Evidence and Satire

Wired is reporting that James Randi has offered a $1m prize to anybody who can prove via a double blind test that homeopathy actually works.

He's had a long standing similar prize for anyone who can provide incontravertible proof that they have a 'paranormal ability', which has been untroubled by psychics in the US who seem to mostly avoid submitting to a test. Maybe they know in advance what the result will be...

It's a good stunt, but he's preaching to the converted. Maybe he'll persuade a few people who are using homeopathic remedies and don't know how they're made, but anybody who does know what's in a homeopathic remedy* and still pays for it isn't going to be inconvenienced by 'facts' or 'proof'. They're very likely to be the sort of person who when they say 'facts' or 'proof', you can hear the inverted commas.

If you can't persuade with evidence, hopefully you can still have a little fun though. I love this from Tim Minchin. His satire is as hard hitting as a $1m bet, which homeopathists will studiously avoid and it's a hell of a lot more fun. Richard Dawkins take note: You might be right, but for God's sake lighten up. Or should that be for science's sake?

You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine. Enjoy.





* Water. Or if you're a homeopathist, water with fond memories of other substances.

An electronic notepad. Finally!

Paper notes, notepads and hand-outs are properly annoying. It's my own fault for being disorganised, but I lose them, leave them at home and I'm convinced there's a troll under my desk who survives on a paper diet. It's the only sensible explanation for where all my handwritten notes could have been going.

I'm also a bit of a gadget fan and keep electronic files pretty well organised, so ever since my Palm Pilot was retired years ago, I've been waiting for someone to produce a working electronic notepad. Nothing as sophisticated (or expensive) as an iPad, just an electronic version of a day-book to scribble on , save the notes and email them occasionally

Microsoft looked like they were on the right lines with the Courier, but then they dumped it. Maybe everybody at Redmond is programming as fast as they can to stop Hotmail falling over again and there's no room for good ideas. Who knows?

Anyway, this week I've found the solution and it's brilliant.

For this recipe, you will need.

One Android mobile phone (free-ish.) Apparently iPhones work too.

A Google Docs account (free)

A copy of CamScanner (free)


You write your notes on anything you like - a notepad or just a scrap of A4 nicked from the printer and then use CamScanner to photograph them. It optimises the pictures, crops them, corrects the perspective if you weren't photographing the paper quite straight and then turns them into PDFs.

Now you may lose the paper, or feed it to your hungry under-desk troll.

Upload a PDF to Google Docs - straight from CamScanner - and Google will do clever things with optical character recognition (ocr) to make the content in it is searchable. Genius.

Edit: It's not actually quite that clever (yet.) You can convert to a Google Doc and Google will try to "read" your upload and re-write the text for you. Surely if you can do that then search by content and finding the original document can't be far away though. Evernote can do it.


Now you've got a Google Docs account with all of your scribbles in it, plus copies of all the bits of paper colleagues insist on giving you at meetings. All searchable and stored, safe and sound. You just have to remember your password...


Footnote:
CamScanner needs a copy of your Google login details to do the upload, which I wasn't entirely happy about. It promises to play nicely with them but my main Google account is pretty much indispensible and I'm not giving the login to an app store download, so I've created another one for the notes. You can always share docs between the two.

A bit of context

The UK police have launched a new website this week, which allows you to look up crime statistics at street level. The figures have been available for neighbourhoods for a while but this level of detail is new and now that the site is back up again, good fun to play with.

The methodology and lack of data history have been criticised. As always with a database this big, looking at the outliers doesn't find you interesting facts (much to the newspapers' annoyance) it finds you anomalies in the data. In this case, the 'most dangerous places in Britain' are streets where the postcode is used as a quick location to log all of the crime that happens in a city centre. It's not that 500 people a month are arrested on the same small street for being drunk and disorderly, just that the police need a postcode for their database, so they use that one.

I've recently moved house, up to my exciting new econometrics job in Leeds, so looked up my new neighbourhood.


Wow. It seemed like such a nice, friendly, quiet little town! Now I can see that just in the last month there have been assaults, burglary, theft from cars... I'm scared.

What about my old address in SE London? I lived there for five years and never had a problem (except for a chav nicking my satnav, but I'm an idiot for leaving it on display in the car.)


Suddenly I feel safer in my new home!

I'm sure a policeman would have looked at the Mirfield statistics and pictured a fairly safe little town. I'm not an expert though and any number above zero looks like a crime hotspot.

If you're producing a dashboard for a non-expert audience - whether it's showing crime or click through rates - then context is essential. Is the number you're looking at good? Bad? Indifferent? The old neighbourhood level mapping did give context and in that very important way was the superior tool.

A belated job update

So the break from econometrics didn't last very long and this blog's going to be getting livelier again... I've made the break from London and am building an econometrics capability for Brilliant Media, based in Leeds.

We're a smaller agency than the big London networks, but the largest independent in the UK and I'm really excited about the challenge. It's good to be back!

It will be nice to leave London behind too. The last twelve years have been great, but it was long past time to go. I'm not a city boy, or one of those Londoners who thinks maps of anywhere North of the Watford Gap just say "here be dragons" and have pictures of ships falling off the edge of the world. It's gorgeous up here.


If you'd like to talk about econometrics, please get in touch, I'd love to hear from you. And if you're looking for a 1.5 bedroomed flat in SE London with a great garden, then I'd love to hear from you even more...

Thanks for reading (hopefully one or two people are still reading) and stay tuned for a Lazarus-like resurrection of Wallpapering Fog.


Neil.

Take the long view. Except in a crisis.

There are many similarities between marketing mix modelling (econometrics) and weather forecasting. They both use data on the past to try to predict the future - though I'd be the first to admit that weather forecasting is harder - and they both struggle badly when you knock them out of their comfort zone. Neither forecasts well when they're in a situation that they haven't seen before.

Weather forecasts in the UK are, to put it kindly, struggling this week. My lovely new HTC phone brings me weather alerts and on Saturday it went from forecasting not really any snow, to heavy snow, to very heavy snow in the space of a few hours. Half an hour after it made up its mind that we were going to get some proper weather, the heavens opened and London went very white and very pretty in the space of about two hours.


There's a marketing angle coming, I promise.

I'd normally argue against taking a day-by-day view of marketing ROI. It's unproductive and it hides the big picture. Retailers especially have an obsession with yesterday's takings which is brilliant for stock control but terrible for working out whether your ad campaign is effective. Advertising has at least medium term effects and you're really looking to build a brand over the long term, so asking your analysts to spend their day working out why Tuesday was 0.5% down year-on-year is distracting at best.

This short term obsession ties in nicely with social media reporting. We're sure we need to track it - how many new Facebook friends, twitter mentions and positive blog posts - but nobody really seems to be able to explain why. If I've got an up to the minute tweet dashboard, what do I do with it? What do I change in my business?

The weather's just given us an example. Forecasts are unreliable and we're out of our comfort zone. What the hell is going on? Is the snow headed our way?

#UKSnow knows.


#UKSnow takes a hashtag on Twitter, a postcode and a report of how heavy the snow is, then maps all the tweets for you. Fabulous! It's doing better today than the Met Office rainfall radar; it updates faster and is reporting snow where the Met Office isn't (in places where it's definitely snowing!)

Most of the time the long view is the best one, but just occasionally, when our models get knocked out of their comfort zone there's a real use for social media dashboards. They can bring us information far faster and more accurately than a model ever could. Provided every day isn't nominated a crisis day, social media tracking is a powerful analysis tool.

Hotmail turkeys in voting for Christmas shocker

Microsoft did a brave thing last week. They sent the Hotmail team onto Reddit to ask users why they didn't like Hotmail.

I should probably have said 'to get feedback on Hotmail' but since nobody really likes Hotmail (I think I'm on safe ground there) it was a brave thing to do.

Some of the replies were a real surprise. I used to use Hotmail - most thirtysomethings did at some point because it's what there was when we first needed email. Apparently we're all leaving now though and when Microsoft asked what it would take to get us back, the first reply and one that kept coming up was...

"Rebrand it and run an ad campaign"

So much for focus groups. Everyone's an amateur marketer!

There's a good point hiding in there somewhere about how "@hotmail" sounds a bit unprofessional and lots of people would probably like an "@office.com" address but it's really not why we all left for gmail in droves.


Quick taste test. Is this a Microsoft product or a Google one?


That was too easy.

Hotmail's a mess. It's had half hearted attempts at social networking and news feeds bolted to it, is awkward to use and it doesn't play nicely with smartphones (through the web UI or IMAP) to name just a few problems. Actually, being a Microsoft tool it doesn't play nicely with anything that Microsoft don't build.

These are huge issues that need to be sorted long before you even think about a re-brand, otherwise you're just spending advertising money bringing people to your site, so that they can remind themselves how bad it is and disappear for another few years.

it's been a while since this one came out. Apparently some email users think it really works too.

Sure the Marketing Directors are wrong?

Brand Republic is reporting on a survey that says one in five marketing directors would rather the IT department handle their social media than the in-house PR unit (original press release here.)

"Seriously that is what the survey (by Wildfire PR) of 250 marketing directors and heads of marketing even found — one in five marketing chiefs believe the IT department should have control of a firm’s blogging and tweeting"

And PR Week on the subject...

"Rob Dyson, PR manager at children’s charity Whizz-Kidz, said: ‘Clearly a number of marketers believe social media are technical tools or an extension of the company website that IT should manage. But it is not just a bit of software and needs to be run by a part of an organisation that is personable."

Maybe they do believe it and maybe they don't, but rather than assuming - like a lot of commenters on the articles - that all those marketing directors don't know what they're doing, how about an alternative conclusion?

One in five marketing directors think so little of their PR team's ability to handle social media, that they'd rather IT did it instead.

Disagree? That's why the question is crying out for a follow up.

1. Who do you think should handle your social media?
2. WHY?

Otherwise what can you learn except to assume that 20% of marketing directors don't understand your industry?