what's in a doodle?

http://foundmagazine.com/

Starbucks bingo

Beim Italiaener

2 and half year wasted

The ONS has published new GDP figures today which show a large decline in GDP. People might think that four quarters of negative growth will be overcome once the economy starts growing again. In fact real GDP in Q1 2009 was as high as in Q3 2006. This means that the UK is a rich as war 2 and half years ago in real terms. And this neglects any population growth in that time.

BBC NEWS | Education | Child poverty 'get out' claim

The new poverty legislation is a distraction from the fact that Labour
will miss its own PSA target to halve child poverty by 2010. In fact
in recent years no progress has been made.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8105030.stm

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BBC getting very informal

Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing

See a free issue of the Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing

http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jt/journal/v16/n1/index.html

twitter

Me on twitter http://twitter.com/dirknbr

Clive Granger dies

The Nobel prize winning econometrician has died. He introduced the
ideas of cointregration and causality. Great loss.

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Stats blog

This is a great blog and site around understanding of risk: http://understandinguncertainty.org/davidsblog

Labour and child poverty

It seems to have gone under in the turmoil around the expenses but the latest statistics show that Labour is way off its 2010 target of halving child poverty. The number of children in relative poverty before housing costs has stayed the same between 2006/7 and 2007/8 - at 2.9 million. This means only half a million lifted out of poverty since Labour came into power. Labour is not the party of equality.

http://www.dwp.gov.uk/asd/hbai/hbai2008/pdf_files/full_hbai09.pdf

Less than a tenth of a percent of delivered spam is clicked on

MTA Delivery	82,700,000	21,100,000	10,100,000
User Site Visits	10,522	3,827	2,721
	0.01%	0.02%	0.03%

 

Kanich et al of Berkeley and UCSD in ‘Spamalytics: An Empirical Analysis of Spam Marketing Conversion’ have run a trial to calculate the spam conversion rates for three bogus campaigns. I have recalculated the rates based on emails actually delivered.

http://www-cse.ucsd.edu/~savage/papers/CCS08Conversion.pdf

Government internet database

Maybe the u-turn on the internet database has also to do with the realisation what the cost of such a data base would be. Below I am making an estimate of how big an annual data set would be: 503 terabyte. This would need an army of IT specialists to maintain. A query on this data base would probably take a lot of time. And this is a conservative estimate assuming only the URL (and datetime) is kept and no search keywords or so. It also assumes emails are transferred into text and attachments are lost.

	Population	60,000,000
	Internet users %	73.00%
	Internet users	43,800,000
Websites	Sites per day	15
	Days per week	6
	Datetime field	8	byte
	URN field	8	byte
	Site field	100	byte
Emails	Emails per day	15
	Text size of email	1000	byte
	Email accounts per person	2
	Size of annual database	503,388,144,000,000	byte
		503,388,144,000	KB
		503,388,144	MB
		503,388	GB
	Size of monthly slice	41,949.01	GB

Small towns stereotypes

People from small towns and villages are usually either very shy or
over confident because they are overwhelmed or think of themselves
masters of their little universe. Big city people are more likely to
be neurotic.

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Strangling furious customers

Nowadays every one has to be afraid when causing an argument about the
niggly rules at airports. They will probably arrest and question you.
All in the name of terror prevention. But have they ever seen a
terrorist complaining about bad customer service? It's just a means to
continue bad service and strangle the customer's rights.

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Significance Importance Relevance

You can think of these three concepts in a particular order. Significance means that something is possibly true. However, this only counts if it is actually important - has magnitude. Even if it is important, it's not guaranteed to be relevant. For it to be relevant it needs appeal and has to be practical/ implementable. 

I have uploaded a brief paper on testing for multi-modality using clustering - here.

In general modality is looked at from a distributional perspective. Silverman’s test uses a kernel density estimate (KDE) to test for modality. But the test statistic is biased and it can only test for one mode hypothesis against another. We propose a different way by looking at a distribution from the top.

what ebay is missing

Two things I think

• a random button, to help browsing
• product recommendation, maybe at category level (you liked that mug, why not get the t-shirt)

Wired UK

The CondeNast technology mag Wired is launching in the UK, the site will be here http://wired.co.uk/

Mobile news sites

Here is a list of mobile news sites in English and German, which you can access form your iphone, blackbery, or android:

• FAZ
• Spiegel
• Welt
• Zeit (redirected)
• FT Deutschland
• BBC
• Times
• CNN
• Reuters
• BusinessWeek
• France 24 (iphone)
• Economist

Let me know if any good ones are missing.

eBay on iPhone

clever Excel format

As this example shows you can apply nice looking formats in Excel, so that a simple date appears as "Friday the 13th" using custom format. You could also do this using the text() function with if processing to allow for the "st", "nd" and "rd".

Mobile sites

Mobile web site (as in accessible to mobiles, no scrolling, faster download) come in 3 forms - varying by how they are accessed:

• the site switches automatically if you access with a mobile device
• you need to explicitly visit the mobile site/url
• it's a normal site reprocessed in mobile format, eg by Google (GWT)

Hidato problem

I have tried to create a VBA macro which creates a random grid for a hidato puzzle. But I seem not to have cracked it, it keeps getting stuck without any blank fields next to the last number.

You can try to alter my code and maybe you can find a smart rule to avoid traps.

Ads

Has anyone noticed the drop in outdoor advertising? Many ads are now
by the government or the outdoor operator themselves. The space must
be really cheap now.

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