Do normative statements cause harm to analytics programs in the long run? This may be a bit meta because I’m talking about the effect that an activity that analysts do every day has on what gets selected to study. A … Continued
Claude C. Hopkins wrote a book in 1923 entitled ‘Scientific Advertising‘. It’s still in print. It’s worth paying attention to, as he already made all the mistakes we’re making. (So why pay twice?) “The competent advertis[er] must understand psychology. The … Continued
Adblock Plus is a browser add-on. It allows users to block display ads. It comes with a pre-loaded block list, and, it allows users to create white-lists and black-lists. It promises ‘annoyance-free web surfing’. Here are the usage statistics from … Continued
With few exceptions, everybody has a personal knowledge system. I use the term as Roger Martin meant it in “The Opposable Mind” (pp. 103). It’s all summed up in one nice little diagram. Behold: The text summary is: Your stance, … Continued
From Emanuel Derman’s book “Models. Behaving. Badly.” and the Modeler’s Hippocratic Oath: ”I will remember that I didn’t make the world, and it doesn’t satisfy my equations.” “Though I will use the models I or others create to boldly estimate … Continued
There’s an interesting article from The Atlantic about a patent that Apple acquired earlier this year. As with all things in patents, the devil is buried very deep in the details. The idea of the patent is pretty interesting. The … Continued
One of the amazing things about R as a programming language is just how many libraries there are. The ggplot2 library is one of them. And, so far, I like it. You can download the package here. (You should download … Continued
There is a difference in perception between what is commercial spam and what is relevant to a community of interest. There is a difference in perception between the good that a brand can do for a community, what a person … Continued
Deriving structure from subjectively unstructured data using straight content analysis with crowdsourcing methods may suffer from unintended methodological bias owing to competency (or even polarity) within crowds. Question: Which late night comedian monologue is funnier and why? Assume a corpus … Continued
Deriving structure from the subjectively unstructured isn’t easy, but the results can be extremely useful and rewarding. In particular, the thing about ourselves, as people, is that deficits in our own knowledge can bring about particularly bad biases. These biases … Continued