The technology buzzword standard for prediction appears to be Netflix and Amazon. Everyone wants to get to where they make recommendations customers will buy. But are these predictions any good? Out of the slew of emails you get from Amazon, how percentage do you actually buy? How many do you sneer at it and hit…
John Pavlus in Ghost’s Blogging Dashboard Doesn’t Need to Exist fell hook line and sinker for Anil Dash’s All Dashboards Should Be Feeds false dichotomy. The better argument is dashboards only tell the past with all the noise where the more useful information is an accurate future. People ultimately want to know what is going to happen. The…
Michael Feldstein posted on Twitter: Seeing signs that Google Analytics significantly undercounts. Any recommendation for easy, reliable db-based WordPress analytics? I knew Google Analytics relies on JavaScript to measure what users are doing. Bots typically do not execute JS, so go undercounted. That is OK, probably even great depending on how much they annoy me.…
This is an older TED Talk by Malcolm Gladwell just before his book Blink dropped. He tells the story about how the food industry figured out that there is not a single perfect product that meets everyone’s needs. Instead there are a number of different clusters that meets the majority of wants. We find this…
According to Google Analytics, between Jan 1 to Dec 31, 2011 this blog saw: 146,718Â Unique Visitors 208,520 Pageview 174,104 for Quotes to Make You Think Sources: 138,144 Google 20,055 No referrer (application like desktop email? Twitter?) 8,445 Bing … 843 Facebook … 68 Twitter These could be somewhat under reported depending on the rates by…
From TED’s About This Talk: Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they’re right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry. If…
Reuters had an interesting article on Chinese students gaming the GRE by setting up networks to share questions. Basically those who take the test post the questions online. Blogs and SEO ensures those seeking the questions can find them. Because ETS takes forever to ensure each question properly measures what it should, the questions are…
I glanced at my Google Analytics stats for this site and noticed a huge traffic spike. Somehow my TED Talk: We Are All Cyborgs post landed Bing’s number two spot and Google’s number three spot for “ted talk we are all cyborgs” a couple days ago. Normal for a Tuesday is something like 650 visits.…
This interesting article on the need of more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates in the United States to compete with other countries strikes me as the kind of thing said to Romans right before the fall. Maybe also to the English just before World War I. Of course, predictions of the future are fraught…