Group items tagged

For anyone interested in how to engage others with compelling stories, watch this talk by Chris Anderson, curator of TED Talks. TED's 'Ads Worth Spreading' initiative is an interesting development that takes many of the aspects of sustainable 'communities' and applies them to the world of engaging advertising. Anderson's premise is that the increasingly desperate 'buy me' approach will lose out to those who seek to build relationships with their ad dollars.

"Thinking is hard - yet barely a waking moment passes when we're not labouring away at it. A few of us may be natural geniuses, able to work through the toughest tangles in an instant; others, blessed with reserves of willpower, stay the course in the dogged pursuit of truth. Then there's the rest of us. Not prodigies and a little bit lazy, but still aspiring to understand the world and our place in it. What can we do? In Intuition Pumps, Daniel Dennett, one of the world's most original and provocative thinkers, takes us on a profound, illuminating and highly entertaining philosophical journey. He reveals a collection of his favourite thinking tools, or 'intuition pumps', that he and others have developed for addressing life's most fundamental questions. Along with new discussions of familiar moves - Occam's Razor, reductio ad absurdum - Dennett offers cognitive tools built for the most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, consciousness and free will. In his genial style, Dennett guides readers around the pitfalls in arguments, and reveals easier ways to better understand the world around us and our place in it. An enlightening and practical store of knowledge, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking will teach you to think truly independently and creatively."

Following Richard Wallis' presentation at the KIN Winter Workshop, here is a great example of how open linked data can add value, managed by LGID

This blog was initiated following a KIN WEB 2.0 Roundtable event as a way of sharing items relating to that topic. Any KIN members that would like to participate in adding entries to this blog, email me and I will set you up as an author

Google Sheets is getting smarter. After adding the machine learning-powered "Explore" feature last year, which lets you ask natural language questions about your data, it's now expanding this feature to also automatically build charts for you. This means you can now simply ask Sheets to give you a "bar chart for fidget spinner sales" and it will automatically build one for you.

Michigan State University has over 450,000 alumni around the world. The school's University Advancement department sought to create a representation of alumni and donor sentiment and likelihood of philanthropic engagement based on data gathered from social media. However, these analyses often took weeks to process, limiting the school's ability to gather valuable insights in a timely manner. This case study describes how MSU leveraged business intelligence and predictive analytics to gain deep insight into an individual alum's potential to give, resulting in the following positive results: -An annual ROI of 55% -An average annual benefit of $34,434 -And more The case study purports to show how organisations can identify new opportunities for revenue generation by embracing a BI and predictive analytics strategy.

TED Talks Advertising adds value to a product by changing our perception, rather than the product itself. Rory Sutherland makes the daring assertion that a change in perceived value can be just as satisfying as what we consider "real" value -- and his conclusion has interesting consequences for how we look at life.

How to get started with Office 365. A basic introduction to some of the features.