Month: May 2021

  • A message from the future & things from last week

    Jolibee – a message from the future

    Filipino fast food restaurant Jolibee have created a series of films that tap into the zeitgeist. A message from the future captures Filipinos dreams for a post-COVID future, leaving hard times behind them. A message to the future is well worth watching, despite its efforts to pull at the heart strings

    The Jolibee contrasts sharply with the Burger King UK creative below, which just promises business as usual. More Jolibee content here.

    Burger King

    Burger King reasserts their brand proposition to UK consumers who are hopefully venturing back into their restaurants. There is a nod to the untrustworthiness of internet content and vegan options. At the centre of it all, reminding the audience what flame broiled actually means.

    It’s unlike the usual in-your-face disruption content that Burger King agency David Madrid has been doing over the COVID lockdown. The dark lighting draws your eyes into the protagonists, but also makes a Burger King restaurant feel unwelcoming. It is an interesting creative choice.

    McDonalds Singapore

    McDonalds Singapore has gone completely the other way and focused on cocooning, which they seem to be betting will be post-COVID behaviour. Singapore used to be all about eating out, from kopi stands and hawker food to high end eating; because real estate is expensive, the third space was your space. McDonalds think that this might have changed.

    Masters At Work

    Defected regularly puts up high quality mixes, but this one by Masters At Work particularly stood out. And I’ve been listening to it a number of times.

    https://soundcloud.com/defectedrecords/defected-radio-020421-maw-takeover

    Flight Of The Navigator

    I was just a few years too of the right age to be the target audience for Flight Of The Navigator. So I didn’t go to see it on release, but I appreciate the film and its one of my go to science fiction Blu-Rays alongside Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. This video goes into how early 1980s technology managed to produce realistic effects of the curved mirror surface spaceship. What’s really interesting is how many practical (analogue) effects including trick photography and modelling there are in the film.

  • Get Tough by William E Fairbairn

    What is Get Tough?

    Get Tough is a book on hand-to-hand fighting originally published in 1942. It is important for what it represents as much as it is with regards its content.

    Fairbairn as an author

    By the time Get Tough was written in 1942; Fairbairn was an experienced published author. In 1926, Fairbairn wrote the book Defendu. This was a step-by-step guide to Fairbairn’s fighting system that distilled his experience in street fights, alongside the jujuitsu he learned from early Japanese teachers that went abroad. In this respect Fairbairn, was similar to the Gracie family in Brazil, Imi Lichtenfeld’s Krav Maga and the Soviet founders of SAMBO. Globalisation drove hybrid fighting styles. Something we’d later see with mixed martial arts in general.

    Defendu as a title didn’t catch on that well as a title so it was republished as Scientific Self-Defence in 1931.

    The second world war resulted in Fairbairn’s most prolific period as an author. He wrote Shooting to Live with a colleague and firearms expert Eric Sykes. All-In Fighting was written by Fairbairn as a manual in close quarters combat. Though a section on using firearms in a close up situation was contributed by P.N. Walbridge.

    Get Tough was an American and Australian edition of All-in Fighting, but without the section by P.N. Walbridge. Where All-in Fighting was aimed at the soldiers Fairbairn and his colleagues taught, Get Tough looked to appeal to a wider audience.

    Fairbairn provided an edited version of his work called Self Defence For Women and Girls, which is about a quarter of the pages of Get Tough. There was also an American edition retitled Hands-Off!

    Fairbairn managed to write the book whilst training British commandos. Fairbairn and Sykes had a falling out sometime in 1942 and were never reconciled. Fairbairn took his expertise to to the US and Canada. Sykes carried on teaching in the UK.

    Get Tough and colonialism

    Get Tough was a distillation of experience that Fairbairn had in Korea and then later in Shanghai. As a member of the Shanghai Municipal Police he had been involved in hundreds of fights with local and international residents of the port city.

    The experience led to Fairbairn to play a role in developing:

    • Anti-riot techniques
    • Police sniping techniques with Eric Sykes
    • The Defendu fighting style
    • Two types of knives. The Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife. A slender but sharp double sided stiletto blade designed the weapon to strike at the vulnerable parts of an opponent’s body, especially the vital organs. The original version was known as the Shanghai knife and had a 6 inch blade. It was likely part of the cache of illegal weapons that Fairbairn and Sykes brought back to the UK from Shanghai during the war. The military versions were 1.5 inches longer, to get through winter clothing. The Smachet, a large broad knife almost like a machete or a Roman sword

    Fairbairn’s work was based on the health and lives of colonial subjects. Fairbairn often enjoys exclusive credit for this work, but the reality was that it was a collaborative effort from several officers in the Shanghai Municipal Police including Eric Sykes and Dermot O’Neill. The Shanghai Municipal Police was what modern organisational theorists would have termed a ‘learning organisation’.

    Part of this learning culture was forced upon them by events. The Shanghai Municipal Police killed four members of a protest in May 1925 because they didn’t have enough police on duty to manage a demonstration. This felt rather similar to the Amritsar shootings of 1919, which shattered support for British rule in India by both Indians and people in the UK.

    This led to the Shanghai Municipal Police founding the first modern SWAT team called the reserve unit; this unit was also responsible for modern methods of policing riots.

    The Get Tough legacy

    Defendu had been taught to hundreds of policemen who rotated through Shanghai before the second world war. They then went on to work in other outposts of the British Empire in a policing or military capacity.

    When Sykes and Fairbairn brought their particular set of skills back to the UK in 1940. They were put to work training commandos and and secret agents in their skills. These skills were taught to military age men and women, the women were predominantly going to be dropped by parachute into occupied Europe.

    Again hundreds, if not thousands of people passed through the schools that they ran in Scotland and the south coast of England. Some of the people who went through those schools were from overseas. When they eventually went home, the ideas and training that they learned went with them and were put to use. At first trying to retain colonial rule. Then later, building up nascent special forces units including units from the US, Belgium, Holland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

    Over time these countries evolved their techniques to match modern war, but the principles where still there.

    After the second world war, the colonial policemen of the Shanghai Municipal Police who survived scattered across the British empire. Fairbairn went to Cyprus to train police in his techniques. He then ran two sessions in Singapore for the newly formed riot squad unit.

    The contents of Get Tough

    Fairbairn wrote Get Tough for a wide range of readers, not just the military as Fairbairn himself said:

    It is not the armed forces of the United Nations alone who can profit by learning about how to win in hand-to-hand fighting. Every civilian, man or woman, who ever walks a deserted road at mid-night, or goes in fear of his life in the dark places of a city, should acquaint himself with these methods.

    Get Tough by William E. Fairbairn

    The book covers:

    • Blows
    • Releases – how to get out of holds by an assailant
    • Holds
    • Throws
    • Miscellaneous advice – mostly covering improvised weapons from things at hands
    • Use of the knife – Fairbairn talks about using the Sykes-Fairbairn fighting knife
    • The Smatchet – use of a short machete type weapon designed by Fairbairn
    • Disarming an opponent of his pistol

    If you’ve trained in a martial art, you’ll have done drills of some sort like katas in karate. Fairbairn’s work doesn’t have drills per se. The idea is that if you do the hold or the blow, you are unlikely to need follow up.

    More book reviews here.

  • Military civil fusion response + more

    Military civil fusion

    How Should the U.S. Respond to China’s Military Civil Fusion Strategy? | ChinaFileOver the past four years, the U.S. government has invoked military civil fusion (MCF) to justify a range of policies. For instance, MCF was among the rationales for the reform and expansion of export controls to include certain “emerging” and “foundational” technologies, as well as for the addition of companies and universities to the “Entity List” and “Unverified List” that the Department of Commerce maintains. The Trump administration partially justified attempts to ban WeChat and TikTok from the United States through initial claims about the companies’ alleged linkage to MCF. Moreover, a presidential proclamation on Chinese students and researchers studying in the United States cited students’ proximity to entities engaged in MCF as grounds for denying or revoking visas – military civil fusion is probably one of the biggest things that will affect innovation over the next couple of decades. It will shape the prioritisation of innovation topics in the west as a reaction to what happens in China.

    Luxury

    The Limits of Luxury Livestreaming | Jing Daily 

    Marketing

    Bitcoin declined substantially in value this week. The inciting incident seems to be Elon Musk waking up to the environmental impact of cryptomining. Papa Johns Pizza put out an offer in the UK which seems to bet a rise in the value of bitcoin.

    Promotional offer from Papa Johns Pizza UK

    This offer could democratise ownership of bitcoin, but it’s unlikely. Instead it feels like a PR driven story that could turn into the Hoover’s free flight debacle of 1992. It is apparently to celebrate Bitcoin pizza day.

    Media

    What the ephemerality of the Web means for your hyperlinks – Columbia Journalism Review – really interesting findings, though I am surprised that the percentage link rot is only 25% – I was expecting it to be much higher given the range of years covered. When you have 72% link rot from 1998, it gives a counterpoint to ‘on the web is forever’. My friend Ian often talks about how he can’t find a video demonstration of Orange’ home of the future from the dot com era. This data supports his empirical experience. The work that the Internet Archive do is immensely important. But it misses the interconnectivity between content; which is an important part of the medium and the context of online.

    These Ex-Journalists Are Using AI to Catch Online Defamation | WIRED – so you’ve spotted it, what next?

    Security

    The Full Story of the Stunning RSA Hack Can Finally Be Told | WIRED – interesting story that foreshadowed the SolarWinds breach a decade later

    Technology

    New 2021 Ford Focus RS hot hatch axed | CAR Magazine – interesting story. It implies that motor companies won’t be able to do niches and halo cars. This will have a knock on for suppliers, forcing consolidation. It also has implications in terms of the need for design houses and design teams, motorsport participation and brand differentiation. And the software aspects of car experience looks even worse for the consumer – ‘The uncomfortable future of in-car upgrades has begun’ | CAR Magazine

    Ford’s Ever-Smarter Robots Are Speeding Up the Assembly Line | WIRED – up to now manufacturing robots have been programmed to do a series of movements, not that dissimilar to a CNC machine. This means that they are intolerant of inconsistency. Ford, Nissan and Toyota are looking to use machine learning to handle inconsistency. The man on the line is fine if his screwdriver, is placed in roughly the same place as it was when he put it down. He or she doesn’t mind what part of a bolt they pick up in the parts bin. Yet that kind of thing requires a lot of machine learning work for robots. It will be incremental gains on tasks like this that moves automation forwards

  • Measure What Matters by John Doerr

    I was recommended Measure What Matters by my friend and fellow ex-Yahoo Cathy Ma. Cathy found the book useful in her way through managing teams. In Measure What Matters, John Doerr explains the idea of objectives and key results or OKRs.

    Measure What Matters

    About John Doerr

    If you’ve worked in or around the Silicon Valley technology space from the PC age through to the 2010s Doerr’s name will have a passing familiarity to you. Doerr was a salesman at Intel in the 1970s, realised that there were too many good people ahead of him and took an over in venture capital instead. Doerr was involved in funding:

    • Compaq – Compaq kicked off the market for ‘IBM compatible’ PCs and made the first portable ‘IBM compatible’ PC. Soon after IBM was no longer the dominant player in personal computing leading to the Wintel duopoly. Compaq eventually offered a full range of large servers, workstations and PC when it acquired Digital Equipment Corporation and Tandem Computing. Compaq was in turn bought by H-P
    • Netscape – Netscape Communications mainstreamed the internet browser, email client, web servers and email servers. The server software lives on in Oracle’s product line via the Netscape – Sun Microsystems alliance. The browser indirectly carried on through an open source project Mozilla
    • Symantec – Symantec started off as a natural language processing company in the early 1980s, it became famous for its Mac antivirus software and then went into the DOS and Windows market after merging with Peter Norton Computing. It now has a consumer facing business called NortonLifeLock and the business focused software part of the business was sold to Broadcom
    • Sun Microsystems – Sun Microsystems started off as a UNIX workstation manufacturer. Over time they built up a healthy server and software business that supported much of the infrastructure of the web. They were instrumental in the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix – which influenced parts of the macOS that I am typing this post on, RISC processors in your smartphone, thin client computing like Google Docs, and virtualised computing that is instrumental for cloud computing. Sun Microsystems workstations were popular with investment banks, telecoms companies and internet startups bought their servers. The company’s decline can be marked by the dot com crash. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and their technology lives on
    • drugstore.com – was a first generation e-tailer in health and beauty products. Walgreens bought the business in 2011, and shut down the website five years later.
    • Amazon.com – needs no introduction
    • Intuit – Intuit sells financial software in the US. TurboTax helps Americans do their tax returns, Mint provides a personal finance dashboard for consumers and QuickBooks is accounting software for small and medium sized businesses
    • Macromedia – Macromedia was a software company that developed tools for creatives and programmers. It was eventually acquired by Adobe. Macromedia products live on in the Adobe product range
    • Google – the search engine.

    About OKRs

    For all of the companies that Doerr has funded he has advocated OKRs. The idea of OKRs came from Doerr’s colleague at Intel Andy Grove. OKRs are a collaborative process. The idea is that it is used with teams and the individuals who make up the teams. Management seeks to set challenging, ambitious goals with measurable results. The key results in OKRs are how you track progress towards the objective, create alignment within the team, and encourage engagement around measurable goals. They are also supposed to flex with circumstance, which is one of the key points of separation from Peter Drucker’s management by objectives (MBO).

    The first part of the book Measure What Matters explains the origin and process behind OKRs.

    You can get everything that you need in the first two chapters covering 35 pages.

    The Cult of OKR

    The rest of the book is a series of self aggrandising endorsements of OK from senior executives who are OKR advocates:

    • Larry Page of Alphabet
    • Bill Davidow of Intel
    • Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook
    • Bill Gates on The Gates Foundation

    It crosses the line for me and almost reads like a high water mark for Silicon Valley hubris; Doerr’s book was published in 2018. Three years later and:

    • Bill Gates is in the most trouble he has been in since the Judge Jackson ruling
    • Alphabet and Facebook are being assailed by regulators around the world
    • Intel looks like a shadow of its former self. Its fabrication process are three years behind competitors. Customers are designing their own chips and AMD is eating their lunch in high performance processors

    Secondly, Doerr’s book, whilst acknowledging Andy Groves role of OKR creator; fails to acknowledge that Andy gave a good descriptor of OKRs in his 1983 book High Output Management.

    I think one of the reasons that I am not that keen on Measure What Matters, is that the book doesn’t work for culturally as a non-American. Instead I would recommend Andy Grove’s own book High Output Management. More books that might be of interest here.

  • Eliot Higgins & things from last week

    Eliot Higgins

    Eliot Higgins talks about the origins of Bellingcat. The investigations that Bellingcat has done to date and some of the techniques that it uses in investigations. Higgins has written an account of Bellingcat which goes into open source intelligence and new investigative journalist techniques. Bellingcat are also famous for their courses, where they pass on their expertise in open source investigations.

    The Go! Team

    The Go! Team released a new video which makes good use of a photocopier effect to animate the band members. Pow is the usual mix of genre bending power pop that The Go! Team are known for.

    SK-II

    SK-II has commissioned some lovely films to support their ‘Change Destiny’ brand purpose. You have a mix of gaming, 3D animation and anime in these films. Working on Dove, there was the mantra real women; which went into the core of the brand’s creative. But that misses the online world which we now operate in and is often more keyed into our inner world than the real life around us. SK-II is owned by Procter & Gamble; who have been making leaps and bounds in terms of their approach to brand purpose. More related posts here.

    https://youtu.be/pguAbHCrxzA
    https://youtu.be/pmZr-AcYQs8

    This was something I hadn’t come across before, in 1974 a set of 4 LP records were released that had actor Nicol Williamson reading The Hobbit. Williamson is better known for his role of Merlin in Excalibur. One of his last film appearances of Williamson was the role of Cogliostro in the 1997 live action adaption of Spawn. This film is still vastly underrated. Williamson left us in 2011. This recording just hints at his acting skill. During the 1960s and 1970s he was considered one of the greatest actors of his generation alongside Albert Finney which is high praise.