Avoid AI #Recruiters - @wadeandwendy from @randstad is no Alexa

Randstad is a third-party recruiting firm companies use when they can't or aren't interested in directly recruiting.  Their Twitter header boldly proclaims "human forward." though I'm not sure what that means.

click on any image in this article to enlarge

Randstad themselves have outsourced (fourth-party?) the communications of recruiting to Wade and Wendy, which bills itself as the first AI Recruiter.  In reality, it's not.

First, their emails have MailChimp code showing.  I've tweeted this to them but they continue to send me emails with it, so maybe there's no I, A or otherwise, there.

Second, the emails only have the option for "Yes" - there are FAQs and even an email address, but it doesn't appear that the email box is monitored.  You'd think an Artificial Intelligence company would have something in place to handle incoming messages.  I wrote to them to say that the role wasn't a fit for me, the location was all wrong and even more importantly, the company they were recruiting for wasn't a company I'd ever consider working for.

I never heard back.

Until I got a reminder from Wendy.

So, I looked more closely at the email.  (This is the second company they emailed me about - I would work for Philips - I've stared at their monitors in hospitals on so many occasions that I have a strong appreciation for them.  My first portable CD player back in 1990 - took 10 AA batteries - was also a Philips.)

No real way to select "No" in the email so I clicked yes.  I was prompted to register with my LinkedIn, Google or Microsoft accounts or to create a Username and Password.  So, signed in/registered, and then I met Wendy.

Wendy is a glorified chatbot. Maybe not even glorified.  Maybe not even a chatbot.  More of a progressive form.  Here's my chat:

Red Circle = this was my only choice.

Blue Circle = I had yes/no options.

Green Circle = I had multiple choices, perhaps as many as 9, but it captured the first one and then moved on.  You'd think an AI would want to collect as much data as it could, allowing me to select multiple options, such as Company, Role, Location, I'm Happy Where I Am, and so on.  If I could only pick one, I would have picked Company.

However, I clicked on Role first, so that's what it selected.

Never once did it prompt me for any free-entry typing.

The survey link at the bottom isn't linked - probably to reduce the number of submissions telling them their product is a steaming pile of dog droppings.

Which makes it all the more interesting that Wendy is again writing to me today about the same role at another company.  The Artificial Intelligence Recruiter wasn't paying attention when I told it that it was the wrong kind of role.  

So, with no "No" option in the email, I've clicked Yes.  I'm now asked to sign-in again.  The Artificial Intelligent Recruiter has forgotten who I am.

So, went through the "chat" - the first thing I notice is that the content and prompts are 100% the same. The Artificial Intelligent Recruiter has forgotten it's already had this conversation with me and so it re-introduces itself and tells me the exact same thing it told me last time.  (Which wasn't interesting the first time and wasn't new this time.)

While I wanted to click "Location" or "Other," for the sake of this experiment, I went with "Role" - we'll see if Wendy is capable of learning of it will keep sending me Project Manager roles.  (Unless this post gets me suppressed from their mailing list... yes, please.)

From now on, if I get any more of these, I'm going to click "No" with the reason "Other" - and if it lets me type, I'm going to tell them I'm not interested because of Wendy.

ar·ti·fi·cial
adjective

1. made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural, not existing naturally; contrived or false.
synonyms: synthetic, fake, false, imitation, mock, simulated, faux, ersatz, substitute
2. insincere or affected.
synonyms: feigned, insincere, false, affected, mannered, unnatural, stilted, contrived, pretended, put-on, exaggerated, actorly, overdone, overripe, forced, labored, strained, hollow, spurious
3.conventional as opposed to natural.
(from Google)

Wendy leaves a bad impression and suggests if recruiting is boiled down to a crappy form-based interface, it's only going to recruit people willing to suffer the crappy form-based interface.  (CyberCoder's field-merge approach or LinkedIn's InMail are much better because if you reply, you're immediately talking to a person.)

Amazing Animations

I came across an email in my inbox from a year ago.  I had been looking up some examples of animation in mobile UI for some project.  I was surprised at how well these have held up - how great some of these animations still look.  For these first three, I only had the URLs for the images, not the pages they came from, sorry.

Plus, here's a whole gallery of great animated mobile UI.  Even after over a year, these still feel fresh and relevant and in some cases, futuristic (and not just because some project out of the device).

Splitting Large File with Headers (Mac)

I was given a 3.6 gb CSV data file (43 million rows x ~12 columns). I have an automation that's supposed to intake and process those files automatically, but the file was too large. What I needed were smaller files, each with the same header.

I had to do a number of Google searches to figure out how to do this, so I thought I would bring together everything I learned into a single post in case it would help someone else with a similar scenario.

Experience: Moderate

Step 1: Split the file into multiple files, each 1,000,000 rows long.

split -l 1000000 filename.csv filename-

This will give you multiple files with filenames like filename-aa, filename-ab, filename-ac, etc.

Step 2: Move the large file (filename.csv) to another directory. You don't need it anymore, but you'll want to hang on to it until everything's as you want.

Step 3: Rename all the files as CSV files.

for i in *; do mv "$i" "$i.csv"; done

Step 4: Open filename-aa.csv with Excel. Copy the first row (the headers) into a new worksheet. Save as "header.csv" Close filename-aa.csv (don't save).

Step 5: Move filename-aa.csv to a different directory. We don't want to add the header to it a second time.

Step 6: Open header.csv with a text editor to make sure there's a "return" at the end of the row. (If you move to the last character in your header and press right-arrow, does it drop to a new line? If not, press return or enter and then save. If so, you're good.)

Step 7: Rename header.csv to header.txt - it will warn you, but it's ok.

Step 8: Add the header to all of the other files

for i in *.csv; do mv "$i" tmp; cat header.txt tmp > "$i"; done

Step 9: Move filename-aa.csv back into the directory

You should now have a bunch of files, each with a header and 1,000,000 rows.  (And a file called "tmp" that you can safely delete.)

Feed Sift (09/25/2015)

-1-

ENGADGET.COM -- Floating plasma display

-2-

WIRED.COM -- It's Official: Everyone Has the Same Plan for Tech's Future

-3-

HUFFINGTONPOST.COM -- Boy Who Couldn’t Afford Books Asks Mailman For Junk Mail To Read

-4-

LIFEHACKER.COM -- How to Use Simple Checklists to Boost Efficiency and Reduce Mistakes

-5-

TWISTEDSIFTER.COM -- 32 Maps That Will Teach You Something New About the World

Feed Sift (09/18/2015)

-1-

ENGADGET.COM -- Ford gets serious with self-driving and 3D printing tech

-2-

TWISTEDSIFTER.COM -- How Pixar Artists Made the Cars in ‘Cars’ Do Things Without Hands

-3-

WORKSHOP.LIFEHACKER.COM -- What to Avoid When Picking Lumber for Your Woodworking Project

-4-

WAITBUTWHY.COM -- How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars

-5-

SIMPLE.COM -- Project Days at Simple Bank

Review: Losing the Signal

(cross-posted on LinkedIn)

"When a business declines it begins gradually, almost imperceptibly, until so many failures pile up that the unraveling arrives with unnerving speed."   - Losing the Signal

If you've regularly read my reviews, you'll know I enjoy a good biography/genesis story - how something got its start (Hilton, Disney, Starbucks, Amazon, Google) but often my lament is that the book ends before the story does - the companies continue to grow, evolve and innovate and that as I close the book, I'm already aware of enough new things they've done worthy of additional chapters or books.

This was one case where I didn't feel like that.  While Research in Motion, nay, BlackBerry, still exists as a company, I felt that this book served as a post-mortem to what went wrong.  The patient isn't dead, but all hope has been lost. (It's only a matter of time before they're sold for their patents to a company that would have paid much more for them just a few years ago.)

I'd wanted to read this book for some time, but had never gotten to it.  Before a recent business trip I downloaded it to my Kindle and spent a lot of the flights wrapped up in what serves to be a good look at what can go wrong. So horribly, horribly wrong.

In 2000, I had a BlackBerry for work.  It was an oversized pager with a small screen, probably 8 lines.  At 6 am when it woke up, it would start chirping with new emails from the East Coast and when it went to sleep at 11 pm, I'd often wake it up to send one more email.  I could send messages to a phone number and a robotic voice would read the message to the person.  You could call a 1-800 number and someone would take your message and transcribe and it would arrive as an email on my BlackBerry.

I remember one trip up the 5 in Central California where there was something going on at work.  Every time we'd hit a pocket of coverage, it would chirp, my wife would read it to me and then type a reply for me and quickly send before we drove back out of coverage.

I loved my BlackBerry. I was an addict. I left the company and my BlackBerry behind, but continued to hold a soft spot in my heart for them.

At that point, RIM was so far ahead of everyone else, it was their industry to lose.  And that they did. Spectacularly.  And it's tragic.  And also a warning.

This book followed the two founders from their school days, the company's early days, the explosive growth, the misteps, the arrogance, the failure to listen to the marketplace, their customers, their partners. Before too long, it was too entrenched, there was too much to protect and they were willing to break rules and use their weight to protect and advance their cause at the expense of others.  Sadly, the world moved on and it was really at their own expense.

This book is a compelling tale for any organization that forgets its way and looks inward, becomes protective, entrenched and unwilling or able to pivot, to listen to the marketplace or to kill sacred cows.  It's sad, but what's sadder will be lessons that go unlearned by those who should read this but don't.

I would definitely pair this book with Chip Heath and Dan Heath's great book Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard.


Losing the Signal: The Untold Story
Behind the Extraordinary Rise
and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

Feed Sift (08/21/2015)

-1-

CRINGELY.COM -- Disney’s IT troubles go beyond H-IBs

-2-

TWISTEDSIFTER.COM -- The Giant Waterpark Inside an Old German Airship Hangar

-3-

SETHGODIN.TYPEPAD.COM -- Blah, blah, blah

-4-

LIFEHACKER.COM -- Top 10 Unusual Ways to Make Your To-Do List Actually Doable

-5-

ENGADGET.COM -- Artificial intelligence learns Mario level in just 34 attempts

Feed Sift (08/14/2015)

-1-

WIRED.COM -- Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It

-2-

CRINGELY.COM -- Autodesk’s John Walker explained HP and IBM in 1991

-3-

EXCELJET.NET -- Cool things you can do with conditional formatting

-4-

BLOG.LEARNINGBYSHIPPING.COM -- Privacy and Security: Less Rhetoric and More Product

-5-

QUICKANDDIRTYTIPS.COM -- How to Use the 5 Apology Languages

Feed Sift (08/07/2015)

-1-

WAITBUTWHY.COM -- Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man

-2-

ENGADGET.COM -- The first self-driving big rig licensed to operate in the US

-3-

HOUZZ.COM -- 10 Creative Ways to Bring Structure to Your Outdoor Room

-4-

KPCB.COM -- Internet Trends 2015 **A MUST READ**

-5-

ESPN.GO.COM -- The Whole Game is Beast Mode

Feed Sift (06/12/2015)

Happy Friday, my friends! Here's a few more articles I wanted to share. Have a great weekend!

-1-

CRINGELY.COM -- Your PBX has been hacked!

-2-

DJC.COM -- Seattle might keep going

-3-

CHROME.BLOGSPOT.COM -- New Research: The Ad Injection Economy

-4-

LIFEHACKER.COM -- Outdoor Home Repairs You Can Totally Handle Yourself

-5-

BLOG.LOSEIT.COM -- Snacks on a Plane: 8 Ways to Lose Weight on Vacation

Feed Sift: Skynet Edition (06/05/2015)

I've always said if we're not careful the Terminator stories will have to be considered documentaries and not fiction. Here's some ways we're moving down that path.

-1-

ENGADGET.COM -- Europe's combat UAV takes to the skies over Italy

-2-

ENGADGET.COM -- The Navy sees its future in unmanned fighters

-3-

ENGADGET.COM -- Department of Defense creates new cyberunit in Silicon Valley

-4-

ENGADGET.COM -- AZ town hides license plate readers in dozens of fake cacti

-5-

ENGADGET.COM -- US SKYNET program marks Al Jazeera journalist as Al Qaeda - really? Bad enough there's a company in Japan called Cyberdyne making products called "HAL" but we're going to use the term SKYNET in this kind of way???

Feed Sift (03/27/2015)

-1-

ENGADGET -- NASA wants to build airship cities in the Venus sky

-2-

HOUZZ -- 14 Bathroom Design Ideas Expected to Be Big in 2015

-3-

ADDTHIS -- How to Make a Successful Infographic

-4-

EXCELJET -- How to use VLOOKUP

-5-

SETH GODIN -- But what if this was your only job?

Happy Friday!

Feed Sift (03/20/2015)

-1-

ENGADGET -- Watch an unmanned helicopter put out fires with help from a drone

-2-

SLATE -- The World Is Not Falling Apart

-3-

HOUZZ -- Houzz Tour: Going Off the Grid in 140 Square Feet

-4-

NCASE -- Parable of the Polygons: How Harmless Choices Create a Harmful World

-5-

WEB URBANIST -- Project Sprawl: Mesmerizing Algo-Generated Game Architecture

Happy Friday!

Feed Sift (03/13/2015)

-1-

ENDGADGET -- Shocker: Pandora's study finds Pandora to be good for music sales

-2-

SETH GODIN -- The problem with problems

-3-

SALESFORCE -- Some Customers Aren’t Worth the Headache

-4-

HOUZZ -- Understand Your Site Plan for a Better Landscape Design

-5-

TWISTED SIFTER -- Scientists Recover Audio by Analyzing Tiny Vibrations in a Bag of Chips

Happy Friday!

Feed Sift (03/06/2015)

-1-

ENGADGET -- Flying fake cell towers target fugitives, but can ID your phone too

-2-

WEB URBANIST -- Hoverboards are Here! Design Floats Above Metal Surfaces

-3-

NORMAN NIELSEN GROUP -- Progress Indicators Make a Slow System Less Insufferable

-4-

MORNING DEVOTION -- Sweeten the air


-5-

TESLA ON VIMEO -- Fast Pack Swap Event

Happy Friday!

Feed Sift (02/27/2015)

Five things I wanted to share...

-1-

ENGADGET -- BMW's new street lights will charge your electric car

-2-

LIKE A TEAM -- The Power of Positive Quotes

-3-

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW -- What You Eat Affects Your Productivity

-4-

BBC -- Your life on earth


-5-

YOUTUBE -- Alexander Gerst’s Earth timelapses


Happy Friday!

Feed Sift (02/20/2015)

Hey, errrbody! Welcome to the weekend! Here's a few things I thought y'all would find interesting.

-1-

ENGADGET -- Scientists can make your inner monologue audible

-2-

TWISTED SIFTER -- Wall Street Banker Quits to Open $1 Pizza Joint, Customers Pay It Forward to Feed Homeless

-3-

FORBIDDEN PLACES -- Abandoned Castles from South West of France

-4-

LEVO LEAGUE -- Working With Remote Managers

-5-

BUZZFEED ON YOUTUBE -- 209 Seconds That Will Make You Question Your Entire Existence (hyperbole, much?)


Happy Friday!

Feed Sift (02/13/2015)

Greetings, readers. Here's five more things I wanted to share. I'm also trying something new: posting each article separately every morning on my Twitter feed: @tvjames.

-1-

ENGADGET -- Harvard provides a glimpse at how the robot plague will overrun us all

-2-

REDUCTRESS -- Vaccinations Made My Cat Autistic

-3-

WEB URBANIST -- Fictional Bridges from Euro Banknotes Now Built in Real Life

-4-

MISSING AIMEE -- On one of life's biggest clichés

-5-

TWISTED SIFTER -- Drone Pilot Films Mexico City’s International Airport from Above

Happy Friday!

How To: Make Your Mac React to Your Presence

the totally awesome blink(1) mk2

I love technology, but all too often it's just on a screen - there's no real world impact. I am really excited about the potential for real world impact and automation, stuff that happens automatically. Like the fact that I can set my washing machine to start at a certain time. That's kinda cool. It's a bit basic, sure, but it's cool. Or that my wife can get a text message when I leave the office.  Proximity is probably an easy cool thing - maybe it's a warning if I drive away from the house with my garage door open or if my autistic son gets out of the house.

On a smaller scale, I've set up some proximity automation on my computer that's pretty fun. When I walk away from my computer, it turns on the screensaver. If Skype is running, it sets me to invisible. It HipChat is running, it shuts down. And if my blink(1) is attached, it turns yellow to signify that I'm away. (It's on a USB extension cable so I can mount it higher where people can see it.)

If you haven't seen blink(1), it's very cool - double-sided LED USB key. Can set to any color you want on each side, blink in patterns, etc. Connects to IFTTT and email programs and you can also address it from Terminal or AppleScript. (You have to check the "Enable API Server" - most people miss that and think that they can't run Blink1Control and issue cURL commands at the same time.)

And then when I walk back up to my computer, it kills the screensaver. If Skype is running, it sets me to available. If it's between 8 and 5 on a weekday, HipChat starts. Microsoft Office syncs (first checking to see if it's in offline or online mode). And if my blink(1) is attached, it turns it back to green.

Oh, and my screensaver (Soundstream) is noise activated so that the patterns change depending on the amount of noise nearly in our open air office. That's kind of fun.

So how do I accomplish all this? A few neat tricks.  First a program called Proximity. You introduce your Bluetooth phone to Proximity and then every so often it pings to see if your phone is around. If it senses a change, it runs the Applescript you've identified. Future places I should probably go are ignoring mouse and keyboard inputs and muting the entire computer.

Here are my scripts:

SCREENSAVER-START

try 

do shell script "curl 'http://localhost:8934/blink1/fadeToRGB?rgb=%23FFFF00'" 

tell application id "com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine" to launch 

if application "Skype" is running then 

tell application "Skype" to send command "SET USERSTATUS invisible" script name "invisible" 

end if 

if application "HipChat" is running then tell application "HipChat" to quit 

end try

SCREENSAVER-STOP

try 

do shell script "curl 'http://localhost:8934/blink1/fadeToRGB?rgb=%2300FF00'" 

tell application id "com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine" to quit 

tell application "Microsoft Outlook" 

if working offline is true then 

set working offline to false 

sync 

set working offline to true 

else 

tell application "Microsoft Outlook" to sync 

end if 

end tell 

if application "Skype" is running then 

tell application "Skype" to send command "SET USERSTATUS online" script name "online" 

end if 

set x to weekday of (current date) as integer 

set y to hours of (current date) as integer 

if x > 1 and x < 7 then 

if y > 8 and y < 17 then 

try 

tell application "HipChat" to activate 

end try 

end if 

end if 

end try

The reason that Microsoft Outlook has to check to see if it's online or not is because I have another script that is running that takes it in and out of offline mode automatically. That allows my outgoing messages to temporarily be held and it prevents new messages from being pulled in too frequently. (Otherwise Exchange delivers them immediately and it's distracting. Email doesn't need to be that quick. Yes, I have my notifications turned off, but I actually spend a lot of time in email. It's easier if it's not filling up as I empty it. It's also nice to have some forced delay before my messages go out, in case I change my mind about a message or to avoid email pingpong.)

OUTLOOK

repeat 100 times 

log "Sync at - " & (current date) 

tell application "Microsoft Outlook" to set working offline to false 

tell application "Microsoft Outlook" to sync 

delay 5 

tell application "Microsoft Outlook" to set working offline to true 

delay 600 

end repeat 

log "** Final at - " & (current date) 

tell application "Microsoft Outlook" to set working offline to false 

tell application "Microsoft Outlook" to sync

The Sift (July 11, 2014)

Happy Friday! Here's some recent internet articles that caught my attention and I felt like sharing.

ENGADGET -- The Guardian's new US newspaper has a robot editor-in-chief

TWISTED SIFTER -- This is What Happens When You Fly a Drone Through a Fireworks Show

THE ATLANTIC -- The Trick That Makes Google's Self-Driving Cars Work

ENGADGET -- Her name is Cortana. Her attitude is almost human. - I think it was brilliant to name the fledging personal assistant after the futuristic very advanced artificial intelligence from a video game (and use the same voice actor). The fact that the AI isn't supposed to have a lifespan longer than seven years is gotta be an annoying point I assume they'll eventually retcon.

ENGADGET -- What you need to know about commercial drones