picking winners

Now that preseason pro gridiron games have started up again, I’ve been thinking about whether or not I want to play in the game-picking pool I’ve participated in over the past few seasons. I’ve had some interesting results in the pool – I’ve done extremely well in the regular season, but horribly during the playoffs. […]

more on academic blogging

I’ve written about Lilia Efimova’s excellent PhD research before, and now she’s written another really good post. It’s structured around this table: This is a really nice taxonomy, and there’s not a whole lot that needs to be added to it. I suppose I take a bit more of an evolutionary view of academic blogging. […]

impact

There’s an interesting post on the Six Pixels of Separation blog today about metrics for social media. Here’s the problem that is set up: Maybe we have it all wrong (and I’m just as guilty as the next person). Why are we looking at how many people have joined Facebook overall? Why do we care […]

the long tail for restaurants…

… doesn’t exist, does it? Well, it exists, but how can you get to it? I was thinking about that today while Nancy and I had a fantastic lunch at a Japanese noodle place called Ganbaranba in Cairns. We’ve run across four classes of Asian restaurants in Australia, and you can divide them up by […]

albatrosses v. salmon

I think that last Friday’s post on ideas being cheap ended up being less clear than I had hoped. Ironically, it’s because I tried to tackle too many ideas at once – which supports my main point, but which detracted from my ability to make it! So I’m going to have another go at just […]

ideas are cheap

I’ve had a strange week. I’ve spent a lot of it working around some network data so that I can analyse it. It’s for a consulting job, and the guy that collected it gave it to me in a state that was ….. not what I was looking for. So it’s been a bit of […]

fail now! fail fast!

I grabbed a copy of an odd little book yesterday – it’s called Books vs Cigarettes by George Orwell. It’s a collection of six essays. They’re all pretty good (Orwell is always pretty readable), but I don’t see a lot of logic in assembling these particular essays into one book (the title essay is excellent […]