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The New Unit of Scientific Production

One fundamental principle of science is that there is no privileged observer. You get to question what people did. But to question, you first must know what people did. So part of good scientific practice is to make it easy for people to understand how the sausage was made—how

Quality Data: Plumbing ML Data Pipelines

What’s the difference between a scientist and a data scientist? Scientists often collect their own data, and data scientists often use data collected by other people. That is part jest but speaks to an important point. Good scientists know their data. Good data scientists must know their data, too.

Operating Efficiently: Thumb Rules for Increasing Operational Efficiency

ABC ships cereal to people. ABC has a large operations team that handles customer complaints, e.g., “I got the wrong kind of cereal,” “the cereal was too old,” “the cereal arrived too late,” etc., and custom requests, e.g., “I would like seventy custom boxes shipped to a company

Optimal Sequence in Which to Service Orders

What is the optimal order in which to service orders assuming a fixed budget? Let's assume that we have to service orders $o_1,…,…o_n$, with the n orders iterated by $i$. Let's also assume that for each service order, we know how the costs

Pride and Prejudice

It is ‘so obvious’ that policy A >> policy B that only those who don’t want to know or who want inferior things would support policy B. Does this conversation remind you of any that you have had? We don’t just have such conversations about policies. We

Optimal Sequence in Which to Schedule Appointments

Say that you have a travel agency. Your job is to book rooms at hotels. Some hotels fill up more quickly than others, and you want to figure out which hotels to book at first so that your net booking rate is as high as it could be with the

Automating Understanding, Not Just ML

Some of the most complex parts of Machine Learning are largely automated. The modal ML person types in simple commands for very complex operations, and voila! Some companies, like Microsoft (Azure) and DataRobot, also provide a UI for this. And this has generally not turned out well. Why? Because this

Talking On a Tangent

What is the trend over the last X months? One estimate of the ‘trend’ over the last k time periods is what I call the ‘hold up the ends’ method. Look at t_k and t_0, get the difference between the two, and divide by the number of time

Targeting 101

Targeting Economics Say that there is a company that makes more than one product. And users of any one of its products don’t use all of its products. In effect, the company has a \textit{captive} audience. The company can run an ad in any of its products about