I've been pontificating. I've been procrastinating. I've been putting things off. There are plenty of reasons why. There are always reasons why. Some of them are good, some of them are a bit iffy. It's time to focus. The Play book has gone into a hiatus; I did some work on it, and then in the … Continue reading 0. Book reset: It’s time to focus
I'm currently reading Christian Madsbjerg's excellent and highly recommended Sensemaking. At the core of the book is the proposition that whilst the modern world has become obsessed with what Madsbjerg terms thin data (mostly - numbers), to make sense of the work around us we also need to take account of thick data - emotions, relationships, context - … Continue reading Through thick and thin
This week I have learned: I forgot to do a weeknote last week. That's the first time that's happened. Terrible behaviour, won't happen again. Being asked to give a talk about a subject is a really great way to really get one's head around that subject. Another week, another Watford head coach. I keep getting … Continue reading Weeknote 337: Ley Hill
There are some amazing developments emerging into the mainstream as a result of technologies badged variously as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Natural Language Processing and other whizzy-sounding titles. But alongside any new wave of technology comes a tsunami of marketing hype, overblown expectations, silver bullets and rainbow-pooping unicorns. Non-technologists and technologists alike need to … Continue reading 6 questions to consider when in the path of the oncoming robot overlords.
Much of yesterday was spent at an ERP vendor event listening to the usual combination of analyst ("cloud is good, data is great"), vendor ("you should buy or product") and vendor client ("you should buy their product because we did") speakers. One big theme is that AI and machine intelligence will enable companies to achieve … Continue reading How big is your data lake?
I'm a qualitative kinda guy. My worldview is one shaped more by stories than numbers. At my core I like to think that most people, really, are like me. But I also know that I am probably wrong. I viscerally react against the quantitative. That's almost a definition of the qualitative mindset, I guess. Gut … Continue reading Organisational subjectives
This week I have learned: just once in a while a group of near strangers will have a moment of connection if 90% of our reality is actually a chimera, does Virtual Reality need to be so complicated? and why aren't AI's trying to simulate cognitive biases? Bank Holiday's seem to come up all of … Continue reading Weeknote 336: All the way to Wycombe (these days)
I, like many others, are fascinated by the concept of cognitive biases. It you want a catalogue of these shortcuts that the brain uses to make sense (often incorrectly) of the world around us, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly is highly recommended - although be warned that by the end of reading it you'll … Continue reading Anti-confirmation bias
More discussions yesterday about the somewhat antediluvian world of records management. Something struck me... In times of yore when documents were printed on the back end of a goat, they were expensive. The only things that were created had significant filtering before creation because of the cost of vellum and scribes and that lovely gold … Continue reading Infinity & beyond
I've written in the past about the stack of old, bound editions of the magazine Punch that appear to be the closest my branch of the Ballantines have as a legacy to pass from generation to generation (if only I'd been part of the distilling branch of the family). Whilst interesting, the archive is strangely … Continue reading Disposing the future
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