Word of the day: stand up

To assemble, configure, make operational, and start in operation.

It took two days to stand the system up, but it's now running smoothly.

I have been hearing this use of stand up for quite a while. Before using it in a paper I checked to see if it was in any standard dictionaries. I didn't find it.

Word of the day: socialize

To promote an idea by talking to people about it.

Now that the committee has agreed, we have to socialize the plan to the rest of the company.

Word of the day: crowdsourcing

Apparently this word is about a year old — and I'm amazed that I hadn't heard it before now. I came across it in Tapscott and Williams (2006) Wikinomics, which I mentioned in my list of new cooperation books. This May 27, 2006 article from Jeff Howe's Crowdsourcing.com blog documents the word's origin. It starts out by saying that 9 days earlier Google returned only 3 hits for crowdsourcing. At the time of the writing Google returned 182,000 hits! From 3 to 182,000 in a little more than a week! (This was a year ago, and it was only a year later that I first heard the word.) This follow-up article completes the history of the term.

Wikipedia's Crowdsourcing article (appropriately) captures the meaning.

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for a business model in which a company or institution takes a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsources it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call over the Internet. The work is compensated with little or no pay in most cases. However, in a few examples the labor is well-compensated. In almost every case crowdsourcing relies on amateurs or volunteers working in their spare time to create content, solve problems, or even do corporate R&D.

When Debora and I talked about it she raised the issue of prize money offered for accomplishment. Are the various DARPA Grand Challenges crowdsourcing? Was the reward offered for the first one-person non-stop flight over the Atlantic crowdsourcing?

Some of the uses of the term seem to include those cases as when a corporation offers money for the solution of a problem. The more general and intuitive use doesn't. Wikipedia is a crowdsourced encyclopedia produced by an entire crowd and not just by one individual or team from a crowd. Like Wikipedia, prediction markets are a crowd-based way of producing a result — in this case evaluating an issue. The entire crowd participates.

In some work that I'm doing, I claim that distillation mechanisms will become increasingly important. By this I mean mechanisms that filter out the essence or value from crowd generated raw material. Wikipedia has one distillation mechanism. In fact, its distillation review mechanisms is also crowd sourced. So Wikipedia is doubly crowdsourced: both in the generation and distillation of information. The academic peer review process is a less crowd sourced variant of this. The original input is crowdsourced. The distillation process is more formal — although also dependent on a crowd of reviewers.

Prediction markets are another distillation mechanism. The market mechanism itself is the distillation process, which is not crowdsourced. It is a way of extracting a single essence from the opinion of many people. Of course markets have been around for a very long time.

A third form of distillation mechanism is the offering of a reward as in the DARPA grand challenge or when a corporation offers a reward for solving a problem. Many people are encouraged to participate and produce a result that satisfies the stated need. Only one of these gets the prize. The decision about which participant gets the prize is made by the offerer, not by a crowd.

One of the oldest distillation mechanisms is the marketplace, both economic and more generic. Like Wikipedia most marketplaces use a two-level crowdsourcing mechanism. At the generation level, anyone has the ability to create and market a new product or service. At the distillation level, the crowd itself is the arbiter of what succeeds. The same is true for the Internet. Anyone can create a new website; the crowd decides which websites develop a following. What's different about the Internet is that the long tail effect allows sites with relatively minimal followings to prosper.

Another distillation mechanism is used in the ESP Game and PeekaBoom in which games are used to get people to contribute knowldge. These were created by Luis van Ahn.

Yet another distillation mechanism isn't really a distillation mechanism. Linus Torvalds talked about his GIT source control management system. It is a distributed system in that there is no central branch. Everyone has his own branch. The important branches are the ones that people decide are important. The SCM system doesn't tell you. It is agnostic with respect to which branch is the main branch. There is no main branch.

Word of the day: biobreak

A short intermission during an event, usually a meeting, during which participants are offered the opportunity to attend to some of their biological needs.

Word of the day: professional

An individual who does a job that is not normally considered one of the professions^*. Examples include office professional, janitorial professional, and cosmetic professional.

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^*The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines (definition 1b) profession as

An occupation, such as law, medicine, or engineering, that requires considerable training and specialized study.

Word of the day: vector check

an assessment of direction. To do a vector check is to determine if one is going in the right direction. Generally used to mean to check with one's manager to see if a project is on the right track.

Word of the day: deep dive

I found one online definition. NetLingo Internet Dictionary | Online Dictionary of Computer and Internet Terms, Acronyms & Text Messaging

Slang for exploring a subject in-depth.

For example, 'We did a deep dive on that market and found nothing of value there.'

Word of the day: to task; tasker

To order/request that a task be performed. The order/request itself.

The president tasked us to determine the best way to reduce current corporate expenses. The tasker arrived by email this morning. It was assigned to you.

Word of the day: exfiltrate

Here's the Dictionary.com definition.

–verb (used without object)
1. to escape furtively from an area under enemy control.
–verb (used with object)
2. to smuggle (military personnel) out of an area under enemy control.

I just heard the word used (with an object) to refer to the unauthorized sending of information out of a computer—or more generally out of an organization—e.g., by spyware.

The worm infiltrated the corporate IT system and then exfiltrated the company's personal records.

Word of the day: ambient advertising

I recently came across the use of ambient to refer to advertising in the environment. As in ambient light, it's just there. The advertisers' hope is that such ads are not seen as being projected from a source (like a billboard or TV) toward the potential customer but that they are just there as part of one's environment.

While looking for web references I found the World Wide Words website. This is from its Ambient Advertising page.

… almost any kind of advertising that occurs in some non-standard medium outside the home. Examples are messages on the backs of car park receipts and at the bottom of golf holes, on hanging straps in railway carriages, on the handles of supermarket trolleys, and on the sides of egg cartons …

Ambient advertising contains the seeds of its own destruction … because once the approach is copied and becomes commonplace, it ceases to surprise.
[Guardian, August 1997]

Ambient advertising was in the news most recently when blinking lights were scattered around Boston as part of an advertising campaign. They were at first thought to be terrorist devices. Turner Broadcasting has agreed to pay a fine of $2 million.

It seems to me that what was striking about these ads was not that they were ambient — ambient advertising is ubiquitous these days — but that they didn't look like advertising.

Word of the day: surge

From Staff Study Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence House of Representatives One Hundred Fourth Congress (June 5, 1996).

Intelligence Community "Surge" Capability

The Intelligence Community (IC) in the 21st Century will face a world that presents different, more diverse national security challenges than those presented during the Cold War. At the same time, many of the issues and intelligence problems that were spawned from the Cold War remain, and the IC is expected to address the new and the old challenges with resources that have decreased significantly since the end of the Cold War. Ambassador Robert Kimmitt, former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, in testimony to the Committee, suggested that whether the IC remains relevant and effective may well depend on its ability to be an 'inch deep' in everything, with the ability to have a 'miles worth of depth' on a specific subject at a moments notice. Creating such a responsive IC will require increased internal operating efficiencies; a more collective, corporate approach toward utilization of resources; and structured programs that provide continuous resource augmentation and 'surge' capability.

This 'surge' capability needs to be flexible, dynamic and well-planned -- one that can be relied upon both day-to-day and during crises. 'Surge' can be defined very broadly, including the ability to: move resources quickly to address immediate, usually ad hoc, needs; augment existing resources from outside the IC; and, improve responsiveness of resources by building in more flexible options for collection and analysis.

This use of the word surge is common in the military and among military contractors. Bush's use of the word most likely derives from that source. As you can see by the date of this document, this usage is more than a decade old. Judging by the quotation marks around the term in the preceding, this may have been the start of this usage. These days this usage is commonplace among within the military and military contractors. Contractors must demonstrate their ability to provide surge personal when needed but without having to charge for them when not needed.

Word of the day: actionable

• Sufficient to support a decision to take action.

From An Interview with TCI President and CEO, Debra Goldfarb.

Our plan is to leverage our extensive resources and use our reach into the heart of the HPC end-user community to deliver a range of offerings, including quantitative and qualitative survey-based research and advisory services, along with timely multi-client studies. In addition, Tabor Research will have a discrete organization to support our customers' needs for custom research and strategic consulting services. The key differentiator for Tabor Research will be its intense focus on what we refer to as "actionable insight." This is something I can't emphasize enough. Our products will be both insightful and actionable, providing novel thinking about markets and market discontinuities, customers, business models and futures.