Category: The Work

  • RIP, Porter Anderson

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    ljndawson
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    Porter and I go way back. Possibly to the beginning of his pivot to the book industry – I was on the conference circuit, as a consultant, when Twitter was in its infancy, and he was somehow always in the back of the room, making an art out of live-tweeting. He materialized out of nowhere…

  • Someone Asked Me

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    ljndawson
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    I’d posted some kind of throwaway comment on Reddit about newspapers – physical ones – and how editorial assistants in New York City would get all three of the major papers and read them on the subway on the way to work, folded specially so as not to interfere with your neighbor who was also…

  • Drama

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    ljndawson
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    The new job is lovely. We do our work, we go home. I’m building conceptual models and taxonomy schemas, and the work’s being embraced and implemented. And I’m realizing…I have some peace now. I don’t know if it’s the industry – insurance and financial management vs. adtech – or the people, who are enormously helpful…

  • And Another Thing…

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    ljndawson
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    2020-2021 was a big year that we all seem to have cumulatively repressed – we were inside for much of it, but then, suddenly, we were emphatically outside. Corporate life had quite the shakeup. Organizations were suddenly confronting injustice at all levels – race, gender, ability – and setting up teams and recruitment efforts to…

  • The Old Wheel

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    ljndawson
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    “The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.” – Sherlock Holmes When I left publishing in 2016, a large part of my reasoning for the pivot was because I thought, after twenty years of shouting, cajoling, sweet-talking, and consulting about metadata, I didn’t have…

  • Reclaimed and Resurrected

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    ljndawson
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    Today I’m announcing the revival of my consultancy, Numerical Gurus. As before, and based on my 30 years’ experience in media, I’m providing expertise on the following: And I’m adding a new area of practice: We’re in a highly-disruptive environment. Placing your trust in an astute, experienced, and nimble mind would be a worthwhile investment.…

  • The Humans in the System

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    ljndawson
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    Computers are easy. People are hard. Because tech is built on binary code, it presents a pretty simple series of problems: on/off, yes/no, 0/1. People…are not binary. People are vast soups of insecurity, irritation, pride, integrity, curiosity, resilience, and terror. And they bring all of that to the desk with them. If you’re managing groups…

  • What I Saw at the Evolution

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    ljndawson
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    Thoughts on a career in data governance I started my career in publishing in 1987, as an editorial assistant at Doubleday. (I was really bad at it.) From there I moved into bookselling, and then databases about books and bookselling, and then…well, a bunch of different companies, some of which don’t exist anymore, some of…

  • AI Is Dumb

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    ljndawson
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    I don’t have a lot of patience for the claims being made by companies who are heavily investing in AI. It definitely has its uses – image recognition, mining through large repositories of text, etc. But one thing that AI has not yet perfected is decisionmaking. Computers – even sophisticated ones – are stupid. They…

  • You Know My Methods

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    ljndawson
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    Announcing the debut of exactly what the world needs right now: a new podcast, Good Night, Mr. Holmes! Every Tuesday, my partner in both committing and solving crime, Rachel Rushefsky, and I discuss the ITV Granada Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett and a pair of Watsons. Side discussions include, but are not limited to:…

  • Bad Men Doing Bad Things

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    ljndawson
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    Recently, I was disturbed by a not-new paper about AI written by a woman who was fired from Google for questioning their AI program. Timnit Gebru used to work in Google data science labs and was on the bleeding edge of AI research, when she began to realize AI’s roots in eugenics. It fundamentally has…

  • I am not a replicant

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    ljndawson
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    New year, new…job-hunt! And boy, has the world changed since the last time I went looking for employment (2019). In five short years, the entire ecosystem has been overtaken by AI, bots, and virtual interviewers (also bots). It is very hard to find any signal in all the noise. Some things I’ve noticed: That last…

  • De-Nazifying Blogging

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    ljndawson
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    Thanks to https://bsky.app/profile/loudpoet.com, who shared Anil Dash’s post about Substack with me on Thursday night, I came to the inescapable conclusion that I can’t blog/newsletter on a platform that is actively supporting hate speech – and using the content of non-bigots to provide cover for that hate speech. So I’m back to WordPress. I was…

  • When Money Ate Mike Tyson

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    ljndawson
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    In the 1970s and early 80s, Saturday afternoons before dinner were for Wide World of Sports with Jim McKay. That is, when we couldn’t get the Oklahoma University games – which was most Saturdays, because we were in Delaware. Dad would be freshly showered from whatever yardwork or workout he’d been doing, slumped on the…