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Adam DrakeI didn’t have time to mention it last week, but even though I am happy that the New York Times wrote an article on big data, I think the most interesting part was at the end:
Big Data has its perils, to be sure. With huge data sets and fine-grained measurement, statisticians and computer scientists note, there is increased risk of false discoveries. The trouble with seeking a meaningful needle in massive haystacks of data, says Trevor Hastie, a statistics professor at Stanford, is that many bits of straw look like needles. Big Data also supplies more raw material for statistical shenanigans and biased fact-finding excursions. It offers a high-tech twist on an old trick: I know the facts, now lets find em. That is, says Rebecca Goldin, a mathematician at George Mason University, one of the most pernicious uses of data.
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read more Adam DrakeThe advertising world is both feeding, and being fed a lot of hype about the current state and potential of mobile advertising. It’s no doubt that this form of marketing is unique in many ways, and offers opportunities not available via other forms of advertising. As an example, on mobile you can take advantage of information like a relatively precise knowledge of the location of the individual. Now, it is debatable whether such granular knowledge of a person’s location is a good, bad, or neutral thing, but the fact remains that this piece of information is something that simply has not been available to advertisers until recently. Additionally, advertising on mobile is almost guaranteed to be seen by the user due to both the nature of interaction with the device and additionally due to smaller screen sizes. Lastly, the time spent interacting with mobile devices is far greater than time spent with print media, so the percentage of advertising budgets spent on mobile should be proportionally higher, right?
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read more Adam DrakeIf involved in workflow engineering, technology-related or otherwise, do everyone a favor and don’t pass something to the next stage if the previous stage isn’t done properly. Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario and the Legend of Zelda knows this. Take his words to heart:
A late game is only late until it ships. A bad game is bad until the end of time. –Shigeru Miyamoto
If you pass a project on to the next stage of the workflow when it isn’t perfect, eventually it will have to regress back and be repaired. Just save everyone the effort and make it correct right now.
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read more Adam DrakeWell everyone is reacting with shock and amazement at the negative June jobs report, which showed that contrary to the 125,000 jobs that even the most pessimistic economists expected to be added to the economy, the actual number was in fact about 18,000. This isn’t surprising, as this recovery will take a long time. In fact, it will take longer than most people expect and that is due in part to something called Normalcy Bias.
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read more Adam DrakeThis is just an aside to describe a misconception that we have seen some money managers make when describing their strategies or portfolios. When you are discussing the correlation of your portfolio to another portfolio or the market in general, the fact that your portfolio may be fairly uncorrelated does not have anything to do with the independence of your portfolio from a reference portfolio or the market in general. In fact, even if the portfolio you have developed is completely uncorrelated, it still probably isn’t independent. The Risk Fundamentals (link removed due to being broken as of 2018-06-13) website commits this error fairly egregiously:
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