Stephen Fry: what I wish I´d known when I was 18

Porra, esse maluco é foda!

more about “Stephen Fry: what I wish I´d known wh…“, posted with vodpod

Deming e o conhecimento

In effect, I found it very interesting, recently, and I think various folks here realize that in the US, there may be a waning interest in knowledge management, just about the same time that when you go to Japan, you find that there is a very interesting movement starting up in Japan. That is that a couple of decades ago, Japan decided to really focus on, and paid very close attention to, Edward Deming and the total quality management movement. And that is what they used to rebuild their entire country. And what is happening today is a shift from a focus on quality to a focus on knowledge. And can you really think through knowledge management, as a way to rebuild the country, not just the enterprise? And so I think you’re going to see increasing emphasis coming out of the East on these types of topics.

Aspas tiradas de uma apresentação de John Seely Brown, q durante anos foi cientista chefe da Xerox. É sobre conhecimento e storytelling.

“A state of permanent denial”

For now, advertising looks like the patient who developed an asymptomatic form of cancer without realizing how sick he is. Such behavior usually results from excessive confidence in one’s body’s past performance, mixed with a state of permanent denial and a deep sense of superiority, all aided by a complacent environment.

The digital graveyard is filled with the carcasses of utterly confident people who all shared this sense of invincibility. The music industry and, to some extent, the news business built large mausoleums for themselves. Today, the advertising industry is working on its own funeral monument.

Belo texto de Frederic Filloux no Washington Post. Provcação muito bem escrita.

Sobre recomendações, long tail e serendipidade

A Time tá com uma matéria foda sobre sistemas de recomendações baseados em dados, como os da Netflix. Uma parte que fala sobre seu efeito na cauda longa me chamou a atenção:

The general effect of recommendation engines on shopping behavior is a hot topic among econometricians, if that’s not an oxymoron, but the consensus is this: they introduce us to new things, which is good, but those new things tend to be a lot like the old things, and they tend to be drawn from the shallow pool of things other people have already liked. As a result, they create a blockbuster culture in which the same few runaway hits get recommended over and over again. It’s the backlash against the “long tail,” the idea that shopping online is all about near infinite selection and cultural diversity. It has a bad habit of eating its own tail and leaving you back where you started.

Obviamente que isso não se resume às compras:

How far will it go? Will we eventually surf a Web that displays only blogs that conform to our political leanings? A social network in which we see only people of our race and religion? Our horizons, cultural and social, would narrow to a cozy, contented, claustrophobic little dot of total personalization.

O mundo é dos doidões

Esta é uma frase que eu costumo usar por aqui com certa frequência, e esta matéria da BBC, chamada “Creative minds mimic schizophrenia“, não me deixa mentir.

Creativity is akin to insanity, say scientists who have been studying how the mind works.

Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia. Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.

O assunto por si só é interessantíssimo, mas essa última frase torna a matéria ainda mais deliciosa. Ora, nos dias de hoje, o que mais precisamos para sobreviver à enxurrada informacional são filtros. Além dos filtros dentro da nossa caixola, estamos somando filtros artificias. De que forma isso pode impactar a criatividade? Devaneio concluído, voltemos à matéria da BBC:

Some of the world’s leading artists, writers and theorists have also had mental illnesses – the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and American mathematician John Nash (portrayed by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind) to name just two.

Creativity is known to be associated with an increased risk of depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Similarly, people who have mental illness in their family have a higher chance of being creative.

Fica a dica: se vc tem algum parente pancada da cabeça, coloque no currículo.

Essa frase aí embaixo é foda!

“Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes.

“Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It’s like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way.

“Creativity is certainly about not being constrained by rules or accepting the restrictions that society places on us. Of course the more people break the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as ‘mentally ill’.”

Extinction Timeline 1950/2050

For those who want a quick summary of a few of the things that we anticipate will become extinct in coming years:

2009: Mending things 2014: Getting lost 2016: Retirement 2019: Libraries 2020: Copyright 2022: Blogging, Speleeng, The Maldives 2030: Keys 2033: Coins 2036: Petrol engined vehicles 2037: Glaciers 2038: Peace & Quiet 2049: Physical newspapers, Google Beyond 2050: Uglyness, Nation States, Death

Via

Sobre focus group

O Dan Ariely é tão foda que eu copio o post todo.

When businesses want to find answers to questions in marketing, whom do they ask? Do they set up experiments to test their ideas, pitting the approach they think is most effective against alternatives? Do they survey consumers on a large scale? Do they go to experts who have questioned and requestioned their theories? Surprisingly, the answer is no. Most often, businesses rely on small “focus groups” to answer big questions. They rely on the intuition of about 10-12 lay people with no relevant training who ultimately have no idea what they’re talking about.

I wonder how can this be a useful strategy? Why ask those who are lacking any kind of proficiency when, by definition, experts are more knowledgeable on the topic and have experience that could actually be beneficial? And even if experts are more narrowly focused, and tunneled vision, how can this be better than carrying out their own research?

Research in psychology and behavioral economics has shown time after time that people have bad intuitions. We are very good at explaining our behavior (sometimes shocking and irrational), and to do so we create neatly packaged stories – stories that may be amusing or provocative, but often have little to do with the real causes of our behaviors. Our actions are often guided by the inner primitive parts of our brain – parts that we can’t consciously access — and because of that we don’t always know why we behave in the ways we do; still, we can compensate for this lack of information by writing our own versions. Our highly sophisticated prefrontal cortex (only recently developed, by evolutionary standards) takes the reigns and paints a perfect picture to explain what we don’t know. Why did you buy that brand of fabric softener? Of course, because you love the way it makes your clothes smell like a springtime breeze when you pull them out of the warm dryer.

So, why do businesses go to our imagination when we know it’s just a cover for what’s really going on? Indeed, why do businesses go to the imaginations of a group of people to find real answers? I suspect that the story here is linked to another one of our irrationalities: As human beings, we have an insatiable need for a story. We love a vivid picture, a penetrating example, an anecdote that will stay in our memories. Nothing beats the feeling of knowledge we get from a personal story because stories make us feel connected – they help us relate. Just one example of customer satisfaction has a stronger emotional impact than a statistic telling us that 87% of customers prefer product A over product B. A single example feels real, where numbers are cold and sterile. Although statistics about how a large group of people actually behave can tell us so much more than the intuitions of a focus group, the allure of a story is irresistible. Our inherent bias to prefer the story compels us to believe in the worth of small numbers, even when we know we shouldn’t.

This “focus group bias” is not just a waste of money it is also most likely a waste of resources when products are designed according to the “information” gathered from these focus groups. We need to find a way to base our judgments and decisions on real facts and data even if it seems lifeless on its own. Maybe we should try and supplement the numbers with a story to quench our thirst for an anecdote, but what we can’t do is forget about the facts in favor of fairy tales. In the end, the truth lies in empirical research.

Mobile, por Jonathan McDonald

Esse é um maluco que eu descobri dia desses e gostei muito do que eu li. Essa apresentação é curta e interessante:

View this document on Scribd

Eloquência é isso aí

• No mundo inteiro, tem mais gente com celular do que com escova de dente.
• Tem mais gente com celular do que acesso à água.

Tirei essas informações de um texto enorme e foda sobre celular escrito por Tomi Ahonen. Leitura obrigatória para quem quer tentar entender o mercado mobile.

Notas sobre storytelling

Essas anotações foram feitas por Monica Tailor, durante a “The Power of Story Lecture“, de Robert McKee.