Frank Chen explains artificial intelligence

Amazing Fast Company article on AI. Frank Chen of Andreeson Horowitz explains AI in very basic terms. It's really well done.

Fast Company: Unofficial Explainer of AI

Networking tips: how to start an email

This article gives three different ways to start emails with networking prospects.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3066116/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/the-only-three-networking-emails-you-need-to-know-how-to-w

The cost of free shipping

I am more and more convinced that the unseen impact of logistics can make a tremendous difference in healthcare.

This article from Fast Company talks about the economics of "free" shipping. While organizations may not charge the customer for delivery, there is no such thing as free shipping. In fact, the rising costs of delivery are forcing many organizations to take a very hard look at their policies. I wouldn't be surprised if there are new incentives to pick items up in a store or otherwise offset the convenience of door-to-door delivery.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3061686/free-shipping-is-a-lie

Even mighty Amazon

Original post:  Dec 1, 2015

Last night, I tried to purchase some presents for my son's upcoming birthday. My timing could have been better. Yesterday was the online event commonly known as "Cyber Monday." The items I needed were available on Amazon. I went through the prompts but noticed that it wasn't allowing me the standard two-day shipping. I was unable to place the order. Perhaps it was due to the massive volume of others all trying to place orders at the same time.

Since I wasn't in a mad rush for the item (his birthday is this weekend), I decided to wait until this morning to place the order. Sure enough, it flew through.

I think it goes to show you that even mighty Amazon sometimes runs into issues with its technology!

Bonus fun fact:  while it may seem that Cyber Monday has always been around, it actually was invented a mere ten years ago by the National Retail Federation. Fast Company has an article discussing the origins:  How Cyber Monday Was Born

Here is an excerpt from that article:

A decade ago, during the happy years before the recession, retailers noticed a spike in online sales the Monday after Thanksgiving. In a stroke of marketing genius, theNational Retail Federation decided to make the it an official shopping day. In a small room in the NRF's Washington, D.C. office, Ellen Davis, then a mid-twenties executive on the PR team, coined the term "Cyber Monday." "It's a random bit of cocktail party conversation I like to bring up sometimes," Davis says. "It's surreal to think that I'm associated with a term that has taken off like this."

And taken off, it has: Americans are increasingly spending more money on Cyber Monday than during Thanksgiving or Black Friday. Over the last two years, in fact, they've spent more on Cyber Monday than on Thanksgiving and Black Friday combined. Today is expected to be the biggest shopping day of all time, with predicted sales of over $3 billion.

....

Davis and her team were tasked with come up with a term to easily describe this shift in behavior. There were other phrases that didn't make the cut. They considered calling it Black Monday, in keeping with the Black Friday theme. "But that was also what we call the greatest stock market crash of all time," Davis points out. Also in the running: Blue Monday, after the color of hyperlinks, or Green Monday, because, well, money is green. "I liked the idea of Cyber Monday because it clearly described what was going on," she says. "Also, if you did a search for the term 'Cyber Monday' in 2005, you got zero results."

The name stuck. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the rest of the media picked up the term. "We spoke the word into existence and we really haven't been able to escape it since," Davis says. "It took off so fast that I don't really feel a sense of ownership over the term. The media, the retail industry, and consumers have really embraced it."

Simpler may be better

Original post:  Nov 4, 2015

In a fastidious quest for optimal mechanisms to substantiate your intellectual influence, some suppose it proper to larder their prose with flowery and elaborate phrases plucked out of a thesaurus. According to this article in Fast Company, they may be wasting their time.

It might sound counterintuitive, but using four-syllable textbook words to demonstrate your smarts will actually make you appear less capable.

"So often, our intuitions about what will impress others are wrong," says Daniel M. Oppenheimer, professor of psychology at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. He led a series of studies on how the use of language can make one appear more or less intelligent.

In one study, the researchers took essays from online college admissions essays and replaced words using an algorithm to replace shorter words with longer words and asked participants to evaluate the quality of the author. Surprisingly, participants rated the authors as less capable and less confident. Concerned that the replacement strategy used made the essays worse, the researchers took sociology dissertation abstracts, which tend to be dense in long words, and replaced the longer words with shorter words. Participants judged the authors as more capable and intelligent if they were reading shorter words.

He goes on to explain:

The reason for this phenomenon, Oppenheimer explains, is that the ease of processing information is strongly associated with positive qualities such as confidence, intelligence, and capability. "To the extent that you use long words, you make it more disfluent to read your prose, people will judge you disfavorably," says Oppenheimer.

The secret is to be clear and concise in your communications. When your co-workers require less strain to understand you, they are more likely to value what you are saying!

Here is the link to the full article:  The Secret To Sounding Smart? Using Simple Language