Group items tagged

"Gamification is the process of applying game theory to everyday life - including business life."

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project fielded a nationally representative phone survey about the social and civic lives of SNS users and reported the findings in June 2011 in a report entitled "Social networking sites and our lives."1 During the phone survey, 269 of 877 original respondents who were Facebook users gave us permission to access data on their use of Facebook so that it could be matched with their survey responses. We partnered with Facebook to match individual responses from the survey with profile information and computer logs of how those same people used Facebook services over a one-month period in November 2010 that overlapped when the survey was in the field.

Recommended by Luc Glasbeek at the 2014 Autumn workshop

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.

n today's digital era, governments across the globe are amassing larger amounts of data than ever before. Some of this is structured data such as census records, phone numbers, addresses, and any information that can easily be entered into a database or spreadsheet. And some of it is unstructured data, or harder-to-analyze information such as emails, documents, web pages, photos, and videos.

As automation technologies such as machine learning and robotics play an increasingly great role in everyday life, their potential effect on the workplace has, unsurprisingly, become a major focus of research and public concern. The discussion tends toward a Manichean guessing game: which jobs will or won't be replaced by machines?

Teaching computers to understand casual, contextual conversation in every language and accent is key to this quest to normalise our interactions with computers and to place Google even more squarely at the centre of our lives.

Jaron Lanier - who pioneered virtual reality - stressed that we need to divide "artificial intelligence" into two different things: -the engineering and the science on the one hand -the storytelling about it, the narrative that we have about it, the fantasy life of it - perhaps the religion of it. It doesn't mean one is good and one is bad, but they're just different sorts of beasts.

"Gareth Morgan (Porthcawl, Wales, 22 December, 1943) is a British / Canadian [organizational theorist]], management consultant and Distinguished Research Professor at York University in Toronto. He is known as creator of the "organisational metaphor" concept and writer of the bestsellers Images of Organization.[1], Imaginization: New Mindsets for Seeing, Organizing and Managing, Riding the Waves of Change and other books on management. He is also well known for his writings on social theory and research methodology, especially through his books Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis (written with Gibson Burrell)and Beyond Method: Strategies for Social Research. The common theme uniting his work is that of challenging assumptions - to help develop new ways of thinking in social research, organization and management theory and practice, and, by implication, in everyday life."

Many of these quotes from Henry Ford are relevant for organisational learning and leadership. They seem to have withstood the test of time very well. Like the best ideas they are simple and self-evident.

"The company of the future - and indeed the company of the present - needs new instruments to adapt to a changing reality. The new generation of digital natives is progressively being incorporated to the world of work. We are talking about a generation that has lived most of its life within the technological revolution that has occurred in the last two decades. It has connected people, who spend more time on the Internet than in front of the television and who have lived with the emergence of video games. It is not to judge whether that is good or bad, it's simply real and nothing will change it."

Looking at the HiSocial offering, I can't help but wonder about unintended consequences. The digital natives are savvy and will naturally find ways of 'gaming' the system. If you simple reward actions such as visiting intranet pages or 'downloading corporate material', you are in no way increasing the sum total knowledge, helping efficiency or decision making. What's needed is reward that stimulates participation and qualitative contribution, not just transactions.

Social media is having an increasingly pervasive influence on both personal and professional life. But there is still widespread ignorance about the risks associated with using it. The Snowden revelations gave us the first insight into how our personal data is being "harvested" by both companies and governments, and not all of it for benign purposes. This (preliminary) declaration of digital human rights is something that perhaps we should all give serious consideration to supporting.

Finding useful knowledge nuggets amongst the torrents of data is a skill in itself. Creating insightful stories that bring the data to life is an emergent skill practiced by data journalists. An excellent article with lots of useful references for anyone who aspires to blend data analytics with storytelling.

Many companies are seeing that the future of deep learning is here, and that it doesn't require a lot of money or resources to take advantage of this new industrial science. IBM's Watson Analytics offers a freemium service that allows you to upload up to 500MB, and enables you to explore your own real-life applications for deep learning. Inputting Google Adwords or other sales metrics into this tool can help even startup companies find relational and predictive information in their data.

This technique is a way of gathering lessons learnt by encouraging project teams to talk about their experiences through stories. It builds and makes full use of this natural way in which we learn from each other and gain understanding about everyday life situations through storytelling

"Born and raised in Sweden, Anna Rosling-Rönnlund is a visionary whose main goal in life is to find systematic sense in vast amounts of data. As tons of data concerning the health and economic status of each country is collected annually, Anna's focus is to make this global public data easier to understand and utilize"

Camden propose to use AR to build augmented reality 'culture routes'."

Toby Walsh, an academic and artificial intelligence expert, believes AI will recalibrate our world and its certainties in the next few decades. As with all the best bits of futurology, it does come with a warning.