“A study at Ball State University’s Center for Business and Economic Research last year found that trade accounted for just 13 percent of America’s lost factory jobs. The vast majority of the lost jobs — 88 percent — were taken by robots and other homegrown factors that reduce factories’ need for human labor.” – AP Canada’s labour force is around 19.6 million people, of which 18.2 million people are employed. Together, they worked something like 2.4 billion hours that month. In December 2016, something like 1.7 million Canadians worked about 240 million hours in manufacturing. Roughly. Because of seasonal adjustments and different data at different times. And error. In terms of our working lives in Canada, collectively, manufacturing is about 10% of[…]
Category: Technology
A great mind in public policy told me, just this last September, that people are really bad at judging the rate of technological change and when it’ll affect them. It’s like standing on a railway. You can see the train out there. Some people assume that the train is going to hit them very soon. They get off the tracks. Then, when the train is getting very close, others misjudge the speed and assume that it’s still a far way. And then they get hit. It’s a great analogy because it combines prediction with decision. The rate of technological change is actually quite difficult to predict. If it was easy there’d be a lot more successful startups. One Heuristic Start[…]
Why does it seem like all the unimportant, easy stuff gets done first? Look up The Urgency Bias. Employing simplified games and real-life consequential choices, we provide evidence for “urgency bias”, showing that people prefer working on urgent (vs. important) tasks that have shorter (vs. longer) completion window however involving smaller (vs. bigger) outcomes, even when task difficulty, goal gradient, outcome scarcity and task interdependence are held constant.- Zhu, Yeng, Hsee (2014) Even when task difficulty, goal gradient, outcome scarcity AND task interdependence is held constant, urgency wins. Even when it would be more beneficial to do something important instead of something urgent, even when you’re painfully made aware of those incentives, you still gravitate towards doing the urgent. There’s[…]
In general, information retrieval from analytics systems becomes harder with the degree of customization (It gets harder to find things over time). That customization is frequently an expression of the values of a culture over time. The inertia of the technical debt caused by early customization is greater than the inertia of a data driven culture. There are no silver bullets. The rest of this post unpacks that paragraph. Information retrieval from analytics systems becomes harder with the degree of customization Assume a vanilla implementation of Open Web Analytics. Or Google Analytics. Or Adobe Analytics. It’ll tell you a lot about a web system on its own. The optimization objective that is at the core of the business will typically[…]
Into the trough of disillusionment with the hyped technologies! The canary in the coal mine for me, with respect to BitCoin, is this post. Look, nobody has enjoyed more popcorn around BitCoin than I have. From Coinye to Dogecoin, crypto-currencies have delivered the lulz. Do I believe there’s a slope of enlightenment for crypto-currency? Absolutely. Do I believe that’s imminent? Nope. Banks are apex ruminants. The lessons from BitCoin have to be fully digested before something really good comes out of it. Machine learning. Huge potential and the best is yet to come. The first wave around machine learning gave us Netflix and Amazon. And then the bloom came off the rose a bit. And now there’s deep learning and we’re[…]
Some reports have adblocking penetration at anywhere between 10% and 40%. Some publishers are blocking content from the adblockers. Others are making the ads unskippable with ad block. Broken systems are interesting, aren’t they? The system of advertising is broken. Here’s the best that I can explain it from as many perspectives as I can rally. Advertising in the early days, radio, was incredibly lucrative. The development of a consumer economy in the roaring 20’s and consumerism in general was huge. A marketer could spend $1 on advertising and got $4 back. Paid media was crazy effective. The same went for television. And then there was a sort of grand bargain, a big deal, struck between creatives, those that create[…]
A tier one MSI topic focuses on how should quantitative methods and qualitative methods be combined to understand the total consumer experience. It’s an excellent topic. The two worlds aren’t natural complements. They have radically different systems of activities, tools, and methods, which in turn affects their own experiences, and how they see the world. However, if the stance is unified, in the form of understanding the total consumer experience, the sum of the two approaches produces such more. That focus creates the cohesion. Facts, Experience, and Anecdata Have you ever been asked how many people need to be in a focus group before their statements become statistically significant? It’s a pretty neat question. What are they really asking when they ask[…]
How do you, and those around you, deal with failure? Because if the answer is anything but “well” or “every fail has a lesson”, then progressive, iterative, experimentation and AB testing really, really isn’t for you. Go away. Stop reading. It’s not everyone. The way to build an experimentation and testing bench is entirely by setting sail for fail. How to build your Experimentation and Testing Bench Your bench will be built: 95% with culture 5% with technology The technology is well thought out and several vendors are excellent in this space. The technology isn’t a problem. Sure, there are a few pretty shockingly bad systems out there. Every industry has a phony. Building a testing bench begins with policy.[…]
Here’s what you need to know about automated statistical analysis: 1. Automated statistical analysis is not a substitute for good judgement Statistical tests are tools. They help us understand why nature is the way that it is. Nature resists being known about. But, she is knowable. Statistical tests themselves are part of nature. The tests themselves were never meant to be substitutes for good judgement. That belief, that tests could replace people, has only ended up causing the accumulation of some pretty outrageous assumptions over the years. Just because there is a significant correlation between Magnum Ice Cream sales and Piracy in the Indian Ocean doesn’t mean that it’s causal. Statements of causality require judgement. Automated statistical analysis is not[…]
This is a lot of inside baseball. The motivation is to share information while acknowledging that it’s wildly anecdotal. It’s directed at data scientists thinking about business. The Facts Andrew and I founded Authintic in late 2012. We landed three great customers. We met between 1,600 and 1,900 well wishers, competitors and prospective customers. Five major market hypotheses were tested. Revenue was earned and value was generated. Authintic was acquired by 500px in early 2014. The Feels Thrilled. Very excited. And a tad skeptical about the lessons learned. People are terrible about extracting causal factors from an experience. I’m people. So I reckon that applies to me too. A sample size of 1 isn’t authoritative. It doesn’t constitute proof, or evidence[…]