What does it mean when you are endorsed by someone on LinkedIN

When I initially signed up for an account on Linkedin, the site asked me to provide a list of my skills. I didn't think this unusual because  knew that LinkedIn was intended to be a site to help people build their career (as distinct from Facebook which is more intended to be more of a site for people to enjoy themselves and relax). However, since I was not seeking out a new job, I didn't pay too much attention to what I filled in there.

Recently I started getting notifications from LinkedIn to say that one of my contacts on the site had "endorsed" one of my skills. I never actively sought out these endorsements and so I was somewhat intrigued to know what was going on.

About 2 weeks ago, I got a LinkedIn connection request from someone I know and when I approved the request I was presented with a list of the skills this person claimed to have and was asked to endorse them. Since I knew this person to be reasonably competent, I clicked the "endorse" button beside some of the skills. Then the site asked me if I wanted to endorse more skills from other contacts. It began showing me an apparently random set of people/skill combinations and prompted me to either click on the "endorse" button or else click on the "next" button to see more choices.

In general, I endorsed contacts' skills when I had a reasonable knowledge that the person did hold the skill that they claimed. I sometimes declined to endorse someone's skills either because I did not know them very well of because I knew their abilities and I did not rate them very highly (two very different situations). Although I spent a while reviewing skills, I abandoned the endorsement exercise before I had a chance to review most of the people/skill combinations so many of my colleagues were not endorsed by me due to lack of time/motivation.

I suppose the bottom line is that when you see that the skills a person's LinkedIn profile have been endorsed by someone else it gives you a slightly increased confidence that the person does indeed hold the skill that they clam, but if there are no endorsements for their skills it does not necessarily mean they are not skilled.

I'moving to Zurich

One of the wonderful features of the internet is that it should not matter where in the world you are located. The protocols of the internet were designed to treat all traffic fairly so once you have a connection to the internet you should be able to get at any internet resource.

However, there are a number of industries (primarily music and movies) who continue to try an pretend that the internet is not a global phenomenon and continue to try and limit availability of their products and services to particular geographies. As I wrote before, these services are doomed to obsolescence - partly because such a business model is seen by consumers as unfair, but also because it is a technically difficult task to restrict your internet service to a particular country or set of countries.

There is an advertising series running on Irish Radio stations at the moment with the punch line "That's it, I'm moving to Zurich". The "joke" is that the speaker is actually planning to change pension providers to Zurich Life rather than actually emigrate to Switzerland. However, it seems that the administrators of our work network are planning a similar move.

It used to be the case that we could not access any Irish related web sites from work because most internet geo-location serviced (such as Where is my IP) seemed to be of the opinion that we were based near Portsmouth in the South of England (presumably since we used an internet service provider who was based near there). My colleagues didn't mind too much because it also meant that we got a chance to try out services which were supposedly only available in the UK. However, a recent change in our network configuration means that most internet servers now thing that I am based in Switzerland (not too far from Zurich).

I wonder are there any interesting TV shows running in Switzerland that I should try to catch up on?

Is Google AdSense a lucrative way to earn money?

Many bloggers believe that including Google AdSense advertisement on your site represents an opportunity to earn some significant money that will defray your costs and even provide you with an additional source of income. When I established this blog, I deliberately decided not to include any advertisements because I wanted to make it clear that I was not motivated by potential earnings.

When I registered for Movember I decided to temporarily enable Google AdSense ads for the month. I was partly hoping that this would provide me another way to collect money for the charity, but I was also experimenting to see how much money could be earned from this stream.

The bad news for the Irish Cancer Society is that this did not result in a significant revenue stream. In total I earned 7 euro and 64 cents during the month. Since they don't allow you to withdraw any money until your account earnings exceeds 10 euro, there was very little chance that I would consider giving up my day job and living off my AdSense earnings (in order to ensure that the charity didn't suffer I made a personal donation in lieu).


This experience, matches the experience I had a few years ago with trying AdSense advertisements on the web site of a local soccer team. The earnings from google were negligible, while the club had no problem convincing local businesses to pay several hundred euro per year to have their logo appearing on the web site. Of course, it could be the case that the local businesses are paying above the market rates for the existing advertisements - in fact many of them may be consciously doing this in order to build up good will in the community or to support what they believe is a good cause.

Are we suffering from Affluenza?

The latest eBook, I borrowed from the Fingal Libraries eBook lending service was called "Affluenza: When too much is Never Enough". This book talks about how modern Australia seems to be suffering from the affliction of Affluenza, which is defined as:

"a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more"

This was a really thought provoking book. The book was specifically talking about Australian society, and hence most of the statistics included related to Australia. In a few cases they reported data relating to the United States for comparison. In summary the authors conclude that the level of wealth in Australia and USA is roughly similar as is the level of obsession with consumerism. However, while most American's realise that they are a rich consumption obsessed society, Australians seem to think of them selves as surviving in tough economic circumstances.

When I read the book I wondered whether or not Irish people are suffering from the same malaise. The Irish media are full of stories about how dramatically circumstances have changed for Irish people in recent years since the demise of the Celtic Tiger. However,  I am old enough to remember how tough times were in former decades and so I don't think we are that badly off at the moment in comparison.

I was delighted to read the survey reported in yesterdays Irish Times which contained an interesting fact that the percentage of Irish people who claimed to be "totally happy with their standard of living" had increased from 59% in 197 to 71% in 2012. The journalists seemed surprised with this statistic given Ireland's current economic crisis, but I think it is a sign that we have a good perspective on our economic circumstances.

The Mo has got to Go

Today I cut off my moustache since November is over. Although it is only a short while since I started growing it, I had got used to the feeling of a hairy upper lip. My growth was nowhere near as flamboyant as some of the samples that I saw my colleagues growing. In fact, according to this amusing guide to facial hair in the technology industry my moustache reveals that I am a natural legal analyst. I don't think that is the image I want to project so I will stick with clean shaven for now.

Although the growing season is over, the money collection will continue for a few more days. If you want to donate money my Movember page is still open and the green envelope is still at my desk.

Contributing to my Mo

My mo-running partners

As I mentioned earlier, I am participating in the Movember fundraising initiative. My moustache is progressing reasonably well, although the moustache is slightly hard to see it since it is grey in colour as compared to the hair on my head which is light brown (and getting lighter as I age). This week people are saying to me "are you growing a moustache?", while last week they were saying "you missed a bit while shaving".

Unfortunately the fund raising is not going quite as well. Mainly this is to to my own reluctance to come straight out and ask for donations. To help get around this fact I am going to put a sign up on my desk at work with a donation envelope directly below it. For those of you who want to donate on-line, there are full instructions available from the  Movember website.

Is it a good idea to write about your work on your personal blog?

Recently I attended a presentation by Marie Wallace telling people how to "tackle" social media. She made the point that it is important to have a clear idea for what your goal is for using social media or else you won't achieve it. During the subsequent discussion it became clear that most of the people attending the talk were planning to write primarily about the things that they are working on and associated social networking and blogging primarily with  advancing their career. In addition they didn't really enjoy using sites like Facebook and preferred to only use sites like LinkedIn with a more business orientation.

I enjoy engaging on social networking sites and my motivation is more personal that career oriented, but the discussion caused me reflect to  upon my motivation is and what I blog about. As I looked through my old posts I noticed a post which I wrote about a year ago analysing my motivation and this is generally still accurate a year later. However, I was surprised how few of my blog posts mentioned IBM or the work I do for them.

At a rough count, my blog post fall into 3 categories:

1. Roughly 20% have something to do with IBM or the projects I work on. I included anything vaguely work related in this category e.g. I wrote several posts about the Young Scientist Competition which are not really related to my work, but I counted them because I got involved through IBM's sponsorship of  the event. 
2. About 50% were technology related posts that had nothing to do with my work (e.g. reviews of mobile phone  applications) .
3. The remaining 30% non-technology related (e.g. expressing opinions about politics or sport)

Since I spend well more than 20% of my time thinking about my work I would have predicted  that (due to simple statistics) a higher percentage of my output would be work related.

I make no secret about what I work on, but my reasons for not writing about work relate to two main reasons:

• If I write about IBM or an IBM product I find it rad to get the right balance. If I a praise the company too highly it sounds contrived, but if I am too critical of an IBM product/policy it might have negative consequences too.
• It takes me longer to write about a work related product because I feel that people will expect me to be accurate and check all of my facts. For example if I was to write a technical article for DeveloperWorks about a product I was working on, I would typically expect to spend several weeks getting it exactly right. In contrast I can write a comparison between RunKeeper and MyTracks in a much shorter time and I don't feel obligated to double check any of my statement since I don't claim to be an expert.

After reflecting upon this a little, I decided to keep with my current balance of allowing personal posts to predominate on this blog. After all I have plenty of other forums in which to write about my work. If articles are published elsewhere about stuff that I am working on, I often promote them to friends and colleagues by sharing on Facebook and/or Twitter. Perhaps I in the future I will try remember to also cross post to LinkedIn, since this seems to be more popular with my generation.

A late starter for Movember

Last year many of my colleagues at work took part in Movember and so I resolved that in 2012 I would join them. However, 1st of November came and went without anyone reminding me of my resolution (perhaps many are taking part, but their facial hair is not yet obvious).

This Friday, my daughter told me that she signed up for the Mo-Running event in the Phoenix park next weekend with a friend of hers and she persuaded me to join them. I think that the girls intend getting a moustache from a costume shop, but I though that I ought to take part fully.

While shaving yesterday, I left my top lip untouched. I don't think I will have much of a moustache by the race day next weekend, but I will continue growing until 8th of December to make up for the late start.

I don't know the logistics of how to donate money yet, but I created a profile on the Movember web site and once I find out the details I will share them via this blog. In addition I just turned on Google Ads on this web site and I will donate any money earned to the charity. I don't  want to violate the Google Ads guidelines, but if you want to donate a few cents to the charity the easiest way might be to click on one of the advertisements.

Should Irish people get involved in the US presidential election

In theory Irish people should not care who is president of the United States of America. However, in reality the recent election was the single biggest topic of conversation in Ireland for the last few weeks. This is partly because USA is such a dominant world power, but also because for historical reasons most Irish people have many close relatives living in the USA. In fact many Irish people (including me) have a right to a postal vote as a result of holding American citizenship. So there are active groups campaigning in Ireland for such votes.

Half-Page Ad in Irish Times
publicizing the Paddy Power
early pay-out offer

In the lead up to election day, most professional opinion polls were predicting that the election was too tight to make a definitive prediction. However, on the day before polling, Irish based bookmaker Paddy Power announced that they were so confident that Obama was going to win that they were going to pay out immediately to anyone who had bet on him. This was effectively a very cheap publicity stunt becuase although they claimed it cost them over half a million euro, it ended up costing them nothing because Obama won and the would have had to pay out on all these bets anyway.

I know that the advertisement for this offer which featured the tag line "Sorry Romney - you're not black or cool" was intended to be very much tongue in cheek, but I must say that I found it quite offensive. It was intended to poke fun at Mitt Romney who is not very popular among the Irish public so maybe they felt safe, but the attached picture of president Obama is not very flattering so I suspect that they alienated many of his fans also.

There has been some debate in Irish newspapers recently about whether Ireland should offer some form of voting rights to the Irish Diaspora. This could be quite significant since there are many more Irish citizens (or at least people entitled to Irish citizenship) resident in United States than are resident on the island of Ireland. I wonder how Irish people would feel if a similar advertisement poking fun at Irish politicians was running in American newspapers.

[xpost] Who needs to be involved in running a successful "Show and Tell" event for a Hackday

[This article was originally posted to the IBM internal hackday blog, but it is not really IBM specific]

I find that one of the most enjoyable parts of any Hackday is the Show and Tell event  when the hackers get to quickly present a summary of their project. Typically these events involve about 20-30 projects being presented and since it is unreasonable to expect the audience to sit through more than 1-1.5 hours of talks it is necessary to impose a strict time limit on each presentation (typically 2-3 minutes each). When most people first hear about this event format they predict that this will become a chaotic mess. This is a real danger so it is important that the event is very tightly controlled and well planned.

We are currently planning the show and tell event for the Ireland Lab in conjunction with the recent Hackday X. The main organiser was asking how many volunteers he needed to recruit and so I thought it might be worthwhile to list the various roles which are needed to help run a sucessful show and tell event. Don't be scared by the length of the list, it is of course possible for one person to fulfil more than one role during the event, but it is good to clarify exactly what you are asking each person to do and if you are lucky enough to have enough volunteer helpers it is nice to have a job for everyone so that they feel useful.

• Time Keeper: because of the tight schedule this is probably the most important role. We normally use a highly visible clock that can be seen by both the audience and the speaker so that there is no surprise when the time runs out. It is essential that no leeway is allowed because distilling a presentation down to 3 minutes is hard and if any speaker is allowed to over run the allocated time it is unfair to the other speakers whose speaking time will have to be cut even shorter (alternatively all of the speakers will assume that if the prevoous speaker was allowed to run over by a minute it is OK for them and the entire schedule goes out the window). We find that a referee's whistle or some form of a loud gong is a good way to remind speakers that their time has expired.
• Master of Ceremonies: It is important to have someone speak at the start to tell the audience (and speakers) what to expect and they should also speak briefly at the end to tell people about the judging process (see below). The MC can also help the time keeper by subtly stepping forward as each three minute time slot expires to say "thank you x for your presentation and up next we have y" - it is a very brave speaker who will continue speaking over the MC.
• Speakers: Naturally you can't have a good event without speakers, but it is important to check that you know exactly who is going to present (typically people might not want to present their project if they feel they didn't achieve anything to boast about) and in what order. Someone (either the MC or someone else) should make sure that they seek out the next speaker while the current presentation is bing given and get them to stand next to the podium. Since the allocated time is very short, a significant proportion of it can be wasted waiting for the speaker to walk from the back of the room.
• Judge(s): Normally we give out some local prizes (even if these have only a token value e.g. a certificate). This means that you need at least one judge who is taking notes and scoring the presentations. If you have a judging panel of several judges, you need to clarify how they are going to interact. Typically it is a good idea to ensure that the judges turn up anout 15-20 minutes before the show and tell itself starts so that they can discuss judging logistics among themselves.

The above roles are needed for a single site show and tell. However, in the Ireland lab we have a number of different physical locations and so we like to hold a virtual show and tell so that we can have both presenters and audience taking part from wherever they are based. This is a good idea, but it does add some additional logicistcal challenges and so you need some more roles to be filled:

• eMeeting Moderator: someone needs to run the eMeeting. In IBM we typically have a choice of eMeeting servers to use each with their strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes we choose to use an experimental version of the eMeeting service (this is Hackday after all), but if there is any doubt that the service will be working during the show and tell it is a good idea to have a backup plan in place just in case the primaty server is acting up.
• eMeeting Observer: as I mentioned it is possible that the emeeting service will either fail completely or else be working sub-optimally (e.g. noticable delays in updating the screen in the eMeeting). Therefore it is a good idea to assign someone who is physically in the same location as the speakers to also join the eMeeting as a participant so that they can alert the speaker and/or the eMeeting moderator if there is any problem with the emeeting.
• Recorder (optional): It is not ncessary to record the show and tell, but when you have gone to the effort of arranging the event it is a shame to lose it. Most eMeeting tools and/or teleconference services offer a recording service. The recording might need some post-processing, but you can often find that some of the hackers have a dream to get involved in the movie business and would love the chance to practice their skills