Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • The limitations of algorithms

    The limitations of algorithms

    Are algorithms getting too complex asks Forbes Magazine’s Kalev Leetaru in an examination of how the formulas that are increasingly governing our lives have grown beyond the understanding of their creators.

    With computer code now controlling most of the devices and processes we rely on in daily life, understanding the assumptions and limitations of  those programs and formulas becomes essential for designers, managers and users.

    Leetaru cites the Apollo 13 malfunction and Volvo’s recent embarrassment where a self driving car nearly ran over a group of journalists however there’s no shortage of more tragic mistakes from the consequences of software design decisions, the crash of Air France 447 over the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of 228 lives where two pilots who stalled their plane due to misunderstanding the characteristics of their cockpit  is one recent sad example.

    As business and government becomes more dependent on software, more risks will arise from managers not understanding the limitations of the algorithms they use in their business.

    Similarly a range of industries to exploit the quirks of algorithm driven markets are developing, the Search Engine Optimisation business designed to exploit quirks in Google’s search algorithm is an established example but more will come to the fore as people find ways to profit by anticipating price movements.

    However algorithms have a way to go before they fully take over, as Salon’s examination of Facebook’s news feed reveals a key part of the social media service’s deciding what appears on users screens are the decisions of around thousand ‘power users’.

    The news feed algorithm had blind spots that Facebook’s data scientists couldn’t have identified on their own. It took a different kind of data—qualitative human feedback—to begin to fill them in.

    While Facebook falls back on large focus groups to fill in the algorithm’s gaps, Uber has found a different problem in estimating driver arrival times where it’s currently not possible to accurately calculate estimated times of arrival in real time.

    “The best way to minimise time differential issue is to communicate statistically expected time, which will result in almost always being different than actual (i.e. wrong), but will be less different/wrong on average,” says Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

    Uber and Facebook’s challenges with their algorithms illustrate there’s some way to go before all critical business functions can be handed over to software but as automation becomes standard in many areas, not least autonomous vehicles, the limitations of programs and the assumptions of programmers will become apparent.

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  • Getting off the content hamster wheel

    Getting off the content hamster wheel

    We may have reached Peak Content suggests Kevin Anderson in The Media Briefing as media companies, social media services and sharing platforms flood the world with information, rendering a lot of what’s being produced by media companies effectively worthless.

    For publishers trying to make money from advertising this has been the reality for the last decade as the market has been spread thinner as thousands of new channels have developed and the established players have doubled down on their efforts to churn out content.

    To illustrate the content explosion Anderson cites Columbia Journalism Review’s 2010 feature The Hamster Wheel where Dean Starkman described the effect of media outlets’ focus on churning out content with a description of the Wall Street Journal’s output.

    “According to a CJR tally using the Factiva database owned by the paper’s parent, News Corp., the Journal’s staff a decade or so ago produced stories at a rate of about 22,000 a year, all while doing epic, and shareholder-value-creating, work, like bringing the tobacco industry to heel. This year, theJournal staff produced almost as many stories—21,000—in the first six months.”

    While that was bad enough new players were pumping even more content onto the interwebs as Anderson points out, in 2013 the Huffington Post put out 1,600 pieces a day from its 550 staffers and an uncounted army of unpaid bloggers.

    The vast bulk of what is being put out is trash, in Huffington Post’s case well web optimised garbage, that adds no value to readers and is only attracting fractions of a penny per article. The model, as both Anderson and Starkman point out, is broken and no-0ne is paying much attention any more.

    Fixing the broken attention model is what online travel site Skift are exploring as they rationalise their operations to focus on delivering more relevant content to their audience.

    Skift’s co-founder Rafat Ali described how the company refocused on its core purpose of informing travel industry professionals about their sector and stopped regurgitating syndicated stories and those of less value.

    We gave up chasing scale. We took out *all* goals on traffic on the site, for everyone. We could do this because we didn’t have tons of outside money pumping through our veins, and this was a useless pressure we created for ourselves in an effort to show the illusion of growth to investors. And since we weren’t chasing investors, we didn’t need to chase what they would consider scale. It was a vanity metric.

    We cut back on spending any money on getting users through Outbrain/Facebook/Twitter. We cut back on the number of stories we were doing on a daily basis, on chasing the tail on disposable news stories. We also cut back on syndicating our stories — in which we put in a lot of effort at the start, publishing on NBC News, CNN, Quartz, Fox News, Business Insider, Mashable and many others, to zero effect on our revenues — and also cut back on publishing useless filler syndicated stories we got from a third party syndication service.

    Chasing those ‘vanity metrics’ was killing Skift, just as it is for most of the publishing industry in the views of Starkman and Anderson.

    While we’re still some way off finding the model that works for online publishing, Skift’s stripping back to the basics seems to be an important step in finding what’s profitable.

    The biggest problem though facing the publishing industry is convincing consumers, or advertisers, of the value they are adding in a world of almost unlimited information. This is a challenge that many industries are going to face.

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  • Replacing Japan’s workers with robots

    Replacing Japan’s workers with robots

    Nearly half of Japan’s jobs could be done by computers, robots or artificial intelligence in the near future, says the Nomura Research Institute.

    In working with Oxford University’s Martin Program on Technology and Employment, the Nomura Research Institute examined 601 job classifications that currently employ 42.8 million Japanese.

    Using the Oxford University methodology, the Japanese researchers estimated more than two thirds of the roles could be automated with nearly half of all Japanese workers being potentially replaced by computers.

    Previously the Martin program has estimated  47 per cent of the United States’ workforce and just over a third of Britain’s are vulnerable to similar changes. Anyone who’s visited or lived in Japan wouldn’t be surprised at the relatively high level of vulnerability given the degree of manual jobs still being done in Japanese society that were long ago lost in the rest of the western world.

    For Japan, replacing workers with robots isn’t a bad option given the population is aging force and the nation is at best reluctant to import immigrants to address skills shortages. It’s not surprising the country is probably the most advanced at deploying robots in workplaces.

    How this will work for an aging Japan that has to support an increasingly older population will be fascinating to see. For other western countries – or even China – facing similar pressures, the Japanese will be providing important lessons.

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  • Value versus valuation

    Value versus valuation

    “There are people who build media companies for valuation, then there are others who build media brands for value,” writes Skift c0-founder Rafat Ali in his account of how the business stopped worrying about raising venture capital and focused on bootstrapping the travel industry website.

    Ali’s story of how Skift’s founders gave up on finding investors, refocused their business and found revenues to bootstrap the organisation is worth a read for anybody starting a venture, not just a tech or media startup.

    Notable is Ali’s distancing Skift from the startup label, claiming it’s “a meaningless word that comes with too much baggage”.

    The story of Skift is an interesting perspective on growing a business outside the current focus on external investors, instead focusing on the value it adds for customers, users and readers. Just as Skift went back to basics, many of us should also focus on how we and our businesses add value.

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  • Silicon Valleys of the Twentieth Century

    Silicon Valleys of the Twentieth Century

    The rise and fall of industrial hubs is a topic that fascinates this blog and the excellent BBC and US National Public Radio series Six Routes to a Richer World discusses how countries as disparate as Germany, Brazil, China and the United States are carving their own paths to prosperity in the 21st Century.

    In the US segment, the show looks at one of America’s industrial centres of last century – Dayton, Ohio.

    The home of the Wright Brothers, Dayton also saw the invention of the cash register, air conditioner and even the self starting motor. In the early part of the Twentieth Century it held the most patents per capita of any US city and workers flocked to the region for high paying manufacturing job.

    Manufacturing, and research, is largely gone from Dayton today and the question posed is could the successful cities of California’s Bay Area follow a similar path this Century.

    Whether Silicon Valley and San Francisco fade will be a matter of historical forces that are difficult to see right now, but the likelihood can’t be underestimated.

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