How to predict the future. 31 October 2011Last updated at 08:13 By Iain Mackenzie Technology reporter, BBC News Martin Raymond: "Everybody misunderstands futurology. It isn't about predicting as such, it's more about analysis of data" Imagining the future, we naturally think of it as a different place to the one we live in now. But who are the architects of this future, whose ideas will shape the coming reality? It is tempting to characterize them as explorers who, through inspiration or serendipity, uncover that which is currently hidden.
However, there is an entire profession that takes a different view. "I think there is a false dichotomy between the idea that we can predict the future and the idea that we can't," says Oxford Professor Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute. "If you lift a cup of coffee to your mouth and drink from it, you are implicitly predicting that it is not poisoned or you won't burn yourself.
"There is no sharp point at which things suddenly become unpredictable. Brooklyn As A Lab To Amplify Urban Ideas. Ask people what “design” is, and most would probably mention someone like Steve Jobs, an inspired, brilliant thinker (a “genius”) with greater insight than the rest of us. The Jobs model of design is something to be consumed, rather than participated in, and is epitomized by his contempt for market research, and his comment that “it’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” Eduardo Staszowski and Lara Penin, two social innovation academics at Parsons The New School for Design, have a less top-down approach.
As shown by their Amplifying Creative Communities exhibition, now showing in North Brooklyn, they want design to emerge from the community, and for designers to re-use other people’s concepts, as much as come up with new ones of their own. The exhibition is part of a two-year research project funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s New York City Cultural Innovation Fund, which aims to identify good ideas in the community and “amplify” them. “We don’t want to stop here. Journalisme web : 10 tendances tech & 30 outils. Voici le cru 2011 des 10 tendances technologiques utiles au journalistes en ligne, flairées par Amy Webb, et présentées hier à Boston lors de la conférence de l’ONA. Comme toujours, salle comble et show assuré ! Voici le cru 2011 de son top 10 : 1 – Le « search » affiné Les résultats recherchés sur Google, Yahoo ou Bing ne sont plus assez pertinents pour les journalistes ou sont trop personnalisés.
De nouveaux outils sont disponibles : Sur les sites ou applications d’infos, le search est trop souvent frustrant. 2- Verticaux et thématiques Les outils d’agrégation ne suffisent plus à réduire la surabondance d’informations. Aujourd’hui des outils de tri et de recommandations par thématiques sont prêts à être installés dans des sites ou des applications pour regrouper plus efficacement et régulièrement nos flux dinfos: 3 – Cercles proches Permettre à un petit groupe d’échanger et d’interagir sur un même sujet.
Les outils les plus récents : 4 – Réseaux sociaux de proximité Pour identifier les gens.
MODE DE PRESENTATION. PANEL. BEHAVIOR CHANGE. CONSUMER. CONSUMER DECISION JOURNEY. What if eighth-graders reinvented the classroom? Karie Sceiford, a lab technician at the Cleveland Clinic, used to read her pedometer at the end of an eight-hour day, and it often reported that she had taken 10,000 steps. "That was just to get my job done," said Sceiford, who works on testing for autoimmune diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. "It was a lot of travel time. " It wasn't unusual for Sceiford to leave her workbench for several minutes at a time every time she needed supplies or access to a piece of equipment. And while the laboratory’s administration might not have known Sceiford’s step-count at the time, they understood that -- other than calorie-burning -- nothing good comes from extraneous travel in one of the country's busiest hospital labs.
The resulting $75 million, three-story lab, which opened in 2012, primes Cleveland Clinic Laboratories to become a leading national reference laboratory -- the type that performs many of the specialized tests that regional hospitals aren't equipped to do on their own. How to manage a successful group Twitter chat - TNW Twitter. In the age of digital, there’s no shortage of ways to communicate en masse. You can send group emails/text messages, post messages on social networks, publish an impromptu blog post, hold VoIP conference calls, and even host a group Twitter chat. The latter of these may not be the most conventional ways of grouping people for a multi-way conversation, but it can actually be a very effective way of getting many people from different disciplines and walks of life involved in the same dialogue.
Firstly, it’s informal and there’s no obligation to speak at any given point. And secondly, anyone can get involved, at any time, from anywhere in the world. All that’s needed is an active Twitter account and a unique hashtag. Here we cover some of the ways YOU can facilitate a successful group Twitter chat. 1. As with any meeting, offline or online, a single facilitator/manager in charge of each Twitter meetup will make things run that little more smoothly. 2.
Is piracy killing the music industry? 3. MIT's Place Pulse: A “Hot Or Not” For Cities, To Fix Broken Blocks | Co. Design. When we stumble down an an unfamiliar street, we often determine quickly -- instinctively -- if it feels unsafe. We make a snap judgment about our surroundings, and it can have tremendous implications, influencing where we travel, shop, work, and live. Trouble is, nobody can measure it very well. We might suspect that graffiti contributes to a sense of danger and endless cherry trees to a sense of affluence, but we don’t know with empirical authority. In this sense, policy guiding urban design is, at best, educated guesswork; at worst, flat wrong. At least it was until the whizzes at MIT Media Lab came along. Place Pulse, by the Macro Connections group, is a website that puts the full force of science behind fuzzy things like how safe or rich or unusual a city seems, and it does it in the least likely way: by crowdsourcing people’s ratings of streets, using geotagged images, and turning those answers into hard, eminently crunchable numbers.
Place Pulse goes beyond a basic beauty contest. Place Pulse | The Collaborative Image of the City. An ethical dilemma. There are many divisions in market research: qual and quant, supplyside and buyside, data collection and insight, art and science. Pick a side and fight your corner. The latest split is ‘new’ versus ‘old’ research. Ray Poynter, who puts himself in the ‘new’ camp (and has organised a successful social network and campaign around the concept of NewMR), defines it as “those trying to hang on to the past and those embracing the new”. Alarmingly, though, he warns that the two sides are dividing along ethical lines. “If market research companies abide by the old ethics, in particular anonymity and informed consent, they will not be able to compete for business in most areas where market research is growing,” Poynter writes. These growth areas are things like brand communities and social media monitoring which challenge traditional assumptions of what research should be.
“When you’re pushing at boundaries it is easy to feel frustrated by rules that seem to hold you back. Follow us on. Coi.gov.uk/documents/commongood/commongood-behaviourchange.pdf. Brand sentiment showdown. There are many brands on Twitter that exist to uphold an image of the company they represent. As consumers, we can communicate with these accounts, voicing praise or displeasure (usually the latter). Using a simple sentiment classifier1, I scored feelings towards major brands from 0 (horrible) to 100 (excellent) once a day for five days. The above for example, shows scores for Netflix, Hulu, and Redbox. Netflix had the lowest scores, whereas Redbox had the highest. I suspect Netflix started low with people still upset over the price hike, but it got better the next couple of days. Then on Saturday, there was a score drop, which I'm guessing was from their downtime for most of Saturday.
Hulu and Redbox, on the other hand, held more steady scores. As for auto brands, Toyota clearly had the lowest scores. How about the major mobile phone companies, AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint? Between Twitter and Facebook, there was obviously some bias, but Twitter faired slightly better. So, how do you measure wellbeing and happiness? | News. How do you measure happiness and wellbeing? The ONS thinks it knows. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/Guardian How happy are you right now? Content? Satisfied? Anxious? Crucially, who else feels the way you do? The Office for National Statistics was asked by the Prime Minister David Cameron last November to find out - or at least to work out how to find out. It is essential that the set of measures of well-being is relevant and well-based in what matters to people, both as individuals and for the UK as a whole So, how will they do it? On the subjective front, work started in April, with four extra questions to the 200,000 people in the Integrated Household Survey (IHS)
. • how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? The first results are expected back in July next year. On top of those subjective questions, the ONS is planning to measure four major areas. Childhood Economy and inequality Health Work/life balance What happens next? So, what happens next? More open data World government data. USA : GfK MRI et comScore fusionnent leurs données d'audience presse et Internet. And GfK MRI Announce Collaboration on Product Offering that Combines U.S. Print Readership and Online Behavior Using Fused Database.
June 16, 2011 comScore and GfK MRI Announce Collaboration on Product Offering that Combines U.S. Print Readership and Online Behavior Using Fused Database comScore-MRI Fusion to Provide Insights into U.S. Print and Online Audiences, Bringing Additional Value to Publishers, Agencies and Advertisers RESTON, VA, June 16, 2011 – comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR) and GfK MRI today announced a partnership to develop a new product offering that links Americans’ online media habits with print readership and other media consumption data, including product and brand usage, all in a single unified database known as comScore-MRI Fusion. “comScore-MRI Fusion bridges the gap between online and offline media consumption and helps provide a more holistic view of how audiences are reached in a multimedia environment,” said Steve Dennen, comScore VP of Business Development. “We are pleased to be partnering with comScore on this database fusion product,” said Kathi Love, President & CEO, GfK MRI.
In Your Fridge. Réalisée par la photographe Stéphanie de Rougé dans le cadre d’une démarche de recherche en image sur l’intimité dans les mégapoles, et plus particulièrement Paris et New York, découverte de « In Your Fridge », une intéressante série de photos mettant face à face différentes personnes seules ou en couples avec l’intérieur de leur réfrigérateur. Réalisé dans une optique de journalisme et d’étude sociologique tentant de répondre à trois questions : « Que murmurent les frigos sur les choix alimentaires des citadins ? », « Peut-on lire une culture à travers une étagère de réfrigérateur ? » et « Le rythme effréné de la ville induit-il de nouveaux comportements alimentaires ? », découvrez tous les détails de ce projet en images dans la suite ! Description originale de Stéphanie de Rougé - via Du côté de mes hôtes, l’expérience fut tantôt douloureuse « attendez que je range / lave / jette… », » ohlala une photo de mon frigo ? Plus de détails en images dans la galerie. Naked's Scott Thomson : a game of chess - ADMAP 2011.
Naked's Scott Thomson : a game of chess - ADMAP 2011. The Future Of Research For Consumer Insights. Marketing research is an industry that operates at the intersection of professional and academic side of advertising. In fact, “advertising research” is an aggregation of methodologies (and theories) developed in departments of anthropology, psychology, sociology, statistics, visual arts, and other fields. Last month, the Journal of Advertising Research published an article titled “The Shape of Marketing Research in 2021″. A PDF of the full paper can be downloaded below with full credits, as it is truly a collaborative effort by seven contributors. Here are some key takeaways to keep in mind as you read their work.
What Data Sources Will Impact Consumer Research? Mobile fundamentally lends itself to geographic targeting and the provision of real-time data. 3 Ways to Involve Consumers in Helping Client Decision Making Brand Communities enhance a firm’s ability to interact with consumers. Insights Management: Tips for Synthesizing Data Sources Advertising Research Foundation. Facebook comme thermomètre des tendances sociales ? - Statosphère, les statistiques du web et d'ailleurs. Peu de sites peuvent aujourd'hui se targuer d'être un miroir des tendances sociales. Idéalement, pour cela, le site se doit d'être un moteur de recherche incontournable ou un réseau social éminent. C'est mécanique : pour mesurer une tendance à grande échelle, il faut avant tout de très nombreux utilisateurs et qu'ils aient la possibilité de s'exprimer. Un point de vue, une préoccupation, une mode, un goût : multipliés par plusieurs centaines de millions d'internautes, il devient possible de mesurer n'importe quelle aspiration collective.
Tout cela, Google et Facebook l'ont évidemment bien compris. Et bien sûr, ils s'en servent. Google exploite les données anonymes des internautes en déclinant une armada d'outils (Google Insights for Search, Google Trends et sa version "for website", Google Zeitgeist, Google Flu Trends etc...) et obtient des résultats d'une précision stupéfiante. Le Bonheur National Brut (BNB) L'analyse de la situation amoureuse. Using Lies in Research. This post is part of a series authored by the speakers of the upcoming UX London conference. In case you can’t make it out, though, be sure to see Nate speak on this very topic at SXSW on March 12th. How can we identify lies in our work before we run into serious problems?
Lies. We consider them an occupational hazard. In the course of our research at Bolt | Peters, organizations both large and small will inadvertently ask us to participate in their lies and, intentional or not, the implications are often dire. When we lie to ourselves, our users, or our team about issues at the core of a user experience project, we unwittingly accelerate the interface’s demise.
It can be an uncomfortable topic, but uncovering the lies behind a product or interface can be one of the most effective ways to turn ailing projects around. Searching for search In 2004, our team worked with a startup that helped users find the best deals on products right in their neighborhood. That was a lie. Prototypes Lie. Four key metrics for your brand to focus on. The head of product strategy at Lithium tells marketers gathered at Web 2.0 Expo, "Measure strategy, not stuff.
" She lays out a foundation of applied metrics that you can start with before identifying the KPIs that map to your brand's business goals. Web 2.0 sf 2011 metrics One of the most packed sessions at this week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco was "Measuring the Future: New Metrics for New Media," a solo talk given by Margaret Francis, Vice President of Product at Lithium, one of the top social media monitoring vendors.
"Social media is an effective way to create awareness of and interest in products and services," she told the 400 onlookers. So, how do you do that? Those of us who do social media consulting for brands bump up against this all the time: The client, properly, of course, wants metrics to gauge the success of their social media or social marketing efforts and to shift course when they're not hitting their goals. There are tons of things you could be measuring. J.D. C273.pdf (Objet application/pdf) Why YouTube doesn't get more money from agencies - and what to do about it. Le planning stratégique face au marketing d'influence. User-Led Innovation Can't Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask Apple and Ikea | Co.Design. Why Focus Groups are Broken.
From adhoc research to responsive insight. The changes we need to see now. by martin bailie on Prezi. From ad-hoc research to real-time insight: the changes we need to see, now. « LOVE+MONEY. Interpreting Web Analytics for Beginners. A Day in the Life of the MIT Community.