Ambitious analytics projects have a tangible risk of failure. Uncertainty breeds anxiety. There are known techniques to lower the uncertainty, guarantee failure and shift the blame onto others. We outline a few proven methods of analytics sabotage and their application. In honor of Steven Potter call this activity “statsmanship” which we define as pursing the goal of making your analytics group cry.
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Readers returning to our blog will know that Win-Vector LLC is fairly “pro-R.” You can take that to mean “in favor or R” or “professionally using R” (both statements are true). Some days we really don’t feel that way. Read more…
One of my research interests is finding the principles that underly the management of information, complexity and uncertainty. When something as simple as a web-form is called “technology” it is time to step back and examine your principles. One principle I am not sure about Postel’s law. It doesn’t hold often enough to be relied on and when it fails I am not sure who to be angry with. Read more…
IowaHawk has a excellent article attempting to reproduce the infamous CRU climate graph using OpenOffice: Fables of the Reconstruction. We thought we would show how to produced similarly bad results using R.
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Today’s question is: “should your mom use Google search?” It it is a good thing that Google has directly told us that their motto is “don’t be evil,” as their systems are subtle and difficult to evaluate.
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Microsoft is once again going to try its hand at retail stores (for example see the following CNET article). From my experience I think this is going to be horrible. But it does not have to be- Microsoft (if it had the will) could produce a great store that is profitable and improves the world. Here is my quick history and wish list.
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A bit of a tempest in finance news involving accusations of sensitive code stolen from a major trading desk. For emerging details see:
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Some time ago I subscribed to The Database Column because it would be fun to see what these incredible people wanted to discuss. We owe much of our current database technology to Professor Stonebraker and Vertica sounds like an incredible product. And I definitely want to continue to subscribe.
However, the reading experience is marred by some flaw in their RSS system that keeps marking the article “MapReduce: A major step backwards” as a new article. This causes the article to appear in my RSS reader every few weeks as “new.” This wouldn’t bother me too much except that the article runs so counter to experience that it is itself offensive.
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I don’t really know what the right answer to the $700 Billion Dollar Bailout Question is (I have not read the bill, and I wonder if the bill really describes what would happen). But the whole situation does remind me of a related question: is it really the end of the world if the “credit markets freeze?” It is a disaster if the equity markets tank for a period of longer than a year or so (prevents people from retiring and so on)- but I am not sure if all of the consequences we are being told really follow. Read more…