A topic that has come up for me multiple times recently is how to best measure affinity in retail or eCommerce. In working with customers, I have seen that many different organizations measure affinity differently, and I wanted to take the time to explore the various models and why they may make sense or not. In the end, affinity comes down to probabilities. Before I dive into this, some background (if you already know about affinity analysis, skip below): ...

Update on this post in 2022… This is a cool post to read later. I had forgotten I wrote this and also forgotten that the iPad ever had the numeric moniker. According to this article on iPad history there was an iPad 3 and iPad 4 but then they dropped the numbers. And Apple actually started the differentiation I advocated by introducing the iPad Mini the following year (2012), and iPad Air (2013) and finally an iPad Pro 4 years (2015). ...

My dad had a great quote for me growing up. It was “the most successful people are lazy.” He meant a particular kind of lazy- the kind that finds ways to optimize their life. For example, my dad is too lazy to solve the same types of mathematic problems again and again, so he codes up a solution to automate it. In school, I was too lazy to study more than I needed. Instead I would actually focus on the main concepts and prepare for the topics the teacher was most likely to ask. This left me free to work on side projects or learn things I cared about more. ...

Think about it: The Economist discusses two interesting facts in an article published a few weeks ago. Income inequality has risen in most countries in the world over the past 10 years. Total global income inequality has fallen over the same period of time. How is that possible? If almost every country has rising income inequality shouldn’t total income inequality be growing globally? (If you want to take a second and try to think about how this is possible, do it now). ...

Last week I was fascinated by the IBM Watson vs Human challenge on Jeopardy. Despite my love of technology, I found myself oddly hoping Ken Jennings would win (he did not). He made a compelling run in the second game, and ended final jeopardy with the following meme. (Stoker is the answer to the question- question to the answer?). Afterwards the always witty and intelligent Jennings did a great interview with the washington post. In it, he brought up a very thought provoking idea. In response to a question about the use of trivia and general knowledge in the future, he responded… ...

Update on this post in 2022… I wrote some posts around this time that were explicitly predicting things. This post wasn’t that. It was more what we’d call a ‘vibe shift’ take. But I think I actually called this pretty well! Original post… Like many tech minded people I viscerally hate prestige. We tend to want to view the world as a harsh meritocracy where only the best achieve success. It’s partly why we revere people who have the guts to drop out of school. They took the risk of losing the prestigious paper to hang on the wall. However, whether or not we choose to ignore it, prestige does matter. ...

“The first principal is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” Richard Feynman Near the beginning of my time as an SAT tutor I had a client, who we will call “Steve.” When I first met Steve he seemed like a nice kid, perhaps a bit reluctant to work hard to improve his score, but amiable enough. My first few visits with each student began the same way- going through the basic strategies before tailoring the rest our time to the specific students needs. During this introductory period I gained a good idea of where I thought a student would score when we moved on to taking practice tests. ...