Thinking Analytically

As a Freakonomics fan, I can’t help but be intrigued by the “freakquel” available for pre-order on Amazon.

SuperFreakonomics challenges the way we think all over again, exploring the hidden side of everything with such questions as:

• How is a street prostitute like a department-store Santa?
• Why are doctors so bad at washing their hands?
• How much good do car seats do?
• What’s the best way to catch a terrorist?
• Did TV cause a rise in crime?
• What do hurricanes, heart attacks, and highway deaths have in common?
• Are people hard-wired for altruism or selfishness?
• Can eating kangaroo save the planet?
• Which adds more value: a pimp or a Realtor?

I’ve ordered my copy. You?

What do predictive analytics, real-time monitoring, in-memory processing, and SaaS have in common?  According Doug Henschen at InformationWeek, they’re all a part of next-generation business intelligence.

Next-generation BI has arrived, and three major factors are driving it: the spread of predictive analytics, more real-time performance monitoring, and much faster analysis, thanks to in-memory BI. A fourth factor, software as a service, promises to further alter the BI market by helping companies get these next-generation systems running more quickly.

Interesting article with a number of good points.  What’s your take?

Analytical Thinkers typically are searching for the truth and the truth often implies hard, cold facts. The NY Times article Mining the Web for Feelings, Not Facts might seem hypocritical but speaking from experience, “there’s gold in that ther’ text.” In the mid ’80s I managed a group of employee relations analysts that mined mountains of text in an attempt to quantify employee morale for a 10,000 person company.  Out of this work came “ERATS” or the Employee Relations Attitude Tracking System.  (We were really tracking morale but couldn’t come up with a good acronym with that pesky “M”. Sentiment analysis is exactly what we were trying to do but completely by hand.

An emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape around one of the computer world’s unexplored frontiers: translating the vagaries of human emotion into hard data.

Two recently devoured books on my shelf explore the web-analytics from a few angles.  If you haven’t already, check out:

Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters

I’m a bit behind sharing my recent reading list so I’ll try to spend some time over the next few weeks providing some recommendations.

I “listened” to the audiobook of Click: What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters on my iPod.  This is one of those fasicinating books that makes one think, “How can I get a job like that?”

Bill Tancer mines the gold found in search-engine data.  I imagine him sitting in front of a computer screen with a massive amount of data starting his day by saying, “OK. What can we learn today?” What he learns is fascinating.  From prom dresses to porn to politics, he uses search data to understand and predict consumer behavior.  No need to search for this book — just “Click” on the image and get a copy for yourself!

Brad Feld at Technology Review gave Tableau a whirl for some personal data visualization. He used a online beta version to play with some data.

After I played around it with some, the data wizards at Tableau took
over and created the widget that you see above.  There are a few
things to note about it:

• It is a live exploratory visualization, not a static chart. 
  You can select workout days, highlight across views to see heart rate,
  or filter to different kinds of activities.
• This was done with no custom development. Typically interactive
  visualizations like this take a lot of custom flash work; with Tableau
  anyone can create and publish an interactive visualization with drag
  & drop ease.
• Tableau’s vision with this product is to set data free on the
  web. They want to make real data, no charts, accessible to people so
  they can question conclusions and offer their own analysis.

The visualization above is static but on Feld’s blog, they are interactive.  So check it out and tell him I sent you!