Netflix Personas
My girlfriend and I share a Netflix account. By mail, this probably happens a great deal: a couple or a household of people share one account, all getting movies sent to them. Netflix held a contest that awarded $1 million to any person or team that could improve the quality of their recommendation algorithm by 10%. That is, given any particular individual's viewing history and the viewing history of every other person as inputs, can...
Encouraging Words
People don't set out to do things that are hard. Usually they don't. It's not normal behavior. People do things that are easy, and if they set out to do something difficult, they take it in small, manageable chunks, in an effort to make it easier. This is why I have trouble when people come to me with great ideas. The better the idea, the harder it's apt to be. I tend to err on...
Late at night, a police officer pulls over a car for going a little bit too fast. It's a regular traffic stop, and the officer doesn't work in particularly dangerous neighborhood. So, as far as the officer on duty is concerned, it's a pretty routine thing that he's been doing for well over ten years. And yet, he approaches the car with caution. As the driver rolls down his window, the officer is using all...
The Reputation
There's one aspect of the art community that's sorely lacking from other industries, and it's the reputation of the master. Was walking down the street with a friend of mine the other day, and he said, "Over here, behind this building, there's a painting on the wall. I'm pretty sure it's a Banksy." You hear this in art museums all the time. People refer to the work of an artist as a singular piece of...
The Simple Rule of Delegation
It's wrong to assume that business management principles can be applied to the problems of public education. First of all, a lot of business management philosophy is flawed; it doesn't work out in the business world. A lot of common sense in the business world that people take for granted is broken, but they don't know it because, hey, they're taking it for granted. And the reason why you'd take broken rules from one domain...
It's All Been Done Before
Read a book about social media marketing and you'll probably get a lot of the same old ideas. Here's a perfect example: if you have a hair salon, take "before" and "after" shots of your customers when they come in, friend them on Facebook, and then tag them in the photos. The idea is simple: you build a photo album of customers, and each time you tag one of them, each of their friends get...
Something To Worry About
It doesn't take too long to recognize that people respond to things that elicit fear. We're barraged with gobs of information, day in and day out, and we can't possibly acknowledge all of it. So we're selective about the things to which we grant our attention. And the things that are victorious are those things that make us uneasy or afraid. And so it is that everything becomes a problem. And not just a problem,...
The Universe Is Indifferent; the Internet Is Not
A couple of years ago, Google fundamentally changed something about their search results: the ones you see are based on who you are. If you have a Google account under which you do lots of browsing, try opening another browser or go to another computer where you're not logged in. Try doing a few Google searches when you're logged in as yourself, then as an anonymous user not logged in. It make take some trial...
Overachievers and 4.0s
The two seem like they might be mutually exclusive, don't they? Managing to get through four years of high school or college with a flawless GPA of 4.0 is an accomplishment. There's no doubt in my mind about that. Someone who works that hard to pull that off is definitely an achiever. But an overachiever? I'm not convinced. At the heart of the GPA (or SAT/ACT scores, for that matter) is the term standardization. I...
For the Worse
I've written several times before, and I still believe very firmly, that everyone ought to have a blog. (I'm not flexible on this.) The reason is meta-cognition. Yes, I'm aware that most blogs are and will continue to be exercises in self-indulgence on the part of the person writing them. That doesn't matter; the value doesn't lie in the content, or in the size of the audience, but in the act of writing. When you...