BizMediaScience

Writings Elsewhere for Jun '09

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:34:53 -0700

Continuing the promise made in Writings Elsewhere, my writing elsewhere for June '09 are:

Enjoy.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Upcoming Conferences:

presenting a formal research paper entitled Machine Detection of and Response to User Non-Conscious Thought Processes to Increase Usability, Experience and Satisfaction - Case Studies and Examples at The 7th International Conference on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies: CCCT 2009, The 2nd International Multi-Conference on Engineering and Technological Innovation: IMETI 2009 10-13 July 09 in Orlando, Florida

The 4th Annual SNCR Research Symposium & Awards Gala at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, 5-6 Nov 09

Come on by and say hello.

Relevancy, or "Oh, gosh. Joseph's been at it again"

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 09:05:18 -0700

I've been working with a fellow researcher for about the past three months perfecting a Relevancy metric. I've been thinking about a Relevancy metric for a while, it just took three months of study to finalize a math I'm comfortable with.

Relevancy, Joseph? What do you mean by relevancy?

Ah, good question that. I'm sure what I mean by it isn't what others mean by it. I mean, why should I start now?

The NextStage Relevancy metric measures "How relevant/important is this info to the visitor right now?"

And one may rightly ask "How is relevancy relevant?"

Ah...well now...

Canoeing with Stephane (Sentiment Analysis, Anyone? (Part 2))

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 12:33:24 -0700

The iMedia Brand Summit has kept me a little busy, and I do keep my promises.

One of the folks I asked about Sentiment Analysis prior to writing Sentiment Analysis, Anyone? (Part 1) was Stephane Hamel. I asked Stephane for a site I could analyze without my knowing anything about their strategy, demographics and such. Stephane suggested canoe.ca since it's a well known Canadian site that receives lots of traffic and has lots of diversified content.

The Canoe.ca site has an English and a French version so we analyzed the homepages of both versions to demonstrate the differences in cultural cuing. The homepages shown here are from 8 Jun 09 about 10:30amET. This image is the Canoe French homepage. Below is the English homepage. The information I'm sharing comes out of our tools, specifically the one I described in Sentiment Analysis, Anyone? (Part 1).

This image is the Canoe English homepage. I'll share at this point that the tool I'm using reads whatever digital information you give it exactly like a human of the intended culture would read it, provide it material in French and it thinks in French, provide it material in Gaelic and it thinks in Gaelic (we get a lot of calls for that, you betcha. The first language our technology understood was Gaelic because if you can do Gaelic you can do anything. Now we're teaching it Etruscan because you never know when you might want to sell sandals to a dead gladiator). What makes the tool different from the standard human is its ability to report on what will or would happen in the reader's mind at the non-conscious and conscious levels. Most people don't have that kind of training, our technology (Evolution Technology or "ET") does.

Sentiment Analysis, Anyone? (Part 1)

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 10:06:15 -0700

We've been getting a lot of requests for Sentiment Analysis lately. Based on my fun ride regarding engagement, I decided to find out what Sentiment Analysis was before saying NextStage had been doing it for years, what's all the excitement about?

So I went to Wikipedia and read "Sentiment analysis refers to a broad (definitionally challenged) area of..." "(definitionally challenged)"???

Ah. Yet another buzzword in a long list of "My gosh, what shall we call something else we can't really do?" words being slung about in the analytics world.

Okay, fair enough. People selling the stuff are attempting to own the field by telling clients what it is, what it's suppose to be about and what they should expect. Some of you may know that Susan has a pharma background and that I often advise pharmas. They often say something like "We just discovered that this chemical compound has these effects. Can we come up with some catchy-named syndrome that this concoction will treat?" Same thing, really. "We know what we can do. Let's give it a name and see if we can sell it."

But we are NextStage. We follow a different path.

Asking "What do you want a Sentiment Analysis product to do?"

I asked some people to tell me what they would like in a Sentiment Analysis product (thank you, Chris Berry and Stephane Hamel).

I wrote Chris:
Howdy,
I'm wondering what, exactly, you folks would like a "sentiment analysis" tool to do.
Oh, the heck with that. Please give me a list of things you'd like some tool to do such that when you point some content at it, it tells you something about that content that would be valuable to you/your clients.

Remember, you're talking to Joseph here. Go nuts with this.

<Fair Warning Dept>
This is going to be a long, rambling post, folks.
...and I plan on having fun, too...
</Fair Warning Dept>

Writings Elsewhere for May '09

Thu, 28 May 2009 11:20:59 -0700

Continuing the promise made in Writings Elsewhere, my writing elsewhere for May '09 are:

All Business.Com

That Think You Do

Enjoy.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Upcoming Conferences:

teaching a Masters Class among other things at the iMediaConnection Brand Summit 7-10 June 09 in Colorado Springs, Colorado

doing a presentation on Machine Detection of and Response to User Non-Conscious Thought Processes to Increase Usability, Experience and Satisfaction - Case Studies and Examples at the Towards a Science of Consciousness 2009 11-14 June 09 in Hong Kong, China

The 4th Annual SNCR Research Symposium & Awards Gala at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, 5-6 Nov 09

Come on by and say hello.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes (and Bowie was right!)

Tue, 12 May 2009 08:23:19 -0700

Lots of things to cover in this post. Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes abound.

First, no sooner do I write in the last newsletter (if you didn't receive yours, email me) that I hope TheFutureOf blog will go in some new directions than my wish is answered. The blog is no more, no newer a direction could there be, yes? Makes me want to go back to studying PsychoPomp so that I might find it. I'll probably either place posts here that I was hoping to put there or start a new blog series devoted to what might be in the Future. Stay tuned.

And I'm learning about Twitter. NPR did a piece, Keep Your Tweets To Yourself, today on Morning Edition that gave me a chuckle. I lost a follower today. She joined on Friday, I think. As I'm always curious who's interested in me (again, don't you folks have something better to do?) I clicked on her picture.

And quickly called over Susan (beloved wife, partner, ...) who commented, "Are we going to have people throwing themselves at you at conferences, saying they want to have your children?"

I doubt this will happen. Susan and I travel together now more often than not and have you heard the horse story yet?

Anyway, I discovered I could do a search on @JosephCarrabis, NextStage, all sorts of things. Lots of 140 character discussions going on, questions and answer back and forths...none of them directed at me. Not that I know of, anyway. And people who know me know I won't intrude in the conversations of others unless invited.

More interestingly, many of those twitterings that I discovered in my searches demonstrate stress responses along the Tend-Befriend axis. The most familiar of these axes is the Flight-Fight axis. The Tend-Befriend axis often demonstrates itself in female social interaction patterns. Ha, folks, bet you didn't know you were all thinking like women.

In any case, I'll offer some responses here in (what I hope is) chronological order (LIFO)...

Machine Detection of and Response to User Non-Conscious Thought Processes to Increase Usability, Experience and Satisfaction - Case Studies and Examples

Tue, 05 May 2009 11:13:30 -0700

First thing, I'm on Twitter. It seems like a paranoid's dream, in a way. "Why are all these people following me?"

I don't update it much. I mean, don't you folks have better things to do with your time?

The title of this post, "Machine Detection of and Response to User Non-Conscious Thought Processes to Increase Usability, Experience and Satisfaction - Case Studies and Examples" is also the title of the whitepaper I mention in some recent twitterings and also demonstrate the power of in Why hasn't Marketing caught on as a "Science"?

First thing to note: This paper is my attempt at a scientific paper about psycho-motor, -emotive, -cognitive, neuro-muscular, - cognitive and related displines demonstrating our identities -- the "who we think we are" -- during information exchanges ("when we're navigating a website"). This paper isn't for you if the words in the previous sentence are unfamiliar to you.

Heck, this paper probably isn't for you even if you are familiar with those words.

Writings Elsewhere for April '09

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 08:00:00 -0700

Keeping the promise I made in Writings Elsewhere, my writing elsewhere for April '09 are:

All Business.Com

That Think You Do

Enjoy.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Upcoming Conferences:

teaching a Masters Class among other things at the iMediaConnection Brand Summit 7-10 June 09 in Colorado Springs, Colorado

Come on by and say hello.

Minimizing Mistakecule Probabilities

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 08:00:00 -0700

You know, I'm looking at the title of this post and knowing search engines will have convulsions over it. "Mistakecule"?

Well, as much as I know about search engines (see links below) and with my propensity towards persnickitiness...

I'll be posting elsewhere about the great deal of math work I've been involved in as of late...basically the entirety of 1Q09. The problems I'm solving are varied and fascinating...particularly because they all relate to game theory and something called groupoids and both have to do with (among other things) market predictability, economics, social networking, wom, ...

It also has applications in more interesting things like winning games of solitaire and such. As a matter of fact, I suggested to some folks that they apply these rules (I'm getting to them, don't worry) to solitaire games because they demonstrate the rules so perfectly.

The rules (there are only two. I love it when things are obviously that simple) deal with removing -- or at least minimizing -- the probability of making mistakes. These rules won't remove mistakes (I'm still working on that one. Anybody familiar with Nevil Shute's "No, it wasn't an accident, I didn't say that. It was carefully planned, down to the tiniest mechanical and emotional detail. But it was a mistake." from On the Beach?) and the mistakes that are still makeable can still be grand ones.

The purpose of these rules is to tend towards 0 the likelihood that a mistake will be made.

Let me give you some examples of what I'm talking about.

A Joke about Politics and Marketing

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 08:00:00 -0700

A received a joke over the weekend that made me laugh. Overtly, it's about politicians. Covertly (and perhaps to me and me alone) it's about marketing experts (remember, I'm not one).

A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.
The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, "If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, will you give me a calf?"
Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, "Sure, Why not?" The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.
The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg , Germany .
Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.
Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, "You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves."
"That's right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves," says Bud. He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then Bud says to the young man, "Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?" The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, "Okay, why not?" "You're a Congressman for the U.S. Government", says Bud.
"Wow! That's correct," says the yuppie, "but how did you guess that?" "No guessing required." answered the cowboy. "You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don't know a thing about how working people make a living - or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep. .. Now give me back my dog.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Upcoming Conferences:

teaching a Masters Class among other things at the iMediaConnection Brand Summit 7-10 June 09 in Colorado Springs, Colorado

Come on by and say hello.

Rationality at the Intersection of Ubiquity and Privacy

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 08:43:37 -0700

How many of you are familiar with Google's Latitude, a product that lets you keep track of where people are.

What kind of metrics come out of this? I don't know, that's why I'm asking.

I can tell you a lot about the psycho-cognitive and -emotional makeup of people who latitude themselves.

One of my areas of research is predictive analytics.

<AMPLIFICATION>
I probably don't use the term the way most others do. My usage comes from one of the think tanks I'm associated with. Predictive Analytics is the ability to take something and determine with a high degree of accuracy how well that something will do what it's suppose to do. This kind of predictive analytics is used everywhere from determining MTBF of helicopter rotors to how well marketing efforts will do in their target audiences.
Some people will hear its description and uses and think "trend analysis" and while I won't argue, I'd offer that predictive analytics is to trend analysis what saying "You can have any color you'd like in our portfolio" then showing them only black is.
Predictive Analytics is closely aligned to and sometimes confused with Persuasion Analytics. The latter, again with a high degree of accuracy, is where predictive analytics intersects with things like neuromathematics, neuroeconomics, neurothis-and-that.
</AMPLIFICATION>

First blush from all this; people who latitude themselves are people who want you to know where they are at specific times. Well, Duh! It's also great for people who want to know where you are at specific times. Well, umm...

The former isn't of any real interest. The latter, though. I know valuable domestic animals are radio-tagged so they can be quickly recovered if lost or stolen. I also know that there are transmitters small enough to be ingested without notice and powerful enough to be tracked from miles away.

So parents wanting to know where their children are...that I can accept so long as no privacy issues are violated. Spouses uncertain of their partners...

Yep, very curious to know what kind of metrics are going to show up from this.

And I'll bet both predictive and persuasion analytics forms are going to be used bigtime.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Upcoming Conferences:

teaching a Masters Class among other things at the iMediaConnection Brand Summit 7-10 June 09 in Colorado Springs, Colorado

Come on by and say hello.

Writings Elsewhere

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:00:00 -0700

It's been a while since I listed what I've published elsewhere. I plan on including one of these "Writings Elsewhere" at the end of every month.

I make lots of plans like that, you know...

Since I last noted what I've published elsewhere...

CBS concurs NextStage's Findings -- I think

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 08:00:00 -0700

I got a note that CBS Sunday morning a few weeks back did a segment entitled "In Good Company". It was about companies that treat their employees with...umm...dignity. Respect. Integrity. Like adults.

Whoa!

This dignity/respect/integrity/adult thing transcends the entire work culture -- language to promotions to guitar strings.

Naturally, these employees like working at these places. I'm not surprised by these results. NextStage found out that not only do happy workers make happy companies, we also learned that happy workers make happy company clients, partners, customers, ...

I wrote about this in both "Happy Companies Make Happy Customers/It Pays to be Nice" now on AllBusiness.com and Happy Companies Make Happy Customers/It Pays to be Nice.

I do like it when different researches agree. Kind of.

Please contact NextStage for information regarding presentations and trainings on this and other topics.

Upcoming Conferences:

teaching a Masters Class among other things at the iMediaConnection Brand Summit 7-10 June 09 in Colorado Springs, Colorado

Come on by and say hello.

Nothing New Under the Sun: Flickr meets Jackie Vernon

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 08:00:00 -0700

I've noticed an increasing number of television news shows are encouraging viewers to send in their photos about news events. There are many methods of doing this and the one I remember is Flickr. I know I can be found on Flickr, showing no one is safe, I guess.

Interesting site, Flickr. Someone told me that they found my favorite restaurant in the world, Three Chimneys, on Flickr. Very nice.

But you know, I didn't particularly enjoy my neighbors slide shows when I was a kid. Nor home movies. Yeah, some were funny, a few were interesting, most of them were boring unless you were into family dynamics or anthropology.

So I spent some time on Flickr being curious and I remembered Jackie Vernon's routines on The Ed Sullivan Show and elsewhere, particularly the routines where he'd be making believe he was talking you through a slide show of a vacation. There were no slides, he just had a clicker in his hand and he would talk as if you could see exactly what he was showing you.

Gosh, those were funny.

I wonder what Jackie Vernon would think about all the photo sharing services available now. Maybe he would pull a Woody Allen on them, taking a bunch of the images and doing a What's Up, Tiger Lilly?, adding comments that would crack you up.

Anybody know a site that does that? I mean, if I'm going to be looking at the vacation and family shots of people I don't know, I might as well laugh, right?

Branding in Online Video, Watermarks and Product Placement (responding to Tex's comment on "Branding in Online Video, Again")

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 08:00:00 -0700

Frequent reader Tex commented the following on Branding in Online Video, again:

I think one of the values in watermarking a brand into video is that it cannot easily be removed after 'recording' in the way a commercial could be clipped. Assuming the before, after, and 'going to black' portions could be clipped, is there an effective way to work a brand into video that will not turn off viewers (by placement, timing, or other)? Maybe during the non-contact portions of a Jackie Chan movie or the G-rated portions of a hacker flick?
Is product placement a similar turn off issue during demanding story segments?

I responded "Tex,
"Long time no read. Thanks for reading and commenting.
"You make excellent points and I'll offer that your points are from the Brand's standpoint. I tend to work from the consumer/customer/client/audience's standpoint.
"That considered, I think the two stands can work together, kind of both shining their lights to truly illuminate the goal.
"I think you're inviting me to do a post on this topic. Give me a few days and, if you don't see a response via post to this discussion, ping me and let me know.
"Good thoughts you share, these."

The rest of this post is my response.