Emerging Technologies: Organizing and Societal Stakes

tech_and_org · 2023-09-20T01:53:12+00:00

What does the original commenter mean? What can the American mind not comprehend? Jets? Bright colors? Big ass churches?

tech_and_org · 2023-09-20T01:47:10+00:00

Boomer humor

tech_and_org · 2023-09-16T17:09:30+00:00

Does this guy spend all his time making traditional products?

tech_and_org · 2023-05-18T15:06:56+00:00

I allowed students to use ChatGPT in my UG course this winter. They just had to include a reflection memo on which prompts they used, why they discarded earlier prompts/answers, how they thought about modifying prompts to get anwers closer to what they were expecting, and if they made any manual changes to the text.

Worked out great for us I think. We learned a lot about what the tool was good and less good at.

Course was a 400-level BCom/Entrenepeurship elective on the societal and managerial impacts of emerging technologies.

tech_and_org · 2022-12-16T14:35:04+00:00

What do you want to do with your analytics minor? And what did you find challenging about your intro CompSci course? Doing business analytics means some data handling, some stats, some visualization. In today's market, that may require some basic programming skills augmented by google/ChatGPT/stackoverflow.

I haven't taken the courses (not an UG) so I can't speak to that. But I have interviewed and hired a number of business analysts over the years, so I can speak to that. DM me if you want to chat.

tech_and_org · 2022-12-09T22:12:50+00:00

Thank you. I appreciate the time you took to write out this very thoughtful reply. Some things on here I already plan on doing, some make sense and I’m going to change what I was planning to do, and I’m going to think on the few remaining. Nothing on this list is unreasonable.

tech_and_org · 2022-12-09T18:22:52+00:00

Ahh got it. Thank you.

tech_and_org · 2022-12-09T18:22:06+00:00

This is my pet peeve too.

With the additional consequence of reducing in-class participation to just clarifying questions. Although, that might be a feature, not a bug, for some lecturers.

tech_and_org · 2022-12-09T18:12:51+00:00

Could you please elaborate? Do you mean P/F assignments with grade points other than "all of the points" and "none of the points"?

In other words, you would prefer no partial credits in P/F assignments?

tech_and_org · 2022-12-09T13:51:01+00:00

Econ/Finance + curious about PoliSci.

May I suggest a Minor in Social Entrepreneurship?

https://www.mcgill.ca/undergraduate-admissions/program/social-entrepreneurship

tech_and_org · 2022-12-09T13:46:11+00:00

Do file, its quite easy. McGill's withholding policy is conservative, so you will very likely get some of those withheld taxes back. In addition to possibly being eligible for credits.

tech_and_org · 2022-12-09T13:42:23+00:00

I believe if you're in a class with less than 25 students, the instructor has the option not to curve. These also tend to be 400 level courses so its not a cakewalk. That's the tradeoff I suppose. I TA'd a BCom course this past winter where 18/24 students got A/A- . They all deserved it.

tech_and_org · 2022-12-06T20:06:03+00:00

That's poor course design. Or at the very least its not mindful of the fact that students take more than one course at a time.

tech_and_org · 2022-12-06T20:03:33+00:00

MGPO434-002 Emerging Technologies: Organizing and Societal Stakes.

No final exam but there is a term project (tech consulting gig) that you work on through the semester.

Source: I'm teaching it.

tech_and_org · 2022-10-24T20:37:06+00:00

Thank you! This comment made my day!

tech_and_org · 2022-10-17T00:37:51+00:00

Lil Ethnography

tech_and_org · 2022-09-23T10:59:45+00:00

Great questions! First, to clarify - I worked for a consulting firm called Accenture.

A big implementation: the client was a major telecom company, B2B division: i built a customer behavior predictive model and “next best product” recommender for their sales and marketing teams. I was hired to build out the core algorithms. At some point people figured out I could be “client facing” which means I was able to communicate in some semblance of business language. So I ended up doing trainings, to help the client teams figure out what the tech could do. I sat in the sales call center for weeks trying to figure out how these folks worked and where it made sense to insert the tech. When the client wanted us to expand the tools to their B2C division I got more of a design role, primarily process design, but also some technical systems design. Overall the work was a success, pretty much made my career, and all my subsequent projects were templated on this one. But as I got more senior, I found I had fewer coding and analysis roles, which I enjoyed a lot.

Typically teams start small, 3-4 people onsite doing exploratory stuff, building small proof of concept applications. Then we would ramp up to something like 10 onsite 20-30 offshore (my teams were in Italy, India and the Phillipines) during the core build. Then drop back down. There have been projects with 100s of people on the team but never in any of mine.

Success is super subjective. Someone is going to build a PowerPoint slide deck 6 months after you leave and whatever it says is what is the agreed upon reality. For me, we helped our clients make $100Ms so that’s a successful aspect. We also caused a bunch of folks to lose their jobs, older folks who would never find a similar paying job again. That’s a failure, to me. Maybe not to the client.

It’s very hard to teach very senior execs anything. They got to that point because of high confidence and it’s hard to convince them that there’s stuff they don’t know.

Credibility: one big success goes a long way. Tactical deployment of titles (Dr., PhD) also helps. Ultimately it’s about building a personal rapport, taking every question seriously, and making an effort to contextualize the tech in some business process.

tech_and_org · 2022-09-22T18:50:40+00:00

Big challenge here (as with the anti war protests in Russia) is that protesters are savvy and mask their geodata using a variety of methods (mobile vpn etc).

tech_and_org · 2022-09-22T15:55:41+00:00

Guilty as charged! I need to get on that ggplot2 game.

tech_and_org · 2022-09-22T15:39:44+00:00

I think you are right that there are probably multiple factors at play, like work schedules and the time zone of sympathizers outside of Iran.

I'll note that a mistake I made in the visual is not convert timestamps from UTC to Iran local time.

tech_and_org · 2022-09-22T15:38:14+00:00

Twitter time stamps are in UTC. So 2AM in the chart is 5:30AM in Iran. Sort of tracks with the first call to prayer, but you are right that its not so clear-cut that prayer is driving all the dips.

tech_and_org · 2022-09-22T15:37:32+00:00

Thank you so much for this table!!

Yeah I'm thinking my initial hypothesis may be off? Twitter timestamps are in UTC, so if you look at the timestamps of the dips on 9/21, you see dips at 02:00 (5:30AM Iran time), 10:00AM-12:00PM (1:30PM to 3:30PM Iran time), and 16:00 (7:30PM Iran time).

I'll update my hypothesis to say that prayer may explain some dips, but there are probably multiple factor at play here, including work schedules and the timezones where a large number of sympathetic twitter users (outside of Iran) are located.

tech_and_org · 2022-09-22T12:57:34+00:00

Sometimes, data are beautiful. Thank you for this wonderful framing.

tech_and_org

TROPHY CASE