#I read The Big Short after consuming a bunch of other related reporting so I can't speak to it as a beginner's guide | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

shoichee · 4 years

Note

hello! may i ask some tips about the instragram acccunts the GoM + kagami could have? like of sort of post, amount of followers, stuff like that THANK U and have a great day !!

THIS IS ACTUALLY HILARIOUS SINCE I BREATHE OFF OF INSTAGRAM LFMAO

[Headcanons]

Kuroko Tetsuya

HELP WHAT IF HE HAS NO PRESENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA TOO—

professional lurker

never comments on anything unless it’s to congratulate under a friend’s post or something like that

probably started using it because Ogiwara moved from letters and texts to just... instagram (technology advancements, jazz hands)

his account is on private, and he only lets people he knows follow him

all of his posts are pictures to commemorate something or just really wholesome group pictures

DEFINITELY has that picture of the GoMs at his birthday OVA

DEFINITELY also posted the big birthday picture taken at the end of the party

and also had typed very sappy BIG paragraph captions for both of these posts, talking about the journey and him being grateful… y’know, him being him

HIS ENTIRE COMMENT SECTIONS ARE JUST EVERYONE SOBBING AND KEYBOARD SPAMMING??? ONLY LIKE MIDORIMA AND AKASHI POST COHERENT RESPONSES UNDERNEATH

@kiseryouta: kuROKOCCHIIIII!!NEJWIEISK

@momoiowo: TETSUU (ʃƪ˘･ᴗ･˘) YOURE SO SWEET REEEE

@a_daikiii: i stg quit being so corny no one died yet🙄 and @momoiowo relax smh

@shin_chan77: I suppose I can express some form of gratitude for being in my life despite you being a blood type A. (insert a giant paragraph after this)

@4k4shi: This was very touching to read, Kuroko. I’m very glad that our… (insert him going down memory lane)

Murasakibara has no comment LMAO

his entire Seirin team are his hype men under his posts

his profile picture is literally the gray default blank head because he didn’t even set up a profile picture for himself

he has like 20 followers max or something?

8 posts? like, he only posts on special occasions or big events

his occasional stories are always comprised of Nigou and blurry Kagami pictures/videos running away from Nigou UH OH (courtesy of @dust-of-fandoms)

@tetsuya11 for his user handle

@dust-of-fandoms JUST MADE AN INSTAGRAM FOR HIM HERE!!

Kise Ryota

uses his instagram account as a portfolio for his modeling career

majority of his posts are actually pictures he managed to snag from his frequent model shoots

it looks SO professional… but then you look at his IGTVs and his reel videos

his reels are either short clips of mini vlog series he does whenever he visits the GoMs or when he’s recording his Kaijō teammates doing tricks and dunks

his IGTVs are either skincare tutorials, fashion advice… or just… unexplainable, out-of-context shitposts of Kise running away from what fans assumed “a green-haired man” or some “captain”

follower account?? 124k

who wouldn’t resist a hot model?

DEFINITELY HAS A TIKTOK I CAN FEEL IT

@kiseryouta with an official verification next to it

people either love him or hate him

posts a casual selfie from time to time, and people praise him for “being real” LMAODOA AND HE’S JUST STARING AT HIS PHONE LIKE “??? IMIG BUT I JUST FELT CUTE TODAY”

his captions feel fake LMAO like: “Wow! today’s so pretty today!” as he puts a selfie post OR “What’s your favorite game?✨” under a professionally-shot model picture that does not correlate with the caption???

has posted shitposts on his stories and his fans are utterly confused… only the GoMs get it LMAO

Midorima Shintarou

ONLY reason why he has social media is because Takao convinced him that he could let everyone know the daily lucky items for each signs for every post he makes

so for the first 2 months of having instagram he just casually posts a “daily horoscope” report(?) for the day

his content attracted in all the astrology fans and people who are devoted to tarots

and he’s CONFUSED.

… Takao may or may not have played a hand in messing with the algorithms to expose his account to bigger audiences

once Midorima finds out he’s MAD LMAO *insert Takao pain noises*

either goes down two paths: just casually continuing to post the daily Oha Asa predictions without interacting with anyone OR deleting his account and making a new PRIVATE one just for communication/lurking purposes

so he can honestly have 10k followers if he chooses to be a horoscope account or like 3 followers on his private, take it or leave it

maybe he has two accounts if he feels that having instagram has its merits

definitely has a shit ton of random stuff/posts in his saved collections

boomer energy, like… what’s a “reels” feature?? people talk to their phone camera and record that?? he’s squinting really hard and scratching his head

either has 356 horoscope posts on his “main” or like 19 posts on his private

has a rubber duck as a profile picture for BOTH ACCOUNTS HELP HIM

@oha_asa_ for his horoscope account or @shin_chan77 as his personal because he doesn’t know how to change his username (thanks, Takao LMAO)

Aomine Daiki

he doesn’t give a shit about instagram LOL

it’s MOMOI who handles his account because he doesn’t wanna bother with it LMAOO

she would tease him and try to “encourage” him to stop lazing around by taking pictures of him whenever he’s snoozing and posting it

but he’s so damn good-looking that his sleeping pictures got some traction with new fans

Aomine is still sleeping

his account also has pictures of him eating at Maji burger or at a café, and of course Momoi is the one snapping these photos of him

he started caring about it a little more once Momoi told him that he can post videos of himself doing trickshots and one-on-ones to potentially find worthy rivals over the internet and meet up

so now his account (videos, reels, IGTVs) are all riddled with basketball/small parkour footage shot by yours truly, Momoi

so his fanbase is split between thirsty people and people who genuinely admire him for his skills… but I mean there’s also people in both categories, anywho

he’d totally follow his favorite Japanese idols on IG if they had one

also would follow any NBA-related accounts/players he admires

has like 2.7k followers (but growing really fast) with like 176 posts of videos and random pictures of him

his profile picture is literally a picture of him sleeping by Momoi

@a_daikiii

Momoi Satsuki

LOTS OF REALLY cute, playful selfies, and a lot of them are used with cute filters from the Snow app

sometimes would post herself doing a really cute Tiktok dance while in her school uniform

she doesn’t post too much; she’s actually more into posting IG stories and making highlights out of them and then making highlight covers have a coordinating theme together

very aesthetic theme on her feed overall hehe

definitely uses her account to comment on other GoMs posts, often commenting something snarky on Aomine’s and Kise’s

actually has 1-2 IGTVs on the Vorpal Sword’s big game against the Jabberwocks

doesn’t have much of full-body shots/outfit pictures other than mirror selfies because Aomine refuses to take good pictures of her

only when she sees Kise or Kuroko is when she can ask either to be a photographer

she’s definitely gotten a few small collab offers from small businesses, but she usually ignores them because it’s not exactly her thing

her profile picture is just a selfie with a sketch-line cat ear filter

uses a bunch of emoticons on her bio, captions, comments, everything

⌒(ㅇㅅㅇ❀)⌒ or ☆⌒(＞。≪) or .₊̣̇.ෆ˟̑*̑˚̑*̑˟̑ෆ.₊̣̇.ෆ˟̑*̑˚̑*̑˟̑ෆ.₊̣̇.ෆ˟̑*̑˚̑*̑˟̑ෆ.₊̣̇.ෆ˟̑*̑˚̑*̑˟̑ෆ.₊̣̇. you get the picture

967 followers… that looks way too specific, but it’s somewhere around there; a lot of them came from Aomine’s account after they saw who’s been taking his pictures, and they wanna learn more about her??

around 40 posts?

@momoiowo

Murasakibara Atsushi

Himuro showed him how to use the app, but Murasakibara doesn’t find ANY USE FOR THIS LMAOO

he’d probably only get on it to look at food on the explore page and drool about the cuisines

keeps tabs on local places/restaurants/shops on instagram; those are probably the only accounts he’d follow tbh

it’s probably like ONE post and it’s an old picture of a dango on a plate he ate like 2 years ago

I have this image in my head that he has a really cute bento art as his profile picture?? can you imagine a Rilakkuma-shaped rice as his PROFILE PICTURE?

his bio is definitely: “hungry”

and that’s it

27 followers, and it’s literally just his Yōsen teammates, the GoMs and probably some other classmates of his

his captions are literally empty or 1-2 words

@oomaib0

Akashi Seijuro

only uses instagram because it’ll be beneficial for his company and to expand social networks, plus getting those sweet business deals and engagement

he doesn’t mind seeing really wholesome videos on the explore page though

when he wants to relax, a cat video melts his stress away

laughs to himself while he reads all the shenanigans underneath the GoMs’ posts

DEFINITELY loses a few brain cells seeing trolls and idiots on the internet… especially on controversial or political ones LMAO

he at first had to REFRAIN himself and take deep breaths before he just scrolls on, but he eventually got used to them and can now easily ignore them as easy as he breathes air

he actually enjoys shitposts and meme videos?? like he may not completely understand the meme trends sometimes, but he’ll still find it amusing enough for a chuckle

he ends up being the one who uses instagram the most? like Kise posts a shit ton, yeah, but Kise doesn’t really sit down and just scroll endlessly; Kise releases out content, while Akashi consumes the content

he reasons with himself that it’s to study his current demographics for the company, and while that may be true, Akashi just enjoys social media, plain and simple LOL

he does get to study the behaviors of all the generations using the platform, young folks and old folks alike, and it does get him excited in using his analytical skills to try to figure out people BEHIND a screen rather than those in front of him

it makes a really good challenge for him when he wants a good mental exercise

he has a post or two about his horses, his manor, and a video or two on him playing his violin?? but most are business-related, them being advertisements or business contracts/offers… things like that

his highlights are all about Q&As regarding the company, his background, his skillsets, etc. like an actual resumé

actually links current world issue cards/petitions on top of his company website; he’s quite an advocate

he actually doesn’t post about basketball because that’s something very close to his heart since it reminds him of his late mother… having that mixed in with his company-related posts feels wrong to him

27k followers, most of them are business-related accounts AND some are some followers his father bought for him without Akashi’s input to inflate engagement, etc.

@4k4shi… oh he thinks he’s SO CLEVER FOR MAKING THIS USERNAME LOL with the 4 being his jersey number and the 4s looking like As… AKASHI PLEASE—

his profile pic is like a professionally taken picture, nothing less for our king

his grammar and syntax are impeccable on social media; after all, he’s still being judged for how he carries himself even on the media

Kagami Taiga

mukbang guy… DEFINITELY

hot guy eating nine plates of steaks

IGTVs are filled with mukbang videos because Kuroko said he could make a living off of his appetite

HE COULD MAKE MONEY OFF OF JUST EATING? SIGN HIM UP.

on his posts, he posts dishes he makes for the day/is proud of and talks about the dish and ingredients briefly in the caption

that, or he has pictures of his new basketball shoes LMAO

or all of his basketball merch

HE’S DEFINITELY POSTED PICTURES OF LANDMARKS AND OTHER ICONIC PLACES HE’S TRAVELED TO (*cough* in America)

has a generic Jordan brand logo against a dark background as a profile picture

doesn’t have his face anywhere unless it’s in a mukbang video

279 followers or something

why do I have a feeling that he’ll accidentally blow up when Alex takes his phone to do a quick selfie on it?—

@taiga10

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geffbob · 4 years

Text

First short story I’m proud of

I was given a mission just this morning. While I am only A rank, this doesn’t change the fact that some of my missions can be dreadfully dull. See, when you start out, you’re put into C rank automatically. C ranks are given basic training, basic equipment and told “make a name for yourselves”. And while I did do just that, I didn’t think that I would make it all the way to A rank. I have killed an uncountable amount of monsters, I have donated a lot of treasure to the guild, I have fought and paid and watched quite a few good men and women die over the years, but being here in A rank makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something. And yet, whenever I get told “hey, your help is needed to beat a group of pigspawn over yonder” I always ask why a group of C ranks can’t do it. And the answer is always the same; “they’re too strong for C rank, too many for B rank, and it’s a lot cheaper to pay 1 A rank to do it”. Cheapskates.

So, I get up, get dressed, grab my equipment and get on my way. Kill a few lesser beings, receive a measly payment and go back to the guild common room to talk to a few of my friends.

The missions as of late haven’t been anything special, it’s mostly just observation and escort. However, over the past few days I’ve had to deal with quite a few farmers trying to move their equipment up north as quite a few southern settlements have become locations for a lot of magical activity. First it was the rift gates opening in Charonsville, goblin rampages in Hamlettown, and insect storms on the elven borders. While these seem mostly unrelated, recent intel has tracked these occurrences to a sect that’s working in the aera. Bunch of crazy fucking bastards.

A lot of morons do this, the amount of magic our world uses attracts a lot of attention. Attention mostly from higher beings. Whether these beings are malevolent or benevolent is a chance that not many people want to take, and so quite a few of them get scared and try to pray to the “bad ones” so they don’t get fucking slaughtered when the gods finally get bored of observing and want to come down to intervene. Not understanding that if you’re fucking praying to gods, they’re going to notice you first. And if they’re the type of gods that want to consume any and all magical life, then you’ve just become the first to die. The best way to stop this from happening, is to stop making them notice you in the first place, let the mage’s guild deal with them, I don’t want to think too hard about being devoured by a 500m long asshole with tendrils for eyes and whose shriek causes all your organs to fall out of your body. Just don’t let it come to this planet while I’m still living on it.

So, these recent attacks have becoming stronger and stronger. Recently there was a livestock transmutation, where a bunch of sheep grew 3 times in size and turned into “Sheekem” as the elves call them. They’re basically just ware-sheep. Big soft bastards that tore through a village and ripped about 8 poor villagers to shreds. A mage had to come in to stop them, as the local guard had no chance with their armour, and even he had some difficulty. The best way to stop sheekem is to pacify them, revert the transmutation so to say, but if they’re being constantly transmutated from another source, then there’s nothing you can do. So, this mage asshole thought it would be a great idea to call a storm down and zap the 3 into oblivion, and while that worked at first, the idiot forgot about the magical fires that start because of it. Completely obliterating the town hall and severely burning a few more people. So, while he without doubt saved the village, he didn’t realise how badly he cocked up until a bunch of angry townsfolk came out of the hall holding unconscious crispy children in their arms. Poor bastard is still rebuilding the village today and he probably will be doing so for the next few weeks. Mages doing manual labour, shocking I know.

These attacks were traced to one source. The aforementioned sept in the aera has been stirring up trouble. They’re trying to operate in secret, but thankfully the guild employs a lot of experts in demonology just for these occasions. All the trouble that’s been happening over these months are side effects of rituals being taken place, which is apparently what is happening according to this demonologist that I’m escorting. I had to look after the defenceless sod while I walk down south, and they would not stop talking.

“…So, the main thing to take away from this is that most of the people in the area have been evacuated. Which I think isn’t the best idea because it honestly causes a lot of panic and worry, which exactly what we’re trying to stop y’know?” -she looks up longingly at the clouds- “But at the same time, I feel like many people are glad to get away from violence. You humans really like living in your little settlements and I know you can’t stand to stay away from them for more than a few days at a time, but then you go ahead and go on vacations for months, what’s up with that?” -She turns to me quizzically- “Why do you do that? Why not just live in the vacation site? It’s a lot more fun that way because you can just…”

Oh. And she’s an elf. About 1.5m tall, still 50cm shorter than me, but I am wearing armoured boots while she looks like she’s dressed for the library.

She looks like a typical elf for the most part. Long golden hair, a green hairband, flower behind her ear which apparently doubles as a pen, she’s thin, wearing a white dress with light green leaf patterns on it. A brown belt with a set of tools that I have no idea what they could do. Long thin arms with blue painted nails, holding a brown leather strap book which she occasionally writes in by telekinetically using her flower/pen when she sees something that interests her. She’s wearing shorts that go down to her knees and look to be made of some elven material which I hear is “super soft” and “better than anything you humans can make”. And like most elves, she’s barefoot.

“Do all elves talk this much?” – I bitterly say. I’m already tired of her and it’s been 20 minutes

“Not all elves, in fact, some of us don’t talk at all. Like, they only open our mouths to sing. But singing isn’t uncommon with us elves, I mean, our language involves singing, but what I mean is we like to sing songs instead of sing conversations, y’know?” -she turns her head and looks at me- “Like how our conversations are ‘spoken’ by singing, but songs are different because they involve ‘MORE’ singing y’know? I mean, you’d have to be an elf to understand it because I doubt you would get it, you’re only human after all…”

Please make it stop

“…Anyway, the point is, you have to be extra careful when you head into this area, I know you think you’re sooooo cool by being A class and everything, but you’re not S class, so you can’t get cocky.” - She stops me and jumps in front of me, touching my chest- “You’re just here for observation, you come back, report what you found and then you might be able to go with the search and destroy team that will take out the sept. Don’t do anything stupid okay? Because I’ve read your file, and you really like using that big sword of yours to cut anything that you don’t really like.” -she finally noticed how I’m looking at her, and then glancing at my sword- “In fact, I don’t really like how you’re looking at me, can you stop please? Like, I know you’re probably a racist and everything, but you could really stand to be a bit nicer to me considering you’re with me for the next few hours…”

Please god

“How old are you?” -I ask

“I’m technically a teenager but I mean a teenager in your years is slightly different in my years because obviously we elves live like 10 times longer than you humans so I suppose I would say I am about…”

“how OLD are you?” -I interrupt

“56” -she replies, after a shocked pause

“So, you’re older than me?” “Yes, but also no”

“What do you mean?” “Well, I’m still a teenager in my culture, but I’m double your age in yours. So, you can decide how you want to talk to me”

“where did you learn common speech?” “I went to an all-girls high school in one of you human settlements, I studied with a group of teenagers and they taught me everything about how to speak”

Taught common tongue by teenage girls. Figures.

I look up. I wonder if it would be more trouble to kill myself or her

“So, explain to me again how these things are related, and briefly this time as I wasn’t paying attention last time” – I say bluntly

She turns to me, shocked and clearly angry “Bjar def forden góp human, you could at least pretend to pay attention to me”

I don’t know what she said, I don’t think I want to know

“Look. The first sign that it’s a sept was the rift gates. The sept has been forcefully creating gates to other places. If anyone starts praying to the gods, then the gods send their spawn into the world to ‘clear it out’ so to say, which in your terms means killing and consuming everything in the area until there’s a sizable space for the demon to walk through.” -she stops and looks at her book- “So, whatever created these gates, let a bunch of monsters out into this world which we need to find”

“Don’t rift gates appear randomly though?” “Yes, they do. Which is why we didn’t think anything of it at first. But then the other things that happened caused me to wonder if the gates weren’t random after all”

“How do you mean?” -I ask

“Well all the spawn from the original gate had a red star on the forehead. This could be just coincidence, but there’s a particularly annoying demon that lives within a star cluster close to this planet. It could be trying to reach this planet though a portal being created by this sept”

Crazy ass fucking cultists. I swear

“So, what about the goblins? They’re from this world”

“Yes, but they don’t usually frenzy en masse like this, goblins usually live underground and attack travellers that walk by. These ones were organized, picky, sadistic. They were clearly influenced by something.” “The sept?” “Most probably. We managed to evacuate the town in time, but the ones that were late were ripped apart and consumed. Goblins don’t usually eat human flesh, but these ones were either starving or possessed”

Charming. I didn’t hear anything about anyone getting eaten

“Insect swarms?” I ask

“Side effect. Look here” -she turns to a page in her book

“I don’t speak Elven”

“Can you do anything apart from grunt and complain? I was about to translate. You can look at the pretty pictures in order to entertain your monkey brain”

Never mind, I think killing myself would be faster

“Upon the formation of statues to Gar’Doth’Gun, the daemon we think it is, locusts in the area will begin to enter a frenzy as the residual influence of his greatness will enter their minds and possess their bodies, causing a metamorphosis, increasing their size and aggression. They will sting and strike until they are dead”

“That explains those poor elven wankers” “More humans were attacked than elves there. Thankfully no deaths, but some really need psychological help, you humans really have weak minds y’know? No elves needed help after that” “Us humans aren’t born with the ability to shoot flames out of our fingers like you elves” “Well maybe that’s because you’re inferior”

“Hey! we can use magic too” “Nowhere near as good as us”

I feel like I’m going to scream

“The Sheekem in the area were done differently. When you chant Gar’s name for a long period of time, he will try to enter your body. We’re fairly certain that the sept were in the area and trying to get him to enter, however, something went wrong. Either they chanted his name wrong, or were more likely, interrupted. The influence spread to the neighbouring farmlands and he possessed 3 sheep there. The cultists needed to escape and so the distraction of them decimating the city worked wonders”

“So why are these all linked?” “Here” – she says, turning to another page of the book

“What is that?” I say, a bit worried now “A map of this area. Take a look.” – she points to a point – “rifts” – she points to another and draws a line from the original location – “goblins” – another – “locusts” – another “sheep” - finally down south – “our next destination”

It’s a pentagon. The lines form a perfect pentagon.

She draws a star inside the pentagon, each point matching up perfectly with a point.

“inverted star, we’re headed to their final ritual. We need to stop them soon”

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cindylouwho-2 · 4 years

Text

RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, June 28 2020

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy! This covers articles, podcasts, videos and infographics I came across since the late May report, although some may be older than that.

I am currently working on Etsy search testing and a few new blog posts and pages for my website, so it may be a few more weeks before I get a new report out. In the meantime, if you have an questions, comments or suggestions, please contact me here or on my website.

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

Ecommerce sales are way up, but so are many costs, and delays in shipping are part of the problem. “...many of our merchants start preparing mid-year for peak-season volume, holidays. We’ve seen many merchants hitting and even exceeding their normal Black Friday and Cyber Monday volumes consistently through April, forcing them to adapt quickly for greater capacity.” UPS is charging high-volume customers a surcharge based on how much more they are shipping compared to normal times, and also for an increase in oversized packages.

Mail delivery is still slow in many countries. Canada Post hit an all-time delivery record with 2.1 million parcels on May 19, but may finally be getting caught up. [article in French] Shipping between countries can also be substantially delayed, in part due to the lack of air traffic right now. USPS is using sea transport for packages to some European countries. And USPS rates are going up for international shipping in July, due to the new Universal Postal Union deal. "Anyone who is a bulk shipper, your rates are going up".

A reminder that the US economy isn't suddenly going to stabilize in the fall; it’s likely to crash. The US is now officially in a recession. Many people are not going to have money for a lot of discretionary spending. Furthermore, some categories of items will likely drop in price due to company closures, supply chain issues and bankruptcies. That will increase competition at the same time there are fewer buyers for many types of items. Ecommerce sales in the US are projected to rise 18% this year, but it won’t be enough to make up for the loss of brick & mortar retail sales. “The apparel and accessories category is typically the second-largest in e-commerce, for example, but will only grow 8.6% as consumers shift spending away from discretionary, non-essential purchases.” Retail in the US is expected to be down more than 10% in 2020.

ETSY NEWS

Etsy has released an addition to the iOS app that will allow shoppers to use augmented reality to see wall art on their home’s walls. The Verge was critical of how long it took for Etsy to catch up with the competition, and the fact that it is not available for Android yet. TechCrunch went into more detail.

As mentioned last time, you can now add short, no-audio videos to your listings. Etsy is so big on this, they are offering listing credits and ad credits to sellers who upload 5 or more videos by July 6. As always, make sure you read the legal policies before you participate in this offer.

The Etsy Design Awards are back, with submissions due by July 15th. Note that they are only open to 38 countries, for some reason. There is a forum discussion thread with tips, and a podcast [audio & transcript] with previous winners.

If you sell any items for kids, you will find this trending items article from Etsy useful. Searches including “kid,” “child,” or “baby” didn’t go up as much in April as one might have expected, given the pandemic shopping bump, but puzzles were popular. They include some search terms: for example, there was a “250% YoY increase in searches on Etsy containing “jump rope” in April. Also, “while school may look different this fall, we’re already seeing an increase for school-related searches compared to the same time last year.”

Face mask seller ZhenLinen was interviewed on NPR [text and audio] about mask selling, and was even asked about the offsite ads fees near the end. They sold 31,000 masks while their event-supply business was in pandemic limbo; most of those sales were through Etsy. The good news articles about mask sales, & suggesting Etsy as a source of masks, are continuing, although some do mention slow delivery times and even undelivered orders. By the way, if any mask sellers are looking for new places to sell, Facebook finally caught up and is now allowing mask sales, ads and other promotions.

According to analysis of Etsy’s API data, May 2020 was Etsy’s best month ever. Remember that the API data misses things like sales of multiples, so it is not the most accurate source, but I don’t have any reason to doubt the statement is true.

Etsy stock went over $100 for the first time, before dropping as the rest of the market went down.

You have probably already seen Etsy’s statement on race issues after the recent murder in the US. “That’s why today we are announcing donations of $500,000 to the Equal Justice Initiative and $500,000 to Borealis Philanthropy’s Black-Led Movement Fund, as well as matching employee donations. We encourage our community to join us in supporting these important organizations. Etsy is built on a belief that communities have the power to change the status quo. Change is hard-fought, and we are committed to this fight.“

If you have your real name on your Etsy account, don’t attract any attention from the police.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

If you don’t really understand what algorithms are and how they work for search engines, you will want to get caught up here. Key to understanding: “An algorithm is not a formula.”

This is a bit advanced, but it’s a good explanation of how to figure out searcher intent in Google results, and then fulfill it with new content. [video, transcript, and downloadable form]

Linking from one page on your website to another can be an important part of SEO. It can also help you get more page views, if you link to new pages from your most popular pages. Creating internal site links on the same page through a table of contents [advanced, coding info] can even get you more links in Google search results.

Speed on mobile devices is also a big part of SEO as well as conversions. “a 0.1 second improvement in site speed resulted in Retail conversions increases of 8.4% and average order value increases of 9.2%.”

Bing made changes to its backlink tool, including the ability to see your competition’s backlinks. The option is part of Bing’s Webmaster tools, & allows you to analyze “similar sites”. Their Webmaster Tools now can also analyze your site for SEO errors.

A former Google employee is starting a new search engine, called Neeva.

Some SEOs recommend removing “low-quality” pages from your site to improve your overall rankings, but low-quality doesn’t necessarily mean pages that few people visit [text & video]. And short posts are not necessarily “low-quality”. If your page is mostly duplicate content, it is like low quality, but just repeating a few lines on each page is not duplicate content.

Google missed a few episodes of its Google search news YouTube post during the pandemic, but they were back on May 26 with an update. They’ve also finally released their webspam report for 2019. “we observed that more than 25 Billion pages we discover each day are spammy.”

Advanced content [video with multi-language subtitles, & text summary in English]: Google, JavaScript, & links.

Shopify sites have built-in blogs,and those blogs can help you get sales through SEO. And while we are on Shopify SEO, here is some advice on fixing technical SEO issues on Shopify sites. [the second is advanced content unless you know some coding]

While having an author page isn’t a requirement on any news/blog site, it might be a good idea anyway [text and video]. Content that is useful for readers is ultimately good for your site’s SEO.

Here is a history of Google’s PageRank, and what it still does for ranking.

Did the Google May core update really mess up organic search relevance? Some people think so. [I had noticed the Wikipedia drop but thought it was just for a particular search.] There may be more ranking updates underway right now.

Google plans on introducing user experience as part of the ranking algorithm, although it won’t happen before next year, and we will get 6 months warning. Search Engine Land lists the following elements: “whether the page loads quickly, if it’s mobile-friendly, runs on HTTPS, the presence of intrusive ads and if content jumps around as the page loads.” They add a bunch of technical advice, and the tools to follow up on it.

Do you find SEO confusing? Don’t worry - even the pros working for big companies make huge errors.

(CONTENT) MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

Updated infographic with the common social media image sizes used today. (Several of these get published yearly, because there are always changes.)

Is blogging still relevant? [TL;DR - yes] And if you want to write more interactive posts, here are some tools for that.

Video app TikTok made a lot of money in April, but is seeing competition from a new short video app called Zynn, which allows users to make money by watching videos and bringing in new users. However, Zynn has already been removed from Google Play store amid accusations of content theft. Instagram has a challenger called “Reels”, and even YouTube wants some of that TikTok traffic, so they are introducing 15 second videos. Meanwhile, TikTok is coming under closer scrutiny for its invasive tracking.

Every social network apparently needs to have their own version of Stories these days, so Pinterest has introduced a new version of Story Pins in the US. “Unlike Stories on other platforms, which are often self-focused snippets from someone’s life, Pinterest Stories Pins are designed as clickable content focused on sharing ideas. For example, Story Pins could offer a step-by-step guide to cooking a recipe or creating a craft project. A Story Pin could also offer ideas around how to reorganize your home office, keeping the kids entertained, beauty tutorials and more.”

Google appears to be imitating Pinterest with their new release, called “Keen”. You add items yourself but Google then attempts to find more things you are interested in, using AI.

If you are looking for some new tools to help with Instagram, Social Media Today compiled a list of 5 recent ones. They include image processing, templates, and analytics.

Twitter is beta-testing the ability to tweet sound files directly from the platform, instead of embedding links to other sites. The article notes that these may be more difficult to moderate than text tweets would be.

Two of the three parts of this article cover local businesses, but the middle part has some promotional ideas that mostly involve content marketing & social media. Nothing groundbreaking, but a decent list if you are looking for new free ways to advertise.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Semi-advanced - how to improve your Google Ads optimization score.

GCLID is short for “Google Click Identifier” to help track ads and conversions. You can learn more here. [Understanding this is useful for both your own ad campaigns and understanding other ads, such as the Etsy Offsite Ads program.)

Money coming in from social media video ads has increased from the lows in April. Facebook ads have improved the most.

New advertisers on Instagram will not necessarily have to link their accounts to Facebook any more. It may be linked to a campaign to “stop hate for profit” that calls for people to stop buying Facebook & Instagram ads during July, and which has attracted several big players such as Unilever and Verizon. Some companies are leaving all social media ads, or are extending the Facebook boycott until the end of the year. But as the first article points out, Zuckerberg’s complete control of voting means he can’t be turfed by a board just to protect profit, so a short boycott may not be the best way to get change.

Facebook published a new explanation of how ads work on the platform.

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING

For people who are new to Google Analytics: here are some things you should be tracking, as well as these, and some tips on finding source info for SEO work. If you want to improve your customers’ experience with the site, check out these tips. [There is some crossover between the 4 articles, but I think that those of you trying to learn more detailed examples of how GA works will find everything useful.]

What is a “session” in Google Analytics? This article includes screenshots & tips on changing their length.

You can get great keyword data from the Google Search Console - here’s how.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Online shopping has received a huge boost from the pandemic lockdowns, and big online marketplaces are now competing for new small businesses to fill the growing demand. Walmart outsold eBay in May, for the first time ever. Things are slowing down a bit, though: “buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS) had begun to “plateau.” BOPIS growth in May was 195% year over year, which was down from its April peak of more than 200%.”

Amazon is being criticized for allowing many prohibited items to be sold on the site, even through “fulfilled by Amazon”, so the items are stored in its warehouses. “Graham did not respond directly to many of our specific questions, including how many of the banned items that The Markup found had been sold, why the company had not noticed some of them for months, why some were listed as Amazon’s Choice, and why many were stored in Amazon’s warehouses for shipment. He did not respond at all to questions about why Amazon itself had offered banned items for sale. Most of the banned listings we reported to Amazon have been removed, although at least three have popped back up.” [emphasis added]

Amazon is now offering multi-channel fulfillment in the US; you don’t even need to use Fulfillment by Amazon to sign up. They’ve also introduced lines of credit for sellers, through a partnership with Goldman Sachs.

eBay is rallying sellers to object to a proposed Louisiana law that would force marketplace sites to verify the identities of higher-volume sellers in the state. The law was passed anyway, and takes effect July 1. Here are the highlights of the new law.

Now-fired eBay employees harassed and stalked the EcommerceBytes owner and her husband for months after eBay’s CEO at the time said eBay needed to “take down” the site & its owner.

Walmart now has ThredUp as one of its third-party sellers on the Walmart website. They sell second-hand clothing and accessories for women & kids, often famous labels. Sales are all online but buyers will be able to return things to Walmart stores.

Walmart has also partnered with Shopify, allowing small businesses to list directly on Walmart’s website through Shopify. This appears to be a limited initiative, as they only plan on including 1200 Shopify sellers by the end of 2020. Most analysts think this is a plan to compete with Amazon more directly.

In addition to its existing website, Target is now offering items on Instagram Checkout.

Shopify has been getting great media coverage lately, including this article suggesting them as an alternative to Amazon third-party selling, once the new “Shop” app gets some traction.

BigCommerce has introduced drag-and-drop design tools for its website builder.

Square has begun using rolling reserves to reduce its risk with some sellers. “In one instance, Legal Knock, a company that builds websites for law firms, told the Times that it never had a customer demand a refund for their work and yet Square kept $4,000 in reserve in May. Sean Weber, the owner, said he had trouble contacting the company and wasn't satisfied with its explanation. He even said Square blocked him on Twitter.”

Upcoming PayPal changes for US users include seller protection for some digital items, and not necessarily requiring buyers to return items to win a significantly not as described case. Remember that many PayPal changes start with the US and then expand to other countries; Canadian changes are here.

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

When thinking about customer returns, remember that a lower-than-average return rate is not necessarily your top goal. “You may ask, “why would a merchant want to increase returns?” It’s because they’re using returns as a growth driver. They’ve figured out, for their respective businesses, that a higher rate of returns actually nets out to an increase in sales and repeat purchasing. So much so, that the overall uptick in business far outweighs the increased costs of more frequent returns.”

Consumers are reading reviews more than ever, but half of this study’s respondents said that “‘too many companies’ are creating fake reviews online.”

Many people are tired of the “things are different” ads that have predominated, & want to see more ads showing people getting back to normal. “The U.S., U.K. and the Netherlands are primed for a jump in fashion purchases, with significant percentages of consumers in those countries planning clothing purchases in the next 30 days. The finding suggests that fashion marketers may increase their marketing efforts to reach consumers who are ready to buy apparel as lockdowns are lifted.”

We don’t know what the holiday shopping season will look like this year, so ecommerce businesses should be planning for many different scenarios.

Here’s an interesting overview of how some searches changed in the first few months of the pandemic. [infographic] And some of the shopping changes people made, especially Gen Z, may be permanent. “...younger consumers are shifting their habits faster than their older counterparts.” That report also states that “33% of these consumers have increased their online spending, for a net increase of 6%, versus 23% of consumers in older generations, or a net increase of 1%.”

Here’s more on the second-hand clothing trend that is hitting its boom years. “According to the report, secondhand goods are expected to make up 17% of a person’s share of closet space by 2029, up from just 3% in 2009.” Gen Z is a big user of Depop, which has a lot of altered and enhanced vintage clothing available.

MISCELLANEOUS

This article has inspired me to completely redo my website’s About page. Not yet, of course, but some day soon…

Speaking of websites, here’s a good list of dos & don’ts for a contact form.

eBay may be probing your computer when you visit, and that is not always legal.

Free Zoom accounts can’t set up encrypted calls/meetings, because “the firm wants to keep this feature away from free users to work with law enforcement in case of the app’s misuse.”

Finally in privacy news, Google is being sued for still tracking you in various ways when you use Chrome’s incognito mode.

#etsynews #search engine optimization #analytics #content marketing #customer service #ecommercetips #social media news

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skincarejesus · 7 years

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Hum Nutrition Buying Guide: The Good, The Bad, and the Meh

When I initially talked about Hum Nutrition’s supplements, I was less than positive. The price was extortionate and the products often made claims that they couldn’t back up with science (al å “detox”). However, after some further research, I found that you can get up to a ~75% discount on their products. With that discount, some of their supplements are actually very good and I would recommend them.

So, I’ll sort through the supplements. “The Good” I would recommend. “The Bad” I wouldn’t recommend for anyone. “The Meh” have potential, but I have reservations about them. (I’ll star (*) the ones I’ve purchased)

Oh, and if you choose to make a purchase, my 25% off referral code is: 13EAEC 😉

The Good

*Base Control

A very good multivitamin with iron, zinc (for acne), b12, biotin... for the price, I recommend it for any woman looking for a multivitamin supplement. If you don’t need or want iron, there is an iron-free version (though I think the iron is a major benefit).

*Raw Beauty

This is a drink mix powder. It contains antioxidants, digestive enzymes, and probiotics. Those are all things that can be helpful (antioxidants to prevent free radical damage and digestive enzymes/probiotics for indigestion), but don’t expect it to do anything for your skin/hair/”beauty”.

*Skinny Bird

This pill is meant to prevent the storage of fat in the body and to suppress appetite. I put this in “The Good” category instead of “The Meh”, because the evidence seems pretty convincing. The plant responsible, caralluma fimbriata, has been used for centuries in India to promote weight loss. Also, there have been many modern studies showing its modest effect on weight loss. I think, in addition to diet and exercise, this is actually a viable and safe weight loss supplement to take.

*Flatter Me

For those who struggle with indigestion, this is a pill that contains digestive enzymes. I will say that the amount of lactase is wimpy, so I wouldn’t necessarily rely on this if you’re lactose intolerant.

*Gut Instinct

An excellent probiotic. 10 strains of bacteria, 25 billion microorganisms; if you have bowel issues (ex. irritable bowel syndrome), I would highly recommend this to you.

*OMG! Omega the Great

This is another winner for me. Provides the appropriate amount of omega-3 fatty acids without any notorious fish taste or burps. Omega-3′s have an anti-inflammatory action in the body and they also help to fortify your skin’s moisture barrier. This is a great option for those with sensitive or acne-prone skins, but anyone can benefit.

Beauty zzZz

A basic melatonin supplement. This helps those with sleep disturbances. Keep in mind that melatonin is a neurotransmitter (a brain chemical). Don’t take this when not necessary. Daily, long-term use may have negative side effects. Definitely talk with your doctor first about melatonin supplements.

Here Comes the Sun

A basic vitamin D supplement. I added this to “The Good” and not “The Meh”, because I always advocate for sunscreen, which makes vitamin D supplements essential. As a result of daily sunscreen use, your vitamin D levels decrease. You have to make sure you’re getting enough vitamin D. You don’t need Here Come the Sun if your multivitamin already contains vitamin D (Base Control does).

*Killer Nails

Pure biotin. And an excessively high dosage, too. Keep in mind that biotin is water-soluable, so if you take more than your body can use, you just piss it out. I caution against biotin, because some people report that it gives them acne. It may help with hair and nail health.

Hair Sweet Hair

Like Killer Nails, but sexier. Contains that same dosage of biotin, but with b12 and zinc. This is honestly what I would classify as their “beauty supplement”. And it’s in gummy form!

*Pimp My Calcium

This is a calcium/vitamin D pill. It’s very important for young women to consume lots of calcium, in order to store it in our bones. Good calcium stores reduce your risk greatly for osteoporosis as well as other chronic diseases. If you feel as though you’re not taking in enough calcium, Pimp My Calcium may be a good option for you.

B12 Turbo

If you’re a vegan/vegetarian, this supplement was made with you in mind. As you may already know, b12 is an essential vitamin that is largely absent from a meat-free diet. Taking this supplement could help you to avoid needing b12 injections (and I think we can all agree that less injections is good).

The Bad

Red Carpet

This is a pill that contains some omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids. These essential fatty acids promote skin and hair health, so I could justify putting this supplement in “The Good” category. But- and this is a serious but- the average American already consumes more than enough omega-6′s daily. Like too much. This is bad news, because excessive omega-6 actually has a pro-inflammatory affect on the body. This could contribute to a number of serious diseases. You really want to avoid this. In fact, I would recommend you look for more ways to reduce your daily omega-6 intake.

*Big Chill

Intended to keep you calm and help you cope with stress, this pill is composed entirely of rhodiola extract. I don’t find the research on this plant to be strong enough. Hum Nutrition sites random studies “European and Asian” studies that tout the plant as an “adaptogen”. To keep things short and sweet, adaptogens are bullshit. I’m not convinced this will do anything for you.

Uber Energy

To make things funny, they used rhodiola extract again, but this time to give you lots of energy! Wait... Isn’t it supposed to help you calm down? Again, they claim the use of adaptogens and “adrenal support blends” which are just a bunch of plant extracts. The only thing I can see having a focusing effect is the L-tyrosine (an amino acid), and the research is not strong for it. Save your money.

Wing Man

This is probably the worst one, in my opinion, so forgive me if I go off. It claims to “detoxify” your body (which we already know is BS); specifically, your liver and dark undereye circles. Hum Nutrition claims that plant extracts will treat liver damage from alcohol consumption... and that it will get rid of your dark circles...

Ok, I’ll bite, how? With milk thistle... because it has antioxidants. And dandelions, because they have a diuretic effect. Peeing more will detox your liver... Am I missing something? Wouldn’t a diuretic make alcohol-related dehydration worse? They even brand it like “Go ahead and drink, you filthy alcoholic, as long as you take this pill!” I’m just not seeing how these claims add up. It’s psuedoscience, at best.

Cut back on the alcohol and drink some water. That’s a far better “detox” than anything you can buy in a bottle.

*Moody Bird

This is a supplement to reduce the severity of symptoms of PMS. The star ingredient, chasteberry, has some backing to alleviate PMS-related breast pain... but that’s it. There’s just not good enough evidence to support this supplement as a treatment for anything.

The Meh

Daily Cleanse

Another “detox” pill. This pill claims that it will “flush the toxins” from your body and skin. It’s meant for those with acne, specifically. They attribute this cleanse to their “Skin Cleanse & Detox Blend”, which is just a bunch of plant extracts.

So let’s cut the bullshit. It’s a zinc pill. Zinc deficiency does have a link with acne, so taking this product may improve your skin appearance. Yes, I am saying that this may help with acne. And some antioxidants never hurt anyone.

The marketing just pisses me off, because its attributing it’s benefits to the wrong stuff. It’s the zinc that’s clearing your skin, not a plant blend. The whole product page on the website seems to gloss over the zinc, instead highlighting shit like algae and beetroot.

Then when this product works for people, they’re like “Oh, detoxes must work!”. I hate it lol! If you read the reviews, the amount of placebo is crazy. People are attributing this pill to “debloating”, feeling “lighter”, improving digestion, and weight loss when there’s no way it could do any of those things. It’s like, this is what happens when people have no idea what they’re taking.

I’ll finish off by saying that I wouldn’t necessarily even recommend this to those with a zinc deficiency. Some multivitamins, like Base Control, contain the same amount of zinc as Daily Cleanse. It’s not worth it to buy a separate product.

Arctic Repair

This supplement stars lingonberry seed oil, which “helps to rejuvenate the skin and reduce wrinkles.” I’ll level on this one; It seems interesting and the reviews seem positive. However, I can’t in good conscience recommend a product with only 1 study to back it. If you want to give it a try (at $60 a pop), go for it!

Turn Back Time

This pill will not “turn back time” for you, so into “The Meh” pile it goes. I don’t like the pill advertising something it can’t deliver on. That being said, this is a very interesting supplement. It contains polypodium leucotomos, an herb which has been shown to help (in addition to sunscreen) protect the skin against sun damage. I would try Turn Back Time based on that alone, because I’m a crazy sunscreen lady. It also contains some fun extras, like turmeric and lutein, but at negligible doses. The dosage of polypodium leucotomos could be higher as well. If the concept of polypodium leucotomos interests you, then give this pill a shot, but don’t expect it to turn back damage that has already occurred to your skin. The name is especially misleading because the nature of this product is preventative, not repairing.

Collagen Love

Collagen Love derives it’s name from the collagen peptides it contains. I initially wrote this one off completely because consuming collagen does not give your skin collagen. However, collagen peptides have been shown to help synthesize collagen, hydrate the skin, and improve wrinkles! .... In rodents. There’s not a single human trial that shows it’s benefits. Is there a potential for benefit? Yes, but it hasn’t been proven. Therefore, I can’t recommend Collagen Love.

Also, to address the other ingredients in the supplement: Meh.

Ripped Rooster

This is a pill meant to boost your metabolism and increase weight loss through a chemical known as 7-keto-DHEA. There is limited research to show its benefit, but one study that does exist claims that there is significant weight loss with 7-keto-DHEA usage. I think, if you’re interested, give it a try, but it may or may not work for you.

Air Patrol

Vitamin C, calcium, and anti-inflammatories. Is this a bad combo? Not at all. Are they going to make your skin look “young and rejuvenated”? No. Is it going to reverse all the damages that could arise from air pollution? Absolutely not. Also, these ingredients can be found in other multivitamins. The bioflavinoids are nice.

Always check with your doctor before starting supplements or making significant changes to your diet. Especially if you’re 18 years old or younger. The opinions above are my own based on the evidence available to me.

Keep in mind that supplements are supplements to your diet. You should only take them if you feel that your diet doesn’t already provide them. Chances are that you’re already consuming most everything you need in a normal, healthy diet.

My judgement on a supplement is not the final word. If you’d like to try any of “The Bad” supplements, go for it. They won’t hurt you. You may even have success. Visa versa, “The Good” supplements may have no effect on you. YMMV.

#hum nutrition #supplements #health #skin care #beauty #nutrition #skincare #vitamins #minerals #multivitamin #detox #daily cleanse

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clemency-for-the-heathen · 8 years

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‘To know and not to act is not to know.’ - Wang Yangmin

I’ll try not to repeat myself. I forced myself asleep as soon as I sat down on the plane to China Wednesday night, to banish the pulsing headache that was making me retch, and when I woke up we were about to land and it was 3 p.m. the next day. I was meant to be going to Tianjin, but that’s not where we landed. It turned out I had to transfer. It wasn’t specified during the booking process, it didn’t say on the ticket, the scarlet-nailed thick-as-a-pig-shit fake-tan bitch who checked me in at Gatwick didn’t tell me, and the stewardesses didn’t know whether I had to collect my luggage and re-check-in. It was then that I met a 21 year-old Chinese girl who’d been in London for a month and whose name I couldn’t pronounce, also bound for Tianjin, and she sorted out everything. Before our next flight she spent 3 hours teaching me Chinese. Explaining the 3 characters that comprise ‘airport terminal’ took about twenty minutes in itself. Why was I learning about arable farming in school instead of this? Out on the runway, the dusk was rose and dust, the land flat past the mind’s eye. When I got to Tianjin it was 9 p.m. and I had a sleepless 11 hour wait in the deserted airport without food. I read and thought and watched the night disappear hour by hour. China is a scary place and no one ever talks about it. Three times I had to stand around and wait whilst they called the airline to check I was really traveling on to Korea. Mate, why would I be trying to sneak into your shithole country? When I landed at Incheon, it was approaching midday on Friday and the sky was powder blue.

One of those big luxury purple buses took me back to Bundang - Jeongja specifically, right on the river, an affluent area I’d rarely frequented in the past. Sarah was waiting at the bus stop, a merry and porky South Carolinian in her early thirties who’d been responsible for hiring me. She took me to our nearby apartment complex. My room was on the 10th and top floor, freezing from vacancy but decent - wouldn’t have mattered much anyway, for the mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. She let me stay in her cramped place all day sucking up wifi, watching Netflix and eating junk until showing up again at 8 with her 10 month-old baby and her husband, Tom, who was from Taunton. They’d actually both been to Portishead last year to get fingerprints done for visa applications at the Police HQ. Tom spent an hour telling me about his trip to North Korea a few years back and I spent an hour asking him questions relating to it. That’s my next destination, without a doubt, one hundred percent (to visit, not to live). Sarah stuffed an air-mattress, blankets, and a a plastic basket full of cutlery, detergent, and household cleaning products into my arms, and I went up to bed.

The next day I had burgers with them and Anthony, a giant body-building black guy (coworker, just like Tom and Sarah) who’d thrown his back out deadlifting stupidly heavy weights and could barely walk. If anyone had any beef with him, then was the time to strike. All three of them spoke less Korean than Chris, who’s been here three times for an aggregate total of about a month, which disgusted me, but they were all so funny and friendly and interesting and I was thinking, Don’t give me more grey areas, life, please. Their baby was eating macaroni cheese; the sight was revolting and cut down the half of my appetite that the jetlag hadn’t.

After lunch, in a fugue state from that very same horrendous jetlag, I walked down the river to Seohyeon, where the language exchange centre I first learned Korean at is, for one of my six goals this year is to sort my Korean out by studying with a man. The centre was beset by gloom what with all its East-facing windows, and empty but for one Korean man in his twenties sat studying alone. He introduced himself as Tony, and said that he was also looking for a language exchange partner. Oh serendipity, you little cunt, only showing up when you’re not prayed for, like football miracles and cool funny women with eyes so pretty I could kill myself. Just one thing: Don’t fuck me, Tony; don’t you ever try to fuck me, I successfully resisted the urge to say.

I don’t remember how I spent the Sunday, but all of last week I had training, which meant sitting in on Sarah’s classes and teaching parts of them. All you have to do is follow the syllabus, standing beside the interactive screen, having the children perform videos in front of a separate green screen at the culmination of each chapter (weekly or fortnightly). The marking is time consuming but effortless. I met the boss, Minnie, a scrawny women presumably named after her round protruding ears, who had that strange empty affability that suits labour camp leaders just as well as it does businessmen. I ended up going to immigration three times in five days, a nauseating Eastern Blocesque abomination 90 minutes away on the subway staffed by utter utter cunts (I know I say cunt too much, but if there ever were a bunch of cunts, it’s at Omogkyo immigration) thanks to her fuck ups, first not booking an appointment, and secondly booking the wrong one. It became apparent that Sarah was the actual boss, had hired me, was training me, had worked in other academies connected to this in China, Japan, and Malaysia, spoke to Minnie with the freedom of a Shakespearean Fool. For instance, Minnie came into the room and asked Sarah to finish some reports by the end of the day. Sarah replied, ‘Nah I don’t think I’ll be doing that.’ Minnie’s face went blank with seething consternation for a good two seconds before she clocked that Sarah was joking, at which point Sarah broke into her Southern cackle.

A man came with a bed and constructed it for me; a man came with wifi and installed it for me. I’m borrowing a bike off of Anthony for six weeks until the girl he’s already sold it to comes back to Korea. I bought a TV in order to use my Mac from an American girl for thirty dollars thanks to a Facebook group called Bundang Buy and Sell, which I’d never been able to use before, as I’ve never technically lived in Bundang. She’d told me to meet her at Seohyeon station, and that she might be a bit late. She was an hour late. Her apartment was 800 or so yards from the station. The TV was huge and weighed about five kilos, the transformer I needed in order to use it that she hadn’t mentioned weighed about ten. Encumbered to an infuriating degree, I waddled back to the station like a gullible cunt, sweating through my jacket and swearing through my teeth a serpentine hiss of fuck, fuck . . for fuck’s sake … for the love of fucking Christ. Why? Why? What did I expect for thirty dollars. However, her apartment was small and filthy, and I felt staggeringly fortunate by comparison, and not only because the attractive woman in the apartment across from me walks around naked every morning with the shades drawn up. I noticed by chance, but what am I supposed to do now that I’ve noticed, not look? Come now. She must know what she’s doing. She must know.

Got shouted to halt by a policeman who caught me jaywalking. I was so annoyed at Korea having adopted the stupidest of American offences that when he came up to me I belligerently said, ‘What?’ He pointed to the traffic light and said, ‘What colour is that?’ like a patronising school teacher with a hard-on for authority. ‘Red.’ ‘So don’t cross.’ ‘But I’m late.’ ‘Don’t be late.’ Yes sir, sorry sir. Next time I’ll make sure you’re not looking, sir.

I met Tony last weekend for our first language exchange session - an hour of Korean, an hour of English. His English is already fluent so there isn’t a lot I can do except help him to sound more natural. He’s been going to the language exchange centre for 4 years and somehow we’d never met, though as it happens my friend Brian who’s back in America right now knows him. He’d helped Brian get a suit fitted last year. I told Tony that Brian had described him as a ‘playa’, at which point he held up his left hand to show me an engagement ring. I asked him why he’d stopped ‘playing’ and he told me that it was because he’d met a girl who likes to get up early and exercise every day. I thought, Jesus Christ, yeh, that’ll do it. So he’s two days older than me, already engaged, has some lucrative job to do with clinical trials in Gangnam, and dresses immaculately as a gay - in short, puts me to shame, even though that’s not the life for me. He confessed that actually he thought I might be gay, seeing as when I first met him I’d specified I wanted to study with a man. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. I said, ‘But even if I were, why would I have presumed that you were gay too?’ He said, ‘Good point.’ With regard to my Korean ability, he thought it was really ok, better by a mile than most foreigners he’d met, but said that lots of bad habits have been allowed to get engrained from studying by myself for so long. As a consequence, we spend most of the time working on my pronunciation and the cadence of my speech, which is a horribly humbling process but only because its happening three years later than it should have.

My confidence is being boosted, on the other hand, by all the things I have to do alone, not having a girlfriend to thoroughly administrate my life anymore. I had to go into the phone shop and explain my situation and get my phone reconnected; I had to instruct the moron wifi installation guy on where to install it in the room and why; I had to go back to my old climbing gym today and rejoin as a member. They remembered me and asked where my girlfriend was. I explained that we’d broken up before traveling. They recognised me as a man no longer suffering GBH of the ear’ole and it seemed like we could have a fresh start, having never really been in the mood to make friends with them before. On top of all this, my ego was tested at the hagwon when I was advised by Sarah to pretend not to speak any Korean, because if Minnie cottoned on to me being even halfway decent, she’d try to make me do phone conferences with the mums.

Korean tutor - found; climbing gym - rejoined; hapkido - impossible, at least for the time being, since Master Kim no longer teaches past 9 p.m.; football - found and joined a team of ex-pats and Koreans that trains 25 minutes south of me on the Bundang subway line. My stint in Korea was put in perspective when I found out the ginger guy from Sheffield who’s captain and his Irish best mate have lived here for 9 years and one of them’s got a car. Considering I’ve not played with anything close to regularity since my teens, and laden with clunky running shoes, training went alright. Out of the twelve there, I’d say I was probably the fourth best overall. Twenty people showed up to the first game this weekend, though the captain told me that’ll fast shrink down to the low teens. Half the starting lineup are Korean, and none of them were at training in the week, nor apparently ever come. I think it showed, but the other team were so shit we won 5-0 anyway. I was quite abysmal for the duration of my 30 minute runout in borrowed boots at left wing forward, but I think I’ll soon shake the rustiness off. I also think there’s a place up for grabs in the midfield trio alongside the reliable captain and this short fat Korean guy who no one forces to lose weight or stop smoking cigarettes at half time because he’s got the first touch, vision, and intelligence of Zinedine Zidane.

Working on my novel and a sub 1 hour 20 half marathon - these pursuits are reserved for the mornings, my droogies. I’m getting up as early as I can and staring at the naked Korean woman for as short a time as possible, and then I get cracking. With all my stress and resentment channeled into my job, which really isn’t bad (one class was a nightmare, conducted by four wild rude arrogant boys, but Anthony came to my rescue, having suffered at their hands during his first month a few months back. I was to stare at the rudest one for as long as it took for him to stop grinning and mouthing off and eventually cry, and that would break all four of them. ‘You’ve gotta nip this in the bud now, man, or you’ll be suffering for a year,’ Anthony said. God was he right. From this day forward, I will be someone who nips things in the bud.), the hopelessness, depression, regret, and lack of appetite that have marked my last twelve months or so is really starting to drain. The sky is frequently blue and the food is oh so tasty, but that can’t be presumed to be enough. To keep them away, I’ve written five rules on five post-it notes and stuck them to my fridge:

1: Do not concern yourself with that which you cannot change and/or does not matter.

2: Exercise every day.

3: Write for at least two hours every day; read for at least one.

4: Do not dwell on regret. If you learned from it, then that’s enough.

5: Do your best to make that which is not enjoyable as enjoyable as possible.

I look at them every morning. This might be considered a pretty cliched thing to do, but then again one of the important points David Foster Wallace was making with his titanic Infinite Jest is that Postmodernism has a lot of orphans to answer for, that its irony and chaos and catatonic realism are redundant, that saying, ‘Oh how banal,’ to anything remotely sentimental or ‘cliched’ in an emotional sense no longer gets us anywhere and perhaps never it. That’s why I eventually decided to also affix on post-it notes to the wall by my bed the story of the two wolves:

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. ‘A fight is going on inside me,’ he said to the boy. ‘It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.’ He continued, ‘The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.’

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, ‘Which wolf will win?’

The old Cherokee simply replied, ‘The one you feed.’

If you’re wondering why this blog is called Clemency for the Heathen, it comes from one of my favourite speeches in all literature, delivered by the Judge to the kid in Blood Meridian: ‘There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.’ The more I think about this book, the higher the regard I hold it in. It’s up there with the best of the best of the best, sir, with honours. The heathen in question are threefold, as far as I can surmise, but what’s most amazing is that to my mind the line could be levelled at any human being (you have to read Blood Meridian, have to have to fucking have to). Anyway, Clemency for the Heathen has been the title of the novel I’m completely rewriting ever since luscious Nicaragua.

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aikungfu · 4 years

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Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. (You can sign up for the newsletter here!)

Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

The week’s biggest IPO news had nothing to do with Monday’s S-1 deluge

During Monday’s IPO wave I was surprised to see Asana join the mix.

After news had broken in June that the company had raised hundreds of millions in convertible debt, I hadn’t guessed that the productivity unicorn wouldn’t give us an S-1 in the very next quarter. I was contentedly wrong. But the reason why Asana’s IPO is notable isn’t really much to do with the company itself, though do take the time to dig into its results and history.

What matters about Asana’s debut is that it appears set to test out a model that, until very recently, could have become the new, preferred way of going public amongst tech companies.

Here’s what I mean: Instead of filing to go public, and raising money in a traditional IPO, or simply listing directly, Asana executed two, large, convertible debt offerings pre-debut, thus allowing it to direct list with lots of cash without having raised endless equity capital while private.

The method looked like a super-cool way to get around the IPO pricing issue that we’ve seen, and also provide a ramp to direct listing for companies that didn’t get showered with billions while private. (That Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s trust led the debt deal is simply icing on this particular Pop-Tart).

This brief column was going to be all about how we may see unicorns follow the Asana route in time, provided that its debt-powered direct listing goes well. But then the NYSE got permission from the SEC to allow companies to raise capital when they direct-list.

In short, some companies that direct-list in the future will be able to sell a bloc of shares at a market-set value that would have previously set their “open” price. So instead of flogging the stock and setting a price and selling shares to rich folks and then finding out what public investors would really pay, all that IPO faff is gone and bold companies can simply offer shares at whatever price the market will bear.

All that is great and cool, but as companies will be able to direct-list and raise capital, the NYSE’s nice news means that Asana is blazing a neat trail, but perhaps not one that will be as popular as we had expected.

The NASDAQ is working to get in on the action. As Danny said yesterday on the show, this new NYSE method is going to crush traditional IPOs, provided that we’re understanding it during this, its nascent period.

Market Notes

Look, this week was bananas, and my brain is scrambled toast. You, like myself, are probably a bit confused about how it is only finally Saturday and not the middle of next week. But worry not, I have a quick roundup of the big stuff from our world. And, notes from calls with the COO of Okta and the CEO of Splunk, from after their respective earnings report:

China-based fintech giant Ant is super profitable and super big and super powerful and is going to have a mega-IPO that matters, even if it isn’t happening Stateside. (This has long been expected.)

As I write to you, the TikTok saga is not yet over, but between the lawsuits and smokescreens and other crap, it appears that Microsoft and perhaps Walmart are the leading bidding duo. What a year.

SPACs for real companies are happening, and Boston unicorn Desktop Metal is pushing ahead with one. This is an event to watch, and if it goes well we could see a bunch more in rapid-fire fashion.

Speaking of which, here’s a run-down of all the companies that filed to go public on Monday. You are welcome, as that post was annoying to compile. (I jest, it was fun as hell.)

Also this week, Y Combinator had a two-day Demo Day confab that we wrote a lot about. Sure, these are early-stage companies, but their ranks will generate some material winners. So catch up here, with that link containing our chat about the startups and directions to all our coverage.

And for fun, here are some slightly deeper looks at Snowflake and Sumo Logic’s respective IPO filings, and a contrarian take on why Palantir has problems, but also some merit.

Over to our chats, starting with Okta COO and co-founder Frederic Kerrest:

Okta had a good quarter. But instead of noodling on just the numbers, we wanted to chat with its team about the accelerating digital transformation and what they are seeing in the market.

On the SMB side, Kerrest reported little to no change. This is a bit more bullish than we anticipated, given that it seemed likely that SMB customers would have taken the largest hit from COVID.

Kerrest also told us some interesting stuff about how the wave of COVID-related spend has changed: “We actually have seen the COVID ‘go home and remote work very quickly’ [thing], we’ve actually seen that rush subside a little bit, because you know now we’re five months into [the pandemic], so they had to figure it out.”

This is a fascinating comment for the startup world.

Okta is big and public and is going to grow fine for a while. Whatever. For smaller companies aka startups that were seeing COVID-related tailwinds, I wonder how common seeing “that rush subside a little bit” is. If it is very common, many startups that had taken off like a rocket could be seeing their growth come back to Earth.

And if they raised a bunch of money off the back of that growth at a killer valuation, they may have just ordered shoes that they’ll struggle to grow into.

And then there was new McLaren F-1 sponsor Splunk, data folks who are in the midst of a transition to SaaS that is seeing the firm double-down on building ARR and letting go of legacy incomes:

I spoke with CEO Doug Merritt, kicking off with a question about his use of the word “tectonic” regarding the shift to data-driven decisions from Splunk’s earnings report. (“As organizations continue to adapt to tectonic societal shifts brought on by COVID-19, one thing is constant: the power of data to radically transform business.”)

I wanted to know how far down the American corporate stack that idea went; are mid-size businesses getting more data-savvy? What about SMBs? Merritt was pretty bullish: “We’re getting to tectonic,” he said during our call, adding that before “it really was the Facebooks, the Googles, the Apples, the DoorDashes, [and] the LinkedIns that were using [Splunk].” But now, he said, even small restaurant chains are using data to better track their performance.

Relating this back to the startup world, I’ve been curious if lots of stuff that you and I think is cool, like low-code business app development, will actually find as wide a footing in the market as some expect. Why? Because most small and medium-sized businesses are not tech companies at all. But if Merritt is right, then the CEO of Appian might be right as well about how many business apps the average company is going to have in a few years’ time.

And finally for Market Notes, my work BFF and IRL friend Ron Miller wrote about Box’s earnings this week, and how the changing world is bolstering the company. It’s worth a read. (Most public software companies are doing well, mind.)

Various and Sundry

We’re already over length, so I’ll have to keep our bits-and-bobs section brief. Thus, only the brightest of baubles for you, my friend:

Y Combinator startups are focusing on revenue in this more uncertain world. Per The Information, the startup org has encouraged startups in its world to “focus on generating revenue” and how to juice enough cash from their operations to endure sans checks from private investors.

Given the pace of private investments into certain startup niches today, it’s almost odd advice. But what is true for late-stage SaaS companies (very hot!) might not hold true for smaller YC companies that are focused on consumers.

Natasha wrote about a particularly hot startup from this YC batch, so I reached out to a hot company from a prior batch, namely Tandem. But they didn’t want to talk on the record, so no news there. Alas.

The Fastly deal is super cool and you should read more about it. As was this $300 million investment.

And with that, we are out of room. Hugs, fist bumps and good vibes,

Alex

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2G3bVM8 via A.I .Kung Fu

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lauramalchowblog · 5 years

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7 Mistakes to Avoid When You’re Reading Research

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about how to read scientific research papers. That covered what to do. Today I’m going to tell you what NOT to do as a consumer of research studies.

The following are bad practices that can cause you to misinterpret research findings, dismiss valid research, or apply scientific findings incorrectly in your own life.

1. Reading Only the Abstract

This is probably the BIGGEST mistake a reader can make. The abstract is, by definition, a summary of the research study. The authors highlight the details they consider most important—or those that just so happen to support their hypotheses.

At best, you miss out on potentially interesting and noteworthy details if you read only the abstract. At worst, you come with a completely distorted impression of the methods and/or results.

Take this paper, for example. The abstract summarizes the findings like this: “Consumption of red and processed meat at an average level of 76 g/d that meets the current UK government recommendation (less than or equal to 90g/day) was associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer.”

Based on this, you might think: 1. The researchers measured how much meat people were consuming. This is only half right. Respondents filled out a food frequency questionnaire that asked how many times per week they ate meat. The researchers then multiplied that number by a “standard portion size.” Thus, the amount of meat any given person actually consumed might vary considerably from what they are presumed to have eaten.

2. There was an increased risk of colorectal cancers. It says so right there after all. The researchers failed to mention that there was only an increased risk of certain types of colon cancer (and a small one at that—more on this later), not for others, and not for rectal cancer.

3. The risk was the same for everyone. Yet from the discussion: “Interestingly, we found heterogeneity by sex for red and processed meat, red meat, processed meat and alcohol, with the association stronger in men and null in women.” Null—meaning not significant—in women. If you look at the raw data, the effect is not just non-significant, it’s about as close to zero as you can get. To me, this seems like an important detail, one that is certainly abstract-worthy.

Although it’s not the norm for abstracts to blatantly misrepresent the research, it does happen. As I said in my previous post, it’s better to skip the abstract altogether than to read only the abstract.

2. Confusing Correlation and Causation

You’ve surely heard that correlation does not imply causation. When two variables trend together, one doesn’t necessarily cause the other. If people eat more popsicles when they’re wearing shorts, that’s not because eating popsicles makes you put on shorts, or vice versa. They’re both correlated with the temperature outside. Check out Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations blog for more examples of just how ridiculous this can get.

As much as we all know this to be true, the popular media loves to take correlational findings and make causal statements like, “Eating _______ causes cancer!” or “To reduce your risk of _______, do this!” Researchers sometimes use sloppy language to talk about their findings in ways that imply causation too, even when their methods do not support such inferences.

The only way to test causality is through carefully controlled experimentation where researchers manipulate the variable they believe to be causal (the independent variable) and measure differences in the variable they hypothesize will be affected (the dependent variable). Ideally, they also compare the experimental group against a control group, replicate their results using multiple samples and perhaps different methods, and test or control for confounding variables.

As you might imagine, there are many obstacles to conducting this type of research. It’s can be expensive, time consuming, and sometimes unethical, especially with human subjects. You can’t feed a group of humans something you believe to be carcinogenic to see if they develop cancer, for example.

As a reader, it’s extremely important to distinguish between descriptive studies where the researchers measure variables and use statistical tests to see if they are related, and experimental research where they assign participants to different conditions and control the independent variable(s).

Finally, don’t be fooled by language like “X predicted Y.” Scientists can use statistics to make predictions, but that also doesn’t imply causality unless they employed an experimental design.

3. Taking a Single Study, or Even a Handful of Studies, as PROOF of a Phenomenon

When it comes to things as complex as nutrition or human behavior, I’d argue that you can never prove a hypothesis. There are simply too many variables at play, too many potential unknowns. The goal of scientific research is to gain knowledge and increase confidence that a hypothesis is likely true.

I say “likely” because statistical tests can never provide 100 percent proof. Without going deep into a Stats 101 lesson, the way statistical testing actually works is that you set an alternative hypothesis that you believe to be true and a null hypothesis that you believe to be incorrect. Then, you set out to find evidence to support the null hypothesis.

For example, let’s say you want to test whether a certain herb helps improve sleep. You give one experimental group the herb and compare them to a group that doesn’t get the herb. Your null hypothesis is that there is no effect of the herb, so the two groups will sleep the same.

You find that the group that got the herb slept better than the group that didn’t. Statistical tests suggest you can reject the null hypothesis of no difference. In that case, you’re really saying, “If it was true that this herb has no effect, it’s very unlikely that the groups in my study would differ to the degree they did.” You can conclude that it is unlikely—but not impossible—that there is no effect of the herb.

There’s always the chance that you unwittingly sampled a bunch of outliers. There’s also a chance that you somehow influenced the outcome through your study design, or that another unidentified variable actually caused the effect. That’s why replication is so important. The more evidence accumulates, the more confident you can be.

There’s also publication bias to consider. We only have access to data that get published, so we’re working with incomplete information. Analyses across a variety of fields have demonstrated that journals are much more likely to publish positive findings—those that support hypotheses—than negative findings, null findings (findings of no effect), or findings that conflict with data that have been previously published.

Unfortunately, publication bias is a serious problem that academics are still struggling to resolve. There’s no easy answer, and there’s really nothing you can do about it except to maintain an open mind. Never assume any question is fully answered.

4. Confusing Statistical Significance with Importance

This one’s a doozy. As I just explained, statistical tests only tell you whether it is likely that your null hypothesis is false. They don’t tell you whether the findings are important or meaningful or worth caring about whatsoever.

Let’s take that study we talked about in #1. It got a ton of coverage in the press, with many articles stating that we should all eat less red meat to reduce our cancer risk. What do the numbers actually say?

Well, in this study, there were 2,609 new cases of colorectal cancer in the 475,581 respondents during the study period—already a low probability. If you take the time to download the supplementary data, you’ll see that of the 113,662 men who reported eating red or processed mean four or more times per week, 866 were diagnosed. That’s 0.76%. In contrast, 90 of the 19,769 men who reported eating red and processed meat fewer than two times per week were diagnosed. That’s 0.45%.

This difference was enough to be statistically significant. Is it important though? Do you really want to overhaul your diet to possibly take your risk of (certain types of) colorectal cancer from low to slightly lower (only if you’re a man)?

Maybe you do think that’s important. I can’t get too worked up about it, and not just because of the methodological issues with the study.

There are lots of ways to make statistical significance look important, a big one being reporting relative risk instead of absolute risk. Remember, statistical tests are just tools to evaluate numbers. You have to use your powers of logic and reason to interpret those tests and decide what they mean for you.

5. Overgeneralizing

It’s a fallacy to think you can look at one piece of a jigsaw puzzle and believe you understand the whole picture. Any single research study offers just a piece of the puzzle.

Resist the temptation to generalize beyond what has been demonstrated empirically. In particular, don’t assume that research conducted on animals applies perfectly to humans or that research conducted with one population applies to another. It’s a huge problem, for example, when new drugs are tested primarily on men and are then given to women with unknown consequences.

6. Assuming That Published Studies are Right and Anecdotal Data is Wrong

Published studies can be wrong for a number of reasons—author bias, poor design and methodology, statistical error, and chance, to name a few. Studies can also be “right” in the sense that they accurately measure and describe what they set out to describe, but they are inevitably incomplete—the whole puzzle piece thing again.

Moreover, studies very often deal with group-level data—means and standard deviations. They compare the average person in one group to the average person in another group. That still leaves plenty of room for individuals to be different.

It’s a mistake to assume that if someone’s experience differs from what science says it “should” be, that person must be lying or mistaken. At the same time, anecdotal data is even more subject to biases and confounds than other types of data. Anecdotes that run counter to the findings of a scientific study don’t negate the validity of the study.

Consider anecdotal data another piece of the puzzle. Don’t give it more weight than it deserves, but don’t discount it either.

7. Being Overly Critical

As I said in my last post, no study is meant to stand alone. Studies are meant to build on one another so a complete picture emerges—puzzle pieces, have I mentioned that?

When conducting a study, researchers have to make a lot of decisions:

Who or what will their subjects be? If using human participants, what is the population of interest? How will they be sampled?

How will variables of interest be operationalized (defined and assessed)? If the variables aren’t something discrete, like measuring levels of a certain hormone, how will they be measured? For example, if the study focuses on depression, how will depression be evaluated?

What other variables, if any, will they measure and control for statistically? How else will they rule out alternative explanations for any findings?

What statistical tests will they use?

And more. It’s easy as a reader to sit there and go, “Why did they do that? Obviously they should have done this instead!” or, “But their sample only included trained athletes! What about the rest of us?”

There is a difference between recognizing the limitations of a study and dismissing a study because it’s not perfect. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

That’s my top seven. What would you add? Thanks for reading today, everybody. Have a great week.

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jesseneufeld · 5 years

Text

7 Mistakes to Avoid When You’re Reading Research

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about how to read scientific research papers. That covered what to do. Today I’m going to tell you what NOT to do as a consumer of research studies.

The following are bad practices that can cause you to misinterpret research findings, dismiss valid research, or apply scientific findings incorrectly in your own life.

1. Reading Only the Abstract

At best, you miss out on potentially interesting and noteworthy details if you read only the abstract. At worst, you come with a completely distorted impression of the methods and/or results.

2. Confusing Correlation and Causation

3. Taking a Single Study, or Even a Handful of Studies, as PROOF of a Phenomenon

4. Confusing Statistical Significance with Importance

Maybe you do think that’s important. I can’t get too worked up about it, and not just because of the methodological issues with the study.

5. Overgeneralizing

It’s a fallacy to think you can look at one piece of a jigsaw puzzle and believe you understand the whole picture. Any single research study offers just a piece of the puzzle.

6. Assuming That Published Studies are Right and Anecdotal Data is Wrong

Consider anecdotal data another piece of the puzzle. Don’t give it more weight than it deserves, but don’t discount it either.

7. Being Overly Critical

As I said in my last post, no study is meant to stand alone. Studies are meant to build on one another so a complete picture emerges—puzzle pieces, have I mentioned that?

When conducting a study, researchers have to make a lot of decisions:

Who or what will their subjects be? If using human participants, what is the population of interest? How will they be sampled?

What other variables, if any, will they measure and control for statistically? How else will they rule out alternative explanations for any findings?

What statistical tests will they use?

There is a difference between recognizing the limitations of a study and dismissing a study because it’s not perfect. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

That’s my top seven. What would you add? Thanks for reading today, everybody. Have a great week.

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cornishbirdblog · 5 years

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In wandering over some of the uncultivated tracts which still maintain their wilderness . . . against the march of cultivation, we are certain of finding rude masses of rock which have some relation to the giants. The giant’s hand or the giant’s chair or it may be the giant’s punch bowl excites your curiosity. What were the mental peculiarities of the people who fixed so permanently those names on fantastic rock masses? What are the conditions, mental or otherwise, necessary for the preservation of these ideas? – Robert Hunt, 1896.

Legends of giants permeate the Cornish landscape. These legendary personages are prolific and dynamic. Cornish giants are often used to explain the unexplainable. To account for an unusual geological phenomena such as the Cheesewring or perhaps the baffling stony remains left behind by our ancestors, like Trethevy Quoit.

Giants built giant walls, carved out giant-sized seats or threw giant boulders like bowling balls. They left their giant footprints and buried their giant hearts.

On Carn Brea hill near Redruth there is a Giant’s coffin, a Giant’s head and hand, the Giant’s wheel and the Giant’s cradle. According to folklore all were the property of a giant known as John of Gaunt, one of the last of his kind.

John is not quite as cool a name for a giant as many of the other Cornish giants. Bolster, Trecobben, Wrath, Blunderbore, Rebecks or Cormoran.

But the real question is what are the origins of these larger than life characters?

A Compact and Bijou Nation

Someone suggested to me recently (now don’t get offended) that the Cornish tend to be rather short in stature. Short, stocky, dark hair. More of a stereotype these days perhaps? But in the past did this more diminutive trait lead somehow to this plethora of legends about giants in Cornwall?

In the anthropologist John Beddoe’s book, The Races of Britain, published in 1885 the Cornish are described as ‘a stalwart race’. Loyal, reliable and hard-working.

“Superior to the Devonians in stature and length of limb . . . Cornwall probably gave the last refuge to the free British warriors, who were gradually forced back by the West Saxons into the peninsula . . . The Cornish are generally dark in hair and often in eye: they resemble the Scottish Highlanders in their warmth of colouring . . .”

So we were taller than the Devonians apparently, (more attractive obviously) but still not exactly blessed with height. Beddoe concludes that the average height of the Cornishman, from his survey of over 300, was around 5ft 7ins. The overall average height for men in the UK is around 5ft 9ins.

There was a theory batted around in the 19th century that Cornwall had been a refuge for the pre-Celtic people of England.

During the Celtic invasion the Neolithic or Pre-Celtic people were a short dark race of an imaginative temperament. The incoming Celts were a much bigger race, broad headed and fair and to the aborigines appeared big men . . . Giants. – J Hambley Rowe, Cornish Notes & Queries, 1906.

This idea that the Cornish were towered over by invaders seems quite common. So could this be the origin of Cornwall’s giants?

It is sometimes supposed that the numerous Cornish giant legends may originate from the Anglo-Saxon, and later Norman, overlordship . . . Cornishmen are relatively small and the foreign invaders probably loomed large by comparison. – Tony Dean and Tony Shaw, The folklore of Cornwall, 1975

Cormoran, illustration by Arthur Rackham

Cornwall’s Real Giants

Not far from the Lands End there is a little village called Trebegean, in English the town of the Giant’s Grave. Near whereunto and within memory certain workmen searching for tin discovered a long square vault containing bones of an excessive big carcase [sic] and verified this etymology of the name.

The above was written by Richard Carew in 1602 and his is not the only account of a real life Cornish giant.

More than 150 years later in 1761 tin miners unearthed something equally strange in the village of Tregony. They accidently dug up a coffin. And this was no ordinary coffin, it was 11 feet (3.5m) long. While any other remains appeared to have crumbled to dust a single tooth was found inside. It measured two and a half inches in length. It was assumed that the miners had found the grave of an actual giant.

You see in Cornwall the giants aren’t just the stuff of legend. There are one or two who have made it into the parish registers too.

• Charles Chilcott

Charles Chilcott was born in 1742. He was what was once known as a ‘gentleman farmer’ and he lived near Tintagel. Charles was big. In his day he was well known for his gigantic stature and feats of extraordinary strength. These days anyone over 6′ 8″ tall is officially classed as a giant. Charles was 6′ 9″ (203cm) and weighed 32 stone or 208 kilograms. This was in a time when the average height was considerably shorter.

Charles lived a pretty uneventful life. His father William had died when he was 3 years old. In August 1768 he married Mary Jose and the couple went on to have two children. Langford, his son born in 1769 and Rebecca, his daughter in 1771.

Their house, Treknow, also known as Tresknow or Trenaw, was actually mentioned in the Doomsday Book. And Charles inherited the property from his mother Rebekah after her death. He lived out his life there, dying in 1815. He was then buried in Tintagel churchyard. Such was his fame locally that his death was reported in the West Briton newspaper:

Died last week at Trenaw, in the parish of Tintagel in consequence of an apoplectic [sic] fit a person commonly known by the appellation of Giant Chilcott. His height was 6 foot 4 inches without shoes. He measured around the breast 6 feet 9 inches. Around the full part of the thigh 3 ft 4 inches and weighed about 460 pounds. He was almost constantly smoking. The stem of the pipe he used was about 2 inches long and he consumed 3 pounds of tobacco weekly. One of his stockings held 6 gallons of wheat. The curiosity of strangers who came to visit him gave him evident pleasure and his usual address on such occasions was “come under my arm little fellow”. – 14th April 1815

Another real life giant was John Laugherne of Truro. He was 7ft 6in tall and known as ‘Long Laugherne’. During the Civil War he fought for the royalist cause as a lieutenant in the Calvary Regiment. It is said that it took more than two strong men to pull his sword from one of Plymouth’s gates when the Cornish Royalists laid siege to the town.

• Anthony Payne

By far the most famous giant (real one anyway) in Cornwall is Anthony Payne. Payne was born in Stratton, near Bude in 1612 and was a sporty lad who grew to be 7’4″ tall (223.5cm) and 32 stone. A great bear of a man he was also quick-witted and gentle.

Anthony Payne

Anthony became the bodyguard of a local notable, Sir Bevill Grenville, and fought along side him during the Civil War. His loyalty and bravery gained him the attention of King Charles who ordered the portrait above, now hanging in The Royal Cornwall Museum, to be painted.

There are many stories about his formidable size and great shows of strength, such as carrying his friends up the steep cliffs near Stratton for a bet, one tucked under each arm. Making him a jerkin (a waistcoat) took three whole deer skins as his chest was so large. But perhaps the most poignant story is that when he passed away at his home in Stratton in 1691 the coffin was too large to fit down the stairs. They had to cut a hole in the floor and lower him out that way. It then took a relay team of strong bearers to carry him to his final resting place.

A Gentle Giant

The legends associated with Cornwall’s Giants are many and varied. There was Bolster the bane of St Agnes is life, Wraft the terror of the St Ives and Porthreath fishermen. Cormoran and his wife Cormelian who lived at St Michael’s Mount and Blunderbore and his brother Rebecks who rampaged around Ludgvan.

But perhaps the most moving story is that of the kindly giant Holiburn. He was a friend to humans and spent his life protecting the people of Morvah and Zennor.

Holiburn the kindly giant

But one day, while playing some game with a local man, Holiburn affectionately patted him on the head and accidentally squashed him completely flat. When the giant realise what he had done he was devastated and cried:

“Oh my son, my son why didn’t they make the shell of thy noodle stronger?”

Holiburn pined away and died of a broken heart. Interestingly there is still a large stone near Morvah church known as the Giants Grave.

The Bones of Prehistoric Beasts

In 1906 an unusual but perhaps logical explanation was offered by Rev. D Gath Whitley for the stories of huge bones often offered as proof of the existence of giants in the past.

At a meeting of the Royal Institution of Cornwall he said:

It has been proved . . . that many of the bones which were formerly said to have belonged to giants in different countries of Europe are simply the remains of the mammoths and the rhinoceros.

Mr Whitley quoted instances in France, Germany, Spain and Russia where the discovery of enormous bones had been taken as evidence of a race of extraordinary men. These had then later been identified by anatomists as the remains of ancient elephants or even whales. Whitley explained:

In prehistoric days many of the bones of the elephant, rhinoceros and hippopotamus were found in Cornwall by the rude primitive inhabitants and were by them considered to have belonged to a race of gigantic human beings.

Whatever the roots of our many Cornish giant legends the landscape and folklore of Cornwall is far richer because of them. And I for one am beyond grateful that our ancestors were such an imaginative bunch!

Further Reading:

The Giant’s Heart

Zennor Head

Real Cornish Giants, where legends begin In wandering over some of the uncultivated tracts which still maintain their wilderness . . . against the march of cultivation, we are certain of finding rude masses of rock which have some relation to the giants.

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lucyariablog · 7 years

Text

Scale Your B2B Content with Artificial Intelligence: Ideas and Tools Marketers Can Try

“Same house, right?” The question came via Facebook Messenger from a friend who was coming over for dinner. Under his message appeared two options: yes and no. With one touch of a fingertip, my answer appeared in a blue bubble as if I had typed y-e-s myself.

That experience, a first for me, was so logical, natural, convenient, and simple that I hardly noticed it. An app had recognized my friend’s message as a yes-no question and had presented me with ready-to-use replies. Nothing about the exchange shouted, “Hey! Check it out! Artificial intelligence at work!”

Only after I heard Paul Roetzer’s Content Marketing World talk did I realize that my experience represented exactly that: artificial intelligence at work.

In fact, artificial intelligence is at work all around us. And this “science of making machines smart” (Paul’s favorite definition, which comes from Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind) is beginning to open possibilities for B2B marketers who want to increase efficiency, boost performance, and create a competitive advantage.

If you take away only one thing from this post, let it be Paul’s mantra: “Try it!”

If you take away two things, let the second be “Don’t wait!”

Try #artificialintelligence in your B2B marketing and don’t wait, says @PaulRoetzer. #intelcontent Click To Tweet

This post covers highlights of Paul’s CMWorld talk, Machine-Assisted Narrative: How to Transform and Scale Your B2B Content With Artificial Intelligence.

Artificial intelligence: Part of everyday life

As a marketer, you’ll never have to understand artificial intelligence in depth. “You don’t have to know how it works. That’s irrelevant to you. You just have to know that there are AI-powered tools that do things you weren’t capable of doing before that can now start to inform your strategy,” Paul says.

For the record, he notes that artificial intelligence is an umbrella term for lots of related terms, including machine learning, deep learning, natural-language processing, natural-language generation, computer vision, and image recognition.

Image source

AI is part of everyday life in ways that you may not recognize. Examples:

Photo applications, such as Facebook and Apple Photos, outline people’s faces and prompt you to tag them by name.

Google and other search engines suggest text strings that you might have in mind as you type, and personalize your search returns based on your location and your past online behavior.

Phone and texting apps offer context-appropriate quick replies (like “I’m in a meeting”) for you to tap.

Netflix recommends shows based on your viewing history.

Amazon recommends products based on your buying history.

Online media, such as The Washington Post, recommend articles based on your reading history.

You get it. As Paul puts it, “Your life is already machine-assisted.” Less apparent is that your marketing will be too, Paul says.

How exactly? No one knows yet, but Paul has some ideas. Imagine, for example, you, as a content marketer, set up a system that knows enough about each visitor to surface precisely those nuggets of content from your site that make that person’s day. What would happen to your conversions?

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Cognitive Content Marketing: The Path to a More (Artificially) Intelligent Future

Caveat marketor

Caveat marketor. That could be Latin for best get ready. While no one knows the impact AI will have within marketing, inevitably some jobs will disappear and others will emerge. Knowledge work – your work – will be disrupted, Paul says.

No one knows the impact #AI will have. Some jobs will disappear & others will emerge. @PaulRoetzer Click To Tweet

Some big brands have high expectations of what will come of applying AI to activities that humans are paid to do today. For instance, according to one report Paul points to, Coca-Cola is “ditching flesh and blood creatives in favor of software algorithms in an experiment to see whether AI bots have what it takes to beat their human masters.”

Similarly, in October 2016, the lingerie retailer Cosabella replaced its digital agency with an AI platform named Albert. “It has more than tripled its ROI and increased its customer base by 30%,” as reported in this article in March 2017. The brand claims that it “will never go back to humans.”

.@shopcosabella replaced its digital agency w/ an AI platform & more than tripled its ROI. @CampaignLiveUS Click To Tweet

So yes, caveat. Beware. But don’t panic. Paul suggests looking at the situation this way:

For the foreseeable future, humans are uniquely capable of creative, emotion-based functions. If it’s a task that is data-driven or can be executed by defining a set of rules, a machine will eventually outperform humans at it. All it takes is for someone to have the vision, desire, ability, and funding to build it.

In short, take the initiative to look for ways machines can help marketers do what machines do best, and keep doing the things that humans do best.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Why Automation Is the Future of Content Creation

How to get started

As you review all the possibilities mentioned below, you may be overwhelmed. Where’s a marketer to begin?

Paul’s advice: Pick one use case, a task that eats up a lot of time, some administrative or tactical thing your team hates to do. Assume a tool either exists or is being built that can enhance what you do in that area. Get a basic understanding of what’s possible. What you learn “will give you superpowers that others don’t have,” Paul says.

If you pick a couple of tools and start doing some of these things, no one’s going to understand what you’re doing. It’ll be magic to people in your company. It can be your competitive advantage.

As you read this article, look for an idea that has your name on it – the one thing you’d like to try.

Experiment with #AI to automate your most time-consuming #marketing tasks, says @PaulRoetzer. #intelcontent Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: From 2 Hours to 2 Minutes: How This CMI Duo Blew Away a Tedious, Unscalable Content Task

An AI framework for marketers: The five Ps

Paul, who created the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute about a year ago, has developed a framework of five Ps:

Planning

Production

Personalization

Promotion

Performance

This framework outlines ways that marketers might take advantage of AI today and in the future.

Planning

Planning, the first category of the AI framework, relates to marketing activities like predicting consumer behaviors, defining strategies, prioritizing activities, and determining allocation of resources.

In this area, not much AI technology is available yet.

Topic clusters

One example of AI-supported planning is HubSpot’s ability to build topic clusters (as shown below), which gives content teams a way to discover topics they might want to write more about.

Topic clusters give #content teams a way to discover topics they might want to write more about. @PaulRoetzer Click To Tweet

Image source

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How Topic Modeling Can Strengthen Your SEO and Content Marketing Strategy

Monitoring competitors’ digital footprints

You can support your planning by using tools like Crayon and Pathmatics (shown below), which enable you to monitor the digital footprint of your competitors, giving you information to use when forming your content marketing strategy.

Tools like @Crayon ‏& @Pathmatics enable you to monitor digital footprint of competitors.‏ @PaulRoetzer Click To Tweet

Analyzing content

Marketing planning often involves analyzing content as a basis for making decisions about future content. One free AI tool anyone can use for this purpose is IBM Watson Analytics. You import any dataset – for example, a CSV file – and explore it.

Paul gave IBM Watson Analytics a try. He used BuzzSumo to export analytics data from the previous 12 months on CMI’s website: titles, URLs, total shares, word count, etc. He hit export, cleaned up the spreadsheet a bit (shown below), and imported it into IBM Watson Analytics.

Click to enlarge

“I don’t know how it works, but I know it’s an AI tool,” he says. “I just threw the spreadsheet in there and watched what happened.”

Paul typed in “total_shares,” and Watson Analytics came up with a set of questions that it predicted people might want to ask (shown below).

Click to enlarge

“Instead of me trying to figure out what to do with this data, Watson recommends things to look at, questions to ask of this dataset,” Paul says. “I don’t have to be a data scientist. I don’t have to be an analytics expert.”

From the set of generated questions, Paul picked, “What is the breakdown of total_shares by author_name?” – a question he hadn’t even considered asking. Instantly, Watson Analytics delivered the breakdown in a stunningly simple visual: a bunch of blue boxes, one per author, packed into a big rectangle in order of the number of times that author’s CMI posts have been shared in the past year (shown below).

Click to enlarge

At a glance, Paul could see that nine authors – those whose boxes take up the left half of the big blue rectangle – account for about half of all shares of CMI content. (Whoa … there’s my name, fifth. Thanks, all of you who have shared my posts. And thanks, Watson Analytics, for the rush.)

Paul suggests that content marketers get out of their comfort zones and try tools like BuzzSumo and Watson Analytics to increase their insight into questions like: How are your authors performing? How do your articles perform based on word count? How does your content perform within specific channels?

Content marketers: Use tools like @BuzzSumo & @watsonanalytics to increase insight. @PaulRoetzer Click To Tweet

“I imported a free dataset into a free analytics tool and used AI to help me crunch this,” Paul says. “It’s a simple use case with tools that are readily available to anybody.”

Production

Production, the second category of the AI framework, relates to marketing activities like these: creating, curating, and optimizing content, including blog posts, emails, landing pages, videos, and advertisements.

In this area, “we’re not that far along,” Paul says. Yet he touches on several production-related use cases, as described here.

Curating content

Tools use AI to help people surface the right content to share across a network or to enhance a blog. You may even be using a curation tool – Curata (shown below) or Scoop.it, for example – and not realize that you’re using AI.

Use content curation tools like @curata or @scoopit to surface the right content to share, says @PaulRoetzer. Click To Tweet

Image source: Curata

Writing email subject lines

One new tool – Phrasee – creates email subject lines that can result in more opens, clicks, and conversions than subject lines written by people. This software uses AI to evaluate email content and recommend 10 subject lines based on scores (as shown below) that indicate how each is likely to perform.

Use @phrasee to create email subject lines that can result in more opens & conversions. @PaulRoetzer Click To Tweet

Image source

A company video says that Phrasee “understands the emotions, sentiments, and phrases that resonate with your audience. Your past, present, and future results drive advanced algorithms that generate better subject lines than humans can, all tailored to your brand’s voice.”

Paul urges you to compare how the machine-generated subject lines do against your own in A/B tests. “Try it,” he says. To listen to Paul is to hear those two little words over and over.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Deliver Emails That Will Increase Reach, Impact, and Subscriber Satisfaction

Analyzing text

Tools that analyze text for grammar, sentiment, style, and tone of voice include Acrolinx, Grammarly, and AtomicReach. Acrolinx, which has been doing this kind of AI for enterprise companies since 2004, offers software that integrates into authoring tools and can assess content in multiple languages against organization-specific guidelines.

Use tools like @Acrolinx, @Grammarly, @Atomic_Reach ‏for grammar, sentiment, style & tone. @PaulRoetzer Click To Tweet

Image source

Creating data-driven content

Data-intensive content (based on financial info, analytics, product info, etc.) lends itself to automation. A human creates a template, and machines do all the rest at scale, spitting out updates as often as you please. While fill-in-the-blanks automation isn’t AI – the computer isn’t learning as it goes – Paul includes it in his AI talk as a step in that direction.

Here’s an example of this type of natural-language generation (NLG) as executed using the Automated Insights tool called Wordsmith, which companies in over 50 industries used to generate over 1.5 billion “NLG-powered narratives” – reports, articles, etc. – last year.

Image source

This approach strikes me as a Mad Libs®–type exercise without the “mad.” A number here, a noun there … voilà! Natural-sounding sentences and paragraphs.

Automate your reports Mad Libs® style using @AInsights #Wordsmith, says @MarciaRJohnston via @PaulRoetzer. Click To Tweet

It was this type of automation that inspired Paul in 2012 to dig into the possibilities of AI for marketers. He was attending a conference where the managing editor of The Associated Press and the CEO of Automated Insights were on a panel. They told the story of how The Associated Press had automated its earnings reports using Automated Insights tools. They went from humans writing 300 earnings reports per quarter to machines generating 3,000 reports per quarter.

“I sat there as a content marketer at heart and thought, ‘This could change everything,’” Paul says. “Can you actually write content with machines?”

He took on that question himself. His agency now uses Automated Insights with Google Analytics to automatically generate most of the text for their clients’ website reports. Where his team used to spend eight hours creating each report, it now simply adds insights and recommendations to the generated report, which takes less than an hour. The automated approach has cut analysis and production time by more than 80%.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Content Creation Robots Are Here [Examples]

Recognizing and auto-tagging images

In a tool like Clarifai, an algorithm assesses images – for example, items of apparel – and tells how likely each image is to be one type of thing or another. The example below shows that Clarifai is 97.9% sure that the image is of a turtleneck. As humans work in the background to confirm or correct the machine’s guesses, the machine gets more accurate.

Image source

Personalization

Personalization, the third category of the AI framework, relates to the one-to-one tailoring of people’s experiences through intelligently automated content, such as emails, product recommendations, web content, and augmented-reality and virtual-reality experiences.

Paul calls this the “Amazonification” of content marketing. This is probably where most of the money has gone so far, he says.

Like data-driven content, personalized content doesn’t always qualify as AI. Still, Paul talks about personalization in the context of AI for marketers because automation is a big part of content’s evolution. And personalization sometimes contains elements of AI, with the machine getting smarter on its own without a human telling it how to do it.”

The NBA basketball team Orlando Magic, for example, personalizes some of its emails. The example below shows an email to a season ticket holder who was reselling tickets. It was created and sent by the Wordsmith tool; no human was involved (beyond setting up the rules). Basically, the message says, “Your tickets aren’t going to sell tonight. You can either waste them or trade them in for Magic Money.”

Image source

The personalized emails are “boosting fan engagement and season ticket renewals,” Paul says. Those results spell real money.

Promotion

Promotion, the fourth category of the AI framework, relates to AI for social media. Paul describes it as managing cross-channel and cross-device promotions to drive engagement and actions, including audience targeting, social publishing, and management of digital paid media.

In this area, too, Paul says, not much is happening yet, although a lot of companies are experimenting.

Cortex is one such company. Its software, also called Cortex, makes recommendations for content headed for social media. (Like many of these startups, Cortex comes out of Boston. “MIT has a little bit to do with AI development right now,” Paul says.) This software, according to a company video, helps marketers create the images, text, and videos that “inspire consumers to take action” yielding a 40% to 500% increase in marketing results while saving an average of 8.5 hours per week.

.@meetcortex is a tool that makes recommendations for #content headed for #socialmedia, says @PaulRoetzer. Click To Tweet

Cortex suggests colors, hashtags, keywords, image types, and publication dates and times. You can set it up to make these choices automatically.

Image source

Performance

Performance, the fifth category of the AI framework, relates to marketing activities – activities like turning data into intelligence through automated narratives and insights and then using that intelligence to optimize performance.

Today’s tools are “not very smart yet” when it comes to reporting on performance, but they can answer questions like how was traffic in August.

Paul predicts the tools will get smarter faster, especially since Google has jumped in with its recent release of Google Analytics Solutions. If you have a list of questions you want answered every month, you can set up this tool to ask Google those questions (as shown below) instead of asking a data analyst. “Google’s probably going to tell you better than the data analyst – and instantly,” Paul says.

Image source

While we’re on the subject of AI and performance, think back to Paul’s story, told earlier in this article, of his agency automating its clients’ analytics reports – cutting its analysis and production time by more than 80%, from eight hours to less than an hour per report. Where could you use that kind of boost in performance?

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: The Challenges Facing Tomorrow’s Marketer: 3 Biggest Themes From Intelligent Content Conference

Conclusion

You don’t need an AI algorithm to conclude that Paul’s main message is “Try something now.” The technology may be young, but it’s evolving fast. Don’t wait.

Which AI tools have you and your teams tried? What have you learned?

Here’s an excerpt from Paul’s talk:

youtube

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Should You Trust Artificial Intelligence to Drive Your Content Marketing?

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Want to view Paul’s Content Marketing World presentation in full to learn about more tools and examples, and watch more presentations from hundreds of other experts from the 2017 event? Secure your video-on-demand subscription today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Scale Your B2B Content with Artificial Intelligence: Ideas and Tools Marketers Can Try appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

from http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/11/b2b-content-artificial-intelligence/

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sglabs · 7 years

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Visit with a Veep- Chris Arnold

Chris Arnold is the general counsel for Schell Games and oversees legal affairs and human resources. He is also responsible for developing relationships with clients, handling dispute resolutions, licensing intellectual property, and managing corporate governance.

What brought you to the video game industry?

I really didn’t know that people could make games for a living. I played games, I enjoyed games, but working in the video game industry was never a goal of mine or on my radar. My background and education is pretty diverse. My undergraduate degree is in biology.

Is it really?

Yes. I wanted to be a doctor. I found out that it was not in the cards however; becoming a doctor is tough if you don’t like being in a lab or seeing blood. But I graduated with a degree in biology because it took me a while to come to that realization, and I quickly found myself looking for other opportunities. In the meantime, I ended up doing a bunch of odd jobs.

Like what?

First, I tried to be a writer. And when you’re 22 years old, you really don’t have that much to write about. I discovered I was not going to be the next Hemingway or Vonnegut, so I began searching for my next venture. I moved from Beaver Falls to Pittsburgh, and I got a job as a personal assistant to the CEO and CFO of Mellon Financial.

I worked for Martin McGuinn and Steven Elliott, pillars of the Pittsburgh community. I was hired to get them coffee, make sure their reports were printed on the right paper, and other administrative tasks.

Okay, then what?

Well, one thing I always try to do, and did back then, is to keep my eyes open and learn things. In doing that job, I gained a pretty unique perspective on how corporations operate. It really changed my thinking. How opportunities could be created- or in the case of the bank- how the bank gave companies the opportunity to create, was fascinating. It was a powerful experience for me. I developed a relationship with their general counsel, a former partner of ReedSmith and we talked a lot. Part of my job was to record the minutes and notes from Board of Directors meetings, so I had a chance to read them. I became very interested. I asked the counsel questions and he, thankfully, liked when people asked questions so he answered me. He encouraged me to apply to law school. I had never considered the law as a career before. I applied to law school and was accepted. I always wanted to help people in some way- back to the idea of becoming a doctor- and I was beginning to think that law could be a different way to do it.

What aspect(s) of law interested you?

While I was taking classes, the idea of intellectual property was really fascinating. I discovered that my talent is suited to defending and helping individuals with creative ability to relate to the larger world.

Okay, interesting.

Learning on how to protect ideas and creativity, and to use them to create wealth were topics of interest to me. From there, I got a job at law firm Fox Rothschild in Pittsburgh. I wasn’t doing intellectual property law at that time, but I learned really great lessons on how to be an attorney and how to treat clients well. I learned from incredible professionals, who took time to train me, to answer my questions, and to make sure I was a fundamentally sound, good advocate for my clients. While there, I was representing doctors and physicians, and helping to create companies.

Later, one of my former professors at Pitt asked if I wanted to join his law firm, Buchanan Ingersoll, one of the bigger law firms in the city of Pittsburgh, to work in their tech transactions group. That’s when I got started in intellectual property as the centerpiece of value in different company transactions. After that experience, I decided that intellectual property law was something I wanted to do. Later I worked on the client-side in intellectual property, and that’s where I first met Jake Witherell [COO of Schell Games].

What did you do next?

Working as the general counsel for that company, I started exploring ways to best leverage intellectual property. And somehow, I inherited the responsibilities of human resources (HR). I had no idea about working in HR. But it became clear to me very quickly that regardless what business you’re in, you’re in the people business. You need to respect how privileged you are to have contact with people who need your help and that you have the opportunity to help them. I like learning, so I started reading about best practices and policies that made sense. One of the things I’ve always been mindful of is to never let the goals of a HR department get swallowed by procedure, and I think that it can happen very easily. From there, I went to Mylan, a pharmaceuticals company, and spent my time exclusively on intellectual property.

While at Mylan, Jake, with whom I’d worked for only a short period of time, contacted me and asked if I wanted to join him at his current employer. I knew from meeting Jake that he was someone I wanted to work with; he’s brilliant, humble, and by far the most genuine person I have ever met.

Very Cool.

I was like, “Let’s do this.” I came to Schell Games and I met Jesse for the first time. I had no idea who he was, what this industry was, or anything. I was cautiously curious about this opportunity, but Jake assured me that I should look into the studio and Jesse himself.

How did you get started looking into Schell Games?

I went on YouTube and researched Jesse. I listened to his concepts, and learned what he believed. I was impressed with his message and the fact that he was taking big swings on big issues. When I met Jesse, I found out that not only is he brilliant but he’s one of the more generous, caring individuals I’ve ever met. Since that time, it has been my personal and professional privilege to represent him and the studio. It’s been a joy heading up HR, trying to create a culture and environment where people can be their best selves; where people can grow and work on amazing things with amazing people.

(The principles and mission statement for Schell Games)

When people apply to work at Schell Games, they often want to know what the benefits are. Sometimes it means health care plans, vacation plans, and those things are important. But in the grand scheme of things, those things are insignificant compared to an organization’s commitment everyday to make the big and small decisions with the best interest of the employees. What I mean by that is: 1) do not over regulate things, 2) understand what is important to people and makes them happy, and 3) try to deliver as consistently as possible. Running a business is messy, and full of compromise. But one thing Jesse has never compromised is his commitment to making this place amazing and sustainable for the people here. That takes courage and personal sacrifice. It’s been a lot of fun to be a part of it.

Since you oversee legal and HR, there’s a lot on your plate. How do you stay on the top of your disciplines?

First, you need to have some humility. You will not stay on top of everything. You need to establish a network, and it can be a mix of internal and external people and resources. For me, I take one piece at a time. For the legal aspect, I need to be the point person for contractual relationships, employment relations- the things that govern all the people in the studio- all the time. When issues arise that require a nuanced approach to the current state of the law, I make sure I build relationships with those experts in those relative fields.

Do you have an example of that?

Sure. For instance, 2016 and 2017 have been extraordinarily turbulent times for our foreign national employees. There have been many real and rumored changes to the current immigration system. Making sure that our employees not only get information- but expert information- in a timely manner is very important. We have established a network which enables me to deliver that information in a way that is actionable to them, so they can continue planning their lives.

(See Chris and other legal experts in Pittsburgh respond to the February 2017 announcement about the ‘travel ban’)

In other aspects, there are projects like Happy Atoms. We applied for a U.S. patent for the modeling set. I am an intellectual property attorney, but not a patent attorney. In order to obtain the protection and go through the application process, we retained other attorneys. Also, in my group of friends we talk, and I get information from them to make sure that I am properly fulfilling my responsibilities in the best way possible.

(Happy Atoms, a physical and digital chemistry modeling set)

Okay, good deal. Now what about the HR side?

For HR, I am incredibly lucky to have Lauren Reed, our HR manager. Lauren is a ravenous consumer of information. She is very connected on all national trends relating to our industry and to companies in general. It is important to make sure that you are following best practices for your employees. We are actually exceeding a number of those ‘best practices,’ The way we look at it, the ‘best practice’ is our floor. Anything else, anything that might be more flexible, or more difficult to administer, we’re on it. We’re in the solving business. We’re not in the business to make HR easy. It takes work. It doesn’t matter if it’s hard for us; we want to make sure the policies and practices we adopt work for the people who work here. The trap that many HR departments fall into is trying to avoid the hard stuff. It’s easy to do that. They may think “how can we make this process more efficient?” but efficient and effective are different words for very good reasons. They don’t always mean the same thing.

(HR Manager Lauren Reed speaking to a group about attracting and retaining a diverse workforce)

That’s very true.

We aim to be effective. It’s a balancing act, but we try to do right by our people with the resources we have. When we do something, you have to understand that people may not see the whole picture. It doesn’t change people’s expectations. And you have to make peace with that reality. If you don’t, you’re going to be miserable. You can’t have the mindset “I can’t believe all these people want me to do all this..”, because yes, they do. Of course they do! Should they really understand that we’re a small company, not a FORTUNE 500, and we can’t do a lot of things those companies can do all at once, without the benefit of that kind of capital? No, but we do the best we can, and we make sure that when we do something that it’s consistent with the type of place Jesse wants to create. Whenever there is a new or changed policy, it’s not disconnected. It makes our teams better. It makes our place more fun and playful. It hopefully creates an environment where people feel free to grow. I think those are the things that we look for when we try to manage all the expectations of our people and the duties and responsibilities we have.

From a hiring perspective, what characteristics do you look for in a potential hire that other companies or other industries might overlook or ignore?

The thing that separates our industry from other custom software companies- especially those that I have worked with- is our lack of ego. If you’re going to work at Schell Games, you have to check your ego at the door. I like the way that Jesse puts it, “this is not the place for talented jerks.” You cannot be a diva, and you cannot think your ideas are precious, because the only thing that matters is the experience the team is building. It’s important because our scale for success is different.

How do you think it is different?

For traditional software companies, or custom software developers, those companies are creating products that solve problems the user has. Look at TurboTax, for example. It has to make sure that the user’s tax return is right, while also delivering an easy customer experience. So for TurboTax, getting a 10 out of 10 for customer satisfaction is important. But our scale is a 15 out of 10. We have to do everything that TurboTax et. al. do, but we also have to garner the “holy crap this stuff is magic” response. We have to create experiences that people would rather do instead of watch TV, listen to music, or other leisure activities you can imagine. We are battling for the discretionary time of the consumer when they come across any of our products. Discretionary time is the most precious resource in the world. No government is going to require you to play a video game, or go to an amusement park.

(Screenshot of the awesome art in mobile VR game Frostbound, a Schell Games original game)

I see what you mean. How does Schell Games create that type of experience?

For us to get to that ‘15 out of 10,’ our products require an inordinate amount of iteration. Trying different things, playtesting again and again, and at every step there are ideas that have to change. There will be ideas that you as a developer thought were brilliant, but end up being flaming disasters. Not only do you have to be okay with that, but you have to want to know that your idea or design might not work. To do that, you have to be humble, and be willing to seek out information in a way that is typically pretty foreign to people not in this industry. When people come to interview here, I tell them that being able to collaborate with passion and humility is crucial. Our process of rapid iteration demands that people communicate clearly and give their best selves at all times.

To put it simply, the people who do the best in our studio are those who can give good feedback and work well with others, while being incredibly technologically savvy.

What makes the Schell Games leadership team click?

Everyone has the same goals. No one is working off some different agenda. Everyone wants to make great, meaningful games and experiences together. When weighing the opportunity of a new project or policy, the leadership always thinks about all the factors that could affect the studio. While there may be differences in opinion, there are never differences in the over-arching goal.

What advice would you give to those trying to get into the video game industry?

Demonstrate your passion. People apply to Schell Games, and say that they “want to be in game development.” That’s the wrong approach. I want to see people who are already designing and developing. Show me the things that you’ve been doing. I want to see the ugly prototype that you made by yourself. Tell me why it looks bad, or why it doesn’t work. I want to see your thought process; how you jumped from concept to concept in your portfolio. Why did you make the changes, and what was the intention? What was your vision? Anyone can say that they “want” to do something. I want to see what you’re doing, and that you have the ability and willingness to grow and learn. No one is entering the industry as a finished product. You may be just starting your career. Show aptitude of your skill, potential of growth, and most importantly, put your stuff out there. I know that the prototype you made by yourself isn’t going to look like World of Warcraft. I understand that. Show me what you’ve made. Tell me you’re going to game jams. Search out opportunities so you have a story to tell.

#visit with a veep #studio management #studio leadership #general counsel #thought leadership #schell games #human resources #HR #legal

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touristguidebuzz · 7 years

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CEO Interview: How American Express GBT Tackles Innovation

Doug Anderson was named CEO of American Express Global Business Travel in August. John O'Boyle / American Express Global Business Travel

Skift Take: American Express Global Business Travel is investing in technology to give travelers better digital tools and a more streamlined booking experience.

— Hannah Sampson

Editor’s Note: A year ago, Skift expanded its coverage of corporate travel with more frequent stories and a dedicated newsletter. The Corporate Travel Innovation Report focuses on the future of corporate travel by examining the big fault lines of disruption for travel managers and buyers, the innovations emerging from the sector, and the changing business traveler habits that are upending how corporate travel is packaged, bought, and sold.

In this series of stories and one-on-one interviews, we explore some of the latest trends, technology, and external forces causing corporate travel to evolve. You can read the rest of the articles in this series here.

As longtime CEO of travel management megacompany Carlson Wagonlit Travel, Doug Anderson always kept an eye on rival American Express Global Business Travel.

These days, Anderson is keeping an even closer watch. After about 10 years at CWT, he was named CEO of American Express GBT in August as the firm continued to move forward with growth plans following its 2014 spinoff from American Express in a joint venture between the credit card company and a group led by Certares. That deal came with $900 million in new funding.

Just about a week after he was named to the position, the company announced it was acquiring corporate travel technology firm KDS in a move to boost its online booking capabilities.

The ability to make such investments at GBT is key, Anderson said.

“This industry is moving so rapidly in the direction of technology as the solution to just about everything that we do that the ability to invest in that technology, develop it and lead the market is what makes my job fun,” he said in an interview in late March. “I think it was very good for me to be able to come into an environment where we have the flexibility to either decide to buy, build, or partner for technology solutions that are fundamentally important in our industry while at the same time knowing a little bit about it, which enables me to help our team think through what are the most relevant opportunities that we have and then how do we bring those most relevant opportunities to market.”

Anderson spoke to Skift about the company’s technology plans, disruption in corporate travel, and his priorities moving forward. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Skift: What’s surprised you about the role or about the company since you’ve started?

Anderson: I was somewhat surprised at the strength of our technology plans at GBT. I had, as a competitor, been a keen observer of what Amex GBT had been doing — at least, the part that was visible to the public over the last two and a half years since the joint venture. When I joined the company and got a firsthand view at our technology roadmap, I was very…surprised may be a strong word, but I was energized and was, and continue to be, very enthusiastic about our technology and innovation plan. It’s second to none in this industry.

Skift: That’s an interesting insight because it’s not that often that you get to see on the other side of that curtain. Has it been a real cultural shift to go from being a competitor to an insider, or do you feel like you come in with really good, fresh eyes?

Anderson: The culture of every organization is different. The culture here is one that I would assess at being extremely service focused. I was very impressed from, literally, from day one with the service ethos across Amex GBT. You might expect me to say that, because we’re in the service sector, but the enthusiasm and the commitment, the dedication to providing service to our clients is absolutely superb….

I knew the industry fairly well. But I didn’t know, other than what we see in the competitive field, much about the organization and the way the organization thinks and operates here at GBT. I did understand the joint venture setup and the capitalization of the company and what was in the public domain, but what I think is really unique about this opportunity for me personally is coming in with a fairly good understanding of the industry, a pretty good understanding of the largest competitor that GBT has in the [travel management company] space and then being able to think about the opportunities we have at GBT through the commitment of our shareholders, the investment capital that we have to really build out our innovation pipeline and our product roadmap that I referred to earlier and really invest in growing this business as this digital revolution happens around everything that is travel in both in the consumer and in the corporate space. When you bring those together, and when I think about the service ethos that I referred to, and then the capital available to really invest in separating ourself from the industry, I get really excited about the opportunity we have here and what we’re delivering.

Skift: You’ve been making a bunch of moves in technology, both by acquiring other tech companies and developing your own tools. What’s really the driving force of that tech roadmap? The second part of that question would be how difficult is real innovation when it comes to corporate travel specifically? Just because it’s not just a pure leisure experience. There’s so many other things you have to keep in mind.

Anderson: The goal of our technology roadmap and of our investment in technology is really twofold. One is to enable travelers, the digital traveler — that’s a term I’ll use — to have access to anything and everything the traveler needs while they’re on the road to make them more efficient in their journey. Today’s traveler is at the point of having everything that he or she needs in their hand on a smartphone or a tablet that’s relevant to their trip. Not just the static information about flying and hotel reservation and confirmation, but the information around the dynamic events that are occurring around them at any one time.

From events that are national and manmade disruptors or disasters all the way to my meeting was delayed, I’m going to miss my flight, I need an alternative and everything in between. Travelers have become much more efficient, much more effective, and the journey’s become less I guess I’ll call it stressful for travelers as a result of the digital solutions that are being delivered and are safe. We’re at the forefront of that.

You also asked for what’s some of the difficulty….That aspect is access to content. There are disruptors in the marketplace that are changing the model — the industry typically talks about, for example, Airbnb and Uber, and there are a number of others that have found a new way to distribute travel and travel-related services, and we have and will continue to partner with the kind of new-age distributors in order to make sure that we give our travelers and our clients access to full relevant content.

We have a distribution agreement with Airbnb and we have an agreement with Uber, for example, and others to make sure that we’re where we need to be and want to be in our ability to distribute content that’s relevant for our clients because we want our clients and their travelers to come to us and be able to find the solutions that they’re looking for to completely facilitate their journey.

Skift: I actually want to come back to that, but first I’d love to hear what you think some of the challenges are.

Anderson: The disruptors are called disruptors because they create challenges, they create the need to change and innovate. I think we’re in a good position in that regard. Some of the things that are current events today create challenges; hopefully they’ll be short term, like the travel ban that is now working its way for the second time to the court system. The ban on electronic devices that was announced earlier this week. Events like the horrific incident that occurred in London earlier this week. Those kinds of things create challenges. There are always technical challenges; technology doesn’t always work perfectly. But we strive and drive to make sure that our technology is reliable and that our systems and our applications are up and running all the time, every time. Those are challenges.

But I think the the biggest challenge the industry faces, and we as intermediates face, is around maintaining access to relevant content. There’ve been attempts at new ways of distributing travel — some of which I mentioned earlier, other I haven’t — and that have been evident in the last six or eight years now. I think our industry, and at GBT particularly, has responded well to those challenges. Each day brings a new challenge and along with it comes a new opportunity.

Skift: It would be one thing just to say, ‘Okay, we can partner with Uber and Airbnb, technically, we can do that.’ But then you have these additional levels of: ‘Is it approved policy? Does it comply with duty of care? How do you know where your travelers are?’ I mean, are those complexities that just add to the difficulty in really streamlining that content and building those kind of partnerships?

Anderson: Well, our clients have to determine how their policy is designed, developed, and deployed. To take your example, we have clients who have decided Airbnb works in their travel program and we have clients that have decided that it does not. Our role is to enable those travelers who work for companies that have decided that, for example, Airbnb works for them, enable those travelers to be able to gain access to Airbnb content. For us to make certain that those clients who’ve decided that it does not work for them to manage their programs in that way. That’s no different than any other slate of preferred suppliers or providers or class of traveler who are staying at a hotel that one of our clients may choose.

They’ve developed this program, we help them with implementing and designing our technology to support their programs. There’s nothing new about any of that.

The new aspect is that we develop relationships with suppliers that are new relationships, and those new relationships, sometimes, have unique characteristics. But it’s not any different than what we’ve been doing for a long time now. It’s just that the platforms are different and there are more new interests, and the pace of new interests entering the market is accelerating.

Skift: Now that you’ve been there for a little while, what do you think are your key areas of focus moving forward from this point?

Anderson: We have a very, what I believe to be, well defined set of priorities going forward. At the top of that list is our product innovation roadmap and plan that I’ve already talked a bit about and you’ve heard us talk a bit about in the media. It is and will continue to be a real differentiator for us in the market.

Hotel is a big opportunity and priority for us, as it is for many of our competitors. Our clients want their travelers for a number of reasons — one, cost savings, two, duty of care — to come back into their managed program for their hotel needs. The level of compliance with hotel booking for most companies is in the 50 to 60% range. Helping our clients pull their travelers back into the channel for hotels, for again, for cost and for duty of care and just taking security purposes into priority.

We have a priority on strategic mergers and acquisitions. You’ve already referred, indirectly, to the one important acquisition we made in the latter part of 2016, and that was KDS. Which gives us our own proprietary online booking capability, which we will do a lot with going forward. Again, sets us apart from our competitors. We support, as was the case previously, a full range of online booking tools based on our client’s preference. We now have our own proprietary capability and we are looking at other either geographic market or capability acquisition opportunities going forward. Nothing to talk about today, but we are actively looking at a pipeline of opportunities.

Then the last one I’d mention is the mid-market….Our traditional business is medium and large corporate, multi-regional, global. We’re going to be focusing more on the mid-market. We have a healthy thriving mid-market business in the U.S. We’re looking to grow that business significantly over the next three to five years. Some of the technology that we’re developing and have acquired recently will help us in the mid-market. We’ve actually, recently, relaunched our mid-market offering in the U.S….We’re pursuing those opportunities with enthusiasm.

Skift: We talked about the disruptors, Uber and Airbnb, but what are some other important trends that you’ve been tracking broadly in corporate travel?

Anderson: Well, the macro trends would be the challenge to maintain access to relevant content, which I’ve already touched upon. Another big trend is mobile, mobile everything, all-the-time traveler connectivity, which I’ve also referred to. Mobile is moving at a pace that I believe — and forecasters like Forrester and Phocuswright believe — a very high percentage of online transactions will be platformed on a mobile device in the very near future, so moving mobile forward here at GBT is a priority that I haven’t talked about previously. We’re enriching our mobile offering. We’re working on developing mobile booking capability, which we would expect to launch in the not too distant future. Enabling travelers to be as efficient and effective as they possibly can while they’re on their journey. I think those are three big trends — access to content, and the others that I just mentioned — that take up a segment of our time to think about and, again, they’re opportunities that if we leverage, and we intend to leverage the opportunities wisely, that will create competitive advantage for us.

Skift: We hear the word consumerization a lot, or at least the sentiment of consumer behavior that they perfect in their leisure life then influencing how they travel and book travel for business. I think the overarching sentiment is prioritizing or making the satisfaction of the traveler more important in their corporate travels like it is in their leisure travels. Is that a consideration that you’re keeping in mind when you’re planning your future moves? Or is that an approach that is important to you?

Anderson: It’s critically important. Our approach is to ensure that traveler centricity is at the heart of everything we do. Now, that doesn’t mean we’ve forgotten about our corporate clients, but travelers are actually a joint interest and focus for our travel manager, procurement officer clients as well. Our joint goal along with our clients is to make sure that their travelers are very effective and very efficient. Traveler centricity is right at the middle of everything we’re thinking about as we move forward and develop and innovate. When you talked about consumerization, I think the clear channel here that’s really come to the surface in the last four or five years is the booking experience, which you referred to. Consumers find it relatively easy to book through many of the online travel sites, leisure travel sites, and when they compare that experience to the corporate booking tools, they don’t understand why the experience isn’t as efficient and as smooth and as easy to accomplish. One of those difficulties, that you actually referred to earlier, is around some of the requirements that are built in to the corporate booking tools that aren’t required for the leisure experience.

Things like policy compliance and corporate rates and backend integration into reporting and analytics technology etc., etc. One of the drivers behind our development of mobile and our acquisition of KDS was to start to make the online experience on the front end more like the consumer online experience.

For those that have looked at what has been developed with the KDS online booking tool, the efficiency and the number of steps that are required to assess the various alternatives for a trip and then make a decision is much more streamlined than the average corporate online booking experience. What we’re striving for is to get as close to that consumer experience, not because….We’re not trying to deliver a consumer application, but we’re trying to give our travelers a consumer-type experience because they when they find that in their personal lives, they’re looking for that in their corporate lives.

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