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.

  • Bullshit job + more news

    Is Public Relations A ‘Bullshit Job’? | Holmes Report – If you find yourself in a company that doesn’t use public relations in a way that you find meaningful, and even occasionally inspiring, you’re in the wrong place. That doesn’t mean public relations consulting is a “bullshit job” but it may be an indication that you’re working for a shitty organization. – when I started in agency life I wondered if my new career was a mistake: was it a bullshit job? It didn’t help that I was working with a bunch of dot com startups and enterprise software companies.

    I’d previously worked in industry formulating plastics and in the petrochemical industry. The chances are that if you drove a car from the early 1990s to the 2000s, I’d either helped develop part of your car, or helped provide the road surface that you drove on. 

    Agency life isn’t like that. It took me years to become comfortable on whether I had a bullshit job. That came as I started to see the difference to businesses that my work did. More related content here. 

    Folli Follie folly | FT Alphaville – interesting read, QCM used the companies own store finder function on their website – in order to determine that Folli Follie’s distribution wasn’t as healthy as claimed

    The Brazen Bootlegging of a Multibillion-Dollar Sports Network – The New York Times – interesting article on how Saudi Arabia is bootlegging live sports content as part of its conflict with Qatar. More worryingly it is spreading its piracy into other franchises because it can

    Apple’s Jony Ive discusses his ‘best friend’ and the origins of the Apple Watch – Business Insider – interesting that it is ‘un-Jobsian’ as a product

    The Great Disappearing Act of the ‘Most Downloaded Woman in the World’ | Mel Magazine – when adult entertainment led the way in profitable business models for the web

    Swiss Watchmakers Are Targeting Teens | News & Analysis | BoF – the challenges of dealing with customers too early for brands is an interesting one

    Instagram quietly launches payments for commerce | TechCrunch – makes perfect sense

    Facebook’s Double Standard on Privacy: Employees vs. Everyone Else – WSJ – just a little bit of old school geekery exists in the Facebook yuppie farm with ‘Sauron’ technology that lets FBers know if someone else has accessed their accounts

    Keeping your account secure | Twitter Blog – Twitter dropped the ball big time

  • 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)