An abridged version is available at Amazon. I downloaded the unabridged version from my local library account at NetLibary. That version is published by Recorded Books.
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Archive for October, 2007
Analytical Black Jack
Monday, October 29th, 2007Goodbye Spreadsheets?
Monday, October 29th, 2007A recent article in CIO suggested that spreadsheets will go by the wayside in favor of BI applications. As a self-professed spreadsheet junkie — (I once created an Excel Solver model to optimize the cutting of wood molding for the baseboards in my house) — I’m not sure what to think of this claim. On the one hand, there is a lot of analysis that business users force into Excel that would be better suited for other tools. On the other hand, Excel is familiar and accessible to most. So is it better to use the right tool or the familiar one? I say Excel (or something similar) will be around for quite some time.
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The Long Tail in Digital Music
Thursday, October 25th, 2007
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Google Game Creates Free Meta Data
Thursday, October 18th, 2007This is brilliant! If you’ve ever used Google Images, you know searching is less than perfect. That’s because many images found on the net lack good meta data or are on pages that are only partially relevant to the image. So how can Google enlist the help of the masses to improve the relavancy of search results? Offer a simple “game”, award some points and pair partners up from across the word. Check out the Google ImageLabeler app. In a nutshell, partners are presented an image and each type in their own list of words related to the image. Partner’s can’t see the other person’s list until the two minute time limit is reached. The object is to eventually match on a word. When that happens, the team is awarded some points. The more you play, the more points you earn and the more relevant meta data Google has for the images. And like “Who’s line is it anyway?”, the points are pretty much meaningless…no prizes, just the satisfaction that you’ve burned the better part of the day providing free labor to Google. Simply brilliant.
Try it out and let me know what you think.
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Are We Ready for a Chief Analytic Officer?
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007In “Building the Analytic Organization,” Peter Graham states that the role of Chief Analytic Officer (CAO) is critical for organizations to evolve to the next level of analytic organization. In this organization, analytics becomes a key organizational competency to the point of requiring a dedicated functional area responsible for analytics.
This intrigues me since I often find myself somewhere in between the purely technical roles and business roles regarding analytics. Though I have some technical aptitude, I don’t have the formal training nor the experience to consider myself an IT person. On the other hand, though I have completed many tactical reporting and analysis projects, I feel analytics can add significant strategic advantage. Sounds like the analytic functional area would play in that “in-between” space.
So how do the CAO and CIO roles differ?
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Book: Super Crunchers – Thinking-by-Numbers – Ian Ayes
Monday, October 15th, 2007
Amazon has a brief video of the author. Click here to watch it.
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Visualization of Wikipedia
Sunday, October 14th, 2007
The folks at A Beautiful WWW have created a couple of very interesting visualizations to explain or represent activity on Wikipedia. The first article – Visualizing the ‘Power Struggle’ in Wikipedia – includes a description of the technique. They even have a zoomable and scrollable graphic. This is a good place to start. The follow-up shows science and technology activity. I find this fascinating. It reminds me of some of the visualizations in Edward Tufte‘s books such as is The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
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