Focus groups and polling have become a standard approach not only for advertising, but also for developing political platforms or even for developing courses. Even research, to some extent, develops by building consensus, but sometimes this just doesn't allow for creative leaps and exceptional judgement. In some ways, this lowers the creative process to the lowest common denominators. There are lots of stories of scientists having this kind of breakthrough, but here's a well documented one from advertising (with an amusing video).
Here's a good example. The "1984" Apple advertisement has been cited and one of the most creative and influential advertisements of the 20th century. There's a real focus group of people who have never seen it commenting on it.
Now the focus group is not alone. Most of Apple's board also disliked the ad when the y first saw it (before it was ever aired), decided not to air it, and Mike Markkula supposedly said "Who wants to move to find a new agency?"
After it aired it immediately received immense publicity and recognition. It proved to be highly memorable and won over 30 awards. In a 2004 USA today article, Kevin Manley said "Twenty Super Bowls later, many tech industry leaders say the ad and the first Mac played an inspiring role in their career paths."
For the record, the actual final ad can be seen here. Steve Jobs authorized it after trepidation by his predecessor. It was directed by Ridley Scott and the production apparently had a budget of $900,000.
The take home message? Sometimes when you have a creative vision you have to follow your own instinct and ignore other people's advice.
Of course sometimes, a bad response results from not pitching your idea well. Here's a link on grant proposal writing that deals with that issue.
2008
2008
I saw the movie Live Free of Die Hard recently. The film involves a heroic hacker Matthew Farrell who
gets into trouble due to his illicit hacking-for-hire. The movie is enjoyable, given that one expects it to
be a mindless action romp from the outset. It's always good to see the computer guy
cast as a powerful figure, albeit a rather neurotic one.
The nerd perspective is that our guy is initially logged
in from his home with an IP address of 172.16.55.103. In fact, that's a blackhole address along will all of 172.16.0.0 through to 172.31.0.0 (172.16/12)
according to RCF 1918, so it's the same as a 555-1212 phone number that is common in
"older" movies beack in the days when they still used the telephone (i.e. 172.16 like the more common 10.0.0.0 (10/8) and 192.168.0.0 (192.168/16) subnets).
Other people on the net have used screenshots to determine the IP used for an scp transaction has the address 202.218.154.52
and this is osaka-itkaikei.co.jp, Osaka IT Accounting Technical School.
2008
I am meeting in Ottawa as part of the NSERC grant selection committee for computer science. This is a brutal exercise due to rather limited amount of funds in a growing area. In theory it would be nice to give every applicant a lot of meny, but it practice one can't do that. On the other hand, I think the process is very fair with a lot of discussion and a good-sized commitee that looks carefully at every grant applicantion.
Gearing up for this exercise was a lot of work. Computer science it divided into two different fund committees, based on the sibject of the proposal. The committee I am on has about 13 members and we each had to read a lot of proposals over the preceding 2 months. In the end, each proposal gets examined by about 6 people. I will be a relief simply to get rid of the 4-foot high pile of documents that have been haunting me.
