TED Community » Matthew Taylor

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Solutions and policy for the long term. Our future depends on seeing past today, the next month, or next quarter and laying the ground work for that future now.

An idea worth spreading

Technology is moving beyond its initial niches. As that innovative wedge broadens out to transform every mundane aspect of our day to day life, the practice of operating that technology infrastructure must also change. The tech pioneers that were my heroes will continue to blaze new trails, but those heroes, by there very nature are limited. The rest of us need to learn their lessons and apply them, and its through that process that technology will truly revolutionize our world. Its the wide-adoption of simple technology that radically changes the world. Hero's pave the way, but it is us that must democratize what they have discovered.

Talk to me about

Talk to me about concept that connect the dots, that truly bring understanding into the light. I live on new information, but the true impact of information cannot be realized until it is connected.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +0.50 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A comment on Talk: Dan Ariely: Our buggy moral code

  Feb 7 2012: It has long felt to me that the concept in this talk was a divider in society, or at least in the American society I see expressed a lot today. People of strong intuition, personal certitude about their observed world lined up across a cultural divide from those with a less well developed sense of their own perfect intuitions. Anecdotes line up through out history:
  
  World is flat / Columbus
  Earth is center / Copernicus
  Its Snowing / Pretty much every global warming scientist.
  
  In fact, in some ways, I think this echos the struggle inside humanity between Faith and Intellect. I am not choosing sides (my global warming snark not withstanding), because I see them both as rational ways of resolving conflicts in their own personal information. Faith provides frameworks for answering things or which you have no direct experience. Intellect does the same, through experimentation.
  
  Perhaps understanding that mankind has both types will lead us towards finding ways to harness both traits positively.
• +1

  A comment on Conversation: How should economy system that comes after capitalism look like?

  Feb 6 2012: I don't believe that Capitalism, as such, will end. I do believe, however that period of time over which profit is measured, will increase. Right now we are measuring quarter to quarter (or even month to month). There are a GREAT many businesses that are currently eating their own tail because their current leaders are profiting individually. Over time, the interests of the company will diverge from that of the individual leaders because the "value" and of the business is being siphoned off.
  
  Either that, or company scale will have to radical come down to the point where the value of the company is more synonymous with the interests of its leaders.
  
  If capitalism is to continue at the scale it does today, the social benefit will have to be re-integrated. For otherwise, those companies are doomed, and that is not in their interests, no matter how large a golden parachute has been negotiated with its failed leaders.

• A comment on Conversation: What are some TED talks that I can add to my mp that can be listened to but not watched?

  Feb 6 2012: There are several that do not overly rely on visuals. I am just now listening/watching the recent talk by Paddy Ashdown, which I recommend VERY highly. Its great to watch him, and see his gestures, but there are no critical visual elements. No PowerPoint, nor critical gestures that would make the verbal talk hard to understand.

• A comment on Conversation: Given that cloud is becoming more popular to aid in scalability of a business, how are you evaluating your complex cloud contracts?

  Jan 31 2012: First and foremost you need to complete at least one very comprehensive ITIL-style planning cycle, or leverage your existing Capacity and Performance Management process to establish a realistic forecast. This process should be deeply rooted in the Service Strategy of your business, and a detailed Service Design.
  
  This process is necessary to accurately estimate the cost of the needed cloud services, and the suitability of the cloud providers service offerings to your needs. Even top-tier cloud providers have limitations around up-time commitments, and specific capability around remediation times, RTO/RPO, etc. These are risks that are not necessarily unreasonable, but must be matched against your true business needs.
  
  In my experience, there are two main pitfalls to utilizing he cloud. Firstly its underestimating the growth of your business, leading to over-consumption of cloud services and undermining the ROI. Secondly, its overestimating the availability guarantee's and support process of the providers, leading to critical outages.
  
  To to sum up (and to blatantly steal from Sun Tsu), know yourself, and then use those questions to evaluate your providers. If you have completed both of those processes well, the risks to your business should reveal themselves.

• A reply on Talk: Sean Carroll: Distant time and the hint of a multiverse

  Jan 31 2012: The singular reliance on red-shifting as the end-all be-all of cosmology has driven me nuts!!!
  
  I want to know if they can quantify the red-shifting in any way, and if so, there should still be variance in the degree of red-shift, unless of course, we really are at the center of the universe, which I find to be unlikely.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Joshua Klein: The intelligence of crows

  Jan 30 2012: There is a lot of value to this beyond the prosaic tasks of the vending machine. There is a lot of communication going on here. The crows have already selected human contact for themselves. They could be using their intelligence to thrive in a wild environment, but they did not. Like rats and dogs, they chose close proximity with humans as a survival strategy. The idea here, that we can be allies rather than enemies, is still a powerful one. Think beyond the spare change.

• A comment on Conversation: Can advertising be both a force for commerce AND a force for good?

  Jan 24 2012: The revolution in data-driven solutions is really helping change the mechanics of advertising in positive ways. We are also seeing, however, the counter pressure of commercial interests. While Amazon and web-based ad companies are using data about me to target ads, the flip side is the "sponsored" placements from Facebook, et al that overrides the personalized stream. I am skeptical that a purely personalized ad mechanic will survive the pressure to generate demand from corporations for new products (without a clear tie-in to existing customer interests) or perhaps less wholesome products, that users may select against when asked, but buy in moments of weakness like junk-foods. To the extent that established linkage algorithms can be overridden at all, its likely to take large amounts of spending, placement and repetition that will suppress small innovators in favor of large firms with ad budgets. The tension between these two forces will always limit the utility of paid advertising to the mass market. There is no "sweet spot" between them.
• +2

  A comment on Talk: Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution!

  Jan 24 2012: Instead of creating dry hours of fundamental learning, we need to create the most dynamic experiences possible, guided and enriched by those fundamental subjects. Why waste an hour sitting in one place, doing something boring, when you can be engaged and enjoy the hour with the same results.