Brief thought exercise: has modern politics mostly become about Big Data and targeting?

Famous narrative of Obama winning in 2008 (and again in 2012) was that the Democratic machine had better data, analysis, and targeting methods. This has been discussed for years. The Republicans have a good deal of problems at the national… Continue Reading

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Mass shootings are actually seemingly good for gun sales

Logic might indicate that, after something like Sandy Hook (where actual children were murdered), people might hit the pause button on buying guns, just as a general “whoa” thing. (The devil’s advocate approach is that “Well, I’m not intending to do that… Continue Reading

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Sanga Moses figured out an innovative way to help Uganda, perhaps re-contextualizing “innovation” in the process

People love to band about the term “innovation” — there’s a whole issue right now because of the recent New Yorker article on “disruptive innovation” — but most people actually use it the wrong way. (It’s similar to how many people think… Continue Reading

On health care, patient engagement, and social physics

Last summer, I worked for a pretty large health care organization in between my two years of graduate school. My primary focus/assignment was on fixing the Intranet for one business unit of this organization — made sense, because my background… Continue Reading

The most important people on Wikipedia might be Carl Linnaeus, Jesus, Michael Jackson, and Hitler

If you use two approaches to ranking web pages — PageRank (Google-developed) and 2D Rank (which measures how many external sources cited) — and you apply those ranking systems to Wikipedia, here’s what you learn about the “most important people… Continue Reading

Kiribati, an island of 100K in the South Pacific, just banned commercial fishing. That seems like a big step.

Here’s the article, and here’s the money quote: “If you think of the ocean as a bank account in which everybody withdraws but nobody makes a deposit, then protected marine reserves are like savings accounts that produce interest,” Sala told… Continue Reading

Goodbye, Greatest Generation

More signs in the ongoing ‘Boomers out, millennials in’ discussion that will soon re-shape global society: at the 40th anniversary of D-Day (30 years ago), there were close to 11 million D-Day veterans still alive. Last week, at the 70th… Continue Reading

Are hashtags going to become really valuable during the 2014 World Cup?

FIFA is definitely going big-time on social media for the 2014 World Cup, and it appears that brands might be as well. Here’s a quote via Mashable: “Connecting with fans posting through social is a critical opportunity for advertisers, who can engage… Continue Reading