something I could sign up to. More on this tomorrow...

*I don't mind being at a footie match but that's mostly because I want to watch the crowd and sense the collective waves of emotion that roil around the stadium. It's like being in a psychic washing machine.

Man Tag

I would like to invite the following to discourse on manliness on their blogs.

• Gav Heaton
• Mark Pollard
• Brad Hinton

There will be 3 more invites per day this week. Gird your blogging loins gentlemen.

Ma

Pots are formed from clay,

but the empty space between it

is the essence of the pot. - Lao Tse

Listening is only partially about what is said. What is unsaid is often more important. This is one important reason why machines struggle to interpret human speech. They can only work with what is there.

The concept of "negative space" is used in painting to describe the spaces between objects. It's important. The objects and the space in which they sit are closely related. You might call "negative space" by another name: "context".

I had the same experience again in a very different context this morning in a hospice sitting with a friend who is dying and talking to her son. Bizarrely about sport: the England game last night, the Lions Tour, 2020 world series and Andy Murray. Although our topic was carefully chosen to keep us away from the theme of impending death I couldn't help noticing how aligned the themes we spoke of were with the figure in the bed alongside us - metaphors about mental strength, injury, weakness letting go. - Further & Faster

And then I stumbled over the concept of "Ma". Gap. Pause. Lacuna. Space. Betweenness. Our interactions and our lives are full of Ma*. Are you listening hard enough to the spaces?

*As I write there's some dub reggae on the radio - a music built on the use of space (to build intensity, a dub producer subtracts rather than adds sounds).

i'm not a racist but...

Whenever some starts a sentence with "I'm not a racist but...", you know this conversation is not going to go somewhere pleasant.

So are Australians racist?

Well of course we are. Human beings are probably hard-wired to be prejudiced to those outside their social group. I am a racist. I try not to be. I do not think that prejudices based on race are good thing or to be cultivated but nevertheless I probably exhibit them to a degree.

So are Australians (and esp. white Australians) more racist than other countries?

That's a little harder to decide. Thankfully Andrew Leigh* & co at ANU have done some experiments on this involving CV applications, return to sender letters and reaction times (full report here).

So when it comes to wrongly addressed letters, Australians are not that racist. The reaction times stuff is a little ambiguous but (and this is the part of the research that caught the news headlines) if you want to get an entry-level job in data entry, sales or waiting and you are Chinese or Middle-Eastern then you may need to change your name** if you want to get more call backs. There's so much in this study that I could write about I'll let you read it instead.

In international comparisons, Australians appear to exhibit "CV Prejudice" at similar levels to Swedes (in their attitudes to Arabs & Africans) and Americans (in their attitudes to African-Americans). N.B. This is just one behavioural test. It's not like there's an international racism index - altho that may be something to consider...

This once again reminds of my great good fortune in matters of birth. Ain't nothing like being a white, middle-class male to put a smile on your face!

*Prof Leigh's work has kept on appearing on my radar over the last few years. I'd definitely subscribe to his blog.

**There's some interesting additional stuff in there about what qualifies as a good CV when applying for jobs in different categories too.

statswatch: no recession?

The Australian Jan-Mar GDP figures came out last week and they were positive. Just. So we are not in recession - officially. There was talk of the role that consumer spending & exports played in keeping the economy buoyant.

What got less attention was what was going on with imports.



As this handy little graph from the ABS indicates, much of the good news in the Q1 data came from imports decreasing drastically. In other words, Australians were buying less from overseas - probably because the AU$ hasn't been doing so crash hot.



The AU$ has been doing considerably better since. Which is great if you want to go on a holiday abroad - but less good if you are an exporter. In fact the trade figures for April came out the next day - and weren't so promising: imports are continuing to go down but exports are decreasing faster.

Last month's employment figures were actually good - more people in jobs. Yay! Let's hope that the numbers for May on Thursday keep the good news coming.

dr cool hits delete

I'm a fair man.

Actually that's not true. I'm a viciously unfair man.

So when Adam "Dr Cool" Ferrier posted his Facebook quiz, I could not resist. Adam's research is probably sound and his writing is not stupid (but it does tend towards the schoolmasterish - "I've outlined the 4Ps of Marketing as applied to this instance..."). I asked him what the foundations (who, when, where) for his cool research were. And he didn't fess up. So I asked him again. I asked him so many times that he deleted one of the comments. As you can see, oh hang on, you can't because it's deleted. So I guess we'll never know.

Incidentally, putting your research out as a quiz on Facebook is a darned-sight more effective than publishing it in an academic journal. But if you claim that your results are based in research and then complain when people take you seriously and ask for the evidence underlying your research - well that is a bit disingenuous. And frankly: uncool.

paying more

I'm a big fan if Atul Gawande's writing on medicine (yet another good tip from Patrick Lambe). AG's latest article in the New Yorker is strongly recommended. He visited McAllen, Texas which has the dubious distinction of spending more per person on healthcare than anywhere else in the US (apart from Florida). Is it because healthcare there is better? Apparently not.

And yet there’s no evidence that the treatments and technologies available at McAllen are better than those found elsewhere in the country... Nor does the care given in McAllen stand out for its quality.

So why is it so expensive to keep people healthy in McAllen?

He knew of doctors who owned strip malls, orange groves, apartment complexes—or imaging centers, surgery centers, or another part of the hospital they directed patients to. They had “entrepreneurial spirit,” he said. They were innovative and aggressive in finding ways to increase revenues from patient care. “There’s no lack of work ethic,” he said. But he had often seen financial considerations drive the decisions doctors made for patients—the tests they ordered, the doctors and hospitals they recommended—and it bothered him. Several doctors who were unhappy about the direction medicine had taken in McAllen told me the same thing. “It’s a machine, my friend,” one surgeon explained.

In McAllen, there is s tendency for doctors to focus on making money. They are being entrepreneurial, obeying market forces. All the stuff we've been told is good. And is it good?

In a 2003 study, another Dartmouth team, led by the internist Elliott Fisher, examined the treatment received by a million elderly Americans diagnosed with colon or rectal cancer, a hip fracture, or a heart attack. They found that patients in higher-spending regions received sixty per cent more care than elsewhere. They got more frequent tests and procedures, more visits with specialists, and more frequent admission to hospitals. Yet they did no better than other patients, whether this was measured in terms of survival, their ability to function, or satisfaction with the care they received. If anything, they seemed to do worse...

...To make matters worse, Fisher found that patients in high-cost areas were actually less likely to receive low-cost preventive services, such as flu and pneumonia vaccines, faced longer waits at doctor and emergency-room visits, and were less likely to have a primary-care physician. They got more of the stuff that cost more, but not more of what they needed.

Despite our tendency to see price or cost as a reliable surrogate for quality, it ain't necessarily so.

In the Anglophone world, we have spent the last 30 years valorising private enterprise, business, making money as the optimal way of doing things. The generic government plan to fix something involves introducing market forces. Fortunately their success rate so far has been patchy. If they succeed then we're screwed.

I suspect (& I'm hardly original in pointing this out) that in the future, there will be less money around. There'll be fewer natural resources, less farmable land and less cheap energy. We're going to have to ween ourselves off our obsession with growth - and going cold turkey is going to be very painful.

crown seal

Neck hugging
Bubble reining
Cloth catching
Shining
Cutting
Closing

I make a glass bottle a monarch.
I seal royal lips.
No gossip in my court.
Vagabonds use me to adulterate
their cups of change
in exchange for cigarettes.

Don't throw me away.
Let me rest in the palm of your hand.
A cold pockmark on your skin.
In your dreams I cover you.
A cap armadillo.
Made to be twisted open.



Source: 96dpi

good readin'

The missus has a subscription to the London Review of Books that I frequently intercept before it reaches her. A recent pleasure has been the writing of John Lanchester - a novelist with a talent for writing about finance & economics. Apparently his dad worked in a bank. I am as thankful Lanchester senior's conservative choice of career as I am for that of his son's bohemian one as JL's article on the UK economy included the best explanation of a balance sheet that I have ever read.

Meanwhile a little googlesurfing led me to Helen DeWitt's blog that includes this wonderful offer:

Secondhand Sales

Readers sometimes want to buy copies of The Last Samurai for friends. It's tempting to buy the book "As New" for $1.70 + $3.99 postage rather than for $14.95 with free shipping in an order of $20 or more, especially if there are many, many friends. The author gets nothing on a secondhand sale -- but then, the author would get only $1.12 on the new book. To send the author $1.12 the reader would have to pay an extra $9.24. That's a pretty expensive goodwill gesture.

Goodwill doesn't have to cost that much. PayPal takes 30 cents + 3% on each transaction; if you send the author $1.50 by PayPal she will get $1.15. So only 35 cents of the goodwill gesture goes to a middleman. It would look like highway robbery if we hadn't seen the competition.

I'm not into fiction at the moment but for AU$2, I feel like I've played a small part in allowing Helen DeWitt to continuing writing - and being slightly crazy.

google wave cures cancer

Actually I made that up. Despite the predictions & prognostications, no one actually knows how well Google Wave will work. It sounds cool enough but we should remember that not everything in Google world is a lush fountain of awesomeness (Blogger is not quite up there with Wordpress, what the **** happened to Jaiku) but nevertheless, the dog is keen to see the rabbit.

The only issue with calling your product "Wave" is bad PR whenever there's a tsunami. "No, no, our product doesn't drown people. We're the good kind of wave..."

google vs bing: microsoft thinks i'm gay

Microsoft have brought out there own search engine competitor to Google. it's known as "Bing" (which makes me think of a dead crooner, not sure if that's the association that they're after). I put both these products through their paces by conducting a rigorous benchmarking process entering a stupid question. Google's results were quite funny. Bing's results were... gay. And I don't mean that in an offensive, equating-homosexuality-with-lameness fashion but literally.

Yikes, may be I am gay. May be Microsoft have tapped into the murkiest corners of my sexual orientation and revealed my true nature to me.

I am out of my closet and it's all thanks to you, Bing!!!

[Click on images to enlarge - please note the findings from Bing are not safe for work or a web demo for your kids]

Story Week Monday: How did Obama do?

Some of you have been asking about Story Week. Well, our team of researchers have been combing the data and here are some initial results. You may remember Monday's story - as told by a little-known former junior senator from Illinois.

We got about 66 responses for to our questions for this story. Here are some early results. Here is a Wordle cloud made from the responses people gave to the question: "What was memorable about the story?" - note "little", "old" and "lady".

And here is the Wordle cloud of keywords that people added to the story (more words like "motivation" and "inspiration").

And here are the numerical results for each of the criteria.

Most people found it memorable and most seemed to like it - although a significant minority of people thought that it sounded manufactured or slow. How did Obama compare with the others? Well, you'll have to wait and see.

One noticeable difference in responses could be seen in the reactions of people by their country of origin.

Americans found it highly memorable - less so for the Brits and the Aussies. Some possible explanations (and bear in mind that this is a small sample size so it may just be chance):

• Americans are more familiar with Obama;
• Americans are more emotionally invested in Obama (and I suspect a bias towards liberals among Anecdote/Sparknow/EngineerswithoutFears blog readers);
• Obama's mode of storytelling is more appealing to Americans.
• Any other suggestions/speculations?

More to come soon.

mixed states

Now let me start off this post by saying I like Dave Armano's writing and have a lot of respect for his visual thinking talents but I want to take issue with one of his recent diagrams.

I don't know much about Dave's background or experiences so I'm purely responding to this image. To me, it embodies a certain romanticisation of mental illness. Mania + Depression = Creativity?

Well, maybe. But sometimes mania + depression = higher suicide risk. A mixed state (or dysphoric mania) is a very dangerous state to be in. If you're depressed then you may not want to live but frankly suicide is too active an option. Dysphoric mania unfortunately gives you the energy just at the time that it can most do you harm.

Do these results imply that creativity and psychopathology are intimately connected? Are genius and madness tantamount to the same thing? The answer to the first question is affirmative, but the response to the second is negative. DK Simonton

There is evidence of a link between mental illness and creativity but there are some issues here:

• In linking creativity to mental illness, we mystify the creative, we make it alien to ourselves. Creativity is for those wacky, crazy people - not for us, no siree. We're normal.
• It seems as though we cannot handle mental illness unless we demonise or romanticise it. Monsters or heroes please.
• Many people with mental illness are no more geniuses than the rest of us. What happens to them? Where do they fit in?
  

uppers

Although "severely elevated mood" sounds somewhat desirable and enjoyable, the experience of mania is often quite unpleasant and sometimes disturbing,

People know that depression is bad. "Mania" on the other hand is often viewed as being a bit "cool". And it is "cool" - in the same way that going on a 3-week crystal meth binge is "cool".

Yes you have lots of energy. And yes you get lots of ideas. However many of these ideas are twaddle but you struggle to tell the difference between twaddle & genius (see megalomania below) The insomnia can be a bit of problem tho. As can the poor impulse control. It can often make you a little aggressive - YES, AGGRESSIVE - YOU MUTHAF****S!!!

Arrogance is also a problem - you basically feel like you're God, all-powerful, all-controlling. Of course, you aren't - but it feels that way. DON'T INTERRUPT ME!!!

If it sounds like being on drugs then it is - except these drug are homebrewed by your nervous system. My episodes are hypomanic - I don't tend to get the full-blown delusions or psychoses. I'm just really, really annoying.

downer

So depression is very hard to write about in a way that others want to read.

"Oooh, I feel like spending the whole week in bed. In fact scratch that whole 'life' thing, I'd really like that to end in the near future but I don't have the energy to do anything about it right now. Hmmm, maybe I'll cry for a bit."

It's hardly up there fun-wise is it? And yet it's also distressingly common. In any one month, about 4% of Australians (that's about 800,000 people) will suffer from a depressive episode. And I'm guessing that thise figures are similar across the developed world.

At its worst, depression is like being hollowed out with a spoon. All the ice cream in the tub of self is gone, there's just the packaging left. And the packaging is cardboard - thin, soggy & weak. It is like being already dead - which is presumably why depression leaves people feeling suicidal. Ending your existence does not seem like such a big leap, such an unthinkable act. It just feels like finishing the job. The pain is like phantom limb pain, except that this is phantom self pain. "You" have been amputated - what do you do next in the grieving process?

For some people, this is all they have. For many of us, these feelings come and go. Sometimes we just get profound lethargy. We've been left stuck in neutral. Cut adrift. No drive. Frustrating yes, but not fatal.

It's not cancer but it can kill. All of us hit a blue note.

Take a moment to hear that echo in others.

way down in a hole

Thoughts triggered by watching The Wire: When I started in the world of work, I regularly assumed that everyone above me was competent and that decisions were made with the purpose of the organisation in mind. Admittedly I had grown up listening to my parents' complaints about incompetent colleagues & superiors but they were also keen for me to join a large, powerful organisation that offered a decent salary. There seemed no disconnect between these two positions.

Large organisations tend to be dysfunctional. It's not that they don't do what they're supposed to (and in The Wire that means pushing drugs or catching criminals), it's that they seem to achieve these goals in spite of of themselves. It's really all about individuals getting and retaining material wealth and power over others. We may tell ourselves that the "invisible hand" of the free market makes everything work fine or that some technocratic official knows best but these institutions seem to decrease in effectiveness as the money and effort that we pump into them increases. This can be corporations, government entities, not-for-profits, even entire industries (hello banking sector!).

Institutions both enable and constrain. In engaging with them as individuals we make a trade, I'm not sure how often that trade is worth making. Human institutions will always be flawed but is there a way out of "the game"?

Story Week: Friday

So its Friday and here we are at the end of Story Week. Many thanks to all of you who contributed and here is our final story - something serious...

grief

So I was talking to a tech-head who went green. She was into all this social software stuff - esp. virtual worlds / Second Life. And now she's into sustainability and permaculture. And she's had to give up heavy internet use as part of that - because all these massive server farms probably aren't sustainable. And giving that all that stuff has caused her some grief. I mean literal grief - a sense of profound loss.

This is important because all of us are going to have to go through at some stage in the future. We are going to have to give up a lot and most of us in the developed world really aren't prepared for that.

Think of this recession as a warm up, a test run for the future. How are you going to handle it? What are you going to do?

Story Week: Thursday

Our fourth story for Story Week is from the UK - please tell us what you think.

No red signal when minister plays with train set by Adam Sherwin (From Times UK Online)

All aboard the Adonis Express. Frustrated commuters will get direct access to the Transport Minister next week when Lord Adonis embarks upon a railway voyage to criss-cross Britain in six days.

The Minister will board the Paddington to Truro sleeper service on Easter Monday, just one man, his laptop and a £375 standard class Rail Rover ticket. On Saturday he will arrive in York after a 1,500-mile Michael Palin-style trip, involving 45 trains and extensive knowledge of the timetable. He will speed (hopefully) through Cornwall, East Anglia, the West Midlands and up to Aberdeen, before arriving in North Yorkshire to a hero’s welcome. Any signs of cabin fever will be logged on a Times Online blog.

A spokesman said: “Andrew is travelling solo and is happy for commuters to chat to him.”

Lord Adonis tells us: “My plan is to get to railway lines I have rarely or never used. Nothing beats first-hand experience when you are responsible for a major public service.”

Network Rail is advised to clear the line of engineering works.

A prize for the best picture of Lord Adonis captured on the rattlers.

Story Week: Wednesday

Many thanks to everyone who has contributed to Story Week so far. Continuing with our theme of "leadership", today we are featuring a story from Dr Fiona Wood, who was recognised as "Australian of the Year" for her work after the Bali Bombings. And we'd still like to hear your ideas for Friday's story.

When I saw the burns patients and I saw that we needed something radical to actually cover these large areas, that had to be more... They had to be smarter than traditional split-thickness skin grafting. We had to be able to do this better. And that was, I guess, the gauntlet that I threw down to myself. On the Sunday morning after the Bali bombing I got a call from the registrar, who is a very close friend of my senior registrar, who actually on Saturday had left for his holiday to Bali. Our first patients arrived in the early hours of the morning and they were the most severe patients, the most severely injured. And my overwhelming memory of that is the relief on their faces as they arrived at Royal Perth and spoke to us just before they were incubated for ventilation and for the treatment to commence, that relief on their faces. We were full at the time, so we started putting our disaster plan into action. And as the Sunday developed it became apparent that there was going to be a significant need, not just for the Perth Burns Unit but for the Australian Burns community as a whole. When the Bali bombing situation arose we did in fact deal with 15% of our annual workload in a day, but it's the sort of situation that we've been training for a long period of time and when you're involved in it and actually active in doing things it's a very motivating situation because you are able to influence those lives, not always to a positive outcome but we did our best.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/talkingheads/txt/s1711934.htm

Story Week: Tuesday

Day 2 of Story Week is here. Yesterday we had a video with a big Story. Today we have a snippet, a small story of a day-to-day interaction in a workplace. Our theme for the week is leadership, so look at the story in this light. Think how you would feel in the same circumstances. And of course, please pass this on to your networks and encourage them to join the fun. The more, the merrier. N.B. We have yet to finalise a story for Friday - is there a video of a story on the theme of leadership (preferably involving a woman) that you'd like to suggest?

... we organised a workshop, it was really high pressure and done at very short notice. It ended up being a success, but the CEO was there, and I thought it was one of those things where the team had all sort of pulled together, and it could of fallen over, but it didn't. At the end of the workshop, it had all gone well, there was a perfect window there for the CEO to come up to the team and say "Good job". I don't know the CEO at all, but it was a perfect opportunity for him to go and get some easy PR, or even at least say good stuff, and pass it on. But he just left. I mean, he may have had a thousand other things to do, but it was one of those things

Story Week: Monday

Blurb: The Story Week is here! Over the next 5 days, we'll be offering you 5 stories - some momentous, some more low-key - and we're inviting you to tell us what you think of them. After you have viewed, read or heard the story,we'd like you to fill out the form below and maybe tell us a story of your own. We will be publishing (under a creative commons license) the aggregate results from this little experiment and also some of the stories that you tell us. So without further ado...

happy endings

Keith McArthur has kicked off the Cluetrainplus10 Project with the FAQ and the list of participants. This is my contribution.

36. Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.

The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. However "fell" is not really the right verb to use. The inhabitants of the two Germanys did not wake up one morning to find that this icon of the Cold War, this continual reminder of the divided state of their nation, had collapsed in the night. It was taken down. By people. Demolished. It didn't fall, it was pushed.

Organisations have a strange relationship to the outside world - and it doesn't matter if they are corporates, small businesses, government departments or not-for-profits. We talk about customers, suppliers, citizens, donors or service users. We may even have been one just a few weeks previously. We talk publically about serving them. We fantasize privately about killing them. We wonder why they are so alien and difficult. And that is a little odd because they didn't create the technological, legal & social firewalls that we are hiding behind.

Social software does not change the world. It simply makes our present patterns of behaviour less tenable. Other things matter too. We outsourced a whole bunch of stuff. We fired a bunch of people then hired them again and then fired them once more. We've had more cosmetic surgery than Mickey Rourke so it's no surprise that we look as good as he does.

Everyone's a little confused. Is "delighting the customer" really what drives your behaviour? Are your staff really "your greatest asset"? Do you really seek "integrity in all your actions"? The NewSpeak of our organisations is bastard, ugly pidgin of the nerves that is incapable of either poetic inspiration or the direction of a combat command.

If we write our words collectively, in public (and whether it's text or images or video or audio is only of minor importance) then may be we can rebuild our language and the relationships that it supports. But we cannot wait for these walls to fall of their own accord.

They must be pushed.

no luck

I am torn by the work of Richard St John & his eight secrets to success.

I cannot disagree that passion, work, focus, push, ideas, improvement, service & persistence are good things to do. I would strongly advise people to do these things.

At the same time, Richard calls himself a "success analyst". And yet I think there's a gaping hole in his analysis. And this highlights a critical difference between Richard & myself. Richard seems to believe that the world is fair. I do not. And this has implications.

From my understanding based on his website (& please correct me if I am wrong), Richard has interviewed a lot of successful people and, based on his analysis of those interviews, has identified the 8 secrets to success*. If you do these things then you will be successful. Richard does not believe in luck: our success is NOT determined by this thing we have no control over called luck. Our success is the result of doing things that we do have control over – the Eight Success Principles.

That's because his chosen method blinds him to the role that luck plays in the lives of successful people for two reasons:

• There is this thing called the self-serving bias. If you ask people why they have been successful then they tend to attribute it to their own abilities. They tend to attribute their failures to their environment. Successful people may be different in this regard but if so, I would like to see the evidence. Asking people why stuff happened to them is not always a reliable way of establishing facts.
  
• The sample of people that Richard chosen are all successful. He has not spoken to people who did all of his 8 thing but were ultimately unsuccessful. So I'm guessing this bunch of people don't exist. Right?
  

I asked Richard about this latter point and he was kind enough to respond in this blog post. Please read the whole thing but I'm going to pull out a quote for you: So, there was a high correlation between not doing the 8 Traits and not achieving success.

Richard is right to use the word "correlation". He picked a group that are defined as failures - and quite an extreme group. There is an issue with this. Let me demonstrate this by adding a 9th secret of success: "owning a Bentley". There was probably a higher level of Bentley ownership aong millionaires than there is among street beggars. Does this mean that their lack of Bentley ownership is a cause of their non-millionaireness?

To put this another way, there is also a strong correlation between poverty & mental illness - but the cause & effect relationship may go in both directions. Being mentally ill decreases your ability to find an income. Being very poor causes you lots of stress that may increase your chances of developing mental illness. But all those unsuccessful people that Richard had talked to must have lost (or never had) passion and focus before they ended up in their situation. Right?

If Richard's method seems familiar that's because it is very similar to one used by Jim Collins in Good to Great. Good to Great looked at companies rather than people but has come in for a lot of stick from Bob Sutton & Phil Rosenzweig for using the "asking awesome people why they are so awesome" method. This recent HBR article noted that: we evaluated 287 allegedly high-performing companies in 13 major success studies. We found that only about one in four of those firms was likely to be remarkable; the rest were indistinguishable from mediocre firms catching lucky breaks. But I thought that luck played no role in success? How can this be?

In his blog post responding to me, Richard goes on to say: So, if successful people follow the 8 Traits, what differentiates the ones who achieve super success from those who achieve moderate success? Again, it’s a question of degree. The Gates and Oprahs of the world not only do the 8 Traits, they do them to a greater degree than other people. They love what they do more than most people. They work more hours (even after he was a multimillionaire, Bill Gates worked most nights until 10pm and only took 2 weeks off in 7 years).

Bill Gates is approximately 100,000 times richer than me. That means that he must work 100,000 times harder than me. Or else he loves his work 100,000 times more than me. Or could it be that environment and/or luck play a role here? But that can't be right because life is fair and luck plays no part.

Actually there is one group in the world for whom life is fair. And that's people like me & Richard - white males in the developed world. Life is more than fair for us. It is wonderful. It rocks being a white male living in a developed country (esp. if you have an education, money, status & power) - and don't let any self-hating liberal hippy tell you otherwise. And if the rest of you aren't as successful as us then you have only yourselves to blame. Be as passionate as us. Work as hard as us. Stop being losers.

So what will I tell my children?

I will tell my children that they must work hard & be passionate about they do & all the other things that Richard talks about. But I will also tell them that life is not fair and they are very lucky to be living in a country with access to education & health services (assuming we still do). I will then refer back to the previous point that life is not fair and state that they are also very lucky to be born into this wonderful country in a position of relative status & power.

And I will finish by reminding them that life is not fair and this all could be taken away from them in a moment.

*But wait? Are these really "secrets"? I don't really feel that "hard work is important" is something that anyone has kept from me. Every authority figure in my life has told me this.

bring the noise

"My name is Legion, for we are many"

Much of the work in data communications has been about getting the clearest data possible, clearest signal possible - and while this may be useful when I'm trying to have a convo on Skype, noise reduction isn't necessarily a good thing when applied to online identity.

Triggers: Marcus Brown writes a little here, Chris Locke writes a little there and Adam Ferrier writes somewhere else.

The strand that links these blog posts for me their recognition that our identities are partially cocreated with others, they lie in relationships (but not wholly). And not all exchanges are good. And not all relationships are wanted.

In giving out our data, in presenting ourselves in different environments we must guard against being too transparent or else we end up like Mr Cellophane.

One option is passive acceptance.

Another solution is to give away as little as possible. Get off the grid. Put up the gates. Information survivalism.

The third is to overwhelm & confuse. Multiple identities. Multiple data. How many social security cards can you collect? How many people do you want to be? How much noise can be introduced into the system*? One person as many? Many as one?

How do we introduce disorder into the world for own collective advantage?

*Michel Serres is obsessed with noise, with turbulence. I have to go back to my copies of his books.

Story week is coming

Anecdote, Sparknow and Innotecture have been working together for a little while now to find out a bit more about what stories have influence and impact. We've found quite a difference in views, even among ourselves. So we're inviting our combined readership and their networks (and their networks) to participate in Story Week (starting May 4th) Over 5 days we're going to show you 5 stories from different people in different formats, intended for very different audiences and settings. You're going to tell us how you respond to them. We'll tell you what you collectively told us. We'll all learn something in the process. Oh, and it will be fun, too.

Watch this space...

moral panics: young people & the internet

Journalists love an outrage like ordinary people love hot cross buns. A couple of items have cropped up in the Australian media recently around cyberbullying & the impact of the internet on young people that I think require a little scrutiny.

Exhibit 1: Miranda Devine wrote an article last week entitled MySpace cadets sliding into addiction. Ms Devine quotes Susan Greenfield. Baroness Greenfield is probably a very good researcher in her field of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. However she also has a side vocation as a writer of speculative fiction. Unfortunately, many journalists cannot tell the difference between scientific research and speculation. Based on this interview, the ABC's Kerry O'Brien seems to be one such journalist. I would like to see the Baroness actually support her claims with, y'know, some science. Dr Ben Goldacre puts it very well in this article.

To her credit, Ms Devine does quote some research. Well kinda. She mentions the work of Dr Mubarak Ali. Currently researching the problem, Ali says internet addiction is so serious that by 2012 it will likely be classified as a mental disorder in Australia. Being a bit of nerd, I dropped Dr Ali an email asking if I could receive a copy of his published research. He was kind enough to respond and tell me that he hadn't published anything yet. He pointed me to the Teenspeak website where he is running a survey on this topic. I asked him how many people had responded to his survey (i.e. his sample size) and, as the survey appears voluntary, how he'd be controlling for self-selection biases. He hasn't got back to me yet but it is Easter so I am looking forward to his response after the holidays.

I must confess that I have a suspicion of the term "internet addiction". I haven't seen articles about TV addiction or radio addiction or SMS addiction or telephone addiction. As this ACMA report states (p.2): Despite these changes, other aspects of young people’s discretionary time are notably stable. Electronic media and communication activities overall take up around half of children and young people’s aggregate discretionary time, and this proportion hasn’t changed since 1995. So far from becoming slaves to technology, young people's use of tech has remained fairly stable - it's just the tech they are using that has changed.

Near the end of the article, Ms Devine makes this comment: Her fears may be reflected in reports this week from two fatal traffic accidents in Yagoona and Burwood, where onlookers were said to have watched, laughed, chatted and taken photographs, ignoring the pleas for help from one man as he died, treating the scene as if it were entertainment. When I was a police reporter almost 20 years ago, such a scenario would have been unthinkable.

The problem I have with this statement is simple. If the internet makes us bad people then we would expect to have seen rates of violent crime rise over the last decade as internet use became more widespread. However the opposite is true: rates of violent crime have trended down over the last 10 years as web usage has trended up. N.B. I am not claiming that the internet makes us better people - simply that there are probably other factors that are more important than the internet.

Let me be clear: I am sure that some young people do not have a healthy pattern of internet usage. We need to have a public debate about the impact of these new technologies on young people and the role their parents could be playing. However I would prefer to base this debate on facts and evidence rather than innuendo.

Which brings me to Exhibit 2: ABC's Four Corners programme last Monday. The topic was cyberbullying. The first half of the show seemed sensible enough - discussing first ordinary bullying and then bullying with an online component. Then it all got a bit weird. The main story was an awful one of young man who took his own life. Prior to this he had been harassed by a former friend using a number of different communication media.

You have to sympathize with someone who has had to bury their child. However I have an issue with the ABC supporting statements like: "There's a new word that I've created for this it's a new drug, and the new drug is cyberspace. Cyberspace to us has taken our child."

Suicide by young males is a horrible problem but it is not a simple one. As the Wesley Mission state: Suicide is a complex issue which, while tragic, confronts families, friends and wider communities. It results most often from an accumulation of risk factors, and it intersects with problems and concerns across society: mental health, drugs and alcohol, family issues, employment, cultural identity, law enforcement and criminal justice, education and poverty.

Rather than discuss the complex issues around teen suicide and the particular issues around men (& our chronic inability to seek help when trouble strikes), as far as the ABC was concerned it was all about the interweb as a sinister tool for bullying that is so powerful it makes people kill themselves. This undermined the valuable first half of the programme.

Again, let me be clear: Bullying is an issue. It probably always will be. There is so much good work that could be done in discussing this with parents - but can we have a grown up talk please?

Are we capable of that or would we prefer to work ourselves up into a moral panic instead?

ways i have been lucky

1. I grew up in family of tight-wads.

I had quite a comfortable upbringing. I am demonstrably middle-class. However in one respect I find myself a little unusual. My family is debt-phobic. My parents grew up with rationing in post-WWII Britain. They nursed a young family through the high-interest rate 1970s. For them, debt was not a handy way of accessing funds but something not that far from alcoholism or drug addiction. This meant that we spent our holidays visiting glamorous Birmingham (where my grandparents lived). However inheritance of their loathing of debt has made my life considerably easier in recent years.

2. I joined a marginal profession just as it faced annihilation.

I trained as a librarian back in the mid-1990s. I don't really remember why. This meant that (quite by accident) I found myself smack in front of the information Tsunami that was the internet. And that was a good thing. It sent me down a pathway that involved technology, human behaviour, all kinds of cool things. Above all, I learned that professionally you either adapt or leave. Simple really.

3. I am mentally ill.

I suspect that I suffer from cyclothymia - a mild form of bipolar disorder (manic depression). The "down" part of the cycle is pretty horrible (struggling to get out of bed, wanting to die), the "up" part is exhilarating & a little scary (boundless energy & confidence, insomnia, poor impulse control) but there are plenty of bits in the middle. There is a genetic link between bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and a close family member was diagnosed with the latter condition. The depression drives me to read compulsively as a form of medication. The hypomania drives me to get things done (often based on what I have read). My condition (and there is no reliable test for it, just conformance to symptoms) has probably aided my professional life - just as my relative's condition has probably condemned them to a life of marginalisation.

There are many other ways in which I have been lucky but these are 3 that have been pinging round my mind recently.

How have you been lucky?

give 'em tha money already

I have been asked to blog in exchange for money before - but only by people who make Babcock & Brown look like a sure fire bet. Jasmin has put out a request to which three brave souls have replied. I was tempted to see how badly I could insult Incentive House (and their mothers) in the course of this post and still get the cash for the deserving but it's been a long day and until I get the Abusive Post Automator, it's too much like hard work.

I know nothing about being poor in the Philippines. Zip. And here's the thing - neither do most of you. So writing about it is tricky. I could just say "look at the photo of the cute kid on the rubbish tip" and let the image do its work.


But by reading this post, you get to be some kind of hard-core, Silion Valley venture capitalist - minus the freaky cosmetic surgery & fake tan. You get to fund someone else's business. Their ambitions and their dreams. I can't promise you an ROI within the next fiscal. I can't even promise you the nasty free T-shirts that most start-ups give away at exhibitions ("it's printed on cotton that we harvested from the dev team's belly buttons after a 3 day coding sesh").

Screw it, the way things are going, these ladies will probably be lending us money in a few years. You'll want them to like you.

There we go, people, it's all about the naked self-interest. Just Do It.

bring me the head of raymond kurzweil

Raymond Kurzweil is an intriguing science-fiction writer but a lousy neuroscientist. He seems to think that being human is all about having a brain. And that having a brain is all about having computing power.

Ray should remember that it's not size but what you do with it that counts. As Antonio Damasio has spent a lot of time researching, we think with our bodies as well as our heads. If we want to give our machines consciousness then we have to give them bodies (or rather systems that interact their environments and provide feedback from interventions in that environment that can guide future action).

I do not believe in a soul or some vital essence so I do not have any philosophical objections to machines with consciousness. However neither do I believe in some "Singularity" (it seems rather to close to Milllenial religious ideas like The Rapture*).

There's an important point here for those of us who spend a lot of our time working on the digital/virtual/interweb. We neglect the bodies of people at our peril.

Actually Ray Kurzweil can keep his head but let's see how well he thinks without his body.

*I quite like this The Rapture - I do hope that God offers them an opportunity to do the soundtrack.

Hat tip: George Siemens

innospivs

Barry Saunders has weighing on the comments section of the previous post with some good ideas and some hot! links!

He's also made me articulate another idea that's been running round my head. You may remember this post from a month ago where I state: Innovation = Invention + Entrepreneurship. Let me spell this out in more detail.

The issue I have with most Idea Management Systems is that they only work for really obvious ideas (often ones that meet explicit needs). The wacky ideas don't get past the first stage gate. The ideation bit (where people are encouraged to come up with & discuss ideas) is fine as far as it goes. But then you get some Stalinist committee of judges and a strict project management framework. Which may be necessary if you are spending big bucks. But more money isn't always better.

Market-based approaches are slightly better but for a proper Innovation Support System you need to recreate an entrepreneurship network inside (& even outside) your organisation:

• You need ways of encouraging your employees to notice things - esp. failures & frustrations.
  
• You need ways of linking people with needs to people who have ideas.
  
• You need ways of linking people who have ideas to people who can sell ideas to others.
  
• You need multiple sources of venture capital inside your organisation.
• You need to acknowledge & reward creative theft as much (or more) than original idea creation.
• You need to actively seek out and embrace innovations that could destroy your business model - because ultimately they will, but the edge is in changing faster than your competitors.
• You need to give simple prototypes of ideas to as diverse a range of people inside your organisation and see what the hell they do with them - because it won't be what you expect.
• You probably need to engage customers, suppliers, business partners & alumni in this process.
  

You need the irate, the dreamers, the spivs & the thieves.