An Old Saying: A saying I grew up with was, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.” I wasn’t far into a college education when I figured out that that was a lousy saying. I knew what it meant—if you didn’t know about a tragedy or pending trauma, then you can’t worry about it. However, these days, some folks appear to take that saying literally. They stay willfully ignorant.
Book Review: The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis
Following Lewis: There are a couple of authors who I like to “follow.” By that I mean, I usually get any new book they publish. Michael Lewis is one of those authors. It all started with Moneyball, even though I’m a dyed-in-the-wool NON sports fan. And so The Undoing Project was a must on my reading list. As is almost …
Big Data, NAI, and Manipulation
Signals Everywhere No matter where I go, I leave a digital trail. In my office, I am pretty much connected to the internet 12 hours a day. My ISP knows what web sites I go to (except when I fire up my VPN). And of course each website I visit tracks what I look for there. Google logs all my …
Hubris abounds from DC to Silicon Valley
At the time of this writing (10/27/2013) the roll-out of the now infamous Affordable Care Act (ACA) continues to be mired in Information Technology (IT) bugs. I feel a bit embarrassed about my response to this quite predictable debacle. It’s the same embarrassment I feel when a friend takes a bad fall and I find myself laughing because it was …
Connecting dots
Everywhere we go most of us are leaving behind “signals” – dots if you will – about where we’ve been and what our interests were. When we’re moving in the physical world, many of us are more or less tracked by our portable electronic devices. When we move about in the virtual world, we are leaving digital signatures everywhere. This …
Book Review: The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver
Ever wonder why economists, in general, seem to always “get it wrong?” Did the thought cross your mind that they seem not to be improving in their economic forecasting but get lucky once in awhile? How about the national weather forecasters – they seem to be definitely improving even though they drive us crazy showing us storm landfall models and …