Entries tagged as ‘data-driven world’
David Anderegg thinks we should no longer use the terms ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’:
[Anderegg] says that merely mentioning terms like nerd or geek serves to perpetuate the stereotype. The words are damaging, much like racial epithets, he says, and should be avoided.
Why?
[Because] math, science and computer science, Dr. Anderegg said, are courses that young people too often associate with nerds and geeks. As a result, he added, “they sabotage themselves in these fields, and the nation’s work force is suffering.”
“The best way to combat this,” he said, “is put it to bed,” banishing “nerd” and “geek” to the linguistic dustbin.
I am not sure how much I agree with Anderegg. On the one hand, I think he has a point that historically certain sets of skills did not confer young students with a great deal of popularity. In many cases, this pressure to conform and thrive provided students with a disincentive to develop their skills in math and the sciences. However, I think culturally we’ve seen a shift, especially in the last 20 years. Being able to create cool applications, websites, etc, is a source of popularity these days (what some have termed the phenomenon digital natives). Most students today revel in having some degree of basic computer science/coding literacy–those that have exceptional skills reap an even greater return socially. Furthermore, many people now embrace the term ‘geek’ or ‘nerd’ (I often times use it to describe myself–e.g. ‘data geek’ or ‘analytics nerd’). Continue reading
Categories: Misc
Tagged: data-driven world
November 18, 2009 · 1 Comment
That’s one way to interpret Zack Greinke’s claiming of the award for 2009:
It was not surprising that Greinke won, since his earned run average, 2.16, was the lowest in the American League since 2000. But his decisive margin of victory over Seattle’s Felix Hernandez was a sign that voters overlooked his deficiency in another bedrock statistic: wins.
Greinke tied for seventh in the league in victories, with 16. The lowest previous total for an A.L. starter in a nonstrike season was 18.
To what extent voters are finally starting to incorporate the perspective of sabermetric analysts (e.g. many traditional statistics, like wins, distort the quality of individual performances) is still unclear. However the vote for Greinke is pretty good evidence that progress is being made.
What’s more exciting for me is that not only was a pitcher voted the award who was dominant in newer, alternative statistical categories, but that he himself incorporates these statistics into his game plan and pitching strategy: Continue reading
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: baseball, data-driven world, Sabermetrics, statistics
Ana Andjelic channels my thoughts on data- and fact-based decision making in an interesting post on ad campaigns:
How can we then decide that a campaign was “better” than another one? We rarely look at a campaign data – partly because the actual metrics data is proprietary and not available to anyone beyond walls of an agency and of their clients…
General, and generally available, feedback mechanisms and benchmarks for success don’t really exist. While it may not have been possible before to know exactly if a TV/print/outdoors/radio campaign influenced particular brand affinity and purchase decisions, digital lets us do things differently.
This means that we don’t have to judge works of others purely on elusive criteria of “creativity”, but on actual data on how this creativity fared with people (what did they do? and what did they do next?).
Read the whole thing.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tagged: Advertising, Brands, data, data-driven world
