Three Thing Game is Go

Well, we’ve spent a sizeable chunk of the weekend printing and cutting out “Bank of Thingland” money, stuffing envelopes with notes, printing coloured things and generally getting ready for the Three Thing Game auction tomorrow that starts everything off. The auction is at 2:15 in Wilberforce Lecture Theatre 2 (WI-LT02). Should be fun.

This year, for a change, we are releasing some of the things that will be auctioned, so that you know what is coming up. You can find the list, along with the briefing document, here. If you find that I’ve spelt your name wrong in the team list (it happens) let me know and I’ll update the registration spread sheet.

Great Big Lego Bricks

Just bought a bunch of these to put things in. They are great big Lego bricks, around 25cm x 50cm which you can put things in. And they fit together just like normal sized ones. So you can build a fort with them.

From the look of the reviews on Amazon they are very popular. Particularly with five year olds. But I like them too.

You must meet Henrietta Lacks–in fact you may already have done

Read. This. Book. It is not about computers (at least so far, I’m just past half way through). It is about medicine, race and human nature. Anyone proposing a work of fiction that followed the story in this book would be dismissed as being fanciful and having ideas that were just too far fetched. And yet it is all true.

It tells the story of how the death of one woman led to the establishment of a whole branch of science. It will also tell you how cells work, how they go wrong and how we found out about a lot of this, just because of Henrietta Lacks.

You can track down a copy from here. It is also available for Kindle at a very good price.

Data, Insight and Customer Weirdness at C4DI

Andy points out his achievements, including coming up with the slogan “8 out of 10 cats…”

We are all surrounded by data which is harvested, refined and bought and sold just like any other cash crop. In the C4DI meeting tonight two excellent talks showed how this “big data” can be used to deliver useful outcomes, but how you also need to be aware of the human context behind the numbers.

First up was Andy Parkinson who now works for Kingston Communications as their Head of Insight and Analytics. He used to work for Hull City Council and gave a great description of how the council has been using the data it collects to refine and target services to make them more efficient. He showed how we can all be clustered into groups and how this helps to target resources. It seems that everybody is unique, but we all mange to be unique in a fairly structured way. And when you can characterise and map this, you can work out where you need to target what you are doing with your resources.

Having told us of the power of all this analysis, he then went on to mention that people can also behave in untoward and unpredictable ways that don’t fit their profile, or just act on “auto-pilot”. This reminded me a lot of my favourite maxim of the moment “Plans are useless, Planning is crucial”. By all means analyse your data and take actions based on it. But be well aware that you will always have to deal with some weirdness around the edges and behaviours that arrive “built in” to people. Of course, if you can harness these you can get some really big wins. So don’t be afraid to try stuff that targets the “automatic self”.

Next we had a talk from Nick Thompson who is Managing Director of Hull City and was formerly Director of Consumer Services with Kingston Communications. Nick took what Andy said and added an even stronger human dimension. By breaking down the Hull City fanbase into sections and analysing their motivations and actions he provided a lovely example of how data can tell you some useful things, but that you need to understand what drives the people in your numbers and how they behave.

It turns out that the spending habits of the fans seem to follow the well established “80 – 20” law, which in Hull City terms means that that 80% of the income of the club comes from around 20% of the fans. And these are not necessarily the most fanatical ones, who see their passion for the club transcending things like replica shirts and other merchandise. Very interesting.

Nick make the point that you can make decisions based on the data, but this must always be done in the light of the emotional attachments and drivers of the people themselves. What made it all the more striking was that Nick has obviously been a huge fan of the club for a very long time, and presumably fits himself into one of his categories as well.

The talks fitted together really well and made for a terrific evening.

A Rather Useful Slice of Raspberry Pi

This is a slightly processed picture of the audience. It seems that quite a few people have a taste for Pi.

We did another Rather Useful Seminar today. It was all about the Raspberry Pi. I covered what is, how you use it, a bit about hardware interfacing from Python and then we had a bit of time to look at my Pi Arcade table, which I’m keeping in the department for now.

This is the table, showing off its Pi credentials. Normally I run Mame on it. You can find out more about how I built it here.

Thanks to a great audience. You can find the slides here.