http://www.analyzethis.net/blog A cog in the knowledge economy. Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:09:30 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en She doesn't look blackish. In fact, she's a blond. Her maternal grandparents emigrated from Sweden, where she still has a passel of second cousins. But it turns out that her grandmother, Jane Helm of Drake, Missouri, was passing all her life. And she carried the secret to her deathbed. Suddenly it all ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2007/11/08/my-black-wife/ Republicans represent rich people in poor states. Democrats represent the rich states - and they look out for everyone from hedge fund managers to the urban poor. Just ask Chuck Schumer. http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2007/11/07/57/ What comes to mind when you think of the Democratic presidential candidates? Bill Richardson and Chris Dodd haven't been pegged yet, as far as I know. But here's my list for the rest: Edwards's $400 haircut and 28,000 square foot home Obama's palmed cigarette Biden's plagiarism Kucinich's UFO sighting There are so many possibilities for ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2007/11/07/reduced-to-a-stereotype/ From Will Fitzgerald's blog at the NY Times: The number of words spoken at the last Democratic ebate correlates precisely with each candidate's poll numbers. Hillary is on top (25% of the words) and Joe Biden at the bottom (7% of the words). The exception is Chris Dodd, who talked himself ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2007/11/02/chris-dodd-blowhard/ From Statistical Modeling and Social Science: Rich people in red states tend to vote Republican. But in blue states there's no strong link between income and party affiliation. The well-off are no more likely than anyone else to embrace the elephant. This blog is an aspirational read for me, since the ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2007/11/02/how-rich-people-vote/ Popular bloggers may disable the comment function or delete the missives of their attackers. Not me. I feel like a kid so starved for attention that he's grateful for any notice, no matter how negative. And the surprising thing is - for someone as thin-skinned as I imagine myself to ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2007/11/01/the-joy-of-commenting/ Today the New York Times quoted from my blog on my memories of Barack Obama. Suddenly I've got more traffic - and comments - than in the previous five years. The Times reporter, Janny Scott, talked to me for an hour or so about six weeks ago. I was already familiar ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2007/10/30/my-15-minutes/ Lately I've been reading books that were on my father's bookshelf when I was growing up. One category he enjoyed was first-person historical narratives. Bernal Diaz's The Conquest of New Spain is the story of how Cortez and 400 soldiers fought and bluffed their way into the command center of Mexico, ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2007/02/18/test-of-amm/ Painfully, stomach-clutchingly funny. From a place we've all been. The sad thing that a mainstream newspaper tried to steal it from the author - and then threatened to sue him for complaining. http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2006/12/02/things-my-girlfriend-and-i-have-argued-about-2/ As sites are increasingly built with Ajax and Flash, page views stop making sense as a metric. When all of the navigation occurs within a single URL, the use of page views severely undercounts traffic. "Ajax shatters the metaphor of a web 'page' upon which much of web publishing and advertising ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2006/12/02/death-of-the-page-view/ Yesterday my son was late to school and hadn't eaten breakfast. I tell him to walk ahead while I run into the Dunkin' Donuts on 105th Street to buy him a bagel. About a half-second ahead of me into the door is a middle-aged, unshaven guy in a porkpie hat ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2006/12/02/if-only-i-had-a-gun/ Back when I worked at the Globecon Group - a personality-driven boutique that trained wholesale bankers - one of my jobs was to come up with keywords for the thousands of books, articles and PowerPoints that comprised our library of training material. Some people didn't like the keywords I chose; they ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2006/12/02/taxonomy-recapitulates-folksonomy/ The Long Tail was just released this month. It seems like it has been out forever. The seminal article in Wired appeared almost two years ago. The ideas have been publicized almost daily on Chris Anderson's blog. And yet the book is well worth reading: Gladwell-esque in its energy and ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2006/07/28/the-ancient-tail/ The Washington Post's Adrian Holovaty on web programming as journalism: The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do: 1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It's reporting. 2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2006/07/01/33/ Last night I learned about the capricious and nasty treatment that Neil Gunton, who runs the CrazyGuyonaBike touring site, received at the hands of a Wikipedia administrator. CrazyGuyonaBike is a six-year open-source labor of love built by Neil for the bicycle touring community. It's got trip journals, discussion boards, touring ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2006/06/19/wikipedias-bad-cops/ My wife and I don't own a car anymore. But we're still hunters at heart - always sensitive to the signs of movement that indicate spaces are opening up. The purposefully striding pedestrian reaching for keys; the sound of doors slamming; the changing of doormen's shifts. Here are the rules ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/12/18/rules-for-parking-in-new-york/ Amazon's "Customers who bought X also bought Y" function displays thousands of paths through hundreds of demographic niches of America's magazines. You don't need Amazon to tell you that readers of 'Guns & Ammo' are more likely to buy 'Handguns' than 'PETA News.' But what Amazon can tell you is ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/12/05/mother-earth-to-swat-in-9-steps/ From Slashdot: "Fortunately for all you Americans, I believe this jackass was born in Canada which would disqualify him from running for president. "Unfortunately for us Canadians, his being a jackass makes him perfectly qualified for running Canada." According to Slate, Edgar Jr. has been designated Hollywood's official idiot. http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/09/25/edgar-bronfmans-cv/ Why is it that only black people are called Jordan? Michael Jordan, Barbara Jordan, Vernon Jordan. And why is it that only white people are called Rockefeller, Rothschild, and DuPont? http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/09/18/black-peoples-names/ Now that the Dutch have adopted rules for euthanizing babies, I hope they'll apply them sensibly. It's so annoying when those babies start crying in the airplane cabin. You can't exactly get up and leave the room. I also don't like it when two-year-olds sit in the handicapped seats on ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/07/10/baby-killing-is-legal-finally/ Andrew Lee writes in the Financial Times that the misogynistic mix of cuteness, violence and perversion prevalent in manga and anime "...must send many tourists running, their 'Fujiyama' image of Japan tainted for life." Andy, I've got news for you: After seeing a reproduction of Makoto Aida's "Harakiri Schoolgirls" (detail below), ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/07/10/harakiri-schoolgirls/ Don't get me wrong - I'm a big fan of Barack Obama, the Illinois freshman senator and hot young Democratic Party star. But after reading his autobiography, I have to say that Barack engages in some serious exaggeration when he describes a job that he held in the mid-1980s.I know ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/07/09/barack-obama-embellishes-his-resume/ A letter to the FT depicts the medieval Christian church as an early regulator rooting out creative accounting practices: The medieval Christian view was highly sympathetic to risk capital formation. The key was the word "risk". What was objectionable to the medieval mind (and Mohammed confirmed that this was far from ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/22/the-pope-and-creative-accounting/ For the past few months I've been teaching myself to write spiders - little Perl programs that crunch through URLs and download data. In the spirit of learning by doing, my first project was to grab 5,000 health inspection reports for Manhattan restaurants from the NYC Department of Health website. The ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/21/17/ I've written about fraud among the Mormons before. Here's another angle, from a social networking thread on Slashdot: Salt Lake City is the smallest city to have its own SEC office, and the state suffers from a high rate for people getting ripped off by people they know. This has been ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/21/trust-based-networks-among-the-lds/ Rashomon retold for fans of Goofus and Gallant. http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/13/goofus-gallant-rashomon/ Interesting conversation on Slashdot about Hollywood Math and Science Consulting, which helps screenwriters portray math and science accurately in their scripts. The company's first client was the TV show Numb3rs, about a mathematician who solves crimes via pattern-recognition techniques. It's a fascinating idea, and I love the eccentric professor played by ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/13/science-versus-entertainment/ I've held investments through both TIAA-CREF and Merrill Lynch, and I can't imagine two more different companies. TIAA-CREF has always been like a big old family-run business - cheap, paternalistic and a bit backwards, but also old-fashioned in its commitment to the educators who comprise its customers. In contrast, Merrill ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/13/tiaa-on-the-slippery-slope/ You may be a great performer on your own. But how much do you help your team? The metric de jour of the NBA - the plus-minus statistic - goes beyond so-called "glory statistics" like points or rebounds to measure a player's total contribution to victory. Refined by Dan Rosenbaum, an ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/13/12/ PWC and KPMG say that 90-95% of business spreadsheets have errors, that each error costs a business $10,000 to $100,000, and that complex spreadsheets (more than 100 columns or rows) have a probability of error approaching 100%. Gee, do you think the folks at PWC or KPMG know anyone who might ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/13/spreadsheet-hell/ Forty-three ways to cure writer’s block. http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/10/therapy-for-writers/ Also from the recent PRMIA meeting on liquidity risk: Ken Winston, CRO of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, threw out the following idea on how to hedge against market illiquidity: sell off-the-run Treasuries and buy on-the-run issues. As liquidity disappears, the on-the-run bonds gain relative to the off-the-run issues. You could offer the ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/10/hedging-against-liquidity-risk/ Went to the liquidity risk discussion at PRMIA's New York chapter a few months back, shortly before GM was downgraded to junk status. I had meant to write about it at the time, but computer problems and the hassles of moving from Blogger to Moveable Type and then WordPress interfered. ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/10/the-myth-of-junk-bond-contagion/ The Body Mass Index of presidents is the subject of a chart in Sunday's New York Times. (Unfortunately, only the accompanying article is available online.) The article points out that BMI is meaningless by itself. Our 6-foot 194-pound president, who regularly runs 6:30 miles at the age of 58, has ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/09/skeletal-jimmy-madison/ A small Utah-based lender, the Bank of Ephraim, collapsed after discovering that 90% of its loan portfolio consisted of loans to a doomsday sect of fundamentalist Mormons. Sect members, believing that the end of the world was imminent, took an oath several years ago to drain the bank of money before ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/09/dont-lend-to-doomsday-sects/ LoanPerformance, which sells retail credit analytics to mortgage lenders, says text mining can boost the accuracy of default models. If a customer uses any of these words when talking to a call center rep, the software flags the customer as more likely to default: Rental Renter Rent Roommate Hazard Debris Fraud Death Marital Problem, Divorce Mold Sad Jail Motorcycle If I were a sad ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/09/words-that-say-youre-a-loser/ Follow this link to try the Autism Quotient test. After taking it, I'm ready to believe that autism is just a special case of being a guy. The average score is 16.5, and 80% of those diagnosed with autism scored 32 or more. Your score appears to depend mainly on (1) ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/09/autism-the-guy-disease/ OK, not really, because it's all about golf. But just listen to the rest. The job title is Data Analyst, but it could also be called Database Journalist. The PGA wants someone to mine and analyze data from ShotLink (the PGA scoring system) to "create a depth of analysis, insight and ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/09/my-perfect-job/ I just love PlasticBag.org. Like Andrew Sullivan (before he went bonkers), but techie and profane. In this post, Tom Coates creates visualizations of his last five years of posts, showing, for example, how his writing style deteriorated as posts become longer and less frequent. There's also a reference to a ... http://www.analyzethis.net/blog/2005/06/09/visualize-your-writing-style/