Data stories analyzed 4 million data points from the front page or Reddit to figure out what features of articles increase their likelihood of showing up on the Reddit front page. A very interesting application of machine learning algorithms, though they don't get into the details of what ML tools/algorithms they used.
According to the article, when computers start doing the work of people, the need for people often increases. I simply cannot take anymore the doom and gloom of the supposed AI revolution and how it will make us all jobless.
Mint can already look at your CC transactions if you connect the bank account to it. I wonder how come they've never done something similar. It wouldn't really cost them that much to maintain a database of subscription based services and do a text match to highlight them. Heck it can even be a category. You can of course do this manually, but they could automate it just as easily.
Wrong motives (trying to be a cool company) plus wrong incentives (billion dollar evaluation and lots of cash to burn) leads to wrong focus and feelings of invincibility.
I think we've been conditioned to expect a CTA at the end of many "articles" which has made many of them into pitches rather than articles. Why can't an article simply bring awareness of another culture from a foreigner's perspective?
This is only the most AMAZING thing to happen to Excel! I got some Excel data from a friend to analyze and went through the usual PivotTable way for a while until I hit a roadblock and I needed something more advanced. I knew how to solve my problem with SQL but not with Excel, so I ended up downloading and installing SQL Server Express. This would have saved me from having to do that. Looking forward to more features.
Hey Khuram, I'm very interested in what you're doing, it's something I'd want to do as well! I love strategy but havent figured out how to leverage my knowledge/skill to get started there. Are you available for chat via email or Skype?
I hated liberal arts classes while in college. "They're useless!" I used to decry. I optimized my classes for my degree and took the bare minimum requirements. Only now do I see how useful they would have been if I had taken more. The only thing that sucks is how much they cost.
Talking to Nick Halstead, the CEO and founder of DataSift, he said that his company was “blindsided” by Twitter’s announcement, which it made without any warning to DataSift.
He should have totally seen it coming and been prepared. When you don't think about the future and don't have the foresight to build competencies to take advantage of what you discover, you end up being blindsided. This is not about hating on Twitter or siding with them, it's pure competition.
This is great! I've always equated consulting with freelancing, in the sense that say if you were consulting as a data scientist, you actually do the model building for the client, but this changes everything!
Is it me or are people switching to non-relational data warehouse architectures simply because it's en vogue? How many companies do you know that have enough data where a non-relational DW would actually make sense? I wonder, have we really pushed relational databases to their breaking point?
I've achieved the same "feat" of being able to chat seemingly about nothing while being an introvert. What it took was introspection and a lucky read. I detail the mental refactoring I went through here: http://refactoredthinking.com/2012/10/14/how-i-cured-my-shyn...
From a quick scan of the notes, it seems like this is yet another 300 page book that says nothing beyond "quit your job and start a multi-million dollar business of some kind"
I'm making my way through this book now. It's very rough terrain since the book was a PhD thesis, but it's really the best in-depth look at Boyd's work, of which I am a big fan!
According to Vivek Wadhwa:
"In a follow-up project, we looked at the backgrounds of 549 successful entrepreneurs in twelve high-growth industries. The average age of male founders in this group was 40, and the average age of female founders was 41. The majority had two or more kids."
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-12-02/national/35284...
I feel the same way. In fact the idea of "flipping" the funnel is not new. Seth Godin wrote an ebook on it: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/01/flipping_the... It's a lot easier for sales and marketing manager to think about conversion in terms of funnels, so a lot of analytics startups (kissmetrics, mixpanel) have it as a standard report. It seems that using a strong word like hate gets you attention; hence clicks.
John Boyd fought for years to build single-purpose fighters, but the idea of one, all-purpose warplane is just too seductive. (See John Boyd's biography by Robert Coram)
This is just a story but a friend of a friend who had been fed soy milk as a baby, developed all kinds of food allergies even from things like chocolate, sugar, etc. She can't eat anything!