I read, with glazed eyes, a product announcement that called predictive analytics an ‘extreme’ technology. lolwut It’s the latest buzzword. It might stick. What comes after Big Data? Extreme Data. Thrutch. Gnarly. Grinding. Both Extreme Data and Extreme Predictive Analytics are in use. Why does this happen? It happens because we have to introduce ideas that are old to us to markets where it’s new to them. It’s expedient to present old ideas as new, because novelty spawns excitement and action. And, in many societies, excitement spawns action. It creates demand. Predictive analytics has been in professional use since at least World War II. Did that keep airlines from adopting the techniques twenty years later? Of course not. And yet,[…]
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Every year I spend a day with the strategists at the eat:Strategy conference in Toronto. What strategists say and how they treat each other is interesting and predictive. I heard five different definitions of insight I heard three different definitions of strategy I heard three different definitions of brand It’s interesting because there’s discord, and that it persists. The web analysts reading this post should click this link. Yeah baby. 5 out of the 8 presentations contained web analytics results as proof points that a strategy worked. 6 out of the 8 mentioned the importance of business objectives and customer needs/wants. The term ‘ROI’ was said with contempt by 2 out of the 8 speakers. Interesting. Maybe a little bit[…]
Einstein had it wrong. The only thing that moves faster than light through a vacuum is bullshit through a social medium. Marketing scientists in academia communicate to each other through journals and presentations. The peer reviewed journal innovation was necessitated by Sir Isaac Newton, who somehow had a drawer that was filled with the ideas of others. “Oh, that’s a neat idea, too bad you didn’t come up with it first. I had written about it five years before you, see, it was in my desk all along.” He wasn’t very popular. Academic findings are loosely peer reviewed (see: biology). There’s a form of moderation there. It varies, but it’s there. Industry marketing scientists talk over beer, blogs, conferences, pdf’s[…]
Lowering technology barriers has enabled more people to comment, more often. What effect has this had? Twitter and Weibo’s, by virtue of limiting the volume of text to be shared, has enabled more people to share more. It’s given rise to link-shortening and exported more SMS language and short-form communication into the mainstream Internet. There is a tendency amongst some to believe that what you’re reading in the comments is a representation of what people think. There are good models, found in marketing science research, that suggests that people experience products, then consider whether or not they’ll post something, and then moderate their opinions based on the audience. This two-step process is fairly important, especially when it’s applied to professional[…]
Short, free-form commenting technologies has enabled more people to say more things. Many technologists prefer users respond by hitting single buttons. Liking, wanting, upvoting, downvoting, thumbs up, thumbs down, share, +1, retweeting, favouriting and so on. Facebook is entirely focused on the affirmative actions. Reddit enables both actions. These are very easy to understand, and have their intended effects. Facebook wants you to share everything. Reddit wants the best content to aggregate to the top. Commenting requires a bit more effort, in that the user usually uses keyboard to generate a comment, hitting multiple keys, and sometimes creating words or even expressing a well formed thought. And so, it must follow, there’s an attention economy around commenting. Herp Derp is[…]
Heading into an analytics interview? There are a few things you should know. Pay attention to the description A few leading hiring managers have been listing specific items outright. For instance, we used to list “Will have an opinion about Peterson’s line on cookies” right in the description. We will ask you what your opinion is on Peterson’s opinion. If you don’t have one, we assume that you will do something prior to the interview to become informed, and, come with an opinion. Different hiring managers implant different preparation questions. Pay attention and prepare. If you’re heading into a department with a good reputation, it’s because they’re all prepared. And, since like people tend to clump together, we’re looking for[…]
Twitter shut off it’s API to LinkedIn, and released a post about delivering a consistent twitter experience. I’ve seen interpretations of the Twitter post ranging from ‘don’t mimic twitter’s functionality and you’ll be alright’ to ‘Twitter is killing its own ecosystem‘. Are you entitled to your Twitter entitlement? Why Twitter Has An API in the first place Offering an API is a strategic choice. They involve tradeoffs. An API costs Twitter: Money to serve, develop, and maintain Risk, from consumers and competitors alike What Twitter gets in return: Scale, in the form of features that are not, will not, or cannot be built by Twitter itself, that are built by other companies Innovation, in the form of observing the ecosystem[…]
I present to you, a Safe Harbor Statement: “Our discussion may include predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward-looking. While these forward-looking statements represent our current judgment on what the future holds, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect our opinions only as of the date of this presentation. Please keep in mind that we are not obligating ourselves to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward- looking statements in light of new information or future events. Throughout today’s discussion, we will attempt to present some important factors relating to[…]
Boxplots are a good way to examine the distribution of data. They allow you to see outliers and understand how it skews. The image below comes from the the US Labor Department 2011 Time Use Survey. The X-axis represents days of the week, Sunday = 1 and Saturday = 7. Along the Y-axis is t010101, the variable for ‘time sleeping’, and it is expressed in the form of minutes. This is what I see when I first crack open some data. It’s raw. You see a box and you see a dark line inside that box. The dark line is the MEDIAN, and the box contains half of all the observations in the sample. the dots represent individuals at the[…]
Mike Miller (@mlmilleratmit) wrote a piece entitled “Why the days are numbered for Hadoop as we know it.” The key paragraph is: “In summary, Hadoop is an incredible tool for large-scale data processing on clusters of commodity hardware. But if you’re trying to process dynamic data sets, ad-hoc analytics or graph data structures, Google’s own actions clearly demonstrate better alternatives to the MapReduce paradigm. Percolator, Dremel and Pregel make an impressive trio and comprise the new canon of big data. I would be shocked if they don’t have a similar impact on IT as Google’s original big three of GFS, GMR, and BigTable have had.” To simplify, in my words: The software package known as Hadoop is incredible for processing[…]