The School of Lifelogging

Could lifelogging address the educational "achievement gap" while preparing children from all backgrounds to work with data? Securing personal data from unwelcome eyes will likely remain a challenge. Lifelogging is not just about quantitative analysis. Highly engaging, qualitative storytelling can also emerge from data gathered by learners. Stories of self-determination would involve the learner's own understanding of personal ambitions and dreams.

Lifelogging is part of a growing movement known as "the quantified self". Wearable sensors and cameras capture data about an individual's everyday experience to improve self-understanding. Ordinarily focused on health and wellbeing, lifelogging could disrupt education as we know it. Smartphones were only the beginning. Performance data from wearable devices could personalise learning in ever more intimate ways.

Decisions in the Age of Abundant Data

A summary of bite-sized insights and views about decision making from fresh articles around the web.

Over the last several months at Cause Analytics we have been scouting the web to bring you some helpful articles from experts in business intelligence. Today, our team will summarise several insights we have collected in our Google+ community in order to save you time and help your organisation with decision making.

You probably know of the debate between speedy decisions based on intuition versus slower decisions that draw upon evidence and rational deliberation. It's a complex debate because both sides have a role to play in various contexts, but in the 'Age of Abundant Data', business intelligence can aid you on your quest for faster results. As analytics and algorithms increasingly offer practical predictions, executives and managers will be able to act upon these predictions to communicate decisions reflexively, and perhaps, intuitively.

Keeping your job in the technology race

Creativity and social intelligence will be needed to adapt to an increasingly automated and unequal world.

If you hate chores, then Roomba's suggestion, 'Let a robot do your dirty work' may strike you as a welcome solution. From automated vacuum cleaners to robots that wash windows and mow lawns, accelerating automation is not only eliminating your time-wasting chores, but your jobs. How do you plan to keep yours?

Learning to Anticipate Change

Learning to anticipate change is a challenge in complex environments. Business intelligence and predictive analytics can help make sense of the signals.

We have all heard, "A smooth sea never made a skilful sailor". Well, for an analyst, a complex sea of data makes the skilful means of sensing evermore necessary. An analyst also needs a crew to help anticipate and navigate the changes that may arrive. These changes arise in three types of systems: simple, complicated, and complex.

3D Printing the Internet of Things

The world of 3D printed things is steadily growing. Awareness of this disruptive innovation is rising and it is becoming difficult to ignore. From printed shells for hermit crabs to printed homes for people, one wonders, will everything soon be printable?

Managing a Black Swan Event

When catastrophes strike, organisations may 'fall apart'. Managers may try to prevent the 'breakdown' and sustain operations, but in the aftermath of a disaster, no simple 'fix' may restore the previous order. A mechanistic-view of organisations leaves managers ill-equipped to handle the consequences of an unexpected event, yet it remains a common view in spite of Black Swan events.

The winds of disruptive innovation

Disruptive Innovation involves simplification. Clay Christensen, who coined the term, didn't quite put it that way, but explained how his theory represents the transformation of a complex and expensive product used by experts into something more accessible for a larger population.

In this way, it is also a strategic move. By targeting the bottom of a market with simplicity, the innovation disrupts the legacies of overly-complicated and costly competitors. You may enjoy hearing his examples in the following video.