You may have heard of App.net It’s like Twitter, only that you own your data and it’s dev friendly. And, because the product isn’t free, you aren’t the product. It costs money to join. (Shocker?) 100 bucks a year if you’re developing on it. 50 bucks for mortals. Why mention it now? The brightest devs I know have hopped on board and are developing for it. When I see innovators doing real things on the platform, especially that cynical bunch, I know there’s optimism. As for me? Soon. *** I’m Christopher Berry.I’m at Authintic.
Month: September 2012
Andrew and I wanted to harmonize all our fonts across all our marketing collateral. We were uncertain if the font we wanted to use was supported by all browsers. I googled it and learned that this one font wasn’t supported by Safari on iOS. I opened up the google analytics and learned that 20% of the traffic to the site was from Safari on iOS. We decided to leave the font as is. The entire experience, from preference to evidence to decision, took four minutes. Not a day goes by without using data to inform small decisions as well as big decisions. We take it for granted that we can complete extremely simple inquiries on our own. It’s efficient because[…]
Coursera is offering ‘computing for data analysis‘. There’s a high probability that it’ll be worth the five hour a week / 20 hour total investment. Why? It’s a guided, hands-on, experience with R You’ll have a large cohort of fellow explorers The learning curve appears to be fairly graduated And, you’ll learn a lot. *** I’m Christopher Berry.I’m a Data Scientist.I’m at Authintic.
Check out this image. Each color group represent 15 trillion in GDP. India and China combined = 15 trillion. Most of Europe = 15 trillion. The United States = 15 trillion. And then there’s the other 30 trillion. The creator lumped Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, South Korea, Japan and Indonesia into a group. Then everybody else into another group. Groupings like this are useful because they’re summaries. They enable really close comparisons. It’s a method doesn’t just have to apply to GDP on maps. You can make comparisons in analysis as well. Saying, for instance, that all the traffic in Inter-Mountain West are equivalent to Chicago, might be a good shorthand. *** I’m Christopher Berry.I’m a Data Scientist.I’m building Authintic
The argument is as follows: There are an infinite number of potential metrics offered up by your standard analytics software. In spite of there being an infinite number of metrics, the actual amount of knowledge or information is limited. The value of a metric should be based on how much it contributes to the understanding of a system. I’ll unpack that. There are an infinite number of potential metrics. Take, pageviews. Take visits. Now divide pageviews by visits and call it ‘pageviews per visit’. Now apply a filter and look at only New Yorkers. You get New York City pageviews per visit. Now run a 31 day exponential moving average on the measure. You’d then get the New York EMA(31)[…]
Have you seen this? Pretty neat. Three points: This is a fun, accessible, relevant experience – and let’s thank the authors for it It is not the best use of layering more than two (2) sources of information “Like People Clump Alike”, “Birds of a Feather Flock Together”, and “Homophily” all mean the same thing; evidence of the phenom can be seen in this experience The authors enable anybody to have a personal experience with information, and to gain their own intuition about the way we are. And that’s great. *** I’m Christopher Berry.I’m a Data Scientist.This is what I’m working.
Andrew Cherwenka and I soft launched our startup, Authintic, last week. Authintic is an analytics technology company enabling permission marketing. Andrew wrote a much more detailed piece for the Huffington Post on the topic. It’s worth a read. He’s very eloquent and accessible. I have nothing contradictory to add. Nothing really controversial to say. Being at the confluence of three mega-trends is where I’m comfortable. The first is privacy in marketing. The FTC and the EU have made their opinions known. There’s this big fear out there that consumers won’t opt-in. Why the fear? Is anybody doing anything wrong? Common’ people – let’s treat people with respect. The second are advancements in machine learning and processing power. There are more[…]
Harvard maintains a pretty awesome worldmap portal. It’s worth checking out. For instance, there’s an awesome series on China here. Information easier to process when it’s in layers. Using a map as the base layer is a great way to see the information. It can be intensely misleading if you don’t know where to zoom. But it’s comfortable. Check it out. It’s a great resource. *** I’m Christopher Berry.Follow me @cjpberryI blog at christopherberry.ca
The National Post had a rather large piece of data journalism yesterday. You can check it out here. Check out the two charts below. Alright – what should pop for you: More Canadians are employed in Health Care than Manufacturing. It’s only 2012. The knowledge economy is growing quickly. That labour mobility between these sectors isn’t nearly as efficient as you might think. There are alarm bells in there. Human bodies are far harder to service than oil extraction. Productivity growth is required, because there won’t be nearly enough people to take care of all those other people. It’s a good piece. *** I’m Christopher Berry.Follow me @cjpberryI blog at christopherberry.ca