#it will not fix the underlying problem that all of my executive functions were tied to a single nonessential task by years of repetition

[essektheylyss]

It is astounding how little urgency my brain has for doing anything up to and including basic physical maintenance tasks but if I go like three weeks without writing it throws a whole ass hissy fit and acts like I've been crawling through the desert without water for forty days.

I really just spent years generating an endless stream of good brain chemicals by making up some guys and giving them problems and arranging their problems into neat little rows of text, and it shows.

[cecillewhite]

Measurement Matters: 3 Data Analytics Lessons to Remember

Although I’ve spent my entire career in marketing and communications, measurement has never been far away. I’m not a natural-born statistics nerd. But these days, it’s hard for any of us to avoid analytics, no matter what we do for a living.

Since the start of the digital age, we’ve all been swimming in business data. Yet many of us still don’t take the time to use it in meaningful ways. Some of us avoid data analytics because it involves so many moving parts:

Valid and reliable methods

Robust tools

High-quality data

Appropriate benchmarks

And of course, relevant underlying logic.

It’s true, these elements aren’t always easy to align. But would you really rather fly blind? Imagine how much more you could achieve by investing some time and effort to put metrics on your side.

Even before data-based measurement became widespread, I saw its value at work in dozens of different business scenarios. Here are three of the most memorable examples:

Lesson 1: Find Your “North Star” Metric

Great data analytics tools are plentiful today. All those interesting apps and widgets may tempt you to spread your measurement efforts too thin. But just because you can track many metrics doesn’t mean you should.

It reminds me of the 1990s dude ranch comedy film “City Slickers,” when Billy Crystal’s middle-aged character, Mitch, shares a serious moment with a grizzled cowboy named Curly, played by Jack Palance:

CURLY: “Do you know what the secret of life is? One thing. Just one thing… MITCH: “Great. But what is the one thing? CURLY: “That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”

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Curly’s little nugget of wisdom is as useful in analytics as it is in life. Every organization has its own special sauce. If you know what sets you apart, you can quantify it. Isolating the one metric that matters most to your organization may not be easy. But it can make all the difference – not just for near-term performance, but for long-term success.

I learned this while working my way through college as a waitress at an upscale restaurant in Seattle. The place was so popular that people would wait an hour or more for a table. By the time most customers were seated, they were beyond hungry. That meant delivering a superior dining experience was essential. But how do you quantify quality?

The owners decided to keep customers coming back for more by uniting employees around one deceptively simple objective – hot food. In other words, success meant cooking every meal to perfection and serving it piping hot. Each of us worked toward performance metrics tied to that central objective.

As a waitress, my goal was to serve at least 90% of meals within 2 minutes of plating. Others had similar goals. With heightened awareness of the company’s mission, all employees became obsessed with hot food. Our behavior rapidly changed, and the culture soon followed.

Hot food may seem like an obvious success factor for any restaurant. But the right choice wasn’t as easy as it seems. In this case, the “north star” metric emerged only after a series of long and intense brainstorming sessions with customers, employees and business partners. It also required trial and error. But It was worth the effort.

Eventually, that metric became a beacon for every employee, and the organization became one of the Pacific Northwest’s most successful and storied fine dining establishments.

Lesson 2:  Measurement is a Nonstop Endeavor

Not so long ago, the road to business intelligence was tedious and expensive. Analysts measured performance by comparing static “before and after” snapshots on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis. Data was compiled in batches that often took days to process before reports could be developed and distributed. The complexity and cost of real-time reporting put it far out-of-reach for all but the largest and wealthiest organizations.

I’ve faced this challenge several times in my career – even as recently as 10 years ago on the data analytics team at one of the world’s leading web services companies. With big-ticket advertising budgets on the line, we knew that faster insights could dramatically improve campaign results for the brands we served.

Of course, other digital economy players recognized the same opportunity. They, too, inched their way forward, compressing reporting turnaround times as quickly as their budgets and capabilities would allow. Suddenly, speed had become a driving force, as companies everywhere sought a competitive advantage by accelerating time-to-insight.

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No more. Now data is dynamic, plentiful and relatively cheap. It has become the fuel that drives remarkably sophisticated, easy-to-use online reporting tools that are also relatively cheap. (Free Google Analytics, anyone?) In fact, with nearly instant data so widely available at such a low cost, it seems that yesterday’s time-to-insight advantage has nearly evaporated.

So, where should you look to find a competitive advantage now? Ask anyone who treats analytics like breathing. Today, value comes from managing measurement as a continuous improvement process. The smartest companies proactively test, analyze, discover, improve and optimize. And that requires more than insights, alone. Which leads to my next lesson…

Lesson 3:  Analysis Without Action Is Pointless

Developing relevant KPIs (key performance indicators) is one thing. Putting them into practice is another. Data-based insights are useful only if you’re willing to act on what you uncover.

With so many analytics tools available today, organizations can become so focused on gathering data, perfecting metrics and generating reports that they lose sight of why they wanted the information in the first place. Developing a dashboard is relatively easy. Letting a dashboard guide your business decisions and behavior is much harder – especially when data tells a story you don’t want to hear.

I learned this the hard way a few years ago, while generating monthly marketing performance reports for a learning solutions provider. By combining data from multiple sources, we defined a handful of meaningful metrics. For each metric, we established benchmarks based on 12-month rolling averages for the previous year.

This became the foundation for a simple KPI dashboard that was timely, relevant and easy to digest. It was exactly what executives had requested. But I didn’t stop there. Each month, I wrote a companion analysis that interpreted the latest findings, explored the implications of those findings and suggested a course of action.

How did business leaders respond? Crickets. Their silence was deafening.

The problem wasn’t data overload. It wasn’t about analysis paralysis. It wasn’t even a “set-it-and-forget-it” mindset. It was something that data alone couldn’t fix. Leaders thought they wanted to track marketing program impact. But when results were difficult to digest, they chose to ignore troubling indicators instead of finding ways to improve.

Perhaps executives expected only “feel good” results. Or maybe middle managers sanitized negative data points and trend lines, so executives wouldn’t kill the messenger. But selective truth doesn’t change reality. And in this case, it didn’t lead to better business outcomes.

So perhaps the most important lesson of all is the hardest lesson to accept. Insight is only half of the measurement battle. Unless your organization is willing to face tough facts, you will never be able to move the meter in the right direction. You may not be doomed. But if you choose to do nothing, you are likely to keep stumbling through the wilderness.

Closing Notes

Business data can tell deeply powerful stories through analytics. Sometimes data will shout right out loud. Other times, it speaks only through a quiet whisper, a fleeting pause or a subtle shift in direction. But even in those tiny signals, data can speak volumes.

So tell me, what are you doing to give your data a useful voice? How closely are you listening to its message about your organization’s performance? And how do you respond?

If you have an analytics lesson to share, feel free to tell me about it at kkruse@talentedlearning.com.

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[click2watch]

Builders on Wall Street: Bitcoin Devs Host Lightning Hack Day

It was described as “not a normal conference.”

Sure, speakers took to the podium to present their futuristic ideas – a staple at the cryptocurrency space’s many, many conferences. But the Lightning Hackday, which took place in the heart of Wall Street on October 27th and 28th, was all-in-all more of a community-led endeavor with a heavy coding twist.

Throughout the two-day event, a hackathon whirred in the background. Tiny computers called Raspberry Pis dotted the tables and developers murmured amongst themselves about how to tweak the rules of the system while also not disrupting the incentive schemes.

This eclectic setup is maybe to be expected from a group of hackers building what they hope is the future of money.

Bitcoin’s lightning network is still in its early stages, but many hope it will fix bitcoin’s biggest underlying problems – that it’s simply too slow and clunky, and so doesn’t scale well for a future of mass adoption – at least, that is, without the help of a second layer.

“For those of you who don’t know, blockchains suck,” Chris Stewart, an engineer at blockchain data provider SuredBits, said when kicking off his talk.

That said, he and other developers hope the lightning network will change that.

Passions were so high, in fact, that it was hard to keep track of all the different projects on the floor. But one thing tied them all together – the interest in building for the technology’s potential as a payment mechanism for everyday purchases.

Indeed, Lightning Labs engineer Alex Bosworth admitted that lightning’s “killer app” – what takes it mainstream – might be as simple as that.

“I don’t know what the killer app is, maybe buying a cupcake is,” Bosworth told attendees during his talk.

Ideas, man

Bosworth, though suspects that the best ideas for using lightning haven’t even been created yet.

For comparison, he argued that the early developers behind Linux, the popular open-source operating system, could never have guessed how far the code would go.

“Were they thinking ‘Oh this will be deployed in a billion phones?” he said, implying that they probably didn’t – and couldn’t – have that kind of foresight when it was first deployed.

As such, Bosworth told the developers to not keep their big ideas a secret. And he took his own advice, sharing his many ideas for how lightning could be used in unique ways. For instance, he believes lightning could be used as a “monetized data layer,” with some retouching of the underlying software.

Right now, lightning works by passing around “little proofs” that are essentially “meaningless, random data,” Bosworth said. “But we could turn it into meaningful data,” added.

One idea: use lightning for passing around little pieces of a file, so that when they’re brought together they recreate the full file.

Bosworth also argued that lightning could be used to pay for enhanced payment privacy and to fuel a wave of “self-organizing” games, although, as Bosworth rattled off idea after idea, it was hard to keep up with just how these features would work in practice.

Still, he was only one developer sharing ideas at the event.

Hailing from Japan, Nayuta CEO Kenichi Kurimoto presented a lightning implementation that’s optimized for the “internet of things,” or the vast array of devices – from cars to TVs – that have enhanced capabilities thanks to being connected to the internet.

He sees great potential in this use case, arguing these connected machines might one day send payments between each other. And with that, he envisions that a “money owned by nobody” (i.e. bitcoin) will play a key role, since payments can be so cheap and various devices can execute them without the need for a third party.

Back to the basics

But with all of the futuristic, look-past-the-horizon ideas aside, another key focus of the Lightning Hackday was simply making lightning easier to use.

“There’s a lot going on, but there’s also not,” bitcoin enthusiast Toby Algya said, laughing about how difficult lightning is to set up. “I’m just trying to get lightning working. That’s my personal challenge for the day.”

In this regard, developers are still thinking about the bottom layer, which might someday help with these kinds of problems. For example, a tool called “lightning autopilot” could make things easier by automating the step where users have to set up a “channel” to use the network.

For one, Rene Pickhardt, a lightning developer and data science consultant, is working in this area and argues that these kinds of design questions are important to answer early.

“Why is it important to think about it early? If we grow lightning for a couple of years, we might find out topology is not that great,” he contended.

While Pickhardt offered some ideas at the Lightning Hackday, he noted that no solution is perfect since there’s a “tradeoff between privacy and the quality of recommendations.”

On a related note, a few key lightning developers are meeting in Australia next week to discuss the future of the project’s specifications. Pickhardt noted that the future of autopilot, including his implementation, is something high on their list to discuss.

Bosworth echoed that sentiment, saying that these kinds of technical tweaks are so vital that he’s going to hit pause on his big ideas – for now, at least – to focus on them. Case in point: he recently joined Lightning Labs on a full-time basis in order to work on the nuts-and-bolts aspect of the software.

“There are so many cool things that can be built on lightning, it’s important for the underlying protocol to work well,” he said, concluding:

“My priority is to get it there.”

Fearless girl statue image via Renee Leibler

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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[newstfionline]

Smartphones Are Killing Americans, But Nobody’s Counting

By Kyle Stock, Lance Lambert, and David Ingold, Bloomberg, October 17, 2017

Jennifer Smith doesn’t like the term “accident.” It implies too much chance and too little culpability.

A “crash” killed her mother in 2008, she insists, when her car was broadsided by another vehicle while on her way to pick up cat food. The other driver, a 20-year-old college student, ran a red light while talking on his mobile phone, a distraction that he immediately admitted and cited as the catalyst of the fatal event.

“He was remorseful,” Smith, now 43, said. “He never changed his story.”

Yet in federal records, the death isn’t attributed to distraction or mobile-phone use. It’s just another line item on the grim annual toll taken by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration [NHTSA]--one of 37,262 that year. Three months later, Smith quit her job as a realtor and formed Stopdistractions.org, a nonprofit lobbying and support group. Her intent was to make the tragic loss of her mother an anomaly.

To that end, she has been wildly unsuccessful. Nine years later, the problem of death-by-distraction has gotten much worse.

Over the past two years, after decades of declining deaths on the road, U.S. traffic fatalities surged by 14.4 percent. In 2016 alone, more than 100 people died every day in or near vehicles in America, the first time the country has passed that grim toll in a decade. Regulators, meanwhile, still have no good idea why crash-related deaths are spiking: People are driving longer distances but not tremendously so; total miles were up just 2.2 percent last year. Collectively, we seemed to be speeding and drinking a little more, but not much more than usual. Together, experts say these upticks don’t explain the surge in road deaths.

There are however three big clues, and they don’t rest along the highway. One, as you may have guessed, is the substantial increase in smartphone use by U.S. drivers as they drive. From 2014 to 2016, the share of Americans who owned an iPhone, Android phone, or something comparable rose from 75 percent to 81 percent.

The second is the changing way in which Americans use their phones while they drive. These days, we’re pretty much done talking. Texting, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are the order of the day--all activities that require far more attention than simply holding a gadget to your ear or responding to a disembodied voice. By 2015, almost 70 percent of Americans were using their phones to share photos and follow news events via social media. In just two additional years, that figure has jumped to 80 percent.

Finally, the increase in fatalities has been largely among bicyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians--all of whom are easier to miss from the driver’s seat than, say, a 4,000-pound SUV--especially if you’re glancing up from your phone rather than concentrating on the road. Last year, 5,987 pedestrians were killed by cars in the U.S., almost 1,100 more than in 2014--that’s a 22 percent increase in just two years.

Safety regulators and law enforcement officials certainly understand the danger of taking--or making--a phone call while operating a piece of heavy machinery. They still, however, have no idea just how dangerous it is, because the data just isn’t easily obtained. And as mobile phone traffic continues to shift away from simple voice calls and texts to encrypted social networks, officials increasingly have less of a clue than ever before.

Out of NHTSA’s full 2015 dataset, only 448 deaths were linked to mobile phones--that’s just 1.4 percent of all traffic fatalities. By that measure, drunk driving is 23 times more deadly than using a phone while driving, though studies have shown that both activities behind the wheel constitute (on average) a similar level of impairment. NHTSA has yet to fully crunch its 2016 data, but the agency said deaths tied to distraction actually declined last year.

There are many reasons to believe mobile phones are far deadlier than NHTSA spreadsheets suggest. Some of the biggest indicators are within the data itself. In more than half of 2015 fatal crashes, motorists were simply going straight down the road--no crossing traffic, rainstorms, or blowouts. Meanwhile, drivers involved in accidents increasingly mowed down things smaller than a Honda Accord, such as pedestrians or cyclists, many of whom occupy the side of the road or the sidewalk next to it. Fatalities increased inordinately among motorcyclists (up 6.2 percent in 2016) and pedestrians (up 9 percent).

“Honestly, I think the real number of fatalities tied to cell phones is at least three times the federal figure,” Jennifer Smith said. “We’re all addicted and the scale of this is unheard of.”

In a recent study, the nonprofit National Safety Council found only about half of fatal crashes tied to known mobile phone use were coded as such in NHTSA databases. In other words, according to the NSC, NHTSA’s figures for distraction-related death are too low.

Perhaps more telling are the findings of Zendrive Inc., a San Francisco startup that analyzes smartphone data to help insurers of commercial fleets assess safety risks. In a study of 3 million people, it found drivers using their mobile phone during 88 percent of trips. The true number is probably even higher because Zendrive didn’t capture instances when phones were mounted in a fixed position--so-called hands free technology, which is also considered dangerous.

“It’s definitely frightening,” said Jonathan Matus, Zendrive’s co-founder and chief executive officer. “Pretty much everybody is using their phone while driving.”

There are, by now, myriad technological nannies that freeze smartphone activity. Most notably, a recent version of Apple’s iOS operating system can be configured to keep a phone asleep when its owner is driving and to send an automated text response to incoming messages. However, the “Do Not Disturb” function can be overridden by the person trying to get in touch. More critically, safety advocates note that such systems require an opt-in from the same users who have difficulty ignoring their phones in the first place.

In NHTSA’s defense, its tally of mobile phone-related deaths is only as good as the data it gets from individual states, each of which has its own methods for diagnosing and detailing the cause of a crash. Each state in turn relies on its various municipalities to compile crash metrics--and they often do things differently, too.

The data from each state is compiled from accident reports filed by local police, most of which don’t prompt officers to consider mobile phone distraction as an underlying cause. Only 11 states use reporting forms that contain a field for police to tick-off mobile-phone distraction, while 27 have a space to note distraction in general as a potential cause of the accident.

The fine print seems to make a difference. Tennessee, for example, has one of the most thorough accident report forms in the country, a document that asks police to evaluate both distractions in general and mobile phones in particular. Of the 448 accidents involving a phone in 2015 as reported by NHTSA, 84 occurred in Tennessee. That means, a state with 2 percent of the country’s population accounted for 19 percent of its phone-related driving deaths. As in polling, it really depends on how you ask the question.

Prosecutors have a similar bias. Currently, it’s illegal for drivers to use a handheld phone at all in 15 states, and texting while driving is specifically barred in 47 states. But getting mobile phone records after a crash typically involves a court order and, and even then, the records may not show much activity beyond a call or text. If police provide solid evidence of speeding, drinking, drugs or some other violation, lawyers won’t bother pursuing distraction as a cause.

“Crash investigators are told to catch up with this technology phenomenon--and it’s hard,” Sanchez said. “Every year new apps are developed that make it even more difficult.” Officers in Arizona and Montana, meanwhile, don’t have to bother, since they allow mobile phone use while you drive. And in Missouri, police only have to monitor drivers under age 21 who pick up their phone while driving.

Like Smith, Emily Stein, 36, lost a parent to the streets. Ever since her father was killed by a distracted driver in 2011, she sometimes finds herself doing unscientific surveys. She’ll sit in front of her home in the suburbs west of Boston and watch how many passing drivers glance down at their phones.

“I tell my local police department: ‘If you come here, sit on my stoop and hand out tickets. You’d generate a lot of revenue,’” she said.

Since forming the Safe Roads Alliance five years ago, Stein talks to the police regularly. “A lot of them say it surpasses drunk driving at this point,” she said. Meanwhile, grieving families and safety advocates such as her are still struggling to pass legislation mandating hands-free-only use of phones while driving--Iowa and Texas just got around to banning texting behind the wheel.

“The argument is always that it’s big government,” said Jonathan Adkins, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association. “The other issue is that … it’s hard to ban something that we all do, and we know that we want to do.”

Safety advocates such as Smith say lawmakers, investigators and prosecutors won’t prioritize the danger of mobile phones in vehicles until they are seen as a sizable problem--as big as drinking, say. Yet, it won’t be measured as such until it’s a priority for lawmakers, investigators and prosecutors.

“That’s the catch-22 here,” Smith said. “We all know what’s going on, but we don’t have a breathalyzer for a phone.”

Perhaps the lawmakers who vote against curbing phone use in cars should watch the heart-wrenching 36-minute documentary filmmaker Werner Herzog made on the subject. Laudably, the piece, From One Second to the Next, was bankrolled by the country’s major cellular companies. “It’s not just an accident,” Herzog said of the fatalities. “It’s a new form of culture coming at us, and it’s coming with great vehemence.”

Adkins has watched smartphone culture overtake much of his work in 10 years at the helm of the GHSA, growing increasingly frustrated with the mounting death toll and what he calls clear underreporting of mobile phone fatalities. But he doesn’t think the numbers will come down until a backlash takes hold, one where it’s viewed as shameful to drive while using a phone. Herzog’s documentary, it appears, has had little effect in its four years on YouTube.com. At this point, Adkins is simply holding out for gains in autonomous driving technology.

“I use the cocktail party example,” he explained. “If you’re at a cocktail party and say, ‘I was so hammered the other day, and I got behind the wheel,’ people will be outraged. But if you say the same thing about using a cell phone, it won’t be a big deal. It is still acceptable, and that’s the problem.”