Archive for the ‘Marketing and Metrics’ Category

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One Not to Miss, Maybe

January 23, 2006

Jason Ruspini has the head’s up on a forth coming book by Nassim Taleb (his website is a treasure trove for a geek like me). I couldn’t get the PDF to open, so I guess I’ll just have to buy the book ;-)

Hopefully Taleb’s new book The Scandal of Prediction “The Black Swan” (I’ve been corrected that the Scandal of Prediction is a chapter in that upcoming book) will be as good as his last “Fooled by Randomness”.

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How does a four letter word change the conversation?

January 13, 2006

We were fortunate enough to be part of an interesting article today in Business Week, worth the read (disclosure: I work for Umbria). Aside from the obvious questions regarding privacy, applications of knowledge, and past examples, I was a little surprised about what was missing: Why can it be done?

I don’t mean the math and modeling parts which are well covered in the article, but why can it be done at all? The “it” in question is why can humans and the encapsulation of their actions and thoughts be so easily converted into math (the 4 letter word) and be both accurate and predictable? As a species, are we not as multi-dimensional as we believe we are?

Perhaps a question better posed to apophenia.