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The weight of data
All that data that we’re collecting and using, what does it all mean? It requires context and a human element. An excellent TEDx talk by Jer Thorp.
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Quantifying baseball caps in Justin Bieber videos
Craig Robertson of Flip Flop Fly Ball, noticed something interesting in Justin Bieber music videos–the Biebs wore different baseball caps in different videos. Craig meticulously watched the videos, took notes and made an information visualization of his findings of baseball caps in Justin Bieber videos. Screenshots included!
Interesting: 20% of MLB teams (that’s 6 teams) are featured in the videos. Craig notes he didn’t include shorter, promotional trailer videos in his sample. The numbers would increase quite a bit if he had.
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Kaggle and data prediction competitions
Competitions, where all things being equal, brings out the best results. Nine players on a baseball diamond work through nine innings against nine other players. Open bidding for contracts in response to a proposal to meet a business problem puts companies against each other for the best solution.
Kaggle is a competition market where players (yes, they call participants players) build the best predictive data model for a problem. In one case, individuals created a model to predict auto collisions nearly 3.5 times better than Allstate’s own models. An ongoing competition is seeking to predict health care admittances. That’s powerful stuff.
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It takes work to become awesome at kicking ass
Over the past week, the theme of posts in my RSS feeds revolved around learning, careers and personal growth. Some ranged from calls to action–we need to rethink our entire education system for todays world. Others spoke of self reliance, be aware and do your best to kick butt. A few were introspective, realizations of actions.
Seth Godin released an expansive manifesto, called Stop Stealing Dreams. Every group imaginable related to schooling, learning, employing, policy making receives commentary. Â Schools are holdovers from the industrial age. Parents and teachers are complicit in encouraging obedience instead of passion and imagination. Employers seek those who say yes. Policy makers make uninformed decisions that ignore real needs. Godin includes statistics when needed, references academic research and includes colorful anecdotes. One such anecdote recalls an email from a blog reader critiquing the use of bespoke, instead of custom.
My blog is hardly filled with words most educated citizens would have trouble understanding. And yet a cable TV–inoculated audience wants everything dumbed down to the Kardashian level. This relentless push for less (less intelli- gence, less culture, less effort) is one of the boogiemen facing anyone who would mess with the rote rigor of mass schooling.
It seems to recall[amazon_link id=”B000K7VHOG” target=”_blank” ]Idoiocracy[/amazon_link], where the future is a dystopian state of passive entertainment for the lowest common denominator.
Andrew Olsen, takes a less passive route, believing the best skill you can learn, and possibly the only skill you need is the ability to learn. From this principle, he lists a 100 ways to be successful without going to college.
In this world, the only skill you really need is the ability to learn new things. If you know how to read (really read) and absorb new information, your knowledge will be far deeper than the average college graduate who listened to lectures and filled in bubbles on tests.
I agree with his principle of being able to learn is the best skill to have. It goes along with being able to figure things out–take the most basic thing you know about what you’re working on and build from there. Granted, this can’t be applied to every aspect of your life (how many people can repair an engine?), but for most knowledge worker tasks, it can.
Where I disagree with him is the value of college. Â College is a safe environment to learn about life and how to manage it. How do you balance work (classes) and life (social gatherings) and coping with the stress it brings. That should be emphasized more than the degree one works towards. As Therese Schwenkler says, “your college degree will not get you the job you deserve“.
Her post led me to Charlie Hoehn’s Recession Proof Graduate. It provides interesting strategies to always be employable, the primary way, he suggests, is to work for free. Â It’s a gamble and a method that should not be the norm. It’s sad that for someone to gain experience, employers can essentially receive free labor. Perhaps, one should follow Jessica Hische’s Should I Work for Free flowchart.
Or, instead of a flowchart, how about Jesse Thorn’s Make Your Thing: 12 Point Program for Absolutely, Positively 1000% No-Fail Guaranteed Success. It references his experiences and those mostly in the creative fields. The best takeaway:
I hear from so many people who have a great idea. The difference between the successful ones and the unsuccessful ones is that the successful ones do it, then do it again and again.
As we become successful, we’ll encounter others with ideas that are different than our own. Jason Freid suggests giving things 5 minutes.
His response changed my life. It was a simple thing. He said “Man, give it five minutes.†I asked him what he meant by that? He said, it’s fine to disagree, it’s fine to push back, it’s great to have strong opinions and beliefs, but give my ideas some time to set in before you’re sure you want to argue against them. “Five minutes†represented “thinkâ€, not react. He was totally right. I came into the discussion looking to prove something, not learn something.
Similarly, Dustin Curtis thinks of 3 questions to asks the individual.
All this seems like a lot to take in. It is. Like driving a car, everything’s new and we’re hyperaware or don’t recognize patterns and habits. Over time, the things we learn, want to learn and apply to our daily lives, become innate habits we don’t even think about. This is true for bad habits, and with awareness, we can change them.
Like good habits, tt takes work to become awesome at kicking ass.
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Stasis promotes mediocrity
When things remain the same, in a state of stasis, there’s no pull in any direction for worse or better. Yes. There are some things where you want the stability of stasis–your house’s foundation. But in a job, how many roles thrive on stasis, things inactive? Yes, harmony is good, but if inactive for too long, does a person really grow? Over time, they’ll seek out actions to remain in harmony, or stable, not really growing or changing or stretching themselves to be better. And that’s what mediocrity is–just ok.
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Looking for treetops or scouring for ground paths
When lost in the woods, do you look for the sky amongst the treetops or do you scour the ground for worn paths?
You’ll need both, to get a sense of direction and to get your footing as your orient yourself.
Communicating’s the same way. You’ll need some higher level goals, supported by details to get to the point.
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A concert on the diamond
There’s something to the first baseball game attended for the season. A concert on a diamond field, underneath bright lights. Instrumental, a bat, ball and glove provide the rhythm to the crowds matching cadence. Tension rises with each fly ball. Drama arises as base runners stand closer to home. Each swing of the bat brings surprises. Each at bat, a song. Each inning, a run in the setlist. The end of the game is rarely set. -
Bell Labs and innovation
Bell Labs brought us into the future, making science fiction science fact. This is all due to forcing people to interact.
ONE element of his approach was architectural. He personally helped design a building in Murray Hill, N.J., opened in 1941, where everyone would interact with one another. Some of the hallways in the building were designed to be so long that to look down their length was to see the end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.
This comes from John Gertner’s forthcoming book, [amazon_link id=”1594203288″ target=”_blank” ]The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation[/amazon_link]
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Review of Doxie Go scanner
It seems too good to be true, a wireless, portable scanner that can send documents to your computer or iOS device. Perfect for one’s office within a Starbucks. Kind of.
Measuring a foot long, two inches tall and about 3 inches deep, weighing in at less than a half a pound, the Doxie Go is definitely portable. It powers on to a default scan mode of 300 dpi and can be toggled to 600 dpi, if needed. The power button can easily be erroneously pushed, too. Paper (photos, too) get scanned face side up, and the scanner gently pulls the item through, saving the scanned item within its on board memory or an SD card that you can add. The scanner seems fickle when pulling the item through. Â If the item isn’t lined up perfectly, or you hold on to the paper a moment more, the Doxie Go doesn’t scan. Also, if the paper goes in angled or as it goes through and the paper catches on a random object on your desk, the resulting scan is a trippy blur of digital LSD. And don’t even bother with wrinkled or worn paper–vending machines take crumpled money better. Ideally, you’re scanning a relatively flat piece of paper and you either have a very clean desk or surface to scan on or you guide the paper through, catching it so it doesn’t get caught on any stray pens or keyboard.
The catch, for wireless scanning, is you have to add the wireless capability yourself with an [amazon_link id=”B004U5QR62″ target=”_blank” ]Eye-Fi wireless SD card[/amazon_link]. So in a sense, it is wireless, but to get the scans off it, out of the box, it’s not.
Oh. OK.
Otherwise, to get your scans off the device, you must connect the Doxie to your computer via a mini USB cable,use a thumb drive, or, in the case of non-Eye-Fi SD cards, a memory card reader. Then, to do anything with the scans, processing through the Doxie software is required.
The software is free and actually pleasant to use. Â Before your first use, the Doxie requires a setup procedure. To note, the Doxie Go I received needed a full charge before using. Setup is painless. To import the scans, select import, and the scans will be moved to your computer within a Doxie application directory.
The quality of the scans is quite good at 300 dpi, usable and the equivalent of a very good, clean fax machine. Scans can be saved to JPG, PNG, PDF, PDF with OCR (object character recognition) in black and white or color. Images scanned OK to good. Â Scan images that have a purpose, e.g. labels, clips from magazines, and don’t necessarily have to be reproduced.
Each scan can be tweaked for clarity and contrast via several sliders (see screen shot below). A neat feature, to group scans, like a 10 page legal form, you select the 10 related pages (make sure they’re in the order you want them). One lacking feature is the ability to zoom in on a document. Legal forms look the same, and distinguishing them was a challenge in Doxie’s software.
Battery life seemed to be less than I expected. Â I’d only get about two dozen scans out of it across several weeks. It comes with a mini USB cable, carrying case, which is a black bag, a calibration card, a guide in which to place 4″x6″ images and some random dongle that I have no clue as to what its purpose is. Â I never go the Eye-Fi to work properly with the Doxie Go, despite several attempts. If Eye-Fi can put a wireless transmitter in something the size of an SD card, why couldn’t the engineers at Apparent put a wifi transmitter on their device to begin with? Would it really raise the price more than the additional $80 it costs for the Eye-Fi?
If you’re regularly out of your office and need to scan a document or three, the Doxie Go will work. Pass on it, if your multifunction printer already has this capability or own a flatbed scanner.
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Book review: The Passionate Photographer by Steve Simon
Steve Simon’s book, [amazon_link id=”0321719891″ target=”_blank” ]The Passionate Photographer[/amazon_link], covers photography as more than a hobby. Â Broken into 10 chapters, he goes from identifying one’s desire to take photographs to using that desire to share a vision. In between, basic technical issues are discussed related to gear, f-stops, shutter speed and ISO as well as elementary composition techniques.
Throughout, he intersperses stories and quotes from other photographers, both historical and contemporary. While some photo books only use the authors images, Simon uses others’ images to illustrate points. Each chapter has an assignment for the reader to attempt and how to assess their ability. Â Also, Simon uses personal stories to cap each chapter in a “lesson learned”.
For beginners, Chapter 2, about practice and persistence, and Chapter 3, about ways to keep seeing the world anew will offer the best value. Chapter 6, about how to see light, really shows how to “see” an image–light and contrast creating interesting shapes and forms that are engaging and pleasing to the eye. Chapter 9, details how to go about creating a photo project and executing it, may help all those with ideas of “this would be a cool thing to do…”
[amazon_link id=”0321719891″ target=”_blank” ]The Passionate Photographer[/amazon_link]Â is a well sourced and well written book. Â Colorful, practical and engaging.
