The Direct Marketing Association is a very good clearing house for anyone interested in marketing analytics. You can find all sorts of useful things here They also have a good journal filled with papers from people doing the heavy lifting in marketing analytics. I was happy to write up a discussion of endogenous regressors for…
There has been quite a lot of backtracking about how big the pollsters were when it came to the estimate on the Remain vs. Leave vote. Nate Silver of 538 has tweeted out a claim that the polls said the whole thing was very tight just before the vote; but if so, how to explain why…
It was common, until relatively recently, to begin the day with a beer. Here is H. L. Mencken enjoying a crew in the Free State (Maryland). There are a number of craft breweries suggesting the tradition should come back and have made suggestions for the best pairing with eggs, french toast, and whatever else you might be…
The graph above is the ratio of total working age people in the U.S. to the number of employed persons. This is a key factor in some models of the economy and is of central importance in all of them. This is a much better measure than, say, the unemployment rate and labor force participation…
The problem of endogenous regressors sounds very much like a highly technical problem that is best left to wonky practitioners to work out in the quiet of whatever windowless room they are working from these days. Unfortunately, the problem very often does not get worked out at all, and the result can be very dangerous…
Fans of The Walking Dead like the show for all sorts of reasons. One of the reasons I like it is because of the interesting ways they deal with organizational problems (and no, I don’t mean the stabby ways they deal with them). Case in point: this last week has a very interesting problem of organizational…
“Strategic,” is one of those overloaded terms that probably suffers through the overloading. In one sense, we use it to mean things that are important, or that are solutions to problems with a long horizon. So, we have a web strategy that targets these customers in those market segments, or we locate stores in census tracts with…
Lots of sports commentary today about the overtime game between the New England Patriots and New York Jets yesterday. Here is a sample headline: Bill Belichick’s blunder on coin flip gives the Jets an overtime win over Patriots For those who don’t know, the Jets and Patriots were tied at the end of regulation, leading…
In 1940, the French soldiers didn’t quit; the government had built an army entirely unsuited to perform the sort of tasks required to beat the Germans.
It happens all the time that you want to get approval or funding for some special project. But, in order to get funding, you need to get a boss to approve the project. Turns out, you may have the real authority in some of these situations, even if you don’t know it yet.
Interesting article in Psychology Today regarding the challenges the children of helicopter parents are now facing in college. Psychology Today on college challenges Students are afraid to fail; they do not take risks; they need to be certain about things. For many of them, failure is seen as catastrophic and unacceptable. External measures of success…
Spent a great day learning about oyster farming at Rappahannock River Oysters. These guys have been at the front of the effort to bring the native Chesapeake Bay oyster back from the dire circumstances of the turn of the century. They are focused on growing the best oysters, working in a sustainable way, and rejuvenating…
