This reminds me of quite a few of the pie charts that claim to make a point.
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Communicating business dealings
We do quite a bit of spreadsheet analysis and case discussions in my class, and sometimes I have students make presentations of their analysis in a way that they are “selling” their analysis to the managers with the decision rights. They spend time fine tuning their presentations to be more convincing than other groups.
But sometimes they fall into bad habits, using stale jargon and omitting crucial assumptions. Here’s an example from the WSJ of our friends at Goldman Sachs, making a pitch that is very similar to a famous pitch that everyone with an email account has probably seen.
Made me smile.
What does free mean?
I don’t have very many, but the ios/droid app marketplace is interesting with all the free apps. I find myself hesitating to pay money for an app, even though having it would be quite useful and I get that the person who wrote it is trying to make a living. I’ll drop $2 on a cup of coffee, but resist paying 99 cents for a app I know I’ll use?
The I saw this article about trying to monetize blogging and was taken by this quote:
If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
Interesting thought now when loading a free app. Do you wonder who is buying you?
Using the brain to develop decision algorithms
There is not enough information in this article to know the details, but the inventor of the PalmPilot has a new venture to model decision making.
College football decision trees
Here’s a nice little article on using decision trees to predict football outcomes. Thanks JD!
Math music video
This is a little weird, but kind of cool. Songs about Mandlebrot Sets:
Football math
UConn surprised everyone for a fourth-down conversion late in the game against Pittsburgh. Here’s the math for doing this more in football.
Goizueta in the news
Some nice press for the undergraduate program here from the Fiske Guide to Colleges.
Time series graph
There are lots of time series graphs available, but sometimes there are more issues that you want to include. This is sometimes accomplished with bubble charts, but here’s a nice example using geography as the “x-axis”:
Graphs can say one thing, or another
First, I am not posting this to make any statement about Paul Krugman, or anything like that. But when comparing time series data, choosing the starting point can be more imporant than it seems, as this blogger demonstrates. You could imagine investing strategies being compared in a similar fashion. One graph shows strategy A is better, but with the same data and a different start date, another graph would show that strategy B is better.
Another issue is the choice of the other data sets – they can also be chosen to look “fair” but those time series contain special features that make the analysis less than fair. For example, compare company X with specially chosen company Y, because of the special charges for Y in a particular quarter make some observation about X seem more true.
Simple comparisons are not always so simple.