Hands up if you remember this ad? Can you believe this was published in the early 2000’s. While probably most of us still have the yellow pages lying around, when was the last time you actually used it? You see its all about convenience and a web search can reveal so much more that a single line and a phone number? You get directions, reviews and can see visually all the business you might be looking for on a map…it really appeals to the hunter gathering in all of us.
Ready, Set errr…go, maybe? NBN goes live in Mansfield, Brisbane
Hooray the NBN is finally here, After years of sitting 4km from the exchange on the end of some suspect copper (and very slow ADSL to prove it) we finally have the NBN. Its not the almost unfundable fibre to the premises or even to the node instead the much derided HFC. HFC is hybrid fibre coaxial, means it pretty much runs on the Foxtel/Optus cable network which is all great in theory. There’s just one snag this network was designed around a certain set of carrier frequencies and the NBN is using a different set of frequencies. All good in theory, but in practice it means the network components may not quite be up to running at those frequencies, nor have been replaced in the arc to connect as much of Australia as possible can before the next election.
Keeping a steady eye on our NBN technician, who didn’t seem to know much beyond which end of the pliers to hold, we got to watch cables being bent well beyond minimum bed radii, attenuators put in to improve a single strength (you do now that attenuation is a negative quantity ??). Luckily with my PhD in Radio Physics (yes thats a thing) and too many support calls, we were able to have it sorted.
Fortunately a mixed mode approach to internet access, including temporarily boosting our phone data plans keeps the wheels turning
Get your business on the High Street
Time was that if your business wasn’t on the ‘High St.’ you didn’t get a lot of customers. I suppose this was because back in the day, passing trade in a busy shopping location was the way to attract customers with an impressive shopfront. These days with everyone looking online for where to shop, finding a business doesn’t entail a stroll down the high street.
Google, google maps, Apple Maps, Siri and Alexa are now the High St of choice so its vital that today you have a presence on the shop front. This means you need both a website (a shop front) and then you need to get it on the High St. In the trade we call this search engine optimisation. Businesses on the first page of google, and ideally listed on the map inset get the lions share of the trade. Ask me about SEO (Search engine optimisation) as well as ad campaigns on google.
The other 5P’s, your “marketing mix”
Probably you have heard the phrase “Proper Planning Prevents (Piss) Poor Performance”.
In the marketing world we talk about another 5 P’s, that make up the marketing mix. Understanding these at a conscious level can really help when it comes to thinking about your advertising, where to put your effort and of course your website.
So here they are:
- Product – That is the product or service you offer (try to be as specific as possible)
- Place – Where are you or your services based, its it a central or mobile location serving an area.
- Price – What is the pricing for what you offer? And more importantly how does it relate to your competitors. Are you going to be competing solely on price is a good question to ask yourself
- People – Who are the people you are offering your products and services to? Who is in your business, their skills are critically important to your business
- Promotion – How do you promote your business? from word of mouth, to passive advertising on a vehicle, advertisements and of course a website too 😉
Understanding your P’s can help understand the positioning of your business right now as well as help to target where you want to be tomorrow. Having a strong sense of your P’s is an essential ingredient in any website design as it feeds into branding, messaging and even how you answer your phone.
When was your last backup?
When was your last backup? If you answer is anything longer than an hour ago you probably don’t have an effective backup strategy! If you can’t remember when you ast did a backup hope to it and do something about it right now.
For many a USB thumb drive or external hard drive is the strategy of choice. Unfortunately the former is all to easily lost and the latter you need to remember to do it. Fortunately there are lots of great products around that can do backups on a schedule for you, with many now offering incremental backups. Incremental backups take a snapshot of your hard drive and record changes made every hour or so. Incremental backups are a great tool if you are doing some document intensive work and need to recover an earlier version – it can easily save you a days work.
For many home and small business Network Attached Storage (NAS) is a very affordable solution that can backup multiple computers. A good NAS system has multiple drives mirroring each other , so that in the event of drive failure you don’t use any data.
Cloud systems are recently becoming popular, because all you need to is sign up to a service (google drive, dropbox etc..), you do need a reliable data connection though, there are storage limits and data security is also an important consideration (get out your tin foil hat). How you manage data amongst a team is also important. The big plus for cloud storage is usually for a modest annual fee everything is taken care of, with no hardware to invest in. Cloud storage gets around the systemic risk of damage to the premises of your place of business.
A good NAS coupled with an external hard drive that you take home once a week is a preferred solution of many business and relatively easy to setup too.
Your websites most important visitor is not a person
Most web design starts with layout images and thinking about what your customer might be looking for and trying to provide that. However there is another regular visitor thats far more important….google! Google decides if your website is going to be on the High St of the internet or in a backwater village somewhere. If google decides you website is relevant to what someone is searching for and places it prominently then and only then do you get a human visitor. This is the black art of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO. The good news is that most small (and many large) businesses don’t even think about this so its usually not too hard to be competitive. So if your web designer doesn’t know what SEO is or thinks its just a few keywords here and there…keep moving!
The basis of competition
If your in business then there is a good chance you have competitors. Having a basic understanding of how you are competing with them can improve the bottom line immensely.
The bright minds at Harvard University c/- Michael Porter have turned their attention to this back in the 1980’s. Essentially in comes to to how do you want to compete (i.e. what business you are in? ) and where your competitive advantage lies (what do you do that is special?)
If your business is broad in nature vs something very specific it entails a different approach think . What approach you take depends on if you want to focus on being a cost leader or being different?
It turns out that thinking about these basic competitive strategies is pretty handy in the way you present yourself on a website too.
Science and Creativity
One of the great joys of being a researcher is taking on doctoral candidates. These are our brightest minds of the future who go on a 3yr (or more) journey into the unknown. Armed with years of technical training it’s their opportunity to apply it creatively to further advance knowledge and society. One of the great things is seeing that success carry forward, where ever their careers take them ..
A while back David Rowlands and I were contacted by former PhD student Adrian Diery to borrow some props for a film he was helping out on. It turns out that Adrien is the composer of the soundtrack for the film too. Its called ‘SPACE/TIME’. Well done Adrian!
Here is a link to the preview trailer and a ‘making of’ short doco …
The value of Tradition
There is a lot of value in tradition, sometimes using modern tools can help us uncover them, and the long lost meaning behind the practice as well. This is an article I wrote sometime back for Aikido Journal, its dropped off the feed now so reposting because there is interest.
Aikido as an Elite Sport
To help improve his golf swing Tiger Woods reputedly used to hit hundreds of golf balls a night into the dark without seeing where they went . This is called ‘error free learning’ and is just one of the many
techniques used by elite athletes to help improve their performance. Today sports teams and institutes routinely employ specialist coaches for specific activities and increasingly a skill acquisition specialist is often part of the team. How to learn a new skill and how that skill performs under the stress of competition is important to the athletes, their teams and even national pride.
There are many similarities between striving for excellence in the martial arts and elite sport. I am somewhat privy to both worlds through my professional work as researcher in elite sports monitoring. Many good things about traditional practice were affirmed for me, a few things were easy extensions and just the act of naming why certain things are done a certain way was helpful too.
Quite a few new ideas were helpful, though some I’m not quite ready to use in my aikido practice. I hope the following bag of ideas might be as interesting to you as they were to me when they gave me the odd ‘aha’ moment.
The Development of Specialist Skills
Scientists and talent scouts have long understood that specialised skills are developed over a long period of time and through rigorous training and a diversity of experience. Diversity is often gained whilst an athlete is in developmental stage through an exposure to a broad base of different sports prior to specialisation. Specialisation in a skill is then developed in order to gain mastery of a particular sport. Early experiences are among the most powerful contributing factors in long-term mastery of a skill
and can shorten that time significantly. The scientific literature suggests that around 4,000-10,000 hours is generally required to gain expertise.
Doing the math on the minimum time to mastery of ~5,000 hours. If you are training a 2hr classes twice a week for 50 weeks of the year its going to take about 25yrs get there, compares well with the often cited “25 year technique”.
Early experiences are powerful, as instructors we must be careful to give our best to new students (even though the revolving door of new students is frustrating) and to provide plenty of diversity. Fortunately the aikido syllabus as something of a modern sogo bujutsu (composite martial art) is already rich and varied and might provide the diversity of experience within a single school.
Learning and tradition
Modern sports used to be highly bound in tradition and coaches were often successful sports stars themselves, tending to teach the way that they were taught. Certainly that was the experience in Australia until the formation of the Australian institute of Sport and the state based institutes that were developed to provide added information of modern research. Out of this some old ways of learning sports have been reinforced and others fundamentally changed.
Martial arts are tradition based and thus markedly similar in that respect. Some would argue that the traditional arts have been through the cauldron of battlefield success as a scientific (darwinian) method of improvement. Others feel that competition (e.g.MMA) have also been able to inform on best practice. Where does aikido sit in this? Preserving the battlefield of success practices or drawing on modern innovations like the systema method and ukemi specialists like Donoan Waite?
Training Practices
In modern sport the relationship between structured training and competition varies somewhat. There are strengthening and conditioning aspects and specific skill based practices. Some skill based practices are un-pressured and some are game based that are designed to broaden the skill base.
Its a widely held maxim that variability in training leads to more robust skill development and hence better performance.
Much of what is done in the dojo is drills that fit the requirements of the above practices. Naturally students ask ‘but this wouldn’t work in the street’ . Just like a footballer doing dodge and weave drills and tackle bag work – its not meant to work. Being able to separate what we do into what is game (the street) based and what isn’t at a cognitive level helps us understand our own practice.
Blocked vs. Random Drills
Blocked drills are the name given to repetitive exercises performed over and over as a core practice of learning a skill while random drills are just that, and have a lot more variability in them. While the evidence in favour of blocked drills for early learning of a skill is overwhelming recent studies have found they may actually hinder progress at higher levels.
The studies have found that single focus, same task drills may engender the athlete with a false perception of expertise through the comfort of drills they have been doing for years and can take short cuts in.
By contrast random, multiple task, multiple focus drills lead athletes to having a poorer perception of their ability but they actually perform better. It is thought that it encourages better focus for higher level athletes as it keeps the cognitive load high.
In my own school we have 20mins of waza performed to a rhythmic count. Its a great way to get in sync and learn the basic moves and increase the repetitions quickly. Its famous for seniors sleep time, losing focus and mentally nodding off in. Its classic blocked learning which leads to quick success but hindering higher level learning. Multiple repetitions of incorrectly performed footwork (in particular Maruyama sensei’s moon shadow lizard legs) that occur in several waza will see 50 repetitions of incorrect movement before paired practice begins. The student will be very lucky to not be going backwards in some aspects. Other schools that focus on kihon (blocked learning) for a long time seem to produce powerful yet wooden aikidoka that struggle to evolve beyond the kihon and just get stuck.
Teaching Skills
“To hear is to forget , to see is to remember and to do is to understand” is I think a Confucian quote that sums up learning methodologies and today is backed up by good science.
Its sage advice and a healthy reminder to beware teachers that talk to much, demonstrate only a few times and leave too little time for practice.
We live in a world of visual, verbal and kinesthetic communicators. Although different people favour different methods to communicate, both the trainer and athlete need to be using the same medium. Good coaches and trainers understand this and adapt to that of the athlete. Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) can be used to assist in discovery.
In some schools the instructor just demonstrates and doesn’t talk and while its great for the visual learner not so good for the auditory learner. The instructor that grabs everyone’s wrist is great for the kinaesthetic learner.
Demonstrations
Demonstrations for learning a for new movement are a great way to teach and a staple of any sporting context. Demonstrations should highlight cues for athletes and provide positive feedforward for learning. Watching others perform is also a great learning tool.Demonstration by sensei is probably the most prominant method of learning aikido. Our students also get a big kick out of watching sempai and kohai doing tanninzugake/randori/jiyuwaza with more than a few ‘aha’ moments
How To! Damien Farrow an internationally renown skill acquisition specialist from the Australian Institute of Sport. There is a lot of focus here on the different aspects of skill acquisition, whilst some of the focus is on team sports there is still plenty of good food for thought
Feedback
Feedback is a vital part of coaching, traditionally it comes from a coach but today a whole host of feedback strategies are used.
Traditional feedback is vital for learning from an expert, but beyond the traditional methods today a variety of modalities and mechanisms exist. We can define feedback as being about providing sensory information to the athlete, not just errors.
Intrinsic feedback
This is natural feedback or consequences of actions. These include success or failure at a task, internal feelings and other measures of success.
There are multiple types of intrinsic feedback built into our aikido practice, from not whacking ourselves with a bokken in solo practice, to a feeling of effortless technique, to that feeling of being jammed or slowed up during a technique. Teaching students to be aware of and learn to use these methods helps them be their own best teacher.
Extrinsic feedback
This feedback is provided from an external source, usually it includes knowledge of the result and is the traditional coach model in its simplest form. Other forms very popular included video playback to athletes, real time or slow motion. Its interesting that coaches can say something over and over again but sometimes when an athlete sees themselves on video there is understanding for the first timeIn our own dojo we have video feedback most often from grading days but also at other occasions. In all cases where it has been employed the response from students has been fantastic and some real progress of personal obstacles has been greatly helped
Verbal Feedback
Some points on giving verbal feedback; it’s not rocket science but it is much more that “do this, don’t do this”. The following are general advice:
Give only 1-2 points of feedback, any more leads to frustration
Try questioning feedback, this engages the student in active rather than passive learning
Withhold detailed instruction early on. Detailed instruction can lead to over specificity. By withholding instruction implicit learning is favoured (see later). It also allows generalisable skills to develop.
There is a tendancy for some athletes to over focus on the mechanics of a skill. It can be important to redirect this analogy or external effects of movement.
In traditional martial arts its common to have very little feedback from an instructor and to be left to one’s own devices somewhat to discover the path and develop skills. Some modern schools can go completely the other way focusing on service delivery.
Feedback, Biofeedback and guidance
Biofeedback is most well known where people with an awareness of their heartbeat can control it – this is usually accomplished with the aid of a heart rate monitor. It is seen as amazing because we are controlling some autonomic part of our body, the feedback is immediate and yields good results. The principle of biofeedback can be applied to learning a skill as well.
The timing and many other aspects of feedback are vital to the learning of a skill. Immediate feedback can bring instantaneous change but is difficult to do in the middle of a 100m dash. The frequency of feedback can be faded as expertise is acquired. Careful attention must be paid to avoid a dependency on feedback. Bandwidth feedback is to provide feedback on performance in the extremes. Feedback should be a balance between error based (skill improvement) and correctness (motivational). Watching others is a strong tool
How not to! Its funny because its true. I think we have all been
a) this poor over corrected and increasingly frustrated student
(parodied nicely by fictional character Borat) at one stage
b) perhaps also even an over helpful instructor providing a frustrating amount of detail
Cognition and the Mind
Some of the following information comes from skill acquisition specialists, some from sports psychologists. Mind power is a much vaunted term and it tends to be talked about in a less dramatic way in sport than in traditional martial arts such as aikido, however i was reassured to find what we think of as modern best practice already present in our teaching methods.
Error free learning
Error free learning is a term for learning that does not engage the athlete in failure but in continued success, to help build positive pathways in the body. It engenders in the athlete:-
– a feeling of success
– a way to practice the entire motion of a skill
– a way to release mind from lower order mechanics of movement
Most famously the example of Tiger Woods reputedly hitting hundreds of golf balls a night into the dark without seeing where they went helped groove his golf swing.
Feelings of failure and over thinking movement are thought to lead to stilted movement and collapse of skill at high pressure times, like competition. Error free learning can assist is getting robust overall skill in place, of course it still needs fine tuning through explicit instruction
Aikido is a two person kata designed to be completed from start to finish rather than contested to failure. Its a great form of error free learning that helps students help each other to learn initially their part. Technical correction is of course important but the teacher that regularly stops the technique 1/2 way through or the competitive uke that blocks the movement can be detrimental to learning and the error free learning method.
Implicit/ Explicit processes
Mentally there are two main ways to learn a skill: Implicit and Explicit.
Implicit learning happens below the level of consciousness. Through action an underlying concept or simple cue is learnt. Many use the example of riding a bike as an implicit process, beyond some simple mechanics of steering there is little in the way of ‘instruction’ to ride a bike…you just do. Implicit skills have been found to be a lot more robust under stress
Extending Ki, flow and other imagery are powerful implicit learning cues that we see in aikido. Through thousands of technique examples the core of aiki is learnt. In our school these core principles might be talked about but are actually learnt implicitly whilst the brain is learning some technique of other. These implicit skills might be keeping good posture, not fighting, using aiki, cutting the opponents center etc…
Explicit learning are skills taught and learnt through detailed process. It’s an essential way to learn some things and more suited to modifying an already acquired skill base. Explicit skills are found to be less robust under stress.
We all need explicit instruction to improve but if its the only modality it can all fall apart come tanninzugake/ jiyuwaza/ randori. For beginning students particularly too much explicit training rather than letting them get on with it can paralyse and frustrate them. By using implict methods early on the felling of success is improved and they are less likely to be the 50% of new students you never see again in the dojo
Cognitive effort
Cognitive effort is the amount of brain power or thinking required to carry out a skill based activity. To learn a skill requires cognitive control of the whole body and fine motor skills in many muscle groups. This is an enormous cognitive load on the brain and it can respond by reducing the amount it has to do by locking up ‘unused’ joint segments to focus on the new skill. Once a skill is acquired it can be relegated to the autonomic nervous system.The big take home messages are for when working with beginners or learning a new tweak on a technique yourself. Its important to understand that movement is going to be blocky, you are going to have 2 left feet for a while as you brain copes with the cognitive load by shutting down some movement.
The other big thing I learnt was when you have expertise, if you focus on the skill like you were learning, you return to that blocky state. Attentional focus is what can get you around this.
Attentional focus
To keep the brain busy athletes are introduced to a ‘dual task’, with a secondary task placed alongside the sporting activity to act as a distractor and prevent cognitive load impeding the execution of a learnt skill. This distractor task might be as simple as repeating a phrase, visualising something or counting.
This one was an exciting find, suddenly a rationale for the oft repeated ‘Extend Ki’, the use of mudra visualisation and ‘imagining youerself as a swordsman holding a weapon and making repeated cuts
Technologies for skill acquisition
Many of these new learning methods need modern technologies to facilitate them; including motion capture systems, cameras, wearable monitors etc. It’s a new world and my professional area of interest is wearable monitoring for feedback post activity, during activity and sometimes in near real time. I have had some limited success in training complete novices using an instrumented sword and biofeedback.
While the world of elite sport offers some clues and validation on training and learning methods there is no escaping the hard work and ‘ bump and grind’ of daily training on the way to mastery.
NOTE:
This article was recently featured on the Aikido Journal, you can read or leave comments here
http://www.aikidojournal.com/blog/2010/05/11/aikido-as-an-elite-sport-by-daniel-james/#comments
Validate or get it to market ?
At the most recent wearable technology conference in Melbourne we had speakers from industry and industry all weighing in on the latest developments of wearables. I had as conference chair the at times challenging task of facilitating an emerging debate on wether ‘product’ should be rushed to market, or first scientifically validated and then released to market. Not surprisingly in a rising growth market being first to market is critical for gaining market share so hanging back and validating might not be desirable…unless of course it doesn’t work, which has brought undone a few companies playing in this space in recent times.
After the conference I spent some time with colleague James Lee musing this over and considering the adoption of wearables in the sports science community we published this invited article for the Journal of Fitness research (get the full issue here , its open access). Have a read…what do you think?
THE INCREASING ADOPTION OF CONSUMER GRADE WEARABLES: COMPARING THE APPLES AND ORANGES OF SPORT SCIENCE
Volume 5, Issue 1, April 2015 | JOURNAL OF FITNESS RESEARCH
Daniel James1 and James B. Lee2
The increasing adoption of off the shelf wearable technologies by sports scientists is a real sign of the times. It was not so long ago that the thought of using lab based body mounted sensors was new and even treated with suspicion. Today, specialist products for sports science exist and the use of the underlying sensors has been well validated1 and since that time, have been applied to all manner of sporting applications2,3. Body mounted instruments offer comparable (though sometimes different) method of the quanti cation of human activity. It has opened the way for consideration of the use of body mounted sensors for a variety of purposes and offered an opportunity to study human movement in relatively unconstrained environments4 where considerations such as ecological validity could be removed. Not only outside the lab, but for the rst time the performance environment could itself be assessed. In competitive sport the issue of feedback and unfair advantage had to be considered and today GPS sensors are accepted in many forms of team sports during competitive practice.
This change has been driven in no small part to worldwide trends in electronic industries that make this possible. The well-established trend of
miniaturisation of electronic components, rst proposed by Moore in the 1960’s shows the doubling of complexity every 18 months5. The net effect of this is that devices become proportionally smaller and cheaper. This has led to market place convergence of a range of technologies (of which smart phones are a mash up of many components including computer platform, sensors, video camera and web aware telemetry platform). In turn the market responds with a greater demand for these products as they become increasingly useful and inexpensive in the growing consumer sports technology market6.
It is here that sports science’s traditional approaches to measurement and instrument is itself subject to digital disruption and the Fitbit is a good example of that7. Here we have a consumer product, itself a trickle down by product of the work that has been undertaken in sports science and allied health, that not only have their origins as tools of science creating a market, but also opening up opportunities not possible by these more mature and dedicated products.
Whilst products like the Fitbit and what are used professionally on the surface are measuring the same thing and do so using the same basic sensors, i.e. accelerometers, each product is driven by its different market segment and achieves its goals through different design decisions. Understanding these, leads to making better decisions when choosing what is the best tool for a particular application.
Lab based technologies (ambulatory or xed) have a signi cantly higher cost, both the capital required to purchase and the more hidden cost, that of having a user suitably experienced to use it. Thus they are suited to high accuracy studies of not too many participants. Commercial wearables on the other hand are at least an order of magnitude cheaper to purchase and can be used widely. They represent an opportunity to do larger scale studies of more participants and don’t require a sophisticated operator. These products, driven by the desire for social engagement (consumers like this interaction and are more likely to continue to use and purchase in the future) over data aggregation opportunities across whole communities. Therefore commercially popular devices can possibly be an option for researchers to consider using.
Research quality monitoring platforms, typically use high rate sensors, today in the order of 1000 Hz. In addition they may also have other sensors, modularity and to accommodate for long periods of operation large capacity batteries. All data is collected and stored in raw form with the minimum of ltering, to allow for the most robust of analysis later on8. Fitbits and other commercial wearables need to make substantial compromises to achieve their small form factor and lower cost, so available computational power, sensor sets and batteries all must be substantially smaller. These compromises necessitate much lower sample rates, typically around 10Hz, or interrupt driven footfall events. Raw data is stored in aggregate form, usually in epochs that provide enough accuracy for a user and reduce the required amount to be stored, for example a 1 minute epoch of 10 Hz data is a 600 times reduction in data, but the trade off is resolution and accuracy.
As these consumer products continue to create a market appetite for such technologies, so too the market eventually becomes more sophisticated and the appetite for greater accuracy grows. Coupled with
technology trends we will increasingly see products like the Fitbit grow ever closer to their research quality cousins. Consider this, rather than doing studies of n=20 for statistical signi cant that n=2M is well within the realms of possibility…how exciting.
For now though they each have a role and a place. Understanding both of these in conjunction with either accepting an accuracy compromise, or that accuracy is paramount, for a sports scientist. Therefore, the sports scientist has to not only understand his or her objective, but needs to have considerable knowledge in the technology to be able to make an informed choice. In comparing apples with oranges it is perhaps helpful to see them as a fruit salad for the consumption of the discerning fitness professional.