You know the On-demand TV has not yet won the battle against scheduled broadcasting when Tom Coates writes this in his blog regarding tonight’s episode of Doctor Who:
“I’m a bit nervous about leaving the house at all, just in case the tube goes down or something and I don’t get back in time…”
(Via plasticbag.org.)
I’ve recently finished reading Freakonomics.
It’s a book about the application of economics and data-mining to every day’s life
The authors analyze various subjects of our daily life, from the mundane to the very controversial and use large quantity data as diverse as statistics, accounting book from the chicago gang land, test scores in high schools,…) to make a sense out of them, to find out what drive one’s behaviors and why .
It also reveals a lot about people’s incentives and human nature.
Incentives, this is the keyword.
The interesting part is when he compares subjects that are “apparently” not really related: it’s fun, sometimes scandalous but it makes me see the world differently.
There’s the saying “there’s three kinds of lies, lies, darn lies and statistics”
The authors are making a lot of efforts to show that many things could be said on behalf of statistics with none being true.
It also leads them to illustrate the traps of confusing ‘correlation’ and ‘causality’ as well as debunking ‘conventional wisdom’ myths, lazy thinking or rushed conclusions, all of this based on every-day examples.
Also what amazed me, is that in the edition I’ve read most of the arguments are built on data obtained either from surveys, government, schools, accountants, …
It worked because there aggregate data in big quantity.
And Internet seems not to have been used for that purpose.
Internet seems to be the biggest source of anonymous aggregate data, with all the server logs, the customer databases, browser histories, chat logs, search logs, message board’s threads , recommendations, …
You could explore a vast amount of individual behaviors and facets of human nature that way.
Although the book is about economics, nowhere in the book it’s explained what it is and little is said about the methodologies used. Maybe the tag line of the book ‘A Rogue economist explores …’ should have been a clue.
Anyway the book explains brilliantly two notions like incentives and causality/correlation.
The book is entertaining and easy to read, it inspires curiosity.
Another downside may be is that the length of treatment for all the subjects is not balanced, and the author’s interest in crimes economics and incentives can be felt by the depth of the crime-related subjects, which is highly interesting but there so many other things to talk about in this world.
Though I’ve finished the book too quickly to my taste, I think it’s worth reading.
I consider it more as a “taster” or “mind opener” for further reading (any recommendations?) rather than a complete reference.
My reading of the book coincided with the release of a new edition.
I don’t know what’s new though. The edition I’ve read is from 2005 I think.
It’s the one with nice Eboy graphics on the hardback cover.
Technorati Tags:
book, economics, data-mining, daily-life, introduction, review, Eboy
These are aerial photos taken using a gyro-stabilized camera
It reminds me the photographs of the famous french photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand.
http://news.jasonhawkes.com/archives/2006/04/aerial_views_fr.html
Technorati Tags:
photography, aerial, gyro-stabilized, camera
BBC 3 now.
The Italian Job is being broadcasted.
It’s the first version with Michael Caine.
The programme is listed in the RadioTimes in that time slot….
but their description describes the new remake with Charlize Theron titled identically.
I’d be curious to know the context of how the error happened.
RadioTimes has editors and researchers to do the job whereas web sites like tvtv.co.uk (which has a correct description) are supplied an electronic programme guide
Last month, I’ve read an article on barrapunto about a photosharing website: riya
This flickr competitor is boasting an interesting feature:
It can recognises faces and text within the photos. Like an OCR software, the service need to be trained to recognise faces of person appearing on your photos.
I think the idea is you can then search your and others’ photo using these criteria (who is in it?, what photos haved this text?)
Although innovative, I think an online service is not the best place for this technology.
I’d rather see it in my desktop photo management software.
It’s definitely a competitive advantage over flickr, but when one day someone will create a mashup that use any photo sharing service with that kind of technology - which is the way not uncommon for “Web 2.0″ apps - it won’t be anymore.
In the other hand, in a web of integration of data and services, one service has to differentiate itself from the others. But these differentiation need to be presented via APIs and not as end user features.
Now riya has got the attention of everybody including competitors. If this feature was presented as an API to developpers, the benefits for riya would have been greater, has third parties would exercice it while keeping a low profile.
last year, I posted photos of Barcelona on flickr.
Quickly, somebody added geographical coordinates to the photo as tags.
This gave me an answer to a question that wander in my head from time to time:
What’s a portable GPS is useful for?
I was in Barcelona last week and I’ve posted photos I took there.
I’ve geo-tagged them myself, but I still don’t have a GPS.
I just use Google Earth and it’s quite accurate.
And this is not news as I later found these related links on flickr:
Why such theatrical names for things as carceral as DRMs ?
