Migrating to WordPress

I'm now in the process of migrating this blog to a WordPress site, and at some point in the near future, my www.alexisadair.com domain will be transferred to a new WordPress blog.  So if you come here via that domain, in the next week or so things will look drastically different.  


I hope you'll forgive any growing pains as I figure out the WordPress interface and get things set up properly.  If you want to check it out now, as is, click here: The Always On Brain.

Those occupied brain cells prove useful after all

One of the recent readings in my Business Analytics class was a Harvard Business Review article by Eric Bonabeau called "Don't Trust Your Gut," (free registration required for full article) an excellent read discussing cognitive biases and software models for analytical decision making, including artificial evolution and interactive evolution.

When I was reading it, I got to the section of the article about "agent-based modeling," specifically the quote ""a computer creates thousands, even millions, of individual actors; each of these virtual agents makes decisions, providing an accurate model of a complex system's dynamics," (p. 120), and I immediately thought of an article I once read about a software program designed based on how ants navigate.  Ants lay down a pheremone trail that fades quickly, and if one finds food, when others follow the trail the scent is reinforced, which strengthens it and attracts more ants.  They end up being very efficient at finding the best routes.  And the software was modeled on this and used for determining things like efficient delivery routes.  But of course, I read the article some time ago, before I used Evernote to track things I read and interesting quotes.  So I had no idea where or when I'd read it.  But it had been taking up space in my memory for a while, and there have been several times when I've wished I could remember the source.

Well, a few days ago I decided to try google it, especially when I thought I remembered something about traffic in Brazil being an example in the article.  Well, when I googled "ants software brazil traffic," I got to an article in the Economist that talked about swarm intelligence and the work of Dr. Marco Dorigo in creating software modeled on how complex social insects solve problems.  Now, I don't think this is the exact article I read, but it has much of the same information.  So I googled Dr. Dorigo.

And what do you know, but in the top three "Scholarly articles" on the results page, there are two articles co-authored by Dr. Dorigo and Eric Bonabeau, the very author who inspired my search in the first place!  And now I have articles and names to cite to the next time I need them.

And another similar example - in my first discussion post in Business Analytics, I had made mention of software that used analytics to predict music hits.  I didn't know where I'd initially read about it, but some googling at least found me some relevant materials on Mike McCready and the companies he's used the software with.   Well, in last week's discussion, the instructor mentioned Epagogix, a company that predicts movie hits based on the scripts, and she mentioned that Malcolm Gladwell had written about them.  Then another classmate (thanks, Aric!) posted a link to a 2006 video of Gladwell speaking at the New Yorker festival about Epagogix and their hit predictions.  In that video, he also mentions Mike McCready and his music hit predictor.  And I recognized everything in the video, though I know I'd never seen it.  So I checked Gladwell.com for his 2006 articles, and sure enough, there it was, "The Formula," the article I'd initially read from which I remembered the story of the music hit predictor.  Over 5 years I'd been remembered that article.

Finally, another memory loop closed.  And at least those occupied brain cells were put to good use.  I've gotten good grades on all my discussion posts for class so far, which included references to and discussions of the above articles.  :)

I am LOVING the fact that the all the things I've been interested in for *years* are turning out to be completely applicable to my current studies. :)

Updated - Plea for Volunteer: Need a Company to be subject of a Business Analytics class project

UPDATE: I have a victim!  Thank you to everyone who made introductions and connections for me, I really really really really appreciate the help!  I'm looking forward to the projects for this class.

Now all I have to do is come up with the topic for my Capstone Project...

Greetings,

I'm putting my full plea here on my blog so I can link to it from other places.  I have a couple upcoming projects to do for my Business Analytics class at Columbia (part of my Master's in Information and Knowledge Strategy).  The course is taught by Jeanne Harris, a top consultant at Accenture in their Institute for High Performance, and a co-author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning and Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results.

Since I'm currently job hunting, I don't have a workplace at which to perform my analysis, so I'm looking for a willing victim.  :)  From the project descriptions (copied below), most of the information gathering will need to be done in the next week.  I'll need to be able to interview managers or other decision-makers within a company about how they make decisions, what data they gather and analyze to aid in their decision-making, and how use of data factors into organizational strategy.  I can evaluate any kind or size of business.  The benefit to your company would be written analyses of your organization's analytical capabilities, and a proposal for how the organization could improve the maturity level of their analytical capabilities.  The first week will be the main data gathering, but it's possible (maybe likely) that I'll need to perform some follow-up in the later weeks in order to fine tune the maturity level improvement proposal.

If your company, or someone you know, would be interested in a free analysis of your analytic capabilities, please contact me asap.  If you go to view my profile, there's an "email me" link to my gmail address.  Or you can email me at my student address, aea2146 AT columbia.edu.  Or, if you scroll waaaayyyyyy down to the bottom of the blog, the image of the front of my networking card has my gmail addy and phone number on it.  

Thank you!

Alexis 

Analytical Assessment project:

In your first assignment for this course, you will assess the degree of your organization’s analytical completion. You will use this analysis in your second assignment (due later in the semester) to help you think through how you might build on this capacity.

To complete this assignment, do the following:

1. Research your organization’s approach to analytics and decision making. You may need to talk to managers about how they make decisions. What kind of data do managers look at when they make decisions? What kind of data is available? To whom and how do they have to justify their decisions? As you research, continue to look deeper at the use of data in the organization: how does data drive strategy?
2. Consider the primary attributes of analytical competitors from the Competing on Analytics text.Which of these four attributes is your organization exhibiting? As you define the presence of any of all of the four, use examples from your research to demonstrate why you believe they exist or do not exist.

3. Define what stage of analytical competition your organization is currently operating under. Be sure you have read the description of these five stages in Competing on Analytics. Defend your assessment.

4. Finally, define what stage of analytical competition you would select as your organization’s desired state. Not every organization is seeking to be a Stage 5 organization. Based on what you know about leaders in your industry and your own organization’s positioning, what would you recommend as a goal for your organization? Defend your assessment.

Your analysis should be a cohesive, three to five-page essay. You will submit your paper to the course dropbox by Sunday, February 12 and 11:59 pm, ET. You will receive your graded assignment by February 15 so that you can begin working on your next assignment.

IMPORANT NOTE: I am aware that this assignment asks you to describe data usage and business processes that you may not feel comfortable sharing with your colleagues. Please understand that when you submit your project to the course dropbox, your instructor and facilitator are the only people who have access to these assignments. At no point will I ask you to share these papers or their content with the other members of your cohort.

Analytical Improvement Plan project:

In your first assignment for this course, you assessed the degree of your organization’s analytical competition and defined its goal state. Now, you will use this information to develop a plan for how you might build on this capacity and help you reach your desired stage of competition. To do this, you will follow the DELTA model described in Analytics at Work and covered in this course during Units 4 through 10. I recommend that you write your paper piece by piece as we go through each module of the course. That will allow you to take advantage of the optional DELTA forums for posting your questions about the content and will help you to manage your time. You will submit your final, cohesive paper on March 18 at 11:59 pm, ET. 

To complete this assignment, you will do the following:

1. Apply each DELTA component to your organization’s analytic maturity. I recommend you work through your paper each week as you progress through these units. As you learn more about each component of the model, answer the following questions: At what stage is your organization relative to this specific DELTA component? For example, your organization may be at a Stage 3 when it comes to Data use but may be far more primitive in its Leadership commitment to analytics. What would it look like if your organization were to move from its current stage to the desired stage? Think both about how your course text describes each phase and what it would look like in the specific context of your organization. What recommendations can you provide that would help your organization advance to this next stage? Your text and our discussions may lead to some concrete items, but I am looking for you to use these as foundational suggestions and to develop innovative, targeted ideas for how you might improve the use of analytics in your own organization.

2. Synthesize your plan and define a holistic rationale for your conclusions. Look realistically at the plans you have developed for how each of these components can be used to strengthen your organization’s capacity. How will you structure an intervention plan that you can deploy as your organization’s knowledge leader?  Explain the overall impact this plan might have on your organization’s strategic use of analytics. Please note that this is very important: I am far more interested than how you see analytics impacting strategic decisions (approaches to products, markets, customers, etc.) than how you see them impacting specific tactics (pricing, transactional items, etc.).  Your analysis should be a cohesive, 5-7-page essay. You will submit your paper to the course drop box by March 18 at 11:59 pm, ET. I will return this paper with comments before our live session during the final week of the course.

IMPORANT NOTE: I am aware that this assignment asks you to describe data usage and business processes that you may not feel comfortable sharing with your colleagues. Please understand that when you submit your project to the course drop box, your instructor and facilitator are the only people who have access to these assignments. At no point will I ask you to share these papers or their content with the other members of your cohort.

Teenage girls' new fave pasttime - curing cancer?

Recently browsing the interwebs, I came across a Huffington Post article about high school student Angela Zhang, who won the $100,000 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, with a method to use nanotechnology to detect and destroy cancer tumors.  And with a little further browsing, I found a Scientific American article about Shree Bose, who won The $50,000 Google Science Fair with yet another cancer treatment.

I'll admit that 2 is too small a sample size to really say whether the fact that Angela and Shree are female has anything to do with their wins beyond coincidence.  But it's certainly a positive sign, when there seems to have been a lot of lamenting that there aren't as many women entering the STEP disciplines as men.  And even more noteworthy than that, I think, is just how advanced a level of research some high school students are both able to do, and interested in doing.  

This is many worlds beyond the old baking soda volcano.  And I would bet that these capabilities owe no small debt to the evolution of technology and collaboration, and the democratization of information and access to information that ye olde internet has wrought.  Angela Zhang mentioned in the HuffPo article that she started reading doctorate-level bioengineering works when she was a freshman in high school.  I'd be willing to bet that it was a lot easier for her to find and access such publications than it would have been for me 20 years ago.  The internet alone, plus the developments of search engines like Google, have surfaced so much more information to the masses than would have been easily findable prior to their arrival.  I might have been able to find those sorts of articles if I had wanted to, but it would have required a much greater investment of time and travel for me than it likely did for Angela.  In the time it would have taken me to locate and get hold of such articles (and decipher them), Angela was already beginning her research.  

It's always been possible for highly motivated people to accomplish amazing things.  But what's truly amazing, and really quite promising, is how quickly technology enables those motivated people to get to the meat of what they're interested in accomplishing.  And it can substantially reduce the threshold for less motivated folks to get to something interesting and valuable before they lose their motivation.  Which all ultimately benefits society.

Just imagine, if these young women are successfully working on curing cancer at age 17 or 18, how much more might they accomplish in another 40, 50, 60 or more productive years of their lives?

Dare we hope that such accomplishments create a virtuous cycle of increasingly ambitious young people?  If two teenage girls can cure cancer (okay, that's a bit hyperbolic, but still, their work is significant), perhaps more high schoolers will realize just how much they can accomplish if they want to.  And of course it's not only high schoolers who can do amazing things, but if significant discoveries start being made by more and more younger people, just think how many more productive years that essentially adds to all sorts of fields of study.  5-10 extra years of practical contribution is a lot, and multiply that by thousands of young people, and you have a lot of potential benefit to society.

Cheers to Angela and Shree for being a big part of that potential!

Mirror Neurons and Intuition

Well, the spring semester is off to a great start, with Business Analytics & Strategic Intelligence with the amazing Jeanne Harris, and Enterprise-Wide Applications & Project Management, with the also amazing Len Peters.  The two courses are already proving complementary to each other, and boy does the analytics class have my brain going full speed!

So many thoughts and connections, but the thought of the moment comes from some class discussions about examples of analytics in the media, one of which was Lie to Me, and its use of analytics and Paul Ekman's Facial Action Coding System.  Which led me to comment that it's interesting how we're getting to a state with technology and computational power that things which might not seem at all mathematical can now be effectively quantified, measured, and analyzed.  That is, things like facial expressions and emotions.

Several of our articles for this next week are about intuition and decision-making.  We've already covered a bit of ground in the class discussions regarding behavioral economics, the work of Kahneman & Tversky, Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, and the cognitive science behind intuition.  Several of my classmates and I have already said that intuition is the brain essentially performing analytics faster than conscious thought - crunching a lifetime of experiences and knowledge and data on sub-conscious observations and associations about a situation to create something you "just feel."

The talk of intuition made me remember Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear, an amazing book (and one I believe every woman should read, especially if you live in a big city, but that's another topic).  De Becker talks a lot in his book about trusting your intuition, and the survival signals you pick up on (usually subconsciously).  The book is full of numerous story examples of people's intuitions, and in some cases when de Becker spoke to the people about their experiences, he was able to suss out numerous details which they had perceived and responded to without ever consciously thinking about them.  But the point is they had noticed all these many details at the time, and their brain had processed them more quickly than they could have consciously broken them down and articulated them.

So where do the mirror neurons come in?  Well, mirror neurons have this funny ability, such that when you watch a person perform an action or make a face, the mirror neurons in your own brain fire, mimicking the same pathways that you would use if you were to perform that action or make that same face yourself.  Your brain is mirroring what you see, as if you were doing it yourself.  According to neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, in an interview with Scientific American, "[mirror neurons] are obviously essential brain cells for social interactions. Without them, we would likely be blind to the actions, intentions and emotions of other people. ... When I see you smiling, my mirror neurons for smiling fire up, too, initiating a cascade of neural activity that evokes the feeling we typically associate with a smile. I don’t need to make any inference on what you are feeling, I experience immediately and effortlessly (in a milder form, of course) what you are experiencing"

Now back to Ekman and his Facial Action Coding System.  Ekman also has done a good bit of research into people who are very good at reading other people, such as being able to tell when someone is lying.  And he has found that what makes those people's intuition so good is their ability to pick up on and recognize micro-expressions.  Micro-expressions are fleeting, involuntary facial expressions that reveal an emotion that someone is otherwise either concealing or unaware of.  They last only a fraction of a second.  Most of us miss them entirely, never noticing them at all.  But some people are innately good at picking up on them.  And even better than that, people can be trained to catch these fleeting expressions.  (There's an excellent article by Malcolm Gladwell about Paul Ekman's work on Gladwell's website, which is also incorporated into chapter 6 of Blink) 

So I just wanted to connect the dots.  I'd be willing to bet that the intuition that comes from picking up on micro-expressions is a result of the activity of mirror neurons, that they are the mechanism underlying the ability to recognize those ephemeral emotions.  For a fleeting second, as one's mirror neurons reflect the micro-expression, you feel what that other person is feeling, and if you're "in touch" with your intuitions, maybe you actually pay attention to and recognize whatever that feeling is, and act upon the information it provides you.

Brief Post-Christmas Update

This semester was a doozie - both challenging and rewarding.   Heavy course work load kept me from blogging, although I probably have at least a half-dozen half-written posts needing to be polished up and fleshed out so I can publish them already.

As far as how I did in the classes, I enjoyed them greatly, and I really like finally getting to thoroughly exercise my brain.  I'm still awaiting the final grade on a major group project in one class (40% of the grade for that course), but I got a high A in Organizing and Accessing Information and Knowledge, which was a course heavy on metadata, taxonomies and information architecture, with three substantial projects.  In the first course (in September), Information and Knowledge in the 21st Century Economy, which was a foundational course, I got a solid A.  Management and Leadership in the Knowledge Domain is my only still-outstanding grade.  I have a 94 so far, but that 40%-of-the-grade project obviously carries a lot of weight, so the final grade in that class is still up in the air, but I have high hopes and expectations.  :)

I just got back to NY from Texas, after visiting the family for Christmas.  My 1-year-old niece is absolutely adorable :)  I love getting to play doting Auntie!  Of course, I came down with a cold my last day there, so had to skip the goodbye kisses and hugs for the little one :(  At least I got my flu shot this year.  Too bad it doesn't do anything for the common cold.  :\

Now back to the job hunt, and seeing how much productive stuff I can get done between now and when classes start back up on January 17.

Happy New Year!!

Thoughts on a (rhetorical?) question in Peter Morville’s “Search Patterns”: “What, if anything, will never be subject to search?”

My first thought was that we’re not currently able to search by feeling or emotion, and that that might not ever be possible.  And to be clear, when I say search “by feeling or emotion,” I don’t mean searching using a feeling word, like googling “sad” or “depressed” or “happy.”  That, obviously, is eminently possible now.  

What we aren’t doing yet, is to literally search (and tag) by the feeling or emotion experienced.  Certainly, you can already tag, for example, a TED Talk, with a feeling or emotion word, such as “inspiring,” or “fascinating,” or “funny.”  But you can’t communicate the actual physical, emotional experience that a video, blog, website or other content provides.  At least, not yet.  What if you could tag a YouTube video with the physical sensation of the uproarious laughter you experienced when you watched it?  Or if you could actually share the feeling of delighted terror you experienced at that new horror movie?   

Or perhaps you could search by physical touch sensation.  If you could imagine the feel of silk, and the online store would filter clothing results by those with that “feel.”  Or someone might sensation-tag a wool sweater as “very itchy,” and when you clicked on that item, you could choose to “feel” the sensation-tags that other users had applied.  (I would hope the default would be that you would have to request or allow that tag first - nobody likes auto-launching music on sites, I can’t imagine they’d appreciate auto-launching sensory overload.)

Or what if you could research vacation destinations by searching for the sensation of warm sand between your toes and the sun on your face?  Or picturing the type of wilderness trails you'd like to hike and letting the search engine find close matches to that visual image, and rank them by, say, how close they are to you?

The more I thought these ideas, though, the more I realized it might not be so impossible, after all.

Consider how advanced things like fMRI are now.  Scientists know where in the brain certain emotions are seated, and can visualize, in real-time, the blood flow to those regions, indicating whether or not you are using that part of your brain, and experiencing that emotion.  And advanced prosthetics are able to use electrical signals from the brain to control movement of those artificial limbs, and the science behind those is continuing to advance.  One has even been demonstrated on the Colbert Report.  We already have fairly accurate speech recognition capabilities which allow people to control their computers hands-free.  

And the technological development (that I know of) that is closest to something which could evolve into the mechanism for such a type of search, is the brain-computer interfaces which are already capable of helping locked-in syndrome victims communicate by focusing their thoughts to move a cursor on a computer screen to communicate, surf the internet and more.  One great example is this video of the NeuroSwitch:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWe5YVV9dWs  And that’s not the only such brain-computer interface out there.  

It’s not a far cry from that to “mind reading,” of a sort.  In fact, when I googled the phrase “computers reading minds,” it returned over 28,000,000 results.  Perhaps a little frightening, in the time elapsed from this afternoon to this evening, the same search yielded 100,000 additional results the second time.  

Right now, the focus seems to be on more obvious practical benefits, such as helping the locked-in communicate, rather than a superfluous-seeming search-by-emotion capability.  But if you consider how quickly computers evolved from giant mainframes that cost millions of dollars, to something you could carry in one hand and use to read books, watch tv, play games, shop, make phone calls, video conference, and more, given the technology that already exists for computers to interpret human brain patterns, what as-yet un-thought-of applications might that develop into in the next 25 years?  It would be frivolous now to use the technology for “mere” online search purposes, but there may come a time when that’s the least of what brain-computer interfaces can achieve.