STEM for women not happening in Star Wars

In November 2016, NASA shared this short video as a tribute from cast from Star Wars to honor the women at NASA who serve as “engineers, aviators, research scientists, astronauts and more are making a future possible for humanity in a galaxy far far away.” This is somewhat ironic in light of what followed in the Star Wars franchise.

In December 2016, the Star Wars film Rogue One was released with a female hero at the center of the film, and there were a couple of female fliers to be seen among the rebels. But the role of scientists and engineers were all held by men. The protagonist’s father was the chief scientist leading whose team of engineers were all men. Even if the film makers didn’t want to go so far as making the protagonist’s mother the scientist, they could have at least allowed for some female representation on the Empirical engineering department, but no.

So progressiveness in representation on film still has a long way to go. But the good news is that in real life and in our own galaxy women are doing better than they are in the Empire with respect to such positions.
Read more in Star Wars: Not Yet a Galaxy of Equal Opportunity

Twitter tools, now with more buttons!

Marketers have recognized the great potential for spreading their messages through shared content on social media. Now Twitter is bringing out new tools for tapping into that potential alongside the new chatbots designed to increase user engagement.

On May 23, Twitter announced that “a new, customizable Direct Message Card” was available to “in limited beta to Twitter advertisers.”  Combining eye-catching pictures or videos with :fully customizable call-to-action buttons,” the card gives marketers a way to reach new customers and further engage existing ones, as well as foster shares of branded interactive experiences, particularly for brands that use chatbots.

On June 13, Twitter further expanded the options for businesses to connect with customers through Direct Messaging with new buttons. As the Twitter blog put it, “ Now, businesses can attach buttons to messages to make it easy for people to take actions outside of the Direct Message conversation – like composing a Tweet, following an account, or opening a website within the Twitter app.”

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Cards, Buttons, and Bots (Tweet, Tweet!)

Location connecting social and marketing

Location-Based Social Marketing

For extreme introverts the great thing about social media is that you never have to see your connections in real life. But for people who like to actually interact with people face-to-face, as well as the businesses that seek to get people in a physical door, that can actually be a shortcoming. Location-aware social media can bridge that gap between the virtual and physical.

Location awareness is what distinguishes the Locye social media platform. It allows users to “observe social activity at real-time hotspots and places of interest worldwide” and to post content that those nearby can see. For those who don't want to give too much away, there is an option to post anonymously. Users can also select whether they want their posts kept up for just a day or for a virtual eternity. 

Locye's Founder and CEO, Sajjad Mustehsan, discussed the platform's potential for marketing with me. He said that it “will soon be offering business-to-consumer marketing capabilities” with three defining characteristics:

Read more in Location-Based Social Marketing

The problem of visibility in today's complex supply chains

Supply chains today are integral to building a competitive advantage. As they grow in complexity, those who manage them acknowledge that they do not have as full visibility as they should. Technological solutions can point the way to more visible, better managed, and more efficient supply chains that deliver better value for companies and their customers.

While there is wide variation in the supply chains of various businesses, there are still some identifiable trends. The 2017 GEODIS Supply Chain Worldwide survey (PDF) delves into some of them. The report draws on the responses of 623 professionals in 17 countries from various functions related to the supply chain, including finance, operations, marketing, strategy, IT, and management.

The majority (67%) of people surveyed in a position of supply chain leadership rank as C-Level or top management. This does appear to play some role in successfully strategies because businesses in which that position is help by “a middle manager seem less profitable.”

The top concerns for those who responded to the survey were, not surprisingly, “containment of their costs (32%).” That fits with their awareness of dealing with “global competition (28%).”  However, more than half (57%) reported that they see “Supply Chain as a competitive advantage, enabling the development of the company and not” merely an area in which to reduce expenses.   

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Today’s Complex Supply Chains Demand Visibility Solutions

Data Scientist Interview

Domingos Lopes is about to begin a new job involving machine learning at Google after having completed the NYC Data Science Academy 12-Week Data Science Bootcamp. He came in with a strong math background, having earned a PhD in that field from NYU in 2016. After deciding that he did not want his job prospects to be limited to academic settings, Lopes decided that the best course of action was to acquire data science skills. In addition to the technical skills like Python fluency, he expects to draw on the ability to communicate data insight and work effectively in a team setting as he embarks on his career at Google.

Read more in https://www.switchup.org/blog/alumni-spotlight-domingos-lopes-hired-at-google

Wait, what?

This is not a post on the popular book that bears that title. (I did write about that here:  uncommoncontent.blogspot.com.) This is my reaction to the number a billion that sounds impressive but is really completely meaningless without context.*

When I shared a link today on LI, it offered me three other links to read. Among them was a FastCompany article, "Six Ways YouTube Is Primed For The Future (And Four Areas That Need Work)" Now read what it says for the fifth and see if you have the same reaction I do:

5. YouTube’s rebuilt algorithms have led viewers to watch 1 billion hours of video a day. YouTube is optimized for what it calls “watch time,” which encompasses what users view, how long they tune in, the length of their overall YouTube session, and so forth. Together, these signals help YouTube algorithms decide which videos a user is most likely to watch shortly after they’re posted and which will lead to the longest overall viewing period.

Do you get what's missing here? How many viewers are there? How many hours did they watch before the algorithms were rebuilt?

Without those two pieces of information, we really have no way of knowing how much of an advance one billion hours of video a day represents. Sure, it sounds like a lot, but we don't know if it represents the two billion people watching an average of a half an hour a day or one billion watching an average of an hour, or half a million watching two hours.

 We also don't know if the actual goal was to bring in more viewers or to keep the ones already watching on the channel for longer. That's a pretty important piece of context, as well, if one is to judge if the algorithms are accomplishing what the company intended for them. The article does refer to 800 million YouTube consumers of music but doesn't clarify whether or not that represents the viewers in total and if that number represents an increase over the number before the adjustment to the algorithms.

The bottom line is this: Don't be dazzled by numbers, no matter how large, that are presented without the relevant context.


*Related post http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2016/10/data-visualization-you-have-to-c-it-to.html
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2017/09/missingness-at-museum.html

Expanding comments with AI

The problem with human moderators is that they have human limitations that cannot keep up with a

pic from https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/img_uploads/Blog-Comments.jpg

huge influx of comments. That was the problem the New York Times faced in balancing reader comments demand with an editorial standard of civility for all published comments. Its solution was a partnership with , an incubator owned by Google's parent company, Alphabet.

Back in September, the Times announced the partnership in an article that set out the challenge faced by its 14 moderators tasked with reviewing the comments on the 10% of articles that do allow them. That alone amounted to 11,000 comments a day. As the article invited readers to try their hand at moderating, it was entitled Approve or Reject: Can You Moderate Five New York Times Comments?

I took the test. The official summary of my results were: "You moderated 4 out of 5 comments as the Community desk would have, and it took you 81 seconds. Moderating the 11,000 comments posted to nytimes.com each day would take you 49.5 hours."

That summation was followed by this: "Don't feel too bad; reviewing all of these comments takes us a long time, too." According to my calculations, however, the Times actually allows more time for their moderators. Given 14 people working 8 hours a day, the number of working hours each day would be 112, or more than twice the number of hours they said would be required for my rate of moderation.

That investment of so many hours is not something they regret, as they regard it as a requisite part of building up "one of the best communities on the web." However, they recognize that needs must dictate a new approach. That's where the machine assistance enters into the picture, enabling the same number of humans to effectively moderate a much larger number of comments and reduce the delay for reviewing time.

Flash forward to June 13, 2017, and the Gray Lady herself announces: The Times Sharply Increases Articles Open for Comments, Using Google's Technolog

Read more in How AI Can Moderate Comments, Eliminate Trolls