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Miscellanea

A collection of 8 issues

Traveling Salesman

White-collar elites venerate travel, especially to exotic and far-away places. There is some justification for the fervor—traveling is pleasant. But veneration creates an umbra that hides some truths: 1. Local travel is underappreciated. We likely underappreciate the novelty and beauty available locally. 2. Virtual travel is underappreciated. We know

Snakes on Ladders: Encouraging People to Climb the Engagement Ladder

Marketers love engagement ladders. To increase engagement with a product, many companies segment their users based on usage, for instance, into heavy (super), medium (average), and light, and prod their users to climb the ladder by suggesting they do things that people in the segment above them are doing and

5 is smaller than 1.9!

“In the late 1990s, the leading methods caught about 80 percent of fraudulent transactions. These rates improved to 90–95 percent in 2000 and to 98–99.9 percent today. That last jump is a result of machine learning; the change from 98 percent to 99.9 percent has been

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

Taking a Holiday from Looking for Jobs

Look for yourself.

A Quick Scan: From Paper to Digital

Additional Note: See this presentation on paper to digital (pdf). There are two ways of converting paper to digital data: ‘human OCR and input,’ and machine-assisted. Here are some useful pointers about the latter. Scanning Since the success of so much of what comes after depends on the quality of

Bad Weather: Getting Data on Weather in a ZIP Code on a Particular Date

High-quality weather data are public. But they aren’t easy to make use of. Some thoughts and some software for finding out the weather in a particular ZIP Code on a particular day (or a set of dates). Some brief ground clearing before we begin. Weather data come from weather

Topography of book sales

A full one-third of books sold worldwide are sold in the US. Of the 1.2 million books sold in the US in 2004, Nielsen Bookscan found: * 950,000 sold fewer than 99 copies. * Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. * Only 25,000 books sold more than