Fallacious generalisation from the specific instance to the whole in order to create a sexist stereotype

Goals

It is well documented that setting goals is a good first step to achieving success in whatever you want to do.

I set goals on 43 things for 3 main reasons

1) To ensure that goals are not lost
2) To keep goals at the forefront to my mind and to motivate their completion
3) To acquire volunteers to help fulfil the goals

On the 43T site there is a section on why 43 things, why not 10 or a hundred. The reasoning on there should mitigate against the feelings of guilt or failure, but only if the advice they give is followed. You should have a mixture of the serious and the frivolous. You should have some easily achievable goals, some harder ones, and a few ambitions you will not feel guilty about not achieving. The later will at least remind you about some things you feel are important. Too many goals and you will either get swamped or will lose the point. Too few and you may fill up with the big goals without room for small achievements to keep you enthused.

My goal to reform the education system has, as yet led to no concrete results but it has made me more conscious of related initiatives. This has in turn made me look to see if I can do something to encourage an initiative that I approve of to help education elsewhere (nutrition and education suggest free meals in third world schools, see elsewhere on the blog for a few more details). I like to think that it will lead to something concrete in time, but even if it does not it will have done some good.

Coming to point number 3, I did not intend this to be a reason for posting but it has been a side effect. While I was at college I saw that someone had punted from Cambridge to Ely in 1907. I was told at the time that it had not been done since. I thought this would be a fun idea, but I lost track of it over the years. Writing a list on 43 things brought it to mind, so I put it down as something for ‘one day’. This led to a friend who had built his own punt joining me in setting this up and making it happen. Setting a goal took something from a nice idea to a ‘once in a hundred years’ occurrence.

So there you have it, and my view is that setting goals is a useful way of turning thoughts into actuality.

Rufus Evison



I have not been keeping this up to date because I have been working on the Retail Media Blog for rather more of my spare time than I expected. Retail media are interesting and do seem to have ramifications in Branding, Sales and all sorts of places.

A while ago I put a goal onto 43 things about keeping my blog up to date. I have not kept this one current, but I think writing blog entries on Retail media for the Retail media Group is reasonable and counts as progress towards the stated goal.

Why? Because the purpose of the goal was not restricted to this blog, but was to get me doing more of the sort of things that blogging entails. Blogging is not an end in itself it is to cause me to do research (which as well as teaching me things hones my researching skills) and it causes me to write, so aiding my communication skills.

I currently run a few blogs, but the retail media blog has the most traffic. This is because it is useful to people and helps to define what retail media are, their advantages and disadvantages and how they are used. Oddly enough another of my goals on 43 things was to get a common understanding of what retail media means as the term was being used rather fuzzily. To this end I have been gathering info and learning a lot. Also it allows me scpe to help shape the industry.

Goals have a way of doing that. Setting a goal is the first step towards doing stuff.

Last year I had a goal to get a new and interesting job. I now have that job and am enjoying it. Unsurprisingly it is in an industry related to retail media. I do not actually work for dunnhumby Retail Media (dRM) but I sit surrounded by people who do and I work closely with the people who are deciding the direction of dRM. This provides me with some insider knowledge that will probably creep on to the blog.

Moving jobs was a big step for me, having been a serial entrepreneur for most of my working life. I had some sub goals that I needed to do on the way. If I am going to move from starting companies to working for someone else's then this must fit with my own life goals.

Just a little post to say that as an experiment begun by Andy G I am now trying to get the term rufus Sexgod to appear on a google page. This is going to be a very half hearted attempt, but I feel it deserves a 30 second mention here.

Rufus Evison
Rufus Sexgod (Damn Andy G)

Guard your brand as it is worth money to someone

Mainstream: Domain Names, Branding

I just read Guy Clapperton’s article Master of your own domain about keeping control of relevant domain names. This struck a chord as I had recently come across a very well known brand who did not own a prime .co.uk domain name that they clearly should have owned. I cannot name the brand, but I did get in touch with them and they now own the brand. The relevant piece of information was that there is a new service for domainers that is just being launched.

In this context a domainer is someone who had bought a large number of domain names and is sitting on them. Domainers can make money in a variety of ways. They can sell the domains at a premium; they can advertise on the domains, they can use the domains to act as advertising for related companies (e.g. make table.co.uk forward to a furniture company for a fee).

The new service effectively populates their site with relevant content. This has a whole slew of effects:

It means that the site will be better viewed by search engines and so may get more traffic.
It means that the site will be stickier so it will get more traffic.
It means that the site is actually justifiably relevant to the domain name so any companies with an interest in the domain name will have to pay more to get it as legal leverage will be lower.
It means that the site will be less cached and so will get more effective traffic.
It means that a larger variety of advertising can be put on the domain.
It means that better targeting of the domain becomes possible providing higher advertising revenues.

In the above I use the term traffic, but let’s be honest and say that what we are really talking about here is advertising revenue. The point on legal leverage translated into a compelling event which persuaded the brand owner to arrange settlement on the domain before things became harder and so more expensive.

While this service has just been launched I am also privy to another new development that has not yet been released. I am not at liberty to say what it is, but let’s just say that if you are responsible for your brand I would take note of Mr Clapperton’s suggestions and get your domain under control now rather than put it off just a little longer.

Rufus Evison

When you sign up for a credit card there is an awful lot of small print on the back. No one reads it all (alright I do, but I am an exception). Basically you trust the bank and the local legal system that there is not going to be anything horrendously unreasonable there. There are a couple of bits people do read though. Those are the bits with tick boxes next to them. You have to read these because they are asking for a decision. You either tick or you don’t; it is a call to action. One of the things they pretty much have to ask you is whether they and their partners can send you stuff through the post.

I generally tick the “don’t send” box. This is because what they send me is generally irrelevant junk and a real waste of trees. In a way this is surprising because my bank has a huge amount of information about me. I mentioned in a previous post that I felt there were limits around what could and should be done with this. I also said I would come back to the topic. The limits are really on a couple of things:

1) Who should use it.
2) What it should be used for.

My thoughts on this are as follows...

Who Should Use It?

Firstly only people I would feel comfortable with should use this data. Second only people who I as a person who uses the card have allowed to use it should have access to the data. Third only people who I can understand might have access to the data should have access to it.

Basically I do not want any unpleasant surprises. I do not want to find that the shopkeepers in the local stores have been getting together and gossiping about me having used my credit card to ensure they mean the same person.

Clearly my credit card provider can use it to provide the credit card. Moreover, if I have said they can send me special offers from partner companies then they can use it to select the offers. I am not sure that I am comfortable with them giving data to those specific companies in order to do this, so if they want to do that then it is best if they contact me to ask me first. I do not mind if they employ people to do the work on it, providing those people are bound to confidentiality. By extension I do not mind if they use companies to do the work providing the companies are similarly bound.

What should it be used for?

Firstly it should never be used for anything that will in any way harm me. Secondly it should only be used for things that will in some way benefit me. Thirdly it should probably not be used for anything that jars with my expectations. If it is something that makes me think "They are doing what???" when I hear it then someone is a bit close to the edge and it might be better to set my expectations, gauge my reactions and maybe even ask me first.

Clearly the data can be used for providing the credit card service. If I have signed up to receive offers, then I would feel it can be used to target those offers. I also feel that it can be used to improve the offerings of the credit card company. I feel that insights from the data could be used to improve offerings from partners of the credit card company. As I do not feel that the partners should have the actual data then I guess it follows that the actual data cannot be used (except as described below) to improve the offerings of the partner companies.

The exception to that is the credit card company (or their agents) can use the data to produce the insights. So the partner company is not using the data to improve it's offering, but in some sense the data is being used, indirectly, to do just that.

Where does all this lead?

I guess the next step is to ask what happens if a single company acts as an agent for multiple parties, taking data from each of them and then providing insight to each but not passing the data back to any of them. At first glance this seems reasonable providing the information providers/insight users are partners. It is probably best if they put the fact of the partnership somewhere where I can find out if I want to look it up, but I have not thought about this enough to be sure whether that is necessary. This is therefore, probably, a good point to finish for now. More on this topic later...

Rufus Evison
JustTheRants.BlogSpot.Com

DNA databases: sending innocent people to prison

Mainstream Privacy and Freedom

Have you ever come across the birthday party problem? The question is how many people do you need to bring together to have a better than 50% chance of two people sharing the same birthday? Clearly if two people match then their birthday parties are likely to conflict and problems may ensue. The probability of a given birthday is assumed to be even throughout the (non-leap) year (1:365). So how many people? The answer is that you only need 23 people (probability 0.5073).

Now imagine that you have a much longer year, say a billion days. What is the number required for a match? To be honest I do not know. I know the way to calculate it, but the numbers get very big very fast. Yes they then divide back down to small numbers, but calculating them is difficult.

What I do have though is a history of testing something similar. In my role as CTO of Clickstream we were dealing with unique IDs. These were created using a (pseudo) random number between +2bn and -2bn. This gives us a 'year' of 4 billion days. Not only that, but we gave each person another user ID calculated in quite a different manner as an independent check. We found that with a population of 100,000 we were getting on the order of 20-40 matches. In dna database matching a match is the equivalent of prosecuting an innocent person. Now this could have been because the numbers were not truly random, or it could have been the combinatorics as in the birthday party problem.

So why am I writing this blog and ranting? Because DNA testing is a bit like IDing.

The population is not truly random.
The probability of an individual match is (we are told) about 1:1bn
We will get false positives (though with DNA it could lead to innocents in prison)

It is important to bear in mind that the real reason that this matters is that a false positive may equal a wrongful conviction. With a much smaller sample we were seeing about 20-40 ‘wrongful convictions’. The government is now talking about creating a database that is big enough to put thousands of people in prison for no reason.

All of this is without taking into account the flaws in the way the system is run. We are assuming people do things right every time. The only time this has been audited (that I have found) the chances of a false match turned out to be 1:100 rather than 1:1bn. This was due to experimental error that we are assured cannot take place in real life, but I am not sure I trust these assurances.

A probability of 1:100 would mean that the bulk of prosecutions were actually of innocent people. If this doesn’t worry you it should, as there is no reason that you should not be one of the innocent once the drive to gather DNA every time we fly comes in. Forget about whether this is privacy intrusive, forget about whether it is moral, I wish someone would address the question of whether it works and makes sense.

It is starting to work

SideLine Article: Web Optimisation and Promotion

I said I would start to see if I could move my blog from an audience of one. I started, as one must, but tracking site usage. I had, as expected myself as the only audience. I have since had a very little play and the audience has grown ten fold. Not a bog growth and unless they happen to be relevant people it will not be a sustained growth, but it is heartening that a tiny change with no time spent can move something from invisible to available for people to find. I am kind of busy right now, but will see if these minimal efforts can over time provide some real and sustained growth.

Rufus Evison
ReasonedRants.BlogSpot.Com