To those of you with young children, here's a peek into your future.
After years of hard work and your best efforts (OK, mostly your best efforts) ...
I predict that your adorable bundles of joy will someday wish they could send you this card.
So, take a moment to think about your Mom ... and remember that she was very young when she did those things to you ...
... and what you make them mean is up to you.
Here's a funny clip from SNL in honor of Mother's Day.
I came across a post from 2009 about social media. 10 years later, with the knowledge of how much data we use today, it's quite a read.
Here it is in its full glory.
Social Media Is Changing Everything: October 18th, 2009
My son won't use e-mail the way I did. So how will people communicate and collaborate in the next wave of communications?
Here is a peek into the difference that is taking hold. I was looking at recent phone use. The numbers you are about to see are from the first 20 days of our current billing cycle.
How can that be? That level of emotional sluttiness makes porn seem downright wholesome.
But, of course, that isn't how he sees it. He is holding many conversations at once. Some are social; some are about the logistics of who, what, when, where and why ... some are even about homework. Yet, most don't use full sentences, let alone paragraphs. There is near instant gratification. And, the next generation of business people will consider this normal.
Is social media a fad? Or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?
Welcome to the World of Socialnomics. This video has a bunch of interesting statistics ... and is fun to watch.
Other Resources:
Social Media Is Changing Everything: April 20th, 2019
Looking at the stats from 2009 is pretty funny
For some context, I looked up the comparative numbers for 2018.
Here's what happens every minute of every day on the internet
via Lori Lewis and Chadd Callahan
A little different than 2009 ...
It's a special weekend.
For Jews, it's Passover - the holiday honoring our exodus from Egypt.
For Christians, it's Easter - the holiday honoring Jesus's resurrection.
The overlap can be seen in DaVinci's Last Supper, a Passover Seder, and Jesus's last meal before his crucifixion.
For both, it's a holy and family-centric time. A reminder to appreciate what we have, and how we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors.
One of the memorable phrases from Exodus is when Moses says "Let my people go!" For generations, people assumed he was talking to the Pharoh about his people's freedom. After a week of eating clogging matzoh, matzoh balls, and even fried matzoh ... for many Jews "Let my people go" takes on a different meaning.
Hope you celebrated with family, food, and a reverence for all the blessings around you.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
via KDNuggets
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
March Madness is in full swing and will have the world's attention for a few more days. As you could guess - most brackets have already busted. Louisville lost, UC Irvine won, and Duke barely weathered UCF's onslaught.
via FanSided
Lots of skill, lots of adrenaline and lots of natural talents (including amazing physical talents). Here is a picture of 7'6 Tacko Fall. Tacko still looks taller than his opponents even when kneeling.
via UCF Basketball
The allure of March Madness is the same as gambling or trading. These are all fertile grounds for emotion, biases, and statistics.
The holy grail is mighty elusive in March Madness (as in most things) ... For example, the odds of getting the perfect bracket is 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (2.4 trillion based on a Duke Mathematician's formula that takes into account rank). It's easier to win back-to-back lotteries than picking a perfect bracket. Nonetheless, I bet you felt pretty good when you filled out your bracket.
Here's some more crazy March Madness Stats:
via Duke University
Feeding the Madness
"Not only is there more to life than basketball, there's a lot more to basketball than basketball." - Phil Jackson
In 2017, I highlighted 3 people that were (semi) successful at predicting March Madness. A 13-year-old who used a mix of guesswork and preferences, a 47-year-old English woman who used algorithms and data science (despite not knowing the game), and a 70-year-old bookie who had his finger on the pulse of the betting world. None of them had the same success even a year later.
Finding an edge is hard - maintaining an edge is even harder.
That's not to say there aren't edges to be found.
Bracket-choosing mimics the way investors pick trades or allocate assets. Some people use gut feel, some base their decisions current and historical performance, and some use predictive models. You've got different inputs, weights, and miscellaneous factors influencing your decision. That makes you feel powerful. But knowing the history, their ranks, etc. can be helpful in making an educated guess and they can also lead you astray.
The allure of March Madness is the same as gambling or trading. As sports fans, it's easy to believe we know something the layman doesn't. We want the bragging rights of that sleeper pick, of our alma mater winning, of the big upset.
You'd think an NCAA analyst might have a better shot at a perfect bracket than your grandma or your musical loving co-worker.
In reality, several of the highest-ranked brackets every year are guesses.
The commonality in all decisions is that we are biased. Bias is inherent to the process because there isn't a clear cut answer. We don't have the answers to "who will win" and we don't have the answer to "what makes a perfect prediction".
Think about it from a market efficiency standpoint. People make decisions on many factors - sometimes irrational ones - and that creates inefficiencies & complexities. It can be hard to find those inefficiencies and capitalize on them - but they're there to be found.
In trading, that's where AI and advanced math come in - taking away our biases and identifying inefficiencies humans miss.
Can machine learning also help in March Madness?
“The greater the uncertainty, the bigger the gap between what you can measure and what matters, the more you should watch out for overfitting - that is, the more you should prefer simplicity” - Tom Griffiths
The data is there. Over 100,000 NCAA regular season games were played over the last 25+ years, and we generally have plenty of statistics about the teams for each season. There are plenty of questions to be asked on that data that may add an extra edge.
That being said, people have tried before with mediocre success. It's hard to overcome the intangibles of sports - hustle, the crowd, momentum - and it's hard to overcome 1 in 9.2 quintillion odds.
Two lessons can be learned from this:
Something to think about.
The US grounded the Boeing 737 Max after similarities between two crashes. It's good they did, safety first, but it definitely caused some headaches coming back from Saskatchewan. There's an interesting thought experiment here to understand the complexities that the airlines had to solve.
Imagine a 737 holds 200 people and does 4 or 5 flights a day. American has 24 737s in its fleet. That means each day ~24,000 people are displaced on American Airlines alone. They're replacing those planes with smaller regional jets – meaning more flights, more small airports, and more delays. The logistical/supply chain dynamics are a nightmare.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading - May 5th, 2019
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
Lighter Links:
Trading Links:
Posted at 06:27 PM in Business, Current Affairs, Gadgets, Healthy Lifestyle, Ideas, Just for Fun, Market Commentary, Personal Development, Science, Trading, Trading Tools, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (1)
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