I saw a wonderful documentary last night about the conjuror and professional sceptic James Randi. After the first part of a career spent emulating and improving upon the work of Harry Houdini, Randi since the 70s has put much of his efforts into debunking fraudster faith healers and spiritualists (including waging a war on spoonbender … Continue reading Blind Faith
Category: Technology
I'm just back from a family trip to the remarkable Italian city of Venice. Former city state and global power, the web of islands and canals is now a powerful magnet for tourism. It's nearly fifteen years since I last visited. In many ways the city remains unchanged. The water taxis are still eye-wateringly expensive. … Continue reading Selfie Stick
My mobile phone is increasingly the most powerful data aggregation service in my life. It knows everything from my whereabouts to my where I should be abouts; it processes information about the world around me in audio and video; it pulls together my communications and my social networks; it gives me access to my business, my … Continue reading Hobson’s Choice
"So what's the difference between IT and Digital?" That's a heck of a googly to receive at the end of a 90 minutes workshop. (For American readers, a googly in cricket is what a curveball is in baseball, but we Brits don't play baseball. We play rounders. When we are seven.) Anyway, an interesting question, … Continue reading IT vs Digital
The world of homeopathy is an interesting thing. Pseudoscience cobbled together to produce medical interventions that are no more effective than a placebo, but have some sort of efficacy as a result of that effect. If you want to create a placebo effect, then you need to tell people a story to get them to … Continue reading Homeopathic IT
On Friday I was at a presentation given by one of the big IT vendors on the subject of Big Data and analytics. During the session the story was told of how US retailer Target had got so good with predictive analytics that they had infuriated the father of a teenage girl by sending her … Continue reading The legends of Big Data
I learned this week of the term Madtech. Marketing and advertising technology. It's good to see that cobbler's child syndrome is alive and well in the world; they might as well call it Sales, Hustling, Interrupting and Tracking Tech. Thing is, for all the talk about how smart marketing is becoming, driven by big data … Continue reading Retargeted
Last week I wrote about the pioneering work of the Tavistock Institute and the thinking that they provided into dealing with a world of cloud-like problems. That terminology was taken from philosopher Karl Popper's beautiful analogy of a world in which some problems are clock-like (complex, complicated, but ultimately knowable) but many of the real … Continue reading Dealing with Clouds
The dust isn't yet settled on the UK's General Election, but one element that is already getting coverage is the gap between opinion polling before the ballot, the exit poll, and what appears to be the final outcome. After weeks of pollsters predicting a result "too close to call", the exit poll published when the … Continue reading Sampling
Welcome to the future of business productivity. Welcome to meetingly.io. With our CloudBigDataScienceCloud patented heuristic algorithms, meetingly.io's HRV (Human Resource Virtualisation) engine enables your staff to quadruple their productivity through meeting automation. With a simple button click integrated into Microsoft Outlook, Google Apps and all major App Platforms, meetings become meetingly.io automeetings. Schedule, click, forget. … Continue reading meetingly.io
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