Imagine this - a Census worker walks on dirt road deep in the woods somewhere in North Michigan. After half an hour she reaches a bungalow, the 1st sign of life she’s seen in a while. Just as she pulls out her new 2010 Census form she sees a bag hanging from the doorknob. In it she finds a Census from 2000 … - - Read More - -
The latest video on thedoublethinkTV is an interview with Dominique Hanssens, Dominique Hanssens is the Bud Knapp Professor of Marketing at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management, where he has been on the faculty since 1977. He has served as the school's faculty chair,
- - Read More - -
A friend just sent me this beautiful visualization of where people are taking pictures in London. You can clearly see the high traffic areas around the tourist hotspots. It’s a great use of the type of data people are generating by going about their everyday lives. It also shows how this data
- - Read More - -
What is the actual value of a story? Are people prepared to pay more for something if there is a story attached to it? It turns out that they are. That is the outcome of a very original experiment by writer / NYT columnist Rob Walker. I saw Rob speak about his
- - Read More - -
Last week at the PSFK conference I watched Nicholas Felton present his 2009 Feltron annual report. He has been preparing annual reports about his life since 2005. This involves him gathering enormous amounts of data about what he does every day. He then visualizes that data in
- - Read More - -
So says a quantitative model from JP Morgan. Analysts Matthew Burgess and Marco Dion used a model designed to predict stock prices and fed it with past scores and Fifa rankings and came to this unauthordox conclusion.
"Having developed a rather successful Quant Model over the years, we intend to introduce it to our readers and also use its methodology to apply it to a fruitful field for statistics: Football - - Read More - -
Imagine my delight when I saw that The New York Times magazine ran a cover story by Gary Wolf with the same title and theme as one of my recent posts: "The Data Driven Life".
It's a thoroughly researched piece about the trend of self monitoring, which, it turns out, has become a sizable sub-culture. I have to admit that this came as a joyful epiphany to me.
Wolf's central - - Read More - -
I was talking to Andy McMains of AdWeek today who asked me if "thoughtful blogger" wasn't an oxymoron. I hope not.
I found Clive Thompson's recent Wired post on "Why We Should Learn the Language of Data" thoughtful.
He argues that being "statistically illiterate" is bad for your health, and everyone else's too. (Shouldn't that be "innumerate", talking of literacy?) Understanding the realities of global warming, the benefits of - - Read More - -
Our latest Doublethink video is an interview with David Art Wales, Prime Minister at the Ministry of Culture. I’ve known David for over a decade, and in that time he has become something of a fixture on the New York alternative research scene. I bumped into him again at a discussion between Moby and Walt
- - Read More - -
The last couple of weeks have seen the ‘new data’ in the news.
The Financial Times ran an article “Smarter Leaders are Betting on Data” by Stefan Stern. This introduced me to a useful idea from Vivek Ranadive, the CEO of Tibco, a software company and general data visionary. He argues that in measurement of consumer activity, we should think of events not transactions or “in-memory analytics” - - Read More - -