Ged Carroll

Category: jargon watch | 術語定義 | 용어의 정의 | 用語の定義

Jargon watch as an idea was something that came from my time reading Wired magazine. I found that in my work terms would quickly spring up and just as quickly disappear. So it made sense to capture them in the moment.

The best way of illustrating jargon watch is by example. I came across the term black technology through mainland Chinese friends. One of the key things that Chinese consumers think about technology products is the idea of ‘black technology’. This makes no sense to your average western reader. It equates to cool and innovative.

The term itself comes from a superior technology featured in a Japanese manga series plot. As an aside the relationship between Chinese and popular Japanese culture is becoming increasingly attenuated due to Chinese nationalism.

What might be black technology this year might be humdrum in six months as the companies quickly catch up. Black technology is a constant moving target, but generally its sophisticated and likely has a cyberpunk feeling to it.

I keep an eye out for jargon like this all the time, hence jargon watch. I find this content in my professional reading and in the sources that I follow online. What makes something worthwhile to appear here is purely subjective based about how I feel about it and how much I think it resonates with my ideas or grabs my attention. A lot of British youth culture doesn’t make it because it doesn’t have that much of an impact any more beyond the UK.

  • Deep design

    Blue deep sea squid

    The key underlying belief to deep design is that modern life systems and processes aren’t designed for humans. From industrial design, to administrative processes and algorithms – all could be categorised as ‘inhumane’. If you’ve ever dealt with work visa forms in a foreign country you’ll know what I mean.

    Human-centred design was supposed to address this. But it fails to scale or handle complexity. Deep design adds a layer of EQ to human-centred design in its approach. Even basic things like ergonomic datapoints didn’t include female data until relatively recently. There weren’t crash test dummies designed to emulate the effect on female bodies.

    Secondly agile processes in software and experience design with attitude of move fast and break things seem to fail as well. Test and learn as an iterative process works well at manipulating people, but is less good at building systems designed for humans.

    In the early 1990s, business process reengineering (BPR) sought to do a similar thing in organisations. It focused on the analysis and design of workflows and business processes within an organisation. BPR aimed to help them fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitors. However customer service and offerings became inflexible and not really customer centred, let alone employee focused.

    The reality was a desire to rollout processes that technology could manage. The field was pioneered by thinking from Michael Hammer formerly of MIT. It didn’t work and its popularity started to wane in the US in the mid-to-late 1990s as the process was abused. SAP consultants looked to reform client companies into one of their industry templates. Building the people round the system rather than deep design.

    Similar posts to deep design here.

    More information
    Deep design to the rescue: Solving wicked problems of the future | Campaign Asia

  • Erooms Law – jargon watch

    Erooms Law is a metaphor that compares other business processes to the virtuous circle of Moore’s Law. It is literally Moore’s Law in reverse. Industries have developed processes that are getting ever more expensive.  Once could consider that is inversely proportional to the way semiconductor manufacture  reduced the relative cost of computing power over time.

    Some see this as a potential opportunity for the use of computing in a sector to reduce costs. As with most circumstances, what seems like a great idea inside an Excel spreadsheet doesn’t work out in the real world. But that doesn’t stop the management consultants, investment bankers or venture capitalists from trying.

    Eroom’s Law and the pharmaceutical industry

    The poster child for Erooms Law cited would be the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industry developing new drugs.

    Here’s how Nature Reviews Drug Discovery put it:

    Eroom’s Law indicates that powerful forces have outweighed scientific, technical and managerial improvements over the past 60 years, and/or that some of the improvements have been less ‘improving’ than commonly thought. The more positive anyone is about the past several decades of progress, the more negative they should be about the strength of countervailing forces. If someone is optimistic about the prospects for R&D today, they presumably believe the countervailing forces — whatever they are — are starting to abate, or that there has been a sudden and unprecedented acceleration in scientific, technological or managerial progress that will soon become visible in new drug approvals.

    You could argue that the defence industry would also fall into this, despite the benefits of technology. (The origins of the semiconductor industry lie in the development of missiles during the cold war. Integrated circuit technology is more robust and lighter than discrete transistors or vacuum tube based systems).

    Other areas were Erooms Law is prevalent include fintech or financial technology and the automotive sector, where massive assumptions are made about the rate of innovation in battery technology based on Moore’s Law rather than the rather prosaic improvements in materials science that underpin existing battery chemistry.

    More information

    Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency | Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (paywall)
    Eroom’s Law | In the Pipeline | Science magazine
    EROOM’s Law of Pharma R & D | buildingpharmabrands
    More posts on the pharmaceutical industry on this blog.

  • Black technology (黑科技)

    Black technology

    An all-compassing phrase that I’ve heard being used by Chinese friends Hēi kējì in Pinyin or black technology. It’s been around for a couple of years but recently gained more currency among people that I know.

    Microsoft Hololens 💥

    It is used as a catchall for disruptive / cool innovative products. What constitutes ‘black technology’ is subjective in nature but generally Chinese would agree on some examples such as:

    • Magic Leap
    • Microsoft Holo Lens
    • Bleeding edge silicon chips with an extraordinary amount of memory or machine learning functionality built in
    • Tesla self-driving cars

    Magical quality

    The key aspect is that the product as ‘magical quality’ in the eyes of the user. Technology companies have tried to use it in marketing to describe the latest smartphone and app features like NFC, gesture sensitive cameras and video filters. Your average Chinese consumer would see this as cynical marketing hype. Xiaomi had been guilty of this over the past couple of years. Chinese netizens aren’t afraid to flay the brands for abusing the term black technology.

    As technology develops, the bar for what represents black technology will be raised higher.

    Manga origins

    According to Baidu Baike (a Quora-like Q&A service / Wikipedia analogue) it is derived from the Japanese manga Full Metal Panic! (フルメタル·パニック! |Furumetaru Panikku!).

    In the manga black technology is technology far more advanced than the real world. An example of this would be ‘Electronic Conceal System’ – active optical camouflage used on military helicopters and planes in the manga. It is created by the ‘Whispered’ – people who are extremely gifted polymaths who each specialise in a particular black technology.

    In the manga they are frequently abducted and have their abilities tested by ‘bad organisations’ who support terrorism. Whispered also have a telepathic ability to communicate with each other. If they stay connected for too long there can be a risk of their personalities coalescing together. Similar content can be found here.

    More information

    黑科技 （动漫中出现的词语）- Baidu Baike
    Full Metal Panic – Amazon

  • Lights out production lines

    Lights out production lines reminded me of my childhood. If you are of a certain age, ‘hand made by robots’ brings to mind the Fiat Strada / Ritmo a thirtysomething year old hatchback design that was built in a factory with a high degree of automation for the time.

    Fiat subsidiary Comau created Robogate, a highly automated system that speeds up body assembly. Robogate was eventually replaced in 2000. The reality is that ‘hand made by robots’ had a liberal amount of creative licence. Also it didn’t enable Fiat to shake off its rust bucket image. Beneath the skin, the car was essentially a Fiat 127. Car factories still aren’t fully automated.

    Foxconn is looking to automate its own production lines and create products that truly are ‘hand-built by robots’. Like Fiat it has its own robots firm which is manufacturing 10,000 robots per year.

    Foxconn has so far focused on production lines for larger product final assembly (like televisions) and workflow on automated machine lines: many consumer products use CNC (computer numeric control) machines. That’s how Apple iPhone and Macs chassis’ are made. These totally automated lines are called ‘lights out production lines’ by Foxconn.

    Foxconn is looking to automate production because China is undergoing a labour shortfall as the population getting older. Foxconn uses a lot of manual workers for final assembly of devices Apple’s iPhone because the components are tightly packed together.

    Forty years ago, Japanese manufacturers conquered high end and low end consumer electronics with pick-and-place machines to automate electronics production, Nokia went on to build its phone business on similar automated lines. Globalisation ironically facilitated hand assembly of exceptionally dense electronics devices.

    It will be a while before Foxconn manages to automate this as robotic motor control isn’t fine enough to achieve this yet. In order for that to happen you need a major leap forward in harmonic gearing. This isn’t a problem that software or machine learning can solve easily. More related pieces of jargon can be found here.

    More information
    Foxconn boosting automated production in China | DigiTimes – (paywall)

  • Toothbrush test + more news

    Toothbrush test

    Google Canceled the Launch of a Robotic Arm After it Failed the ‘Toothbrush Test’ – Bloomberg – executives at Google parent Alphabet Inc. nixed the plan because it failed Chief Executive Officer Larry Page’s “toothbrush test,” a requirement that the company only ship products used daily by billions of people, according to people familiar with the situation. – Surely this would nix Google‘s enterprise products as well? The toothbrush test poses a serious problem to Alphabet. The business can no longer go after most business opportunities, due to the tyranny of large numbers involved in their earnings. Secondly, they may not get lucky twice, the only benefit of the toothbrush test is preventing the kind of problem that Yahoo! had with the Broadcast.com acquisition. The toothbrush test sounds like an innovation killer

    Consumer behaviour

    More millennials switch off social media | FT – qualitative rather than quantitative data

    Economics

    Pound sterling could be worth less than a dollar within three years, investor Jim Rogers warns | The Independent – You’ve got a lot of debt, you’ve got a serious balance of trade problem which shows no signs of being corrected. I don’t see anything to make sterling go up – not terribly surprising conclusion. The only alternative would be massive cuts outside the South East including rural subsidies and infrastructure spending. The state pension would likely have to be means tested and cut. It would also make sense to up taxation on capital gains and death duty

    Marketing

    One on One – Edelman – Six of the top 10 PR firms did not grow or went backwards in 2015. This should be PR’s time, given the complexity of the environment (nationalism, populism, fear of pace of innovation) and the explosion of media options… I contended that the management of PR agencies has not sufficiently recognized the opportunity on the marketing side of the business. The emphasis on continued increase in profit margins has pushed our sector toward public affairs, crisis management and corporate reputation… – in addition PR is letting its top talent walk out the door, pay is below par for other disciplines and needs to get general managers that won’t have a rotating door on the new types of talent that they want to get in

    Media

    The Man Who Stood Up To Facebook : All Tech Considered : NPR – which all goes back to where Facebook deviated from the web 2.0 credo and used it to its own advantage – for instance hollowing out Yahoo!’s user base

    Tag Heuer’s adventure seeking leads to a Red Bull TV sponsorship | Luxury Daily – interesting wrinkle on brand content where other brands come in and sponsor the brand content

    Some Thoughts on Reuters, NY Times, and Yahoo – Lawfare  – Benjamin Wittes flags that much of the Yahoo story is unclear, including legal arguments and the objective of the search, and further reporting from Motherboard and the Intercept

    Online

    Analysis: Trump ‘rigged’ vote claim may leave lasting damage | AP News – I don’t think that you can pin this solely on Trump when you have thinkers like marketing professor Philip Kotler has written a book on how the current framework is broken to ‘repair’ US democracy.

    The Latest Celebrity Diet? Cyberbullying – The New York Times – which is going to legitimise the tactics in the minds of many people out there as ‘normal behaviour’

    Bronte Capital: Measuring how bad Twitter is – needs to fire two thirds of its staff

    Security

    What Surveillance Will Look Like in the Future – The Atlantic – of course this depends on not having Note 7-esque battery problems

    Europe to Push New Security Rules Amid IoT Mess — Krebs on Security – it is the right thing to do, but will be hard to police and won’t stop shoddy security on products coming out of the Shenzhen, Dongguan, Goungzhou silicon triangle in the Pearl River delta

    Software

    The Telegraph overhauls mobile app to focus on speed – Digiday – interesting focus on immediacy, goes against the ‘abundance of bandwidth’ assumption many developers use

    WTF is a container? | TechCrunch – really nice primer

    Huawei has formed a strategic partnership to develop AI – Business Insider – but could you trust it? Interesting that this hasn’t caused upset in the US body politic

    Daring Fireball: Walt Mossberg: ‘Why Does Siri Seem So Dumb?’ – John Gruber’s take is really good. I won’t even get into the fact that Siri just doesn’t understand my BBC northern English accent and so I just don’t bother using it

    Baidu Launches A Medical Chatbot That Acts As A Physician’s Assistant | IPG Media Lab – interesting application, IBM Watson has aspired to go in this direction. Maximises the 8 minutes a patient has in a doctors surgery

    Web of no web

    Most Drivers Who Own Cars With Built-in GPS Systems Use Phones For Directions – Mostly Out of Frustration – explains why TomTom and Garmin are still going

    Building a Smart Home With Apple’s HomeKit | Wirecutter – shows how immature the smart house still is. That is if you’re not concerned about your IoS (internet of shit) devices being compromised and turned into a bot net for hire

    Wireless

    Verizon just raised a big warning flag for Yahoo – The Washington Post – hacks had a material effect on the business

    The exploding Note 7 is no surprise – leaked Samsung doc highlights toxic internal culture • The Register – the Note 7 seems to have shone a light on the Samsung business

    iPhone 7 vs Leica M9-P: A Side-by-Side Photo Comparison | PetaPixel – to me these show the limits of the smartphone rather than how great it is