Allen Day’s Blog

Disclaimer: I’m not claiming to be an expert, or even of above average knowledge when it comes to clothing.  I have noticed, however, that I’ve acquired enough knowledge over the last couple of years to be above-average in my peer group.  Constructive feedback welcome.

I’m approaching this from a technical angle.  There are a lot of very interesting, technical, useful (and some vestigial) features in clothing, from the weave of the cloth to the cut of the garment to the orientation of buttonholes.  Here are a few jumping off points for similarly-minded guys:

Books to read.  Of the 20 or so I reviewed at bookstores or by purchase, these stood out the most for their quality and depth of content:

• Details Men’s Style Manual: The Ultimate Guide for Making Your Clothes Work for You
  
• Gentleman: A Timeless Guide to Fashion
  

Best sites:

• Men’s Flair – good information on foundation principles.  Cloth, color coordination, etc.  Just the right balance of theoretical and practical info.
  

  

• Ask Andy About Clothes – good information on men’s fashion. Focus leans toward classic/traditional American. Has a great “for sale” section
• Style Forum – equally good information on men’s fashion, from a different angle. Focus leans toward contemporary/trendy
• BaseNotes – good information on fragrances
• eBay – best place to score deals if:
  1. you’ve done your home work and know what you’re looking for, and
  2. you’re willing to buy/wear pre-owned.

Probably the single best thing you can do though is go to a high-end deparment store. If you’re in LA like me, which you probably are if you’re reading this, then in order, you should pay a visit to Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills, Barneys New York (next to Neiman Marcus), Nordstroms (preferrably @ The Grove, or alternatively Westside Pavilion), Alandale’s in Culver City. Just go try stuff on. Plan on spending half a day experiencing a range of price/quality points. One good thing about men’s clothing I learned vs. women’s is that you tend to be paying more for quality of materials and construction than trendiness. So really, try on the high-end, well engineered garments. You might be surprised (as I was) at the range of craftsmanship — you literally feel it. Also, plan on visiting the dept. stores a few times, and try on the same garments again. You’ll get a better feel for what works for you this way.

The key to effective crowdsourcing is effective communication.  You communicate with your crowdsourced workers so that you can train them.  Training has a measurable cost, and you want to minimize this cost to make most effective use of your time and your budget.

Consider the situation when you’re in a professional position, or the flipside and you’re training someone to take on a new role.  Assuming you are/have the “right” person with regard to relevant skills to perform the requisite tasks, why is training required?  Knowledge transfer needs to occur.  The same is also true for crowdsourced workers.  So how can we effectively transfer knowledge to workers who may only be spending a few seconds on your task?

Key 1: Be consistent.

Use similar phrasings and images for all of your task descriptions.  This allows workers to come up to speed in a minimum amount of time.  Imagine how hard it would be to read your email if each message opened in a differently styled window.  Similar phrasings/images are just one example of how to employ…

Key 2: Use variables.

Smartsheet.com got this right.  Have a look at these 2 tasks submitted from Smartsheet to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk:

Look closely at what’s going on here.  The two tasks’ input variables (Blog Name and Blog URL) are identical, only their values change.  Note also that there are 2114 tasks just like this available.  Workers like to have lots of very similar tasks because…

Key 3: Batch tasks.

Crowdsourced workers like batches of similar tasks because it presents an opportunity for them to set up a workflow, or even write a small computer program to do the tasks for them, for you.  The cost of learning how to do a task is amortized over the entire batch, letting them make more efficient use of time (and letting you make more efficient use of your budget).

Key 4: Be visual.

The adage “a picture is worth one thousand words” couldn’t be more fitting to communicating with crowdsourced workers.  Images are very information dense, are more friendly to scanning, and are able to more quickly communicate non-linear process structure when compared to text.  The most effective visual tool I have found thus far is to…

Key 5: Use flow charts.

Consider learning to use flow charts, and also to extend your visual vocabulary.  I’m an avid user of OmniGraffle for creating diagrams for crowdsourcing (as well as for myself).  I’ll be presenting some flow charts in the future.  You will find that by presenting your task graphically and in a formal way as a flow chart (as opposed to simply giving graphical examples), users will do more work for the same price because you’ve made it easier for them.  The flow chart also forces you be clear about what you want, which brings us to…

Key 6: Know what you want.  Be unambiguous.

Know what you expect the worker to do for you.  Make each task so simple that it’s virtually impossible for a worker to do it incorrectly.  Break up complex tasks into their most elementary pieces.  Ideally one task = one decision.  Make each task closed-ended.  Do not leave any room for ambiguity.

Designing tasks in this way requires more effort on your part, but will result in less money spent and higher-quality results.

Key 7: Improve through iteration.

Being unambiguous on the first try is nigh on impossible.  It’s for the same reason that you “bounce” ideas off of your peers/friends — to see how your approach to an idea or task might be sub-optimal or misunderstood.

Iteratively remove ambiguity.  Submit a sampling tasks out of a larger batch with a test task description.  See where the crowdsourced workers make mistakes.  Re-examine your task description to a) find the misunderstanding, and b) disambiguate it.

Key 8. Build validators into your tasks.

Make sure the worker’s work is validated before it gets to you.  This could mean having workers check each others’ work, and can even involve some fancy statistics.  It could also mean writing a bit of javascript or some other backend systems to validate worker inputs (e.g. you ask for a minimum 300-word document.  count the words with javascript before they submit).  This is getting a bit more advanced, but opens more opportunity for more complex tasks by delegating part of the work to the computer.

I’m a big fan of meetup.com, but they’re so tragically unhip when it comes to mashups/integration/web 2.0.  One of my biggest gripes until about 6 months ago was that they had no facility (besides API) for exporting a calendar of meetups to my calendar app (I use Google Calendar), or any other calendar app for that matter.

They introduced an export feature recently, but it’s pretty useless.  Here’s why: they offer two calendars

• [Calendar A] contains all upcoming items in all your meetup groups
• [Calendar B] contains upcoming items which you have RSVP’d with “yes” or “maybe”.

That’s it.  The calendars exported don’t even contain links that allow you to RSVP from directly inside your calendar — you have click through to the meetup.com site, log in, then RSVP.  Ugh.

Come on, product guys.  What’s really called for is 4 separate calendars.

• [Calendar "yes"] All groups, “yes” events
• [Calendar "maybe"] All groups, “maybe” events
• [Calendar "no"] All groups, “no” events
• [Calendar "none"] All groups, events to which I have not yet submitted an RSVP.

I was finally just pissed off enough about the status quo that I fixed it for myself, and below I share the code.  You can try it out here: http://spicylogic.com/allenday/cgi-bin/mu.cgi?key=<your_api_key>&cal=<calendar> 

where <your_api_key> can be found here and <calendar> is one of “yes”, “no”, “none”, “maybe”.

Okay, here’s the code.  Install it on your own machine if possible, my ISP will appreciate it.  If you find fuckups, let me know and I’ll update the post.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use Date::Manip qw(ParseDate ParseDateString ParseDateDelta DateCalc UnixDate);
use Date::Parse;
use HTML::Entities;
use LWP::Simple qw(get);
use XML::DOM;
 
use constant URL_EVENTS => 'http://api.meetup.com/events?key=%s&member_id=%d&format=xml';
 
print header(q(text/calendar));
 
my $parser = new XML::DOM::Parser ();
 
my $mode = param( 'cal' );
my $key  = param( 'key' );
my $user = param( 'user' );
 
if ( ! $mode || ! $key || ! $user ) {
  die
}
 
my $events_url = sprintf( URL_EVENTS, $key, $user );
#warn $events_url;
my $events_txt = get( $events_url );
#warn $events_txt;
my $events_dom = $parser->parse( $events_txt );
#warn $events_dom;
 
print qq(BEGIN:VCALENDAR\nPRODID:-//Meetup Inc//RemoteApi//EN\nVERSION:2.0\nMETHOD:PUBLISH\nCALSCALE:GREGORIAN\nX-ORIGINAL-URL:http://www.meetup.com/\nX-WR-CALNAME:mu $mode\n);
 
my $events = $events_dom->getElementsByTagName( 'item' );
for ( my $i = 0 ; $i < $events->getLength() ; $i++ ) {
  my $event = $events->item( $i );
  my $n_id    = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'id'             )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_rsvp  = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'myrsvp'         )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_addr0 = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'venue_name'     )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_addr1 = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'venue_address1' )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_addr2 = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'venue_address2' )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_addr3 = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'venue_address3' )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_addr4 = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'venue_city'     )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_addr5 = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'venue_state'    )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_addr6 = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'venue_zip'      )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_desc  = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'description'    )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_link  = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'event_url'      )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_name  = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'name'           )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_lat   = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'venue_lat'      )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_lon   = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'venue_lon'      )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
  my $n_start_time  = $event->getElementsByTagName( 'time'           )->item( 0 )->getFirstChild();
 
  my $start_time;
  my $end_time;
 
  #my $dummy_time = "20000101T000000Z";
  my ($sec,$min,$hour,$mday,$mon,$year,$wday,$yday,$isdst) = localtime(time());
  my $dummy_time = sprintf( q(%04d%02d%02dT%02d%02d%02dZ), $year + 1900, $mon + 1, $mday, $hour, $min, $sec );
 
  if ( $n_start_time ) {
    my ($ss,$mm,$hh,$day,$month,$year,$zone);
 
    ($ss,$mm,$hh,$day,$month,$year,$zone) = strptime( $n_start_time->toString() );
    $start_time = sprintf( q(%04d%02d%02dT%02d%02d%02dZ), $year + 1900, $month + 1, $day, $hh, $mm, $ss );
 
    my $eday = $day;
    if ( $hh == 23 ) {
      $eday = $day + 1;
    }
    my $ehh = ($hh + 1) % 24;
    $end_time   = sprintf( q(%04d%02d%02dT%02d%02d%02dZ), $year + 1900, $month + 1, $eday, $ehh, $mm, $ss );
  }
  else {
    $start_time = '';
    $end_time = '';
  }
 
  if ( $mode eq $n_rsvp->toString() ) {
    my $id   = $n_id->toString();
    my $name = $n_name ? $n_name->toString() : "";
    my $desc = $n_desc ? $n_desc->toString() : "";
    my $addr = ( $n_addr0 ? $n_addr0->toString().', ' : "" )
             . ( $n_addr1 ? $n_addr1->toString().', ' : "" )
             . ( $n_addr2 ? $n_addr2->toString().', ' : "" )
             . ( $n_addr3 ? $n_addr3->toString().', ' : "" )
             . ( $n_addr4 ? $n_addr4->toString().', ' : "" )
             . ( $n_addr5 ? $n_addr5->toString().', ' : "" )
             . ( $n_addr6 ? $n_addr6->toString() : "" );
    #$desc =~ s/(.)/(ord($1) > 127) ? "" : $1/egs;
 
    $name = HTML::Entities::decode_entities( $name );
    $desc = HTML::Entities::decode_entities( $desc );
    $addr = HTML::Entities::decode_entities( $addr );
    $name =~ s/,/\\,/g;
    $desc =~ s/,/\\,/g;
    $addr =~ s/,/\\,/g;
 
    $desc =~ s#
#\\n#gs;
    $desc .= "\\n\\n\\nGoing?\\n\\n";
    foreach my $response ( qw( yes no maybe ) ) {
      $desc .= uc($response).qq(: http://api.meetup.com/rsvp?event_id=$id&key=$key&rsvp=$response\\n);
    }
 
    my $geo = $n_lat && $n_lon ? "GEO:" . $n_lat->toString() . ";" . $n_lon->toString() . "\n" : undef;
 
    #print sprintf( qq(BEGIN:VEVENT\nSUMMARY:%s\nDESCRIPTION:%s\nLAST-MODIFIED:%s\nUID:%s\nCLASS:%s\nCREATED:%s\nDTSTAMP:%s\nDTSTART:%s\nDTEND:%s\nLOCATION:%s\n\nURL:%s\nEND:VEVENT\n),
    print sprintf( qq(BEGIN:VEVENT\nSUMMARY:%s\nDESCRIPTION:%s\nLAST-MODIFIED:%s\nUID:%s\nCLASS:%s\nCREATED:%s\nDTSTAMP:%s\nDTSTART:%s\nDTEND:%s\n%sLOCATION:%s\nURL:%s\nEND:VEVENT\n),
      $name,
      $desc,
      $start_time,
      "event_$id\@meetup.com",
      "PUBLIC",
      $dummy_time,
      $dummy_time,
      $start_time,
      $end_time,
      $geo,
      $addr,
      $n_link ? $n_link->toString() : "",
    );
  }
}
 
print qq(END:VCALENDAR\n);