Nearly 17 years ago I was a member of a team that implemented the BBC's first data warehousing project. It gathered information from a number of operational systems, and then using a combination of products provided reports about the profitability of various products that the commercial wing of the organisation produced and sold. Technically … Continue reading Big data, little questions, cognitive biases
Category: Themes
I'm currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb's Antifragile. It's not the easiest of reads (a prequel written after a sequel starts on a bad footing - just ask George Lucas) but a fascinating concept - that the opposite of "fragile" isn't "robust" or somesuch (which are just neutral concepts) but rather "antifragile" where things get stronger … Continue reading Digital fragility
Another year, another round up of the top-read posts on this (and also the stamplondon.co.uk) blogs. 20 Implosion September 2013 A review of Andy Law's great book about the Internet and what it's doing to us 19 What is a… Cinema? November 2012 Part of a short series that looked at ways in which many … Continue reading Top Posts for 2013 – 20 to 16
Compare and contrast... A new technological innovation is able to make judgements about people's emotional state, and target advertising to them as a result. An estate agency monitors Facebook accounts to target potential new customers in their area when statuses change from "Married" to "Single". A supermarket constructs long waiting lines at checkouts and then … Continue reading Influencing emotions
The BBC has released a new tranche of data about the use of its iPlayer services (full report here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/iplayer/iplayer-performance-oct13.pdf) and whilst the headlines (like this one http://thenextweb.com/uk/2013/12/02/bbc-iplayer-mobile-tablet-use-almost-caught-desktop/) will no doubt focus on the continuing narrative about the death of the PC, there is something far more interesting (not) happening from my perspective. Whilst the consumption … Continue reading The television will not be revolutionized…
My favourite French post-modernist sociologist is, without doubt, Jean Baudrillard. The knowledge that Baudrillard is the only French post-modernist sociologist that I know is immaterial. And yet also material. And statements like that give a little flavour of what you are getting into with post-modernist sociology. I did enjoy reading Baudrillard two decades ago … Continue reading Has everything gone hyperreal?
I love Twitter. I love it for a whole load of reasons. One of the reasons is because it gives you the chance to have conversations spurred by slightly out of context observations from people attending conferences. One of those came up this morning from the Computing IT Leader's Forum - a special event on … Continue reading The end of email? I wish…
At the core of Nicholas Lovell's book The Curve is a central assumption: if the costs of reproducing and distributing a product drop to as near as dammit zero, then the price of those products will inevitably drop to zero. If you have a business that's model is based on a markup percentage on … Continue reading Bookshelf: The Curve
I've been itching to buy a new phone for some months now. My current phone - a Galaxy SII - has been "showing its age", by which I mean it is three versions behind the current up-to-date version of the Android system, and there are lots of new phones on the market now. I've had … Continue reading What Linux could have been
It was an early start this morning and as a result I dressed more or less in the dark to try avoid waking my wife. Unfortunately two toddlers jumping on the bed put pay to that. Dressing in the dark, however, isn't quite as simple as it used to be. Ten years ago most clothing … Continue reading What underpants can teach us about UX design
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