Recently, at a family gathering I made an off-hand comment to my parents that on some flights during the week it seems like 50%+ people are on Wifi doing work. I expressed how important it was to me in particular, given that I work at a cloud-based analytics company for me, to have access to the internet when preparing to meet with customers. And my Mom told me a great story about one of her first jobs. As a programmer in the aircraft industry building flight simulators (my Mom is very cool), she shared an office with 3 other people. Crowded, certainly. If that wasn’t enough, however, they also shared a single computer! Over the course of the day, they tried to be fair about giving each other ~2 hours each. They tried to be flexible when someone was close to a deadline. Remember, these are programmers. ...

I teach a class on Data Mining at Stanford. Students in my class are expected to do a project that does some non-trivial data mining. Many students opted to try their hand at the Netflix Challenge: to design a movie… One of my favorite blog posts ever. A very simple idea: it’s easier to win by creatively combining data than by using ever more sophisticated algorithms. This is especially important today due to two major trends in the analytics world: ...

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… ...