The Shop I Want

Blog post at Rands in Repose

We’re in a world where you can find anything you want, which is great, except when you realize there’s a lot of everything. Google was created and thrives attempting to solve the everything problem for us. Google has made it wonderfully simple to find a thing, but just because you find a thing doesn’t mean you care about it. As you stare at a PageRanked list of stuff, you have a choice:

You can sit back and be force-fed the decisions and opinions of others.

Or…

You can have an opinion.

It’s not that I want a Stow Davis desk, it’s that I want to find that desk. I want to go to seven different antique shops and spend a weekend developing an opinion about the state of antique desks. I want to find someone who knows the entire history of Stow Davis desks and won’t fucking shut up about them.

The days are long, but the years are short

A great way to describe parenthood, coined by Gretchen Craft Rubin.

She has also made a short Flash video, which is well worth watching for parents who find themselves to be a bit frustrated with the daily grind and need to "reboot" their perspective.

Quote was found as part of this article, on being a more light-hearted parent.

Bonus quote: "happiness equals reality divided by expectations", by Alden Cass

Why is the world a mess?

Blog post by Scott Berkun

1. People don't listen
2. People don't read

There’s this assumption in our culture that with all the TV shows, and books, and websites, we’re all reading more and listening more, but I doubt that. It's become increasingly acceptable not to be listening (e.g. staring at your laptop or phone in meetings) and not be reading (skimming how many emails, or blog posts, in an hour). And I bet any culture, a team, a family, a country, where there is more real listening and real reading, people are happier and more successful at achieving things that matter.

But I’ve yet to see someone monetize listening, or reading. So the whirlwind of commerce naturally encourages less listening and less reading, but more of everything else.

Passive investing, with a dash of market timing

Blog post at Pop Economics

But as tough it is to see if the market is slightly over or underpriced, it’s actually pretty easy to see if it’s way over or underpriced.

Looking back at market prices and earnings for a little more than 100 years, Shiller found that the market’s average P/E10 (the shorthand when you use 10-year earnings) was about 15. What’s more, if you invested when the market was at a high P/E10, your returns for the next 10 years were almost certain to be much less than if you invested when the P/E10 was below 15.

Based on the CAFE10 metric, you slightly tilt your portfolio towards stocks or bonds.

Robert Shiller's CAFE10 Data
updated monthly

Rise of the Data Scientist

This post at FlowingData, which is a response to the "R is an Epic Fail" post at another blog, led me to an older post at FlowingData (which cites Hal Varian's comment regarding the forthcoming sexiness of statisticians).

As someone who finds the label "Data Scientist" appealing, I firmly believe in the following:

Similarly, those who can build visualization and analysis tools are the ones who will provide the next big thing.

So don't get too upset, R programmers, or all data scientists for that matter. While the software was bashed, you're getting a thumbs up. R is not the next big thing. You are. Besides, we all know that data is the new sexy, and in the end it's not about the tools that you use, but what you do with the tools.

My take-home message: Tools don't matter. Results do.

Doing the unprecedented is overrated

Blog post by Stephen Few

...doing the unprecedented is highly overrated.

Most of what we can do to make the world a better place involves, not doing the unprecedented, but doing what matters and what works [emphasis mine], whether unprecedented or not. This might not be as exciting as the unprecedented, but it’s desperately needed. I believe that too many opportunities are wasted because we glorify the unprecedented for its own sake.

In the field of data visualization, failures are more common today than successes, not due to complexity, but to the fact that few people have been trained in the simple principles and practices of graph design. As a result, they rely on software tools to do the work for them and most of those tools lead them astray, encouraging them to produce silly, useless displays...

Here’s an example of one of the earliest quantitative graphs, hand drawn by William Playfair in 1786. In his time, Playfair did the unprecedented by inventing or greatly improving many of the quantitative graphs that we use today.

1786! I think it's pretty clear that software isn't the issue. It's taking the time to learn what the right things are, and being disciplined enough to use them every time you're presenting information. Proper dataviz shouldn't be saved for "when you have time" - it should be an inherent part of the data analysis process.

Arthur Benjamin at TED 2009

"...I think that that [calculus] is the wrong summit of the pyramid. That the correct summit, that all of our students, every high school student should know, should be - statistics. Probability and statistics"