The election result this week in Alberta, Canada confounded a lot of people and cast the art of polling in a bad light. The polls predicted that the Wildrose Party would win, but they were trounced by the PC Party. Two days before the election, one poll gave the Wildrose 38% versus the PCs 36%. [...]
The Economist magazine is taking a jab at another sort of inflation. Women’s pant sizes, while nominally the same, have actually been increasing in girth. The British new magazine estimates that an average size 14 pair of women’s pants “is now more than four inches wider at the waist than it was in the 1970s.” [...]
Facebook sent out a message the other day on its new way of counting “check-ins” to improve accuracy. The result of the increased “accuracy” will be a drop in the number of check-ins. The message said: “We are revising check-in numbers on Facebook Pages to give you a more accurate picture of how people are [...]
Today* stores start selling our book—misLeading Indicators: How to Reliably Measure your Business. It has been a while coming. It’s natural for us as authors to wonder how it will “perform”. Many of our acquaintances wonder too, and ask us how we expect it to perform. Their indicators are usually sales or royalties. Those are [...]
There is a little graphic being circulated around the Internet intended to show that President Obama has recklessly doubled the total US debt accumulated since President Washington. As a piece of political propaganda it is brilliant. It implies that President Obama’s administration is worse than [...]
A “leading indicator” is supposed to forecast, or at least to help the person using it, to make a forecast. The Conference Board recently announced that it was changing its Leading Economic Indicator to address structural changes that have occurred in the US economy in the last few decades. The new indicator was released on [...]
There have been several recent high-profile cases of scientists hoaxing, forging, trimming, cooking or falsifying their data. These cases occurred in spite of the fact that scientific publications must be peer-reviewed before publication, and that scientific findings must be replicated before they are confirmed. Would the safeguards in place in most business catch similar acts? [...]
Whether you are writing a blog like this one, or run a major e-commerce website, it’s natural to want to know how many people visit. There are lots of tools—generally known as web analytics—to measure web site traffic. The problem is, “People don’t visit websites. Their computers do.” But you cannot identify how many people [...]
The standard measure of wealth is GDP per capita. The chart below shows that Americans have been getting continually wealthier for decades, with a few blips here and there (source of data). The measure of wealth—Gross Domestic Product, is based on the dollar value of economic transactions. Such a measure depends crucially on the definition [...]
I snapped this picture at a cross walk in Manhattan near Central Park over the weekend. What does it say? Stop or walk? You could walk and not, technically, be jaywalking. You stand a good chance of getting smacked by a car though if you do. You’d be technically right. And maybe even dead right. [...]