Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

I've addressed the marketing of public transportation, but this is slightly different. The ads that fill the London Underground and UTA's bus system and just about every other mass transit system -- do they work?

I still remember a number of the ads I saw on subways in Korea. One about a bald man who found a miracle hair tonic, in particular, struck me because the first time I saw it I misunderstood the Korean text. I thought it said that the woman got a new husband. Months later I saw it again and realized the subject and object articles were different than I had first thought. It just meant that her husband had changed. (Which is still a little ambiguous in English, huh?)

Anyway, the deal with ads on public transit is that you'll see that ad for maybe half an hour. You can't stare at the people across the aisle from you. You probably don't have a good view out the window. So you're going to read every word on that ad. I remember reading even the small text with copyright information on ads.

Video ads are probably the real future of advertising on public transportation, though. Some cities are experimenting with that. National Geographic had a piece about the flat-panel TVs bus drivers are installing across the world.

If they made it cool enough, maybe they could even make public transit more cool.

Maybe.

Some public restrooms are tolerable, and most are definitely not. One at the office complex I work in has an inch-and-a-half wide gap between the door and the frame, which has a tendency, on occasion, to provide us with visions we'd rather burn out of our heads. There is a small ventilation fan, but it is quiet and doesn't move much air.

(I know, "quietude" is supposed to be a cardinal virtue of bathroom fans, but there's really a purpose they serve beyond just moving air.)

At any rate, I was led to ponder: What makes a good bathroom?

Like any good tech-person, I turned to Google and typed in [public bathroom design]. Like a good search engine, Google returned to me a list that included the following great site:

http://www.edfacilities.org/rl/restrooms.cfm

That article contains links to a myriad of other articles about bathroom and locker room design. Loads of professional insight and discussion on issues that hadn't even crossed my mind. Sure, layout is a big one. But what about maintenance? Durability? Use frequency?

The bathrooms in Hong Kong were the best I've ever used. Tall, tall walls and doors that ran all the way down to the floor. (No more matching sounds and shoes!) But those would probably be invitations for vandals, here in the US.

One article talks about no-flow urinals. Cool thing: they have a 'trap' which contains a 'sealant liquid' that floats above water (and any other substance that may be splashed into it). Maintenance involves dumping a gallon of water into the toilet every once in a while to wash away any build-up. No handles, no plugging and exciting overflowing, no nothing. Just a simple, effective system.

The science of bathroom design is flourishing, my friends. Let us all work to encourage more bathroom designers to take advantage of its fruits.

"People look at this conflict in Iraq and think the results will be driven by big people in big places making big decisions," says Hall, who spent hours interviewing the 20 war veterans. "But, actually, where the individual Iraqi places his or her allegiance largely depends on that 19-year-old soldier walking down the street with an assault rifle."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A48355-2005Apr12_2.html

This article details one of the training methods the Army is trying out. Gator Six, a set of videos that present scenarios and ask the captains to work out what they'd do. A great idea -- teaching people not what to think, but how.

More of us should learn that.

Here's the sitch:

We had a long, long list of keywords related to music. We had another long list of artists, and we needed to identify all the keywords that contained one of the artists. Manually, something like 10 hours of work.

Excel-magically? Half an hour of research.

The keywords go in column A. The list of artists goes in column X. The following function is copied down column B:

=IF(OR(ISNUMBER(FIND(X$1:X$500, A1))),"TRUE","FALSE")

This will throw a "VALUE" error immediately unless you enter it the Right Way, which means to hit SHIFT + CTRL + ENTER when you're done. That puts it in curly brackets and makes it an "array function."

The FIND function allows for keywords to be scrambled and include extra words.

This 'business process' is under a provisional patent by Tom Dalton. You can use it if you pay me $10,000 per keyword.

It's the easiest thing in the world to sort a column alphabetically. But what if you have a column with a bunch of words in each row, and you want to sort the words within each cell?

For instance:

A1 - Tom ate lunch
A2 - Alex brought animal cookies
A3 - Games were played

I want to sort each sentence. A1 should be "ate lunch Tom," see.

1. I approached it by splitting the cells into columns, first. (Data > Text to Colums > Space delimited)
2. Then I ran the following macro:

===============================
Sub AlphaRowSort()
'
' AlphaRowSort Macro
' By Tom Dalton
'
'
Do Until ActiveCell.Value = ""
ActiveCell.Range("A1:Z1").Select
Selection.Sort Key1:=ActiveCell, Order1:=xlAscending, Header:=xlGuess, _
OrderCustom:=1, MatchCase:=False, Orientation:=xlLeftToRight, _
DataOption1:=xlSortNormal
ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Select
Loop
End Sub
=====================

3. Then I copied all the cells into notepad to clean it, copied that into Word, replaced all the tabs with spaces, and finally dumped it back into Excel.

If I were any good at writing macros, of course, I'd have put all the splitting and recombining into the macro as well. But I'm not -- I'm not a programmer! I just get things done. And this got done in time. So I'm a happy boy.

A lone voice, crying in the wilderness:

"What is the definition of click fraud?"

Google just released a new feature that shows advertisers the percent of invalid clicks they've received. What's the criteria for that?

A few ideas: bots, India-based competition-smashing companies, high-school kids researching topics for school papers, Firefox extensions that pre-download pages for you, greasemonkey scripts, people whose browsers or connections timeout after they've clicked, curious competitors who click on your ads to see what the landing pages look like...

Without a clear definition, I have to view Google's 'feature' as nothing more than a flimsy PR stunt. And I don't think the problem will be solved until we come up with a definition that ties into conversion rates -- which just shifts the problem to a different issue.

I've had a hard time answering this question in job interviews, because I try to be honest in job interviews, even when I know that's not what they really want. What they want is the *mostly* completely honest answer:

"I want a challenging, really hard job with enough flexibility for me to learn and accomplish great things."

That's true. But I have a more concrete idea of what my ideal job would be.

I want to work with electronics and the Internet -- I want to integrate broadly disparate systems in innovative ways. I want to deal with security and usability. Honestly, I view marketing as a usability problem in many ways.

I want to live overseas and travel, and I want to be able to research and create effective solutions to impossible problems. I'd like a job where people have problems in their foreign offices and need somebody to come in for a day or a week and assess the problem, then create something on the spot or go back home and build or buy or find something new. And then come back and install it, train everybody, and then support it.

My skills are in Internet technology. I've created prototype systems to simulate Internet connections on local machines or pass stegonographic messages through eBay. I've faked headers and forged connections between systems that couldn't talk to each other and I've created macros and programs to convert data and streams to match crazy specifications. Some of the things I've put together saved weeks or even months of human work. (One system in particular has enabled work that would have taken years of effort -- and might have been profitable even at that level of effort.)

Most of these things were done very, very quickly. I work best under pressure and in bleak situations. If we've got months and millions of dollars, we can find people to do it better than me. :o) But if it needs to be done yesterday and there's no team of developers sitting around to do it, I can typically find a way.

I'm also good at communicating with people -- execs, salespeople, tech people, whatever. I can teach and train -- I've taught at BYU and in a host of other settings. I can understand people's needs well enough to find solutions that actually work for them. (A trait not common among developers, sadly.)

So, what kind of job fits some of that?

Monster doesn't have many that seemed to fit the bill.

(And, as always, I'm mightily arrogant, I know.)

Ever stood across a desk from a stranger who was making your life miserable when they didn't have to?

'Small people' are those who act small -- who act petty when they need not, or who enforce policies over purposes to bolster their own sense of power. These people are often, sadly, terribly important people in the sense that they have the power to deny you things you need or force you to jump through ridiculous hoops. Bureaucracy is an ideal environment for these people.

Typically, if you talk to these people long enough you can catch them in logical contradictions. Because policies really are meant to help people. When they are enforced poorly, it almost always leads to problems. Once you find a chink, you're ready to go. But what should you do?

Here's the quote I saw (in an entirely different context) that made me want to write about this again: "Always provide the person an avenue to preserve their dignity and self respect."

No matter what you do, remember to build the person you're dealing with! Borrowing a line from retail, "the salesperson/clerk/obstacle/whoever is always right." Help them see how they can be right AND help you at the same time. If you 'defeat' them in a battle of logic, they'll retreat to a shelter of bureaucracy in which they are unassailable and you lose the war. If, instead, you persuade them that you're a friend -- you're in.

In a media management class I took last semester, we had frequent discussion about the FTC and consolidation and monopolies. People spouted lots of opinions based on such assertions as, "the government doesn't allow companies to hurt other companies or drive them out of business!"

I frequently countered that making a better product can really hurt other companies and even drive them out of business. Some students suggested that monopolies are illegal -- again, I countered that monopolies are not illegal, only certain, specific tactics that lead to the formation of monopolies.

Debate raged (politely, for the most part) all semester with few of us becoming any more informed on the actual process underlying the whole issue. How does the government decide when to get involved? What factors does the government look at?

Well, then I ran into this: an actual FTC document outlining their decision process on a merger from back in 2000. Apparently there are actually thousands of these, but I'd never seen one before. It's even meant to be human-readable, so I'd highly recommend checking it out.

If, that is, you care about anti-competitive behavior and government regulation. Which normal people don't care about.

http://www.ftc.gov/os/2000/12/valsparana.htm

A few choice quotes are after the jump, but I really recommend you read the whole thing! It's short and fascinating.