Tag Archives: Twitter

Uncertainty: Accounting for Known and Unknown Outcomes

jayakody-anthanas-m1wFkw-Iyt8-unsplash.jpgNote: for the last few posts, I’ve been exhausting the store-house of prewritten pieces from other websites that I hadn’t yet transferred to this website. I believe all have been posted here now, so let’s return to our regularly scheduled programming.

I’ve had an article saved on Pocket for a few months now with a section highlighted. I don’t often highlight sections of articles because I don’t often keep articles on Pocket — once I’ve read it, I delete it (so the highlighting is superfluous). However, there was an article I came across a few months ago with a passage that stopped me in my tracks. It was in a rather weeds-y article about the Twitter war strongly worded discussion (?) between Nate Silver and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I won’t get into the details of it, because it’s not really necessary for the passage that popped, though I did want to set the context, in case anyone clicked through to the link and was confused.

About halfway through the article, the author begins a discussion on uncertainty. In particular, he’s talking about two kinds of uncertainty — aleatory and epistemic. [NOTE: You’re not alone if you had to look up aleatory — I don’t recall every coming across that word.] Anyway, here’s the key bit:

Aleatory uncertainty is concerned with the fundamental system (probability of rolling a six on a standard die). Epistemic uncertainty is concerned with the uncertainty of the system (how many sides does a die have? And what is the probability of rolling a six?).

How many times have you come across a model that purports to be able to predict the outcome of something — without there being a way to “look under the hood” of the model and see how it came to its conclusions? OK, maybe looking under the hood doesn’t suit your fancy, but I bet you partake in the cultural phenomenon that is following who’s “up or down” in the election forecast for 2020? Will POTUS be re-elected? Will the other party win? Or what about our friends on the other side of the pond — Brexit!? Will there be a hard Brexit, a soft Brexit, are they going to hold another election?!

All things, all events where the author of the piece or the creator of the model might not be adequately representing (or disclosing) the amount of epistemic risk inherent in answering the underlying question.

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So let’s bring this closer to home for something that might be more applicable. You make decisions — everyday. Some of you might make decisions that have an impact on a larger number of people, but regardless of the people impacted, the decisions you make have effects. When you take in information to make that decision, when you run it through your internal circuitry, the internal model you have for how your decision will have an effect, are you accounting for the right kind of uncertainty? Do you think that you know all possible outcomes (aleatory) and so the probabilities are “elementary, my dear Watson,” or is it possible that the answer to whether you should have cereal for breakfast is actually, “elephants in the sky,” (epistemic). OK, maybe a bit dramatic and off-beat in the example there, but you never know when you’re going to see elephants in the sky when you ponder what kind of breakfast cereal to pull down off the top of the fridge.

Where on the Internet is Jeremiah Stanghini – June 2016

One of the first few posts I wrote when I first started writing was a collection of the different places I could be found on the internet. That post was more than five (!) years ago. The other day, I happened to come across that post almost by accident and actually, even though I wrote two ‘updates’ to that post, it turns out that I wrote a second post almost a year and a half after that. In looking at those posts, I thought it might be fun to write an update to the series.

Even though I’ve already written an updated post to the first post, I thought I’d still look back on some of the places I used to frequent in that very first post five years ago.

Five years ago, it looks like I had planned on developing a presence on YouTube:

I have a channel on YouTube where I upload videos of presentations. You’ll also find videos that I “like” on YouTube along with videos that I have commented on.

As it happens, there really isn’t much more to my YouTube profile than links back to other places you can find me. I do have some things on YouTube, but that’s only if you’re a student in one of my classes (and have access to the lectures I’ve uploaded).

Similarly, I used to do a lot of writing for Squidoo. It’s been so long since I’d visited any of the things I’d written for that site that it’s not even called Squidoo (!) anymore — HubPages acquired them.

I also let my BodyTalk certification lapse, as my career went in a different direction.

It looks like I used to be a frequent commenter at other sites. In particular, I had profiles with IntenseDebate and Disqus (two popular commenting services). It looks like I haven’t had a comment with either of those two services in more than 2 years (almost 3.5 years with IntenseDebate).

Lastly, I highlighted two Toronto sports blogs that I used to be an active member of: Bluebird Banter and Pension Plan Puppets. If I check-in on my comment history for both those sites, it won’t even let me discern when I last made a post (as it’s been that long).

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If I look at the second post I wrote (in late 2012), the only carryover from the first post (of places I’m no longer that active) is the two commenting services: IntenseDebate and Disqus.

Now, let’s look at some of the places that I still frequent (in one way or another).

In that first post, I talked about writing posts (I’m nearly up to 600 on here). I also highlighted my LinkedIn profile (it’s up to date!), and my Twitter account (I like to share articles that I think people will find useful).

In the second post, I added two other places: Facebook and Quora. At the time, I used to be a frequent contributor to Facebook. Like Twitter, I liked to share articles that I thought people would find useful. I also liked to share pictures I found on the Internet that were either beautiful or provided a different perspective. Somewhere along the way, Facebook changed its algorithms and the people who “liked/followed” your page were no longer receiving all your updates. As a result, I stopped actively contributing in that environment. However, whenever I publish a new post, a link to that post is automatically uploaded to Facebook.

As for the second place — Quora — at the time, I did spend some time trying to build a presence on Quora. I wrote more than 60 answers, but it looks like I haven’t written anything for Quora in almost 3 years. I didn’t realize this until writing this post, but it looks like there are a number of answers that I’ve written for Quora that have more views than some of the things that I’ve written for this website.

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So, in the last 3+ years, how have my internet frequenting habits changed? Well, the best place to find me is still here on this site. Twitter and LinkedIn are also places that I continue to update. Two new places: Business2Community and Research Blogging. Business 2 Community is one of the top business blogs and Research Blogging is a community and collection of posts written about academic research.

The Long View Perspective on Big Data and Metrics?

One of the things that I like to write about is perspective. In my opinion, it’s so important to continue to look at things from different angles and assume other viewpoints to understand the many ways that things can interact. A little over a week ago, I came across a series of tweets from Chris Hayes that presented a perspective that I hadn’t considered:

Big Data is certainly something that has captivated the popular press and some might even say rightfully so. Of course, it’s important that we use metrics when making decisions, but is it possible that the pendulum has swung too far to metrics? It’s hard to say. Chris Hayes certainly seems to think so.

I like how he’s compared this to another phenomenon (can we call it a phenomenon?) from history where engineering took the world by storm. To be honest, given my age, and what I know about ‘recent’ history, I don’t know that engineering had as much hoopla as big data has today. Regardless, this perspective, this long view, is something that we all would be better off with. That is, looking at things from a longer perspective. Considering the adage that ‘history repeats itself.’ Maybe there’s something from our recent past that would help us better understand where we are today.

A good example of this might be international relations. If you’re looking for a ‘fictional’ example, may I recommend the movie “Now You See Me?”

Case Study: When The Twitterverse Turns on You

http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/case-study-when-the-twitterverse-turns-on-you/Every once and a while, Harvard Business Review posts a case study to their blog and solicits their readers to come up with answers to the case. After reading what was posted earlier today, I took some time on my flight back from Washington, DC to Toronto to see if I could develop a suitable strategy for responding to the ‘crisis’ at hand. Head on over to HBR and check out the Case Study. I’d be interested to hear some of your thoughts on how Canadian Jet should proceed.

Here’s what I came up with:

When faced with a decision like this, it’s important to ensure that the group isn’t succumbing to any biases in judgment and decision-making. Right off the bat, it’s clear that one potential trap is the sunk cost fallacy. While the decision to keep the contest running might be the right one, it’s necessary to discern whether this choice is being made because “this is our biggest social media campaign,” and we’ve got “nothing [else planned] on this scale.”

If it were my decision, I would advise Charlene to keep the contest. Right now, it’s going through a bit of a bumpy stage, but when viewed through an optimistic lens, these customers who have tweeted “doozies” can actually turn into some of Canadian Jet’s biggest assets. How? By directly addressing their concerns.

Seek out those customers on Twitter who have shared tweets that have had the greatest impact (reach via retweets, etc.) and apologize to them. Speak to them directly on Twitter, (but not in a direct message, part of the purpose in doing this is so that others can see that you’re) on Twitter and express remorse for their concerns. Where possible, maybe offer some sort of compensation in the form of a discount on their next flight or something similar. It’s important to keep clear that you don’t think that this makes up for the fact that they’ve “missed their daughter’s wedding,” but that you hope they can find some consolation in it.

Why Posting Duplicate Content to Social Media is a Good Idea

When I first connected my website to my Twitter account, I worried about reposting the same link. That is, when I tweeted, I didn’t necessarily want to be sharing something that I had already sent out. I figured if people had already seen what I had said, they wouldn’t need to see it again, right? Well, that might just not be the case.

Yesterday, I came across a creative answer to a question on Quora that I’m going to share below. A quick lead-in: the question asks about bizarre (and small) social experiments  that lead people to the opposite conclusion of their hypothesis. There are some great answers on the question, but this one in particular, applies to sharing content on the web:

We all get countless happy birthday message from acquaintances (veritable strangers) on Facebook.

Out of personal and professional curiosity, I decided to perform an experiment with 2 parameters:

1. I edited my “Facebook” birthday to the current day every day
2. I did this every day until not one person wished me happy birthday

A few people — mostly my closest friends — immediately noticed, but for the few first days, the volume of birthday messages hardly diminished day-to-day.

After a couple of weeks, I started getting a few people who were in on the “joke” wishing me happy birthday every day, along with a handful of “stop it, this isn’t funny” messages.

A few weeks later, a few people just went ahead and un-friended me (on Facebook only … I think).  But more interestingly, a couple people who had just recently wished me happy birthday, did so again.  And did so very sincerely!  They had merely forgotten.  More on that in a bit.

A couple months into it, the messages were still coming in (genuinely), but were down to just a couple or a single every day — along with the requisite friend who wished me HB every chance he got.

Finally, after just 103 days, I got no new happy birthday messages.

The span crossed 3 “major” holidays: Christmas, New Years, and Valentine’s Day.  My favorite messages were the “I had no idea your birthday was on Christmas!” types from pretty close friends.

The “wasn’t it just your birthday? Oh well, hope it’s a good one!” types were fun as well.

What to take away from this? I occasionally coach/teach people how to use social tools for marketing/whatever and one important lesson is that not everyone sees every message every day, so you shouldn’t be afraid of posting duplicate content, especially if it’s an important message or one that resonates well with a big audience.

And when people occasionally express concern over that concept, I tell this story 🙂

Of course, this is just one small social experiment, but it is certainly something to keep in mind when you think twice about sharing that blog post on social media more than once.

 

Twitter vs. Tweeter and the Efficient-Market Hypothesis

This past Friday, I didn’t spend much time in front of the computer, but when I happened to pop onto Twitter to see if there was any news, I noticed a couple of tweets that were rather alarming:

Some folks may look at that and laugh or think it’s funny. I don’t. I think it’s embarrassing. First, I’m hoping that “investors” doesn’t necessarily mean people who manage other people’s money. If that’s the case, I would be very sorry for those people who happened to have someone managing their money that didn’t know the different between Twitter and Tweeter. Yes, I realize they’re very close, but when you’re investing money, don’t you want to be sure you know what you’re doing? Second, how can this mistake even be happening? I could see maybe a few people making this mistake, but for the stock to be up 489%? I wonder if maybe much of that extra trading was people realizing that other people think that it’s the Twitter stock, so they start buying the stock.

That last point really doesn’t make sense, though, because Twitter’s IPO just went public.

Another disheartening thing to think about as a result of Tweeter is the efficient-market hypothesis. This is a fancy way of saying that the stock market (or financial markets) should have the most current information. Meaning, if someone hears good news about company X, they’ll begin to buy that stock (which will make the stock rise and more people will hear the news and the stock will rise some more). This process continues until, theoretically speaking, the stock has reached the price that people are no longer willing to continue buying the stock.

Well, if we think about what happened on Friday, it certainly blows the efficient-market hypothesis out of the water. So, I ask again — how could so many people get that wrong?

 

It’s 2013: Why Isn’t TV Live Streamed Online?

About a month ago, I wrote a post about the future of TV. I came to the conclusion that it was surprising that there wasn’t “live TV” online. That is, I am surprised that you can’t watch a TV on your laptop at the same time as you could watch it on your TV. Of course, I understand why that might not be the case right now (advertising, contracts, etc.), it seems like this form of entertainment is moving in this direction. When you take into account mobile TV, one has to think that live streaming TV shows is on the way, right?

It turns out that I’m not the only one frustrated by the lack of online TV streaming. Xeni Jardin, an editor/partner at Boing Boing (a rather popular technology zine), also shares this frustration:

As you can see, Xeni seems to think that we should be able to watch TV shows online at the same time that we can watch them on TV. This doesn’t seem like an unreasonable request, right?

It turns out, many of you out there agree with Xeni and I:

Market researcher GfK says 51% of those 13-54 years of age watch a TV program or movie via streaming video platforms. This is up from 48% in 2012 and 37% higher than three years ago.

What’s even more convincing is that the data go on to show that many folks would drop their Netflix service if cable companies offered a similar service at a similar price.

It seems to me one of a few things are happening:

a) TV executives already know all of this, but have run the data a different way and don’t think that people would actually follow-through on what they say when they answer these polls. [Not necessarily a response bias, but something more to the effect of the people who intend to vote on election day, but don’t.]

b) TV executives know this and they’re trying to convince the right people (CEO?) that this is what they need to do.

c) TV executives don’t know about these data.

Option c) seems the least likely, but I suppose it’s possible. Option a) seems like it could be plausible, but my guess is that the majority fall into option b). As a result, there seems to be a window of opportunity for an enterprising network to take a leap of faith and capture a great deal of value. Who’s going to be first?

Women Read More Fiction: Is That Why They’re More Empathic?

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a rather informative tweet:

 

When I first saw that, I was a bit surprised. Statistics tells us that for every 100 females born, there are 105 males born. So, there should be more boys than girls and as a result, we might expect that more boys would be reading than girls. Of course, there are so many other factors involved, but from a volume standpoint, I’d think that more boys would read than girls. I thought I’d click-through and read the report, but it’s behind a wee bit of a paywall to the tune of $799. As a result, I won’t be able to (maybe you or someone you know can?) read over the statistics. Nonetheless, I had a different direction I’d like to take this post. Empathy.

I’ve written before about how reading fiction can boost empathy. This very important human skill needs to be cultivated and one of the ways to do that is to read fiction. In addition, we all know the ‘stereotype’ that women are more empathetic than men. However, when there’s data to back it up, I suppose that it’s not so much a ‘stereotype’ as a likelihood. So, in putting these pieces together, my thought was that maybe this empathy gap has grown because women are more likely to read fiction than men. Sounds plausible, right?

In doing research for this post, I came across something from the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley. That post was talking about whether women’s empathy is the result of nature or nurture. It cited a few studies supporting both sides of the debate. I wonder if we could then add the data point of women reading more fiction to the nurture side… or the nature side? Nature side, you ask confused? Well, in saying that women read more fiction leading to greater empathy, we’d have to test whether women reading more fiction leads to a greater empathy or if women having greater empathy prefer to read. If you know anyone doing empathy research, this might be an interesting study.

Motivational Redux: To Make the Obituary in The Economist

About a week ago, I wrote a post about what could be the modern day version of writing yourself a $10,000,000 post-dated check. A few days ago, I saw a tweet that made me reconsider another common motivational activity: writing your own obituary. This tweet came from @GSElevator, which purports to be “things heard in the Goldman Sachs elevators.” Having never worked at a company liked Goldman Sachs (or Goldman Sachs, for that matter), I have no idea whether this account is purely a parody or if these things are actually spoken (or could be spoken).

Anyway, the tweet:

This sounds like it was a question asked in an interview and it’s great on so many levels. To begin, it shows ambition. The people who have obituaries written for them in The Economist are certainly no slouches. These are people who have accomplished — a lot. Second, it shows that the candidate reads The Economist (or at least that the candidate wants to provide the illusion that they do). Working at a place like Goldman Sachs means that The Economist would be required reading. Third (and unrelated to the interview), it gives us another opportunity to talk about ways to motivate ourselves. If you’re having trouble committing to that project or you just can’t get started on that book, you’ve got a number of ways (write your own Wiki page, post-dating a check, writing your The Economist obituary, etc.) to try and get you going.

Take a few minutes this Monday morning and think about that To Do list you haven’t quite gotten to in a while. What grand idea have you been putting off that you just know is brilliant?

 

Massive Miscalculation by GOP Chairman Reince Priebus: No Debates with CNN or NBC

Earlier today, I saw a series of tweets from the GOP Chairman, Reince Priebus:

At first blush, it seems like nothing more than some kind of a stunt to draw attention to the matter. It’s also a great way for the Chairman to do some interviews and bad-mouth CNN/NBC. As I thought about it a bit more, it seems like this can’t end well for the Chairman:

It wouldn’t surprise anyone that there are more Democrats who watch MSNBC and more Republicans who watch Fox News, but what about the people who watch CNN? Well, as it happens, this is home to the political Independents of the electorate. According to TiVo data (actually quite sophisticated):

CNN, which has branded itself as the cable news network without a partisan skew, has apparently made the sale among independent voters. The network’s biggest skew was among independents, 17 percent above the national average with that group.

So, the majority of Independents that watch TV get their news from CNN. Let’s play out this scenario for the GOP. Assume that CNN/NBC decide not to pull their “Hillary Programming,” then the GOP has two options:

1. They’re forced into reneging on their initial stance of no primary debates for CNN/NBC.

2. Or, Like they said, having no debates with those networks. I suppose there might be some unforeseen third option, but at this point, this is what it looks like.

If they pull they’re debates with CNN/NBC, they’ll be losing out on the largest concentration of Independents. For a party that’s currently not in power that wants to be in power, in what will be an “up for grabs” election with President Barack Obama joining the list of Presidents who’ve served two terms, it seems ludicrous that they’d want to remove “free media” of their candidates to Independents.

So, this would force them into reneging on their stance of not having any debates with CNN/NBC, right? Except that this may make them look weak with their base of voters, which usually wouldn’t matter. However, “Republicans like elected officials who stick to their positions.” From my vantage point, this ultimatum has backed the GOP into a corner for which there is no escape.

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Revisiting that third option… it may just be that no one cares about any of this when the 2014 midterms roll around or the 2016 general election.