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The only reason to share a bed

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A fun segment from a great piece on sleep research:

Research studies consistently find, he writes, that adults “sleep better when given their own bed.” One such study monitored couples over a span of several nights. Half of these nights they spent in one bed and the other half in separate rooms. When the subjects woke, they tended to say that they’d slept better when they’d been together. In fact, on average they’d spent thirty minutes more a night in the deeper stages of sleep when they were apart. Randall cites the work of Neil Stanley, a sleep researcher at the University of Surrey, in England, who likes to say that there’s only one good reason to share a mattress.

-New Yorker

Sounds about right. :-D

My Instapaper Reads of the Week – Feb 20, 2012

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A summary of top articles I’ve read over the past week.

Big data

Other business articles:

Other articles:

My Tools
Longform.org Logo Simply stated, Longform.org is one of the best sources for high quality writing, curated and updated regularly with popular recent articles as well as topical and relevant articles from years past.
All of the above articles were read (or listened to) by using InstaFetch PRO, the premier Android app for integrating with Instapaper, the service that allows you to read articles later. The articles are formatted in an easy to read style that has allowed me to put off making an ebook reader upgrade. The single feature of having any article read to me made the pro version worth it.


Lessons From Everywhere: Business Tips From Salsa Dancing

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Have you ever suddenly had an insight in an area completely unrelated to the activity you are currently participating in? For me, this recently happened one evening while out salsa dancing, where I had an insight about leadership. I am no pro, having only taken a few salsa classes here in Boston, and gone out social dancing a handful of times. I’m also currently working at an awesome startup, and have worked as a management consultant advising multinational businesses down to small family owned businesses. I believe some master salseros – and business veterans – would believe these points to be true.

  1. Weak leaders simply cannot be followed - In salsa, the lead is the male1 and he directs the female through dance patterns. Initially, I was so concerned with getting moves right that I would sometimes do the correct motions, but often not with any force, or in jerky motions to catch up to the beat. No woman wants to be lead by a “limp fish” handed lead2, and will have no idea where you intend for her to go. Weak leadership is bad, but the opposite is the same – being overly forceful in your guiding movements will lead to a shoulder dislocation when spinning a woman around. Exceptions aside, too heavyor too weak leadership does not lead to a happy or motivated team. In either case the followers will be looking to move elsewhere.
  2. Find people who are looking for what you are offering, and try to approach them in the proper setting - This is not always true but I must say I love salsa culture because people come to dance, not pose, as it is in many other types of clubs. Finding a dance partner is easy, and when turned away it is often ends with an “I’m sorry” or a similar response. Maybe this has more to do with the approach – respectfully approaching someone from the front with a smile and an open hand, as opposed to jumping on a woman from an angle she can’t see you in a dark club. As I look at my startup’s marketing data the same occurs – our prospect conversion rates vary greatly based on the channel and context. Try to meet people where and when they are looking for what you offer.
  3. Get your reps in - Maybe I just am a slow learner when it comes to dance. I know I have stiff hips. But I need to and do take moments out all the time to practice moves on air. In some Latin cultures, the men  show up early on evenings of dance socials and practice with each other so they had their moves down when the women arrived later in the evening. Often startup success stories focus only on an entrepreneur’s big hit, but that’s not the whole story – many entrepreneurs have numerous failures or smaller wins early on. Don’t believe the hype – get out there and start training so you are ready for when your moment to perform arrives.
  4. Sometimes you have to just wing it - Dance patterns will go wrong and the worse thing you can do is over-analyze it. I’ve had moments where I fail or simply forget a move within a larger pattern and I stop. Cold. Guess how awkward that is for the person following my lead? It took some time but now I’m comfortable figuring out a transition or will just break off into some solo footwork until I can catch the timing. It is a pipe dream to think you will be prepared for everything. Every business challenge (and song/partner pair) will be different. Be flexible.
  5. Have Fun - People remember how you make them feel. Some of the best song/partner pairs I’ve danced to were ones where I botched half of my patterns, but laughed at it and my partner was smiling right along with me. If you take yourself too seriously, you’ll miss out on half of the fun. Learn to take the wins and losses in stride, and have fun sharing all of the moments with others.

Photo Credit: Latino/Chicano Student Association – University of Minnesota http://www.d.umn.edu/~ganen001/4230/client/salsa.html

 

  1. I recognize the hetero-normative statement, that’s simply the history of the the salsa culture. ↩
  2. I made that term up, same concept as with handshakes. ↩

2 Links to Explain Netflix’s Changes

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The people’s reaction to the announcement, in comic form: The Oatmeal – Netflix

The business issues that lead to the inevitable change in Netflix, as explained by Bill Gurley. This is how it should have been explained. Instead, you have the comic above. Above the Crowd – Understanding Why Netflix Changed Pricing

While I can understand Netflix not wanting to throw the content producers under the bus, there was clearly an opportunity to explain the change in a manner that anyone could comprehend. Sometimes a little transparency is better than smoke and mirrors.

3 Keys to Successfully Presenting Data

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Hockey Stick Chart

What every startup presents as their growth trajectory. Also, the human population since 1300 A.D.

I’ve been in a data intensive role in just about every work environment – a management consultant to large companies, a political campaign, a nonprofit, and for-profit startups. In many of these environments, I get labeled as a “data-jock” or “numbers-guy”, a distinction that should not be, well, so distinct. Everyone should be involved in data analysis in some way. Why? Because if you are not comfortable with numbers, you will never know when someone is giving you the wrong ones.1

With this in mind, here are some simple tips to take the data you are presenting to the next level. This may be forehead slap obvious to my occupational peers, but as I said last paragraph, everyone should get to know this. I can say that in general when these three tips are followed, it leads to better run meetings, better action taken from reports, and a greater recollection by your audience of what you just poured a bunch of time into creating. This holds true across all areas I’ve worked in.

Don't make it this hard to find your anchor... and, well, the rest of your boat.

1- A fact with no anchor has little meaning - Never assume that anyone knows what a given piece of information means because it is very often relative. This is a pet peeve that I see most often in journalism. If I’m told that the “crime rate is set to surpass 14% in 2011,” then I should be told what the crime rate was in 2010 or the information is near meaningless. The 2010 number is the anchor – my perception will be based on that. Knowing the 2011 number alone is a nice to know statistic, but how would that help us effectively adjust the local police budget? Many a psychology study has shown how terrible humans are at understanding large numbers and assessing risk. If you are going to take the time to measure and report something, you should put the effort into making it worth everyone’s while – provide an anchor.
Cheesy way to remember this – Let no ship sail without an anchor.

As a follow on – do not present any data that changes without at the very least spending some time thinking about why the change occurred. Depending on the audience some may want a definitive explanation. I’m of the camp where saying “I don’t know” when you really have no idea is a good thing. That said, there is no reason to not come to the table without at least a few hypotheses.

Disgruntled Cat

You can also plan to present to this disgruntled cat. Would you dare waste its time with frivolous data?

2 – Make sure your data passes the “so what” test - A change in a data point alone does not make it noteworthy. If the amount of times your company is tweeted about goes up, does it matter? Maybe, maybe not.2

Consider Dell Outlet, who launches special limited time deals via Twitter and has made millions directly through the deals. At first they probably defined the value of tweets as a function of the amount of clicks back to their site. Then, they compared that new traffic’s conversion rate (sales) against general web traffic and made a business decision to commit to Twitter as a source of increased sales volume. But that only happens if that Twitter traffic makes up a meaningful amount of their current or future revenue (the “so what”). However, what if the tweets are all cheeky comments with no links to track,  and their only way to measure conversion is a “where did you find us” question a customer answers in a survey after making a purchase? In that case it is much harder to tell if there is any value to additional tweets, and figuring out what style of tweets work is very difficult . The point is not that you need to track everything, but at some point that data point you are reporting (total tweets with #delloutlet) better have some sizable effect on the business, or soon become one, if it is going to be reported.
Cheesy way to remember - Imagine you are presenting your data to a disgruntled teenager. Their first question: “so what?”

3 – The data are not the story, but they better be a part of one - This was taught to me early on in management consulting. Anyone can create a series of charts – the value is in the story. Besides, if all you are is a number collector you should plan on your role being automated.

Placing facts within the context of a story makes everything more tangible and memorable. The order in which you display information can sometimes make or break a presentation. Provide an unsubstantiated point too early and it derails your entire meeting. Even worse – it may distract your audience, causing them to mull over it silently, missing everything else you are presenting until you reach the point where you answer their question.

Bedtime story

"The Big Bad Wolf ran out of breath on the brick house. Oh, wait, that's after he already blew two down"

Note that every case is different, and the appropriate sequence may change with the audience. This holds true for reports and dashboards too – while it is often necessary to put the most important data first since people will scan them, give them some way to find out how the data are constructed and how they fit into the big picture. Some stories save the big moment for the end. Other times, you have to give all the big points in the beginning, and work backwards until time runs out. The bigger point is to take the extra time to give a logical, structured sequence of information based on your audience.
Cheesy way to remember - Both good and bad bedtime stories put you to sleep, but with good ones you stay awake long enough to hear the story through to the end.

In all, good data presentation – be it in a conference room, a lecture hall, a spreadsheet, or a 30 page report – requires taking steps beyond simply listing the results of calculations. There are certainly some items I left off this list, and maybe a later post will cover them in more detail. Some things I may take for granted but don’t think are so mission critical, again depending on your audience and medium. For example, I did not mention how important it is to accurately label charts because that should be a given, but also because no matter how well they are labeled, people will often not take the time to read the labels anyway since asking you to explain them is much easier for them to do. So keep plugging away and don’t be discouraged if creating a meaningful presentation gets hard. With enough effort, you can be a stud at presenting data. Building a reputation as someone who creates efficient, thoughtful, organized and useful work results sounds pretty good to me.


Credits:
Disgruntled Cat: Tomi Ungerer: Pas de baiser pour maman, 1973
All other artwork in this piece are owned by rights of the creator. Creative CommonsAttribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

 

  1. I envy people who can just read a person and tell they are providing incorrect information. For the rest of us, the only way to know is to have a sense of things yourself. ↩
  2. I mention this primarily because of the significant growth of spam and astroturfing on social networking sites. When 5 fake accounts all retweet your post, is anyone besides other bots reading it? ↩

Hacking For A Cause: My Experience at New England GiveCamp 2011

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Team Boston Women's Fund focused on the task. Credit to newenglandgivecamp.com

It is not often that reading a blog post leads to an amazing weekend, but that’s exactly what happened to me. In the summer of 2010 I read a blog post recapping New England GiveCamp, where developers and designers spend a weekend helping nonprofits with their technical issues. I am always looking for volunteer projects that give that tangible sense of accomplishment, and that blog post, which I am at a loss to find, had me sold. I immediately started following @NEGiveCamp on Twitter, and was the second volunteer to signup once registration opened. And with that, the adventure began.

Over the weekend there was a steady stream of presentations, food and fun – and intense work – but more on that later.

I was originally set to be a project leader, with two developers working “under” me. Unfortunately, on Friday evening things dissolved with our assigned organization and we ended up without a project. While for some that would mean packing up and calling it a weekend, for me it was just the beginning. One of my original team members, Ryan, was scheduled to lead a session on WordPress at 10pm, and before he could leave the classroom another project had snatched him up.

By Saturday morning I was restaffed. My other team member Patrick and I made rounds of other projects in need, and both landed ourselves in separate projects that were in need of an extra hand.  The interview process was pretty simple:

me: “Hey – do you guys need any help?”

Usha: “Well, yes, do you know any WordPress?”

me: “Yeah I know a good amount.”

Usha: “Great, we could use you.”

That’s only a minor simplification. Within moments I was plugging away at adding the logo and a donation button to the page header of the new site.

I joined the team helping Boston Women’s Fund, a local nonprofit focused on supporting programs that enable, among other things, women to be leaders. Our task? Revamp their entire website, which had not had a serious refresh since 2003. Yes, that means a layout done entirely in HTML tables, and no content management system, meaning every little website change was being hardcoded by their Technology Consultant, Janis, who was BWF’s representative for the weekend.

I have to commend the staff of BWF because they had their ducks in a row. A number of project teams were stuck defining their projects well into Saturday afternoon. Janis provided us with both a thought out information architecture spec and a layout to follow. The layout was more appropriate for a newsletter, but it was plenty to guide us on styling and design. Including myself the project team included 4 developers and a designer, an extreme luxury at GiftCamp. (Seriously, we may need to start a designer recruitment campaign for NEGC2012.)

Everyone had their role, and then some. The devs took on various tasks to hack the selected WordPress theme to fit the specification. Mike was adding a sitemap and modifying the page structure, Milan was working on the homepage slideshow, Usha was busy adding some custom code to the sidebar, and Szu was making it all look good. My primary task was to take the content of the old site and integrate it into the new site following the new information architecture.

None of us were elite WordPress pros, and we came in with our own biases. One example of this was that our project leader, Usha, was more comfortable working with the command line than a wordpress editor window. When anything needed to be changed her first instict was to dive into the PHP source code and make changes. Meanwhile, others of us with more WordPress experience knew that before you do anything custom, check to see if there’s “a plugin for that.” A perfect example of “there’s a plugin for that” comes from an FAQ page I made. The FAQ link on the old site linked to a PDF file. We OCR’d it to extract the text, but then as I started to simply paste the text in it came to me that coding these links and maintaining this page would be a nightmare. To the rescue comes “Q and A“, a plugin that makes an FAQ hierarchy easy to manage – each question is a custom post, and you can add them to categories. Inserting a category is as easy as inserting a short single line of code into any page or post. In addition, it throws in a little jQuery fanciness to make the questions collapsible.

We wrapped up around 2pm Sunday with full stomachs and a nearly completed website. We’ll spend some time over the next week tightening up some final pieces and transferring the site over to an appropriate web host. (I will post an update when the new site is live.)

In all, it was a great weekend and I’d work with any of my team members again in a heartbeat. The changes brought the Boston Women’s Fund website up to date, and dare I say we did so with some style. We hope that the new website will help Boston Women’s Fund raise more funds and draw in more supporters. At the least we have made them that much more efficient at creating content that will engage the constituents and volunteers they hope to reach. Thanks for the fun, Mike, Milan, Szu, and Usha. We were a great team.

Some of the best parts of GiveCamp:

  • All-in attitude – On my team in particular, we were an all hands in, ego-less machine. And that attitude was inter-team, if anyone had expertise they were just as passionate in stepping aside to help another project team.
  • Great development environment – It is not often that I can find such focused hack events. I know many in the Boston scene are trying to make that happen, but this many people cranking out with this level of focus, friendliness and purpose is a rarity.
  • Impressive coordination – Jim O’Neil and Kelley Muir were did an outstanding job of really making it all a seamless affair. Even with my original project team changing we all ended up being able to make meaningful impacts. I cannot understate how impressed I am at how they brought so many individuals together to make something special.
  • Amazing sponsors – can’t go without saying this. Microsoft, among others, spoiled us with their facilities and gifts. There was well over $1,000 in prizes given out over the weekend. Local businesses gave us reason to try their venues (Rebecca’s Cafe’s butternut squash ravioli was stellar and Kickass Cupcakes teased us with a massive variety of cupcakes – it was too hard to choose just one!). The environment was completely set so that the volunteers could focus solely on completing projects, and have a little fun – or a whole lot of fun – in the process.
  • Outstanding results – we were there to help nonprofits on technical issues they face so that they can focus on what they do that makes them awesome. Some organizations left this weekend with their first website, others with revamped database systems, and others with even more complex solutions. Even the GiveCamp website was redone as a project, and it now looks great (My project team was one of the new homepage photos, I shamelessly took it and am using it here). It was great to see the nonprofit representatives stick it out with the devs and the camaraderie was at a high the whole time. The gratitude that was shown by the nonprofit organizations and the excitement shown by the volunteers was simply too much for words.

My advice – follow @NEGiveCamp and get the jump on signups for next year. It is a weekend you will remember. I hope that this article succeeds in my attempt to pay it forward. To the future volunteer that this article sways, be sure to capture the moment and share the experience as I have so the movement grows.

A huge thank you to Jessica Knox for reading a draft of this.

Open Source Dropbox and the Trend of Owning Your Data

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Image representing Dropbox as depicted in Crun...
Image via CrunchBase

Dropbox is a great file syncing service that I have used in both personal and professional environments. It can’t be beat for the ease of use – especially for those who either a) absolutely need files locally since internet access is not always available or b) are too old school to search for their files through a pure play cloud service. There is only one problem, and it is something that runs true with a large number of recent consumer internet hits: one is forced to trust their data to the cloud.

SparkleShare.org

SparkleShare - an Open Source alternative

One potential solution to this problem is SparkleShare – an open source solution that will imitate the solution Dropbox provides, but allow the data storage and service to be hosted locally or with your own hosting space. I can already see the corporate IT world loving this solution – if it lives up to its billing.

Taking a step back, with projects like Diaspora and now SparkleShare, tools are being made to allow people to reclaim their data. The real question will be: does anyone care? Will the person with 2,000 friends and years of fan page links, status updates, pokes, and private messages want to switch? Will they even understand what these projects will do for the privatization of their data? Will they even take the steps to make it happen? Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that we will soon need to create new identities for teens as they become adults, to hide the wealth of already public data of their wild youth. The next few years will certainly show as to whether a full paradigm shift will occur, where such oversharing is the norm and accepted in all circles, or if we will “lose” a generation of potential supreme court justices like in the 60′s & 70′s.

No More Facebook Like and Browsing Privacy

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After reaching my wits end of seeing Facebook “like” boxes, I finally took it upon myself to see if there is some way to block them. (Warning, moderate internet competency needed)

My AdBlock Plus settings welcome all ads, and block the one I don't "like"

It turns out the great Firefox plugin AdBlock Plus can come to the rescue and prevent the “like” box from showing up at all. I am against using adblocking for all the internet (free website producers need to eat). However, for specific instances, like when I see my friend list on random sites, there needs to be a line drawn (even if within an iframe). I adjusted my AdBlock settings to allow all ads, and only block the custom commands needed for the Facebook like fix.

That said, I can only imagine who is winning the competition between Facebook and Google for how much personalized browsing information can be owned. Sites rushed in droves to Google Analytics, giving Google all the detail needed so long as a user is logged in. Now Facebook does one better, by doing the same tracking (though giving little back to the site owner), and collecting an assessment of page preferences.

Since I prefer my website analytics to be my data first, I use Piwik, a great open source website analytics tool that has an interface not that far from what one sees with Google Analytics. And when browsing and I want to not share my history with the hundreds of ad networks that may or not have scruples, I use the also great Firefox plugin Ghostery. I make sure to enable Piwik.

CyberChimps