This This is neat. What could your clothing tell you about yourself, and others, that you don’t already know? *** I’m Christopher Berry.Follow me @cjpberryI blog at christopherberry.ca
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I’m equally skeptical of individual truth and of collective wisdom. We have a tough time, as a group of people, agreeing to what fundamental things mean. Like color. The XKCD color survey is awesome. The data is there and available for secondary analysis. And you’re welcome to it. The summary chart below is beautiful, and, demonstrates the actual variation in labeling between two groups. This case is interesting alone. Different populations look at the exact same thing, and report a different label for it. This variation in opinion can generate problems for a data scientist and a marketing scientist alike. The idea that objective reality exists, and what you see depends on your own bias, shouldn’t be all that tricky[…]
Something pretty neat to share. Check out HN Stats. HN, or Hacker News, is a simple news aggregation site. It features an upvote/downvote system. And, it hasn’t been ruined by becoming popular. It has its days where quality sort of erodes, but at 30 headlines on the front page, chances are good that I’ll find three of the links relevant. That’s a far better hit rate than most of the subreddits I browse. The interface is polished and there are a few design patterns that are unique. We spend so much time staring at the same design patterns that it’s hard to imagine anything else. Sometimes the ideas that help us also trap us. It’s welcomed. Thank you Nafis for[…]
Wired posted a in depth description of the power of the A/B test in April. It’s pretty good. The A/B test is a tactic that has to fit inside a strategic activity structure. The real value in repeated, persistent, A/B testing is the knowledge that you gain. It makes you a better a manager. It can make the organization stronger. It leads to really good results if taken over time. But it’s part of a system of management that includes a healthy attitude towards resolving uncertainty using testing. It’s tough to implement because it’s often seen as an attack on somebody’s experience as-a-something. It shouldn’t. *** I’m Christopher Berry.Follow me @cjpberryI blog at christopherberry.ca
It’s polite to let the regular readership know when posting frequency and content is changing. It was done 158 posts ago, on December 31, 2011. I’m doing so again. Thank you for reading, commenting, sharing, conversing and generating data. I’ve been testing a few hypotheses. The data set won’t be complete for another few months until the search returns are complete. There was no optimization objective and it showed. As a result: The posting frequency (and predictability) will decrease. There will be fewer words to read. There will be more novel ideas curated from other sources. Pandering and Trolling Trolling is the act of forecasting what will likely cause drama or controversy, creating such content, and distributing only for the[…]
Tor.com wrote a decent summary about the Norvig-Chomsky debate. I don’t think we have a common understanding of the science, just in general. Proponents of an extreme Norvig perspective say that Chomsky’s ever complicated theories and models are proof that the traditional scientific method has failed, and that machine learning is the future. Those proponents may be misguided by how science works with models. A model is representation. It’s like looking at the shadow produced by an umbrella. It’s a deliberate abstraction so that you can understand some aspect of it. And you can learn a lot about the shadow. Why not just look at the umbrella? An umbrella is extremely complex, and really difficult to analyze if you have[…]
The best map of the American Census, in my judgement, is from the New York Times. You can find it here. The best map of the Canadian Census is from OpenFile.ca. You can find it here. Many analytics practitioners have their roots in catalogs. And in the cataloging business, geography is a huge predictor. You look for exploitable geographical cleavages in electoral behavior and public opinion studies. Geo-targeting is one of the few things that many social platforms do really well. Consider the cleavage in the chart below. The darker the red, the older the population. Canada is a country without people. Lots of land. Not a lot of people. You see these very red areas in rural zones. You[…]
Predictive analytics is about making statements about the future, and then enabling either an individual or a group of people to make decisions. The idea is that better decisions will be made if people have a better idea of what to expect in the future. I’m not quite as optimistic in the whole relationship between better information and better decisions. The intervening variable, the person, or worse, the group of people, are make poor choices in the face of good futures. They have their own preferences and expectations. Judgement is certainly a trait that is distributed normally in the population. Besides, Arrow’s Theorem. That’s where automatic decision systems can help. Remember the idea of Website Morphing? You can read the[…]
The social app gaming trend continues apace. The mobile app gaming trend continues too. Remember PC gaming? Me too. Steam, from Valve, is a major way that PC gamers buy and manage their games. They release statistics. And, Lauri has visualized some statistics and made them available through an interface called ‘SteamGraph‘. It’s interesting to look at substitution among successive releases of games. A game in a series will be decaying in terms of active players over time. The next one in the series is released. You see a nice big spike in the new release, and then a slow, tell-tale decay. The previous games in the series resume their cold death, but at a slowing rate. PC gaming substitution[…]
Why did I buy the Wool by Hugh Howey Saturday night sometime after 11pm? In the tradition of Deb Luneau, who impressed me some six years ago with her customer journey diary, here’s my account of the consumer journey. We had gone to see the latest Batman. If you follow me on twitter, and open twitter on the weekends, and, have me in a list that you pay attention to, then you knew that I had low expectations going in. And, the movie exceeded my expectations. We got home at around 9pm and ate Thai. I fired up Netflix at around 11pm. It recommended a movie called ‘Kick-Ass’. Bad choice. What a terrible movie. The iPad was out by 11:15pm.[…]