Alphabet DeepMind and NHS

Concrete example of the use of Big Data in creating a new prediction model.

Google will be using NHS data to warn doctors of potential kidney issues.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/23/13726280/deepmind-nhs-data-streams-app-new-deal

Triumph of the curious

This article in the Ringer analyzes the path Theo Epstein took to guide the Cubs to their first World Series victory in 108 years. He led a revolution of the "curious" over the incurious. His easy challenge to the status quo helped solidify the value of intelligently applied advanced analytics in baseball.

Data can be powerful, but it also needs to be harnessed carefully.

Here is a link to the article:

https://theringer.com/2016-world-series-chicago-cubs-theo-epstein-analytics-war-9f1248c44eb7#.fw8ba92p0

10 Ways to improve your Google searches

From this article:
Brightside: 10 Ways to Search Google

1.  Either This or That:  Use the word "or" to help you search both at once and select the one that you want.
2.  Search using Synonyms:  Use the ~ to help search for additional related terms.
3.  Search within websites:  Add the url for the specific site to the search term.
4.  Wildcards:  Use the *. Allows for any combination including the relevant term.
5.  When lots of words are missing:  Use "AROUND + (n)" to help. Example: I wandered AROUND(4) cloud will turn up results like "I wandered around lonely as a cloud"
6.  Use a time frame:  Add specific dates to the search to help focus the results.
7.  Searching for a title or url:  Use the term "intitle:" or "inurl:" Example:  "intitle:husky"
8.  Finding similar websites:  Use the term "related:" Example:  "related:nike.com"
9.  Whole phrases:  Add quotation marks around a quote to get the exact quote in order in results.
10.  Unimportant search words:  Use the minus sign to eliminate the word.  Example:  "Interesting books -buy" for books that are interesting but that you don't want to buy.

The cost of free shipping

I am more and more convinced that the unseen impact of logistics can make a tremendous difference in healthcare.

This article from Fast Company talks about the economics of "free" shipping. While organizations may not charge the customer for delivery, there is no such thing as free shipping. In fact, the rising costs of delivery are forcing many organizations to take a very hard look at their policies. I wouldn't be surprised if there are new incentives to pick items up in a store or otherwise offset the convenience of door-to-door delivery.

https://www.fastcompany.com/3061686/free-shipping-is-a-lie

Most of what you learned about investing is probably wrong

Interesting article:

http://www.fortunefinancialadvisors.com/blog/most-of-what-you-probably-think-about-investing-is-wrong

Sample of the findings:

Buying stocks trading at 52-week lows is not smarter than buying stocks trading at 52-week highs:

Similar to investors not wanting to buy equities when market indices are at all-time highs, many investors are extremely reluctant to buy stocks that are trading at or around 52-week highs.  The thinking, of course, is the same:  if one buys at the yearly high, he or she is simply setting him- or herself up for disappointment.  However, as the brilliant research team at Alpha Architect points out, this ignores two crucial factors:  momentum, which in the simplest terms means that stocks that are rising tend to keep rising, and stocks that are down tend to keep going down; and the bias of technical (i.e. price action) over fundamental concerns (e.g. the valuation of the company).  The Alpha Architect folks sum up the issue thusly:

It goes on to point out that higher risk doesn't necessarily result in higher reward.

The Apple approach to innovation

Vox has an article talking about the release yesterday of the Touch Bar for Apple MacBook Pro laptops. It's a significant advance. They explain why it succeeded for Apple despite the fact that this particular innovation had been tried before by other manufacturers but failed.

Apple controls its products tightly. This approach allows it to approach innovation very differently:

In contrast, Apple controls the entire “stack” for its products. It manufactures the hardware, writes a lot of the software, and even makes some of its own chips. This makes it hard to achieve a large market share, since it’s difficult for one company to serve a lot of different kinds of customers. But the example of the Touch Bar shows that the Apple approach still has some distinct advantages.

It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Apple successfully pulling off an ambitious innovation like the Touch Bar because it requires simultaneous investments on both the hardware and software sides of the business.

Apple’s ability to make dramatic changes to its platforms has been an important source of strength for the company. And it’s a big reason that two of Apple’s chief competitors — Google and Microsoft — have increasingly aped Apple’s business model in recent years.

Here is more on why Apple can lead far more successfully than its competitors despite having much less market share:

A feature like Touch Bar or Adaptive Keyboard is only going to succeed if it becomes a platform-wide standard. And on a decentralized platform like Windows, that creates a chicken-and-egg problem: Applications developers are only going to put in the effort to support it if it’s available on a lot of laptops. But laptop makers are only going to offer it if there’s a lot of application support.

This is a particularly severe problem in the Windows PC world precisely because the PC market is so competitive. The hardware for the Touch Bar is apparently expensive — Apple is charging $300 extra for the cheapest MacBook Pro with a Touch Bar compared with the entry-level MacBook Pro without it.

So if a PC maker added a Touch Bar to its laptops, it would be taking a big risk of getting undercut by competitors that skipped the Touch Bar and charged significantly less. This is probably one reason Lenovo’s adaptive keyboard was so much less impressive than the Touch Bar — the Chinese company couldn’t spend a lot on the feature and risk being priced out of the market.

Apple can guarantee that a significant percentage of their products will contain the new innovation. This allows the software makers to design products with the confidence that there will be a ready market for their work once the new innovation is finally released.

This model has been so successful for Apple that Microsoft and Google are now openly copying it. They have both ventured into producing their own hardware (Surface, Chromebooks, and the Pixel). All of this will likely lead to even more innovation in the years to come.

Here is a link to the original article:  http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/10/27/13441068/touch-bar-apple-google

A personal theory of relativity

In many ways, we have a way of adapting our internal frame of reference. Instead of conforming to some objective reality, we often will try to place ourselves into the reference and determine how something might seem to us.

Considering my own personal experience, I think that this is true. When we've gone on walks, I might consider two miles to be a relative stroll while my son (who strides at half my pace) may consider it an endless march!

This article from Science of Us discusses how baseball players differ in the ways that they personally perceive a pitch. To a good hitter, the ball can seem much larger than to someone who struggles to put the ball in play. The ball itself doesn't change--it's only our perception of it that does!

For a 2005 paper, research psychologists Jessica Witt and Dennis Proffitt set up a table beside a softball game in Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of their school, the University of Virginia. For a free sports drink, ballplayers — 47 in all — were asked to partake in a brief psychology experiment. They were shown a poster with eight black circles on it, ranging from 9 centimeters to 11.8 centimeters in diameter. They were then asked to pick which circle corresponded the best with the actual size of a softball, which measures 10 centimeters. After selecting their circle, they reported their stats: at bats, hits, walks, and the like. The result: The better they hit, the bigger circle they selected. “If you’re hitting well the ball looks bigger, and if the ball looks bigger, you’re going to hit better,” Proffitt tells Science of Us. “What that suggests is that there is a reciprocal relationship between the perceived size and how well you’re going to do, and how well you do is going to be reflected in how big you perceive the object.”

I learned a new concept:  affordance.

While we walk around with the common-sense assumption that everybody sees the same objective reality, Proffitt says that nobody sees the same reality. The geometry your brain takes in isn’t the “disembodied” geometry of yardsticks, meters, and inches, which mean a lot in the abstractions of engineering or physics or math, but the “embodied” geometry of your physical form: The most accurate measurement, to an individual, is the most personal. That a basketball hoop is ten feet high means something very different to you if you’re five feet or seven feet tall. While hoops and goals and roads have objective qualities, what we see and perceive is profoundly shaped by the subjective — by your ability to interact with them. The research backs this up: Golfers who are putting well see holes as bigger; football placekickers who score more field goals see the uprights as wider and the crossbar lower; successful dart throwers recall targets being larger. 
....
In psychology, this dynamic between an object and the things you can do with an object is called an “affordance,” coined by Cornell University psychologist and James J. Gibson, who is something of a Martin Luther–type figure in the study of visual perception. To Gibson, an affordance is the way an object and a subject fit together. “We call it a seat in general, or a stool, bench, chair, and so on, in particular,” Gibson wrote in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. It can be natural like a ledge or rock or artificial, like a couch or a bleacher. “The color and texture of the surface are irrelevant,” he continues. “Knee-high for a child is not the same as knee-high for an adult, so the affordance is relative to the size of the individual. But if a surface is horizontal, flat, extended, rigid, and knee-high relative to a perceiver, it can in fact be sat upon.” Regardless of what the object is, if it fits a sittable set of qualities, then you can take a seat. It affords that to you.

The article goes on to talk about how the best players are actually using pattern recognition to determine which pitches are the best to swing at.

I like the idea that the world conforms to our personal experience of it. I think that must be true because I find it difficult to imagine that we could all perceive things in exactly the same manner.

Here is a link to the full article:  The Science of How Baseball Players Hit Fastballs