Venkatesh Guru Rao

It’s from David Perlmutter – now professor emeritus at University of California, San Diego, who was one of LeSourd’s mentors – that I learned to appreciate the difference between description, analysis and explanation. I remember it, because he would often say to me things like, “See now, there’s description, analysis, and explanation. Which, if any, of those things are you trying to do here?”

40. Media Goblin: the Road to Federation
From just a gleam in founder Chris Webber's eye to a full tilt media hosting project supporting photos, HTML5 video, and more, the road to federation has been a wild ride so far. Come talk to us about the challenges, the fun and the future.

Welcome to the online home of the Group Works cards, groupworksdeck.org.  Why is it that some meetings bring life to your soul, while others leave you wishing you'd never stepped in the room?  What happens at the best ones, that makes them productive, fulfilling, sometimes even magic? 

The views expressed here are my own, and not my employer, clients or other stakeholders.

I enjoyed going to the recent Pop!Tech conference – the combination of bright minds, warm hearts and the Maine autumn is highly conducive to reflecting on what has been and imagining on what will be next.

During the event, I gave a talk to the audience about my research work, and in the panel session at the end of my talk I took two questions from a member of the audience relating to personal motivations of doing this kind of research and whether anyone has the moral right to extract knowledge from a community for corporate gain. Given the asker’s frustrated-politeness I’ll paraphrase what I (and a bunch of folks that came up to me after the talk) took as the intent of his questions:

&#187 What is it like working for BigCorps pillaging the intellect of people around the world for commercial gain?
&#187 How do you sleep at night as the corporations you work for pump their worthless products into the world?
Short answer is that I sleep just fine*.

Those with a desire to go beyond the 110 character headlines should draw a fresh mug of their favourite brew, find a comfy armchair and read on.

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Download the related Pop!Tech presentation here [PDF, 12MB].

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Before delving into a response some context here’s some context: my Pop!Tech talk wasn’t touchy-feely marketing fluff that corporate speakers tend to gravitate toward – consider Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi’s slick talk at this year’s TED Conference, and the debate that followed. Nor was it focused on the work that frog has done in the social innovation space which would have no-doubt resonated with the Pop!Tech audience. My talk focused on the social tension that occurs with the introduction of new technologies, including turn-of-the-second-to-last-century portable cameras, and could have applied equally to the Walkman (remember them?) and mobile phones. It touched on technology use and whether ‘adoption’ is pro-active, passive or even conscious: the consequences of near-time facial recognition; how DNA testing reveals parental discrepancy and will for many change the notion of “family”, how public displays are increasingly monitoring the world around us, and on what all this means for designers who are creating products, services and systems in which consumption, use, and adoption is sometimes conscious, sometimes not. A central tenet of the talk was that as more of what we design is jacked into our social network the option of whether to use, or opt-into a technology or service becomes one of opting into or out of society.

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On the surface these questions are both a continuation of the design imperialism discussion that has preoccupied some in the design community, and a rally against globalisation (there’s a related interview with Fast Company here). In previous instances when I’ve been asked questions along these lines the motivation for asking was driven by an anger against the all-trampling BigCorps and me as

When an A/B testing dashboard says there is a “95% chance of beating original” or “90% probability of statistical significance,” it’s asking the following question: Assuming there is no underlying difference between A and B, how often will we see a difference like we do in the data just by chance? The answer to that question is called the significance level, and “statistically significant results” mean that the significance level is low, e.g. 5% or 1%. Dashboards usually take the complement of this (e.g. 95% or 99%) and report it as a “chance of beating the original” or something like that.

However, the significance calculation makes a critical assumption that you have probably violated without even realizing it: that the sample size was fixed in advance. If instead of deciding ahead of time, “this experiment will collect exactly 1,000 observations,” you say, “we’ll run it until we see a significant difference,” all the reported significance levels become meaningless. This result is completely counterintuitive and all the A/B testing packages out there ignore it, but I’ll try to explain the source of the problem with a simple example.

Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. Though he is navigating the busy parts of town, the impression of countless faces does nothing to assuage his feelings of isolation.

But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey—which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognizable facets of his own soul.