This short video was sent to me by a friend a couple of years ago
It really resonated with me, so continuing a tradition, I like to share it at Christmas time.
… back with you after the New Year
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click to view (best with audio on)
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Consumers are spending more on themselves this holiday season.
This trend is boosting retailer’s sales for now but raising concern of consumer spending after the holidays.
Consumers are taking advantage of deals to snap up items for themselves and non-gift items for their families.
Here’s the scoop from Ad Age …
Today, we’ll be serious, not sarcastic.
As everybody should know by now …
“Without provocation, an attacker ambushed and killed officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos while they sat in their marked patrol car in the Bedford-Stuyvesant Area of Brooklyn … ‘They were quite simply assassinated, targeted for their uniform,’ Police Commissioner William Bratton said at a news conference.”
Earlier in the day, the killer posted a photo of a silver handgun and a message on Instagram in which he talked about killing police officers “in retaliation for the deaths of Garner and Brown.”
Let’s think about that for a moment …
In the old days, folks fretted (or dreamed) about the effect of computerized automation in factories and ATMs replacing bank tellers.
According to a recent McKinsey report:
Physical labor and transactional tasks have been widely automated …
Now, advances in data analytics, low-cost computer power, machine learning, and interfaces that “understand” humans are moving the automation frontier rapidly towards “knowledge work”..
Developments in how machines process language and understand context are allowing computers to search for information and find patterns of meaning at superhuman speed.
Here are a couple of examples …
Punch line: Major retailers are customizing online prices for each user, using users’ information (such as location) to determine different prices for identical items. The goal: higher price realization and higher profits.
Here's the scoop ... (more...)
This isn’t it !
This one was in the WSJ last week.
The accompanying narrative was something like “adding jobs – full-time, not part-time — looking good”.
Earlier this week, we showed that the WSJ data is accurate, but it’s analysis is misleading because it starts analyzing from the depth of the recession (versus before the start of the recession) … and looks at raw numbers of jobs added (without normalizing for population growth).
Again, this isn’t the killer chart, I’m talking about.
Rather, I’ve pulled together my earlier analysis into one simple chart that tells the story …
AdAge ran an article asking “Is the College Football Playoff the Next Super Bowl?”
Answer: Maybe … and maybe not.
The article had a couple of interesting tidbit’s about the CFP’s economics.
ESPN bought exclusive broadcast rights for 12 years of the semi-final games and national championship game as part of a 12-year media rights deal announced in 2012 that reportedly cost $7.3 billion.
Now, that’s big business!
Buried deep in the article was an incidental piece of info that caught my eye … a sure-fire winner.
It has been a while since we looked into the employment numbers … long overdue.
I was awakened by a WSJ article that put a positive spin on the November jobs report – jobs continue to be added …. and, they’re full-time jobs:
“The economy has seen a net gain of more than 6 million full-time jobs since the official end date of the 2007-09 recession, which was in June 2009. The economy has witnessed a net increase of just 311,000 part-time jobs over the same period,”
Hmmm.
Let’s dig a little deeper.
What the Journal says is true, but not complete … and picking to start the chart at the trough of the recession obscures some of the context.
I thought about this one last nite watching the Hoyas give Kansas a run for their money.
I often say that electricity, the EZ pass, and the 3-point line make my list as the top 3 inventions ever …
You know all about the first two.
Here’s the story behind the third: basketball’s 3-pointer …
According to BigThink.com …
The website ratemyprofessors.com has students anonymously comment on their professors’ “helpfulness,” “clarity” and “easiness.”
The punctuation point: Raters are asked where the prof is “hot” or “not.”
Four professors from Central Michigan University trolled through the data and wrote a paper examining “Attractiveness, Easiness, and Other Issues: Student Evaluations of Professors on rateMyProfessors.com.”
After conceding that the site is rife with “issues”, the authors dug in and researched the relationship between student perceptions of professor “hotness” and their evaluation of “quality of instruction.”.
Guess what?
A large percentage of American college students consider courses to be high-quality when the professor is attractive..
As Gomer Pyle would say: “Surprise, surprise, surprise.”
The only surprise is the magnitude and consistency of the relationship.
Profs that are “not hot” are toast.
The Central Michigan “scholars” also evaluated the relative hotness of profs by discipline …
In my Strategic Business Analytics course, we were covering decision rules .. specifically, machine learning and algorithms.
Reminded me to flashback a cool 15 minute TED Talk.
Tech entrepreneur Kevin Slavin tells how algorithms have reached across industries and into every day life.
A couple of lines caught my attention:
Obviously, Slavin comes down on the side of the quants.
Worth listening to this pitch … a very engaging geek who may be onto something big.
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The obvious became apparent to me … really!
The answer: just go back to the future.
Stay with me on this one …
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Let’s connect a couple of dots from the post-selection chit-chat and whining …
The College Football Playoff was supposed to end the collegiate National Championship controversy, right?
For openers, let me disclose that I’m an Ohio State fan … raised in Ohio … big brother played for the legendary Woody Hayes … many relatives only wear scarlet & gray.
And, I’m a big Urban Meyer fan … loyal readers see my E + R = O post every couple of months since it’s one of my favs.
So, I was delighted to see the Buckeyes womp Wisconsin (59-0) behind a 3rd string quarterback in his first collegiate start … strip the nation’s leading running back of his Heisman trophy hopes … and, give the CFP selection committee a heavy dose of heartburn.
For years, college sports fans loved to hate the Bowl Championship Series … the system for designating a so-called “National Champion”.
Interesting study on cognitive biases from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow …
Patients undergoing a painful medical procedure – think, colonoscopy without anesthesia – recorded their pain levels during the procedure on a range from no pain (zero) to excruciating (10).
Some of the procedures were short in duration … others were longer.
Below is the pain chart for 2 representative patients.
The patients were asked – after the fact—how painful the procedure was.
What’s your bet? Which patient claimed to have undergone the more painful procedure?
Harrah’s is a poster child for “predictive analytics” … using hard numbers to make good decisions.
Why then – asks the IO Creative Group of tiny York, PA – did the Las Vegas big boy casinos lose over one billion dollars? (more…)
We’re working through predictive analytics in class these days.
So, my eyes are open for articles on the subject.
Predictive analytics.
You know, the stuff that Moneyball got rolling in baseball … and Target popularized by identifying pregnant women before the women knew they were expecting.
Let’s set the stage.
The Washington Redskins have been having (another) rough season.
Veteran sportswriter Tony Kornheiser says advanced analytics could save the Redskins…
A while ago, I posted It takes more than a swig of ‘tussin…
The punch line to the post was that Chris Rock — a very funny guy — takes his craft very seriously and toils long and hard to test and fine-tune his material.
His routine on the many uses of Robitussin (‘tussin, for short) is a comedy classic.
If you haven’t seen the ‘tussin riff– or want a refresher — click to view it now.
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Rock homes his skits standing up in comedy clubs … for example, he said he worked the Comedy Cellar for a week prior his recent guest spot on SNL.
In a recent interview, Rock talked about an emerging threat to his practiced work routine …
Last week, Sen. Chuck Schumer caused a stir in Democrat ranks’ by observing that President Barack Obama’s insistence on revamping the healthcare system was, in Schumer’s words, “misguided” and was a major cause of the GOP’s mid-term election romp & stomp.
Schumer is still all for massive healthcare changes.
His observation is strictly political.
His reasoning:
“Democrats were targeting the uninsured, a population that makes up only about 5 percent of registered voters. Only about one-third of the uninsured are registered or eligible to vote.” Source
Schumer’s on the right track, but misses a bigger point: When people are forced to give up something they have, they overvalue the loss and try hard to recoup it.
Think, the higher premiums and changed doctors that millions of folks have had had to endure.
Behavioral theorists have long observed that most people are risk adverse and, due in part to an “endowment effect”, they “value” losses greater than gains.
Endowment Effect: People tend to ascribe a higher value to things that they already own than to comparable things that they don’t own. For example, a car-seller might think his sleek machine is “worth” $10,000 even though credible appraisers say it’s worth $7,500. Sometimes the difference is due to information asymmetry (e.g. the owner knows more about the car’s fine points), but usually it’s just a cognitive bias – the Endowment Effect.
The chart below illustrates the gains & losses concept.
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For example, would you take any of these coin flip gambles?
Most people pass on #1 and #2, but would hop on #3 and #4.
OK, now let’s show how all of this relates to ObamaCare.
The Homa Files 