Thought Provoking

Silicon Valley

2010s, Tech, Thought Provoking, TV

I love the TV show “Silicon Valley”, especially the way it takes the piss out of some of the most ridiculous practises it finds. This is a really enjoyable article in the New Yorker about the parallels between real-life Silicon Valley and the tv show.

“I’ve been told that, at some of the big companies, the P.R. departments have ordered their employees to stop saying ‘We’re making the world a better place,’ specifically because we have made fun of that phrase so mercilessly. So I guess, at the very least, we’re making the world a better place by making these people stop saying they’re making the world a better place.

Frank Kelly RIP

Arts, Ireland, Thought Provoking, TV

Frank Kelly has been a cultural presence almost all of my life. He was a character on Hall’s Pictorial Weekly in the 1970’s slurping tea from a saucer with Eamon Morrissey. If I was too young to understand the political commentary behind the sketches, it was memorable to an impressionable young boy with only one television channel to watch.
Later on, there was Father Ted of course.
But one of my favourite performances of Frank Kelly is in the short film where he has a small cameo part Yu Ming Is Ainm Dom

How to read a book a week

Books, Business, Thought Provoking

Useful tips on reading non-fiction books from the Harvard Business Review

  1. Start with the author. Who wrote the book? Read his or her bio. If you can find a brief interview or article online about the author, read that quickly. It will give you a sense of the person’s bias and perspective.

  2. Read the title, the subtitle, the front flap, and the table of contents. What’s the big-picture argument of the book? How is that argument laid out? By now, you could probably describe the main idea of the book to someone who hasn’t read it.

  3. Read the introduction and the conclusion. The author makes their case in the opening and closing argument of the book. Read these two sections word for word but quickly. You already have a general sense of where the author is going, and these sections will tell you how they plan to get there (introduction) and what they hope you got out of it (conclusion).

  4. Read/skim each chapter. Read the title and anywhere from the first few paragraphs to the first few pages of the chapter to figure out how the author is using this chapter and where it fits into the argument of the book. Then skim through the headings and subheadings (if there are any) to get a feel for the flow. Read the first sentence of each paragraph and the last. If you get the meaning, move on. Otherwise, you may want to read the whole paragraph. Once you’ve gotten an understanding of the chapter, you may be able to skim over whole pages, as the argument may be clear to you and also may repeat itself.

  5. End with the table of contents again. Once you’ve finished the book, return to the table of contents and summarize it in your head. Take a few moments to relive the flow of the book, the arguments you considered, the stories you remember, the journey you went on with the author.

Designing for Average doesn’t fit anyone

Books, Design, Thought Provoking

From  thestar.com a story of how the US Air Force discovered a design flaw

It is an excerpt from a new book The End of Average by Todd Rose.

Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all 10 dimensions. One pilot might have a longer-than-average arm length, but a shorter-than-average leg length. Another pilot might have a big chest but small hips. Even more astonishing, Daniels discovered that if you picked out just three of the ten dimensions of size — say, neck circumference, thigh circumference and wrist circumference — less than 3.5 per cent of pilots would be average sized on all three dimensions. Daniels’s findings were clear and incontrovertible. There was no such thing as an average pilot. If you’ve designed a cockpit to fit the average pilot, you’ve actually designed it to fit no one.

This is similar to material that I have read in some copy-writing books recently. Target a specific person and not to a general audience for a product.

Here is the book mentioned.

Reducing product and enhancing result in design

Design, Development, Tech, Thought Provoking, Web

Fanstastic post by Goran Peuc in Smashing Magazine about design in information products.

Some highlights are mentioned below but read the whole article.

One of the main problems in product design:

I still find a lot of products today, be they digital or physical, to be too complex and feature-driven. Shouldn’t we as designers instead be looking to remove complexity for users as much as possible or as much as allowed for by current technology, by making our products fit more seamlessly into their daily lives and routines? I feel that we simply don’t and, more worryingly, that we still haven’t learned lessons from the past.

The desired process:

Figure out a way to remove such complexities. Figure out how to remove entire pieces of your product or interface, while keeping the user on the path to the desired result.

Finally:

Theoretically, the ultimate goal for any product is to be completely removed from the user’s perspective. Work towards that goal because nobody wants to use your product.
People just want the benefit of using it.

The case for planting trees to prevent flooding.

Thought Provoking

I missed this article when it came out in 2014 but it makes fascinating reading in light of the flooding in Ireland and Britain at the moment.

Water sinks into the soil under trees at 67 times the rate at which it sinks into the soil under grass. The roots of the trees provide channels down which the water flows, deep into the ground. The soil there becomes a sponge, a reservoir which sucks up water and then releases it slowly.

Read the article for the full context. I wonder why more action on forestation of hills isn’t being done.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/13/flooding-public-spending-britain-europe-policies-homes

An experiment that reduced theft and burglary by 93%

Thought Provoking

The case for prescription heroin.

Very interesting piece about an experiment to prescribe heroin to addicts in one area of England in the from 1982 to 1995.

He expanded his heroin prescription programme from a dozen people to more than 400.
The first people to notice an effect were the local police. Inspector Michael Lofts studied 142 heroin and cocaine addicts in the area, and he found there was a 93 per cent drop in theft and burglary.

Since the clinics opened, the street heroin dealer has slowly but surely abandoned the streets of Warrington and Widnes.

What I find interesting in discussing solutions to the drug problem is that nobody considers the money argument. Take away the market by providing the supply and the market in pushing drugs disappears.

And something nobody predicted took place. The number of heroin addicts in the area actually fell. Research published by Dr Marks in the Proceedings of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh compared Widnes, which had a heroin clinic, to the very similar Liverpool borough of Bootle, which didn’t — and found Widnes had 12 times fewer addicts.

This approach is worthy of more investigation. It seems to have worked better than other experiments that I know about.

The independent reports that methadone treatment doesn’t work as well..

The last authoritative academic survey found that although more addicts on methadone were trying to give up drugs completely than patients receiving prescribed heroin, the methadone users were three times more likely to “top up” with drugs bought illegally.

Home Office civil servants, meanwhile, concede in private that they are becoming increasingly alarmed at the number of people who are dying from misusing methadone.