Category Archives: Open Access

Too many videos in a presentation – forgetting that the audience is there to see YOU, not a TED talk video

GiardinaKARLSRUHE - Death by Powerpoint 

Think including a TED talk video can enhance your Powerpoint or Keynote presentation? Think again and think like a magician
[Via Les Posen’s Presentation Magic]

Last month, June 2014, I was part of a nationwide travelling convention intended to bring high school teachers up to date with the field of Positive Psychology and what it can offer students.

This year its organisers wanted to pay particular attention to the place of Technologies in mental health, and so I was tapped to offer a series of talks as well as presentation skills workshops.

The talks were part of a seminar featuring how to best understand how current and imminent technologies have a role to play in mental health in schools. The presentation skills effort was a one hour talk, showcasing the highlights of my half day and longer workshops.

All in all, there were about a dozen speakers, comprised of authors, psychologists, researchers and technologists including those from the Australian arms of Microsoft and Google, who visited the cities of Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.

The arrangement, as told to me by the organisers, was that each city would receive the same presentations. On the surface, that sounds ideal and easy: the same talk four times. But as it turns out for a few of the presenters, including myself, this wasn’t ideal and in fact we gave variations for all of our presentations. It was an iterative process, learning from each presentation what worked best and which slides and ideas appealed to the audience.

By the fourth conference I felt I had “honed” my presentations and delivered the “biggest bang for the buck”; that is, in the time I had these were my most impactful presentations.

During each of the conferences, conducted over two days including large auditoriums and break out rooms for smaller concurrent workshops, I was able to attend as an audience member and watch others in action.

For each conference, there were times when all the attendees (400+) would gather in one large auditorium to hear the speakers, including me on technologies.

What I, and the organisers, found interesting were those highly paid professional speakers who gave the same presentation each time. I was perhaps the least known to the audience of all the presenters and likely the least financially compensated, so I had to prove myself and win over the audiences with my content and presentation style. Which is why I welcomed the opportunity to present and improve each time.

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Too many people, either due to fear or inexperience, forget that it is the personal interaction – you are THERE – that explains the audience’s presence. Otherwise they could just watch the video online.

Anything on the screen has to enhance your presence. not detract from it. That is what Powerpoint bullet lists are deadly. Focus moves away from the speaker to a static list, often simply reread out loud by the speaker.

Why even have them there?

If the speaker cannot provide a reason why their personal presence is important, why should the audience?

Videos need to be short and provide an easy to understand visual to support the speaker. Why show someone else speaking? That generally implies laziness, not exactly what an audience wants to see.

Even in scientific presentations, the speaker is there to provide context, not to read data out loud. To be personal.

A 21st century company eschews patents?

Elon Musk, Tesla Factory, Fremont (CA, USA)

Tesla’s Elon Musk champions open source cars: ‘All Our Patent Are Belong To You’
[Via Boing Boing]

“Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.”

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While we will have to see just what this means, it espouses something very important – a 21st century company must remain nimble and adaptive. Relying too much on patents and IP protection can induce complacency.

Patents may be a good defense but should not be really used to prevent someone else from innovating.

And patent trolls are a bane of our existence.

So good for Musk.

Balance – we need both authoritarian hierarchies and distributed democracies

 

 Complexity of Life

How do we shift to a more agile organization? Podio a Case Study
[Via Robert Paterson’s Weblog]

Most people would agree that many organizations today are too stiff, too slow and too disconnected to do well in the complex world we live in now. 

Whymachineorgscannotcope

Many large organizations have placed their bet on a new technology platform that will connect all their people’s work. Some think that real change can only come from the bottom up. Many feel that any form of hierarchy is outdated. Some talk about culture but are not clear about what this means.

Few are making any progress. So what is the better way to go? 

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Great discussion. We are out of balance dealing with complex problems because authoritarian hierarchies –so important for 20th century processes – are seen as the only way to get things done.  Maybe for simply processes but not the complex ones facing us.

Distributed democratic approaches using social networks are all the rage. For the first time in 10,000 years we have major tools that leverage these inherent activities of humanity’s culture. They can now overpower hierarchies especially when examining complex processes.

But, they alone cannot solve what we face. Disctibuted democracy is great at cranking the DIKW cycle to get to knowledge. The problem arises because they often want to keep turning the cycle than actually take an action.

They can spend too much time talking and not enough time doing. I’ve written about the need for a Synthetic Organization, one that is leader-full bit leaderless. 

We need some aspects of hierarchy to get things done. It is finding the right balance, designing feedback to permit leader-full approaches to survive while preventing the accretion of power that hierarchies can produce.

I have worked at organizations that found the right balance. We just did not have a firm understanding of why it worked.

Now we are getting much closer to defining how to create the balance between the two key aspects of human social interaction – authoritarian hierarchy and distrubuted democracy.

The groups that accomplish this will be the ones that truly helpus solve complex problems.

The disruption of Health will be distributed

 DNA / Protein function finder from @WellcomeTrust @SangerInstitute @emblebi @YourGenome

Advances in health IT must be viewed as a whole
[Via O’Reilly Radar]

Reformers in health care claim gigantic disruption on the horizon: devices that track our movements, new treatments through massive data crunching, fluid electronic records that reflect the patient’s status wherever she goes, and even the end of the doctor’s role. But predictions in the area of health IT are singularly detached from the realities of the technical environment that are supposed to make them happen.

To help technologists, clinicians, and the rest of us judge the state of health IT, I’ve released a report titled “The Information Technology Fix for Health: Barriers and Pathways to the Use of Information Technology for Better Health Care.” It offers an overview of each area of innovation to see what’s really happening and what we need to make it progress further and faster.

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Health has always been intimately connected with technology, from removing the handle of a drinking well to a handheld ultrasound wand.

Dealing with human health is probably the most complex system of endeavor mankind us currently trying to solve. Old, authoritarian, top-down approaches are giving way to newer, distributed, bottom-up paradigms.

And new digital tools are driving this.

Often we can only solve health problems because of the technological tools we have access to.

But healthcare has been slow to activate the greatest impacts of the digital revolution – to connect people and communities in ways to solve very complex problems. Healthcare’s natural attraction to the status quo for many medical needs– after all, if a doctor makes a mistake, people can die – means that therapeutic benefit often has to be shown BEFORE anything changes.

Patient healthcare data and its mining does not easily fit this paradigm. Authoritarian approaches stemming from the  medical edifice we all face still drives almost all our health concerns. So change is slow.

But it is coming. Faster than many of the authoritarian processes can deal with.

This has not stopped people from doing the mining themselves. From places like 23andme, patientslikeme to crowdfunding projects, individuals are now taking much greater control of their health data.

And finding out all sorts of interesting things.

Often without any form of mediator, because they can.

(It reminds me of the battle I was part of almost 20 years ago. We needed to connect to the internet because it was becoming critical in order to do our biomedical research. The IT department was very reluctant and stonewalled, due to fear of disrupting things. We simply said we could connect to the internet without needing them. Our IT needs had become decentralized , distributed, and we could simply dial-up without needing the IT department at all. So we did.)

Medicine is becoming a more distributed system, decentralizing access and the practice of medicine. It is, in many way, at right angles and in conflict with the authoritarian processes we find in medicine today.

This holds tremendous opportunity to revolutionize what we know about medicine. But with tremendously disruptive effects on the status quo.

There will be real battles here but the conflict between the old, authoritarian system and the new, distributed system will find a balance which eventually helps us all.

Because it has real benefits. And it cannot really be stopped anyway.

Perhaps by making learning easier, Apple leads the way

appleby Stephen A. Wolfe

The diffusion of iPhones as a learning process
[Via asymco]

All theoretical and empirical diffusion studies agree that an innovation diffuses along a S-shaped trajectory. Indeed, the S-shaped pattern of diffusion appears to be a basic anthropologic phenomenon.

This observation dates as far back as 1895 when the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde first described the process of social change by an imitative “group-think” mechanism and a S-shaped pattern.[1] In 1983 Everett Rogers, developed a more complete four stage model of the innovation decision process consisting of: (1) knowledge, (2) persuasion, (3) decision and implementation, and (4) confirmation.

Consequently, Rogers divided the population of potential adopters according to their adoption date and categorized them in terms of their standard deviation from the mean adoption date. He presented extensive empirical evidence to suggest a symmetric bell shaped curve for the distribution of adopters over time. This curve matches in shape the first derivative of the logistic growth and substitution curve as shown below. Screen Shot 2013-11-06 at 11-6-1.51.57 PM

In the graph above I applied the Rogers adopter characterization to the data we have on the adoption of smartphones in 

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This is a very useful analysis of the way smartphones are diffusing throughout the US. I’ve written about the diffusion of innovation throughout a community many times and it is nice to see that smartphones are following the same curve.

Now, this post makes the point that the speed of adoption entails a learning stage. There have been 5 stages postulated in the personal adoption of something new: Awareness, Interest, Evaluation, Trial and Adoption.

Where someone falls along the adoption curve depends on how fast one moves through each stage. Innovators move very rapidly. The middle takes more time. In fact, they usually get stuck at the evaluation stage. They wait the thought leaders in the early adopter group to help them change.

Notice that the adoption of an innovation is slow until about 16% have made the shift. Then you see explosive and rapid growth, once the early adopters are on board.

So the faster the early adopters can evaluate and learn about the innovation, the faster it will spread. Perhaps by Apple making it easy to learn, especially for the thought leaders , allowed it to rapidly spread throughout a community. 

Other phone makers, whose platform was not as easy to evaluate and learn, suffer from churn as the evaluation process becomes muddy and undirected.

By making the evaluation process easier, Apple makes it more likely that the necessary thought leaders will convince the rest of the community to shift. and see explosive growth.

This explains why the smartphone took off so fast once Apple released the iPhone and why everyone else copied them. The same thing happened with the iPad, while Microsoft had no luck with its tablets for years.

The key step to rapid adoption is not just cool technology. It must be made very easy for the critical early adopters to evaluate. That is Apple’s real innovation.


Changing the course of health care investment

rocket launch

Lean LaunchPad |
[Via  Steve Blank]

We’re deep into week 2 of teaching a Lean LaunchPad class for Life Sciences and Health Care (therapeutics, diagnostics, devices and digital health) this October at UCSF with a team of veteran venture capitalists. Part 1 of this post described the issues in the drug discovery. Part 2 covered medical devices and digital health. Part 3  described what we’re going to do about it. This is post is a brief snapshot of our progress.

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I have been following Steve Blank’s journey into disrupting the way healthcare companies are funded off and on. He has brought the ‘Moneyball’ approach to funding, by using data rather than gut feelings.

As any good scientist does, he wants to do n experiment – can he teach a class on these principles to help startups get funding in a more defined way. And to change the VC industry, especially in healthcare, from looking only for home runs and perhaps consider that 3-4 singles will accomplish the same things.

As I have written before, the cost to get drugs to market today is simply too long and expensive. We must find better approaches. And this approach might just help us get there.

As with any experiment, it may not explain everything. But, as this video shows, it can help us create a better model for success.

Fundraising for our #CrowdGrant project, Consider the Facts, is almost over

Asteroid crowd funding 001

Consider the Facts: moving people to deliberative thinking is an experiment in several ways. The project itself involves experimentation to examine a hypothesis.

But the process of raising money for research through crowdfunding is also an experiment. Can a group of people in the public sphere create, vet and support active scientific research? What is required to make that happen?

SpreadingScience has learned a lot and has some answers to those questions. One final one is whetehr we will reach our goal.

$25 would help a lot. Please help us answer that question.

Our #crowdgrant project is number 1. 14% of the way there. Will an asteroid save us all?

[iframe src=”http://www.rockethub.com/projects/28741-consider-the-facts-moving-people-to-deliberative-thinking/widgets/panel” allowtransparency=”true” frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no” width=”288″ height=”416]

I have been juggling a lot since the launch. Keeping all the social media on board can be tricky, especially since this project is an experiment.

Historically using stories—ones that engage rapid, rules of thumb thinking first and create a counterintuitive reaction—has been a way to teach people complex social lessons.

Can it be used to teach them complex scientific lessons? That is what Consider the Facts hopes to find out. To do that, we need some tools. That is why we need your help.

Consider the Facts wants to answer a basic question: Can using a modern, positive fable move people to utilize more of their slow deliberative thinking in order to engage complex problems?

Aesop’s fables, Christ’s parables and Kipling’s Just-So Stories all used the method of presenting complex ideas within a paradoxical story: “the tortoise is faster than the hare?”, “the Samaritan is good?” or “the alligator gave the elephant its trunk”?

“Really? Is that true? Let me think about that.”

All these stories make people stop using their rapid System 1 thinking (as discussed by Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow) and utilize their System 2 as they reorient their rules of thumb to reintegrate a new view of the world surrounding them.

“I see, under some circumstances the hare could be slower than the tortoise. Good to know.” “We should not prejudge people because sometimes ‘bad’ people will do good things. Good to know.” “No way did the alligator pull the elephant’s nose and make it long. But I wonder how the trunk did form?”

In particular, the framing of Kipling’s stories actually invites deeper examination of scientific problems, not just social ones. It is this particular process that Consider the Facts will attempt to explore – can we move people to think deeply and slowly about science, not just social norms?

Scientists are trained to use slow thinking as a necessary part of their job. I cannot read any paper without dropping into System 2 thinking in order to deeply examine the data: “Do those numbers really add up?” “Does that figure actually show what the paper discusses?” “Do their procedures actually produce the results? Do the conclusions match what was described?”

System 1 thinking would read the abstract and come up with “Cancer is cured” or “Fats cause high cholesterol”. Sound familiar?

That is because most of our mainstream approaches that move information around use System 1 methods. That is why headlines are so important. Most people live in a System 1 world.

That makes sense.You had better know what to do instantly when confronted with a lion. Or wonder if that plant is good to eat. In a stable environment, System 1 thinking does a pretty good job of simulating the world. It’s good enough.

But in our complex, rapidly changing world, things are different. Our social environment is not stable. Changing technology destroys rules of thumb. System 1approaches are maladaptive, They lead people away from reality, they put people into Cargo Cult Worlds whose simulation of reality is so poor as to be dangerous.

Their rules of thumb no longer work. This results in the sort of  future shock described by Toffler. People can see that their rules of thumb do not seem to be working. Most, instead of dropping into System 2 and working things out, refuse to integrate any more information at all. They refuse to use System 2 in a way to move forward effectively.

Research shows that giving people more facts does not move them towards deliberative thinking. In truth, many people retreat even further into their Cargo Cult worlds, ignoring or rationalizing away any facts that contradict their rules of thumb. They will actually forget facts if those facts contradict their Cargo Cult World.

Shouting at them or lecturing them actually produces the opposite reaction from what is desired.

Perhaps telling them a story will. 

My crowdfunding project – How the Asteroid Saved Mankind

I’ve been working of a crowdfunding project based on my Ignite presentation above.

Popular Science is collaborating with RocketHub to fund science projects.

Sounds just up my alley. But the deadline is this Sunday. Since I only found out about it about a week ago, I’ve been spending a lot of time getting it all into shape.

I think I may make the deadline. The if Popular Science picks my project, they will bring some marketing muscle.

But I will probably still rely on my friends and family to help make this project a success.

Get ready.