• Home
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Privacy Policy
  • Special Offers
Business Intelligence Info
  • Business Intelligence
    • BI News and Info
    • Big Data
    • Mobile and Cloud
    • Self-Service BI
  • CRM
    • CRM News and Info
    • InfusionSoft
    • Microsoft Dynamics CRM
    • NetSuite
    • OnContact
    • Salesforce
    • Workbooks
  • Data Mining
    • Pentaho
    • Sisense
    • Tableau
    • TIBCO Spotfire
  • Data Warehousing
    • DWH News and Info
    • IBM DB2
    • Microsoft SQL Server
    • Oracle
    • Teradata
  • Predictive Analytics
    • FICO
    • KNIME
    • Mathematica
    • Matlab
    • Minitab
    • RapidMiner
    • Revolution
    • SAP
    • SAS/SPSS
  • Humor

Tag Archives: Only

Trial by Wombat! Don’t vote, it only encourages them.

February 2, 2021   Humor
 Trial by Wombat! Dont vote, it only encourages them.


Like the Geico ad with Captain Ahab seeking a parking space, the Trumpists are searching for that moment when the government magically gets overthrown. 

(CNN) They were there to “Stop the Steal” and to keep the President they revered in office, yet records show that some of the rioters who stormed the US Capitol did not vote in the very election they were protesting.

One was Donovan Crowl, an ex-Marine who charged toward a Capitol entrance in paramilitary garb on January 6 as the Pro-Trump crowd chanted “who’s our President?”

Federal authorities later identified Crowl, 50, as a member of a self-styled militia organization in his home state of Ohio and affiliated with the extremist group the Oath Keepers. His mother told CNN that he previously told her “they were going to overtake the government if they…tried to take Trump’s presidency from him.” She said he had become increasingly angry during the Obama administration and that she was aware of his support for former President Donald Trump.

[…]

Many involved in the insurrection professed to be motivated by patriotism, falsely declaring that Trump was the rightful winner of the election. Yet at least eight of the people who are now facing criminal charges for their involvement in the events at the Capitol did not vote in the November 2020 presidential election, according to an analysis of voting records from the states where protestors were arrested and those states where public records show they have lived. They came from states around the country and ranged in age from 21 to 65.

x

Wasn’t here involved with Posobiec and pizzagate or am I mixing grifters

— Sandi Bachom (@sandibachom) February 1, 2021

x

Funny thing happening in the QAnon world:

So many people are pretending to be U.S. military generals on Telegram and offering failed, specific predictions about The Storm (their name for a pro-Trump coup) that a major Q forum is temporarily banning links to Telegram. pic.twitter.com/D0CjHGJv4s

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) February 1, 2021

 Trial by Wombat! Dont vote, it only encourages them.

x

When some people say you should condemn the crazy conspiracy theorist in your ranks but it’s tough because condemning her would upset the largest group in your party, you have a problem beyond one crazy conspiracy theorist in your ranks. https://t.co/DEj3VjnWpx pic.twitter.com/mWUbuVcyO5

— Orin Kerr (@OrinKerr) February 1, 2021

 Trial by Wombat! Dont vote, it only encourages them.

x

Dogs have magic skills to make our moods better.

— Animal Channel (@AnimalChannel14) July 13, 2020

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

moranbetterDemocrats

Read More

Trump is only 62% fascist or 29 Benitos short of a dictatorship

August 22, 2020   Humor
 Trump is only 62% fascist or 29 Benitos short of a dictatorship


WaPo published an update to the estimation of whether Trump was more than a rhetorical trope as a fascist, or more of an actual, historical fascist.

29 more “Benitos” to go, Trump has yet to win reelection by rigged balloting and only has a fraction of the population incarcerated. Ripping children from their parents, and increasing disproportionate wealth by exploiting the Treasury are not so fascistic to the WaPo article writer. Not being an economic historian, John O’Neil does undersell the effects on the US economy with a looming recession. 

Capitalists were in bed with Hitler and Mussolini, willing to deficit spend for global conquest. Ferdinand Porsche’s tanks and Hugo Boss’s uniforms. Aside from the use of slave labor, there were those Nobel Prize nominations for Hitler, so Trump has a shot, considering how Spain, Chile, Argentina, and Belarus managed their dictatorships

Trump’s more about the kleptocracy than a thousand year Reich, leaving the world war for the second term. Destroying democracy might then garner a few more Benitos. Darn weighting is much like the dimensions from Trump’s physical exams or his dementia tests. Tim Snyder does leave more room for the kinds of tyranny that we are currently enduring and that may run rampant in the Trump second term. Just because we aren’t there doesn’t mean history won’t get us there. 

So where does Trump’s administration stand as he is nominated for a second term? He earned 47 of a possible 76 Benitos, or 62 percent. He remains the greatest threat to American democracy since the Civil War, but his exercise of power only partly resembles that of real fascists. He still faces checks and balances in Washington. He hasn’t shut down rival parties or uncompliant media.

He has not directed the armed might of the state against citizens on anything like the scale used by Mussolini, let alone Hitler. He does not have his own obedient “squadristi” eager to beat up foes, even if plenty of his followers advocate (and sometimes indulge in) violence against minorities and Trump’s opponents. He has not arranged the murder of prominent political opponents. The cult of violence is integral to fascism but far less central to Trump. He is not ruling like a genuine fascist.  

But he has shown pronounced fascistic leanings. In the right circumstances — a crisis he could manage triumphantly, a more sympathetic military — perhaps he would try to extend his rule beyond whatever the voters allow him and convert the United States into a repressive, racist dictatorship. Or perhaps stage phony elections that hand the reins to Ivanka and Jared. At least a few members of Congress would probably support him, just as many parliamentarians voted to give Mussolini and Hitler emergency powers. Those lawmakers did not know at the time just where fascism might lead. We have a clearer idea.

www.washingtonpost.com/…

x

A lot of Trump’s support comes from young angry white men, particularly the racist, incel, neo-Nazi variety. Trump hasn’t created a youth movement to rival the efforts of Hitler and Mussolini, but it rivals anything any American President has had. 2 Benitos (9/16) pic.twitter.com/fiz4S6a8op

— Riff Raff (@RichardAOB) August 21, 2020

x

3. Glorification of violence & readiness to use it politically (WP score 1)

I think the Washington Post was going easy on Trump even then. There’s an ever present sense of menace among his heavily armed supporters & tear gas has come to symbolise his presidency. 4 Benitos (7/16) pic.twitter.com/Dif84BJwgD

— Riff Raff (@RichardAOB) August 21, 2020

x

Call me a generous marker but I’m giving Trump full points for a fascist political movement, given where we are in the process. With a total score of 40/42 Benitos that’s one test Donald Trump really did ace. (16/16) pic.twitter.com/nAL7pUipAo

— Riff Raff (@RichardAOB) August 21, 2020

Trump is the kind of screw-loose blowhard who has inspired all too many of us to play armchair psychiatrist. We’ve been putting him on the couch for the entire run of his presidency. So most, if not all, of the insights presented by the upcoming documentary “#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump” (it drops on Aug. 28) will be familiar to any student of TISDS (Trump Is Seriously Deranged Syndrome).

Trump, as Dan Partland’s film explains, is a malignant narcissist. (Has there ever been a DSM diagnosis that sounded like more of a direct insult?) The film details the four qualities in Trump that define that syndrome: his paranoia (the feeling that any journalist who asks him a challenging question, or any staff member who doesn’t kiss his ring, is out to get him); his anti-social personality disorder (the constant lying, the lack of remorse about even the most destructive things he does); the sadism (the thousands of vicious attacks and insults in his tweets); and…well, his narcissism (do I need to detail that?).

In addition, the film analyzes his propensity to create and live in his own reality. It explores his absence of empathy — which, of course, is the defining quality of the sociopath. (They’re not insane; they just don’t care about you — or anyone else.) And it compares him to Hitler and Mussolini, and to the authoritarian leaders of our own time.

[…]

“#Unfit” never gets into what I’ve always thought of as the most mentally unsound aspect of the Trump personality, which is this: We all know how many lies he has told in office (and for years beforehand), since it’s well- documented. But apart from the sheer scurrilousness of his daily fraudulence, one has to wonder: What does telling that many lies, to the point that he may actually believe a lot of them, do to a person’s head? What reality is Donald Trump living in? If we knew the answer to that, they could title a new disorder after it, one he’d probably be proud to have his name on.

variety.com/…

x

USPS email tells managers not to reconnect sorting machines
Dallas distrib. center tried to restore 4 delivery bar code sorter machines but found parts were missing
DBCS machines are essential to USPS, handling the sort of envelopes used for voter ballots https://t.co/rodjEt3BHS

— Michiko Kakutani (@michikokakutani) August 22, 2020

x

Democracy is a value, so it must be valued, and it is a practice, so it must be practiced. If we want it, we must be open to learning from others, and then be prepared to take responsibility for ourselves. My reflections about learning from Belarus: https://t.co/8lmNbz58fJ

— Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder) August 16, 2020

x

The diversity of the Maidan is impressive: the group that monitors hospitals so that the regime cannot kidnap the wounded is run by young feminists.”https://t.co/8aCV9EUppV

— Hong Kong Sojourner (@DavidLloydSmit4) August 16, 2020

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

moranbetterDemocrats

Read More

Narrowing down table data to only print if certain conditions are satisfied

February 5, 2020   BI News and Info
 Narrowing down table data to only print if certain conditions are satisfied

suppose there is an ODE function F solved by NDSolve and the solution of this function is in the range [-40 : 34]. Only, I need where the F==0, or the value of F in the interval between [-1,1]. How can I achieve this by using table:

Table[If[F <= 10^-2, Print@F, Return["Exit", Table]];, {x, 3.2, 3.5, 0.01}, {y, 3.2, 3.5,0.01}]

Using the above code gives me all the negative region. So, I am trying to catch the value of function F when it close to zero or zero, and prints it if the following condition is satisfied: a) The F has a value close to zero. Thanks in advance for your time, and sorry if this is simple, I couldn’t find a solution within this site.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Recent Questions – Mathematica Stack Exchange

Read More

Show values in a chart only when a slicer is selected

January 29, 2020   Self-Service BI

Quick one today. This question came up recently: “I only want to show values in a chart when someone selected a slicer”. Now this is actually not that hard, so here is the trick (and a little bonus too).

First I created a page I wanted it including the slicer:

Now the next thing I want is that the values of the visual only show when I select a country. First thing I do is write a measure to only return the value of the measure when a country is selected through the slicer. I do this this by checking if there is a single value in the current context using the HASONEVALUE function. If there is a single value then show the measure value, otherwise return BLANK. When you return BLANK Power BI will not show the whole row or data point which is exactly what we want. BLANK just like in Excel means that it won’t be shown. The measure simply looks like this:

Measure =
IF ( HASONEVALUE ( Country[Country] ), SUM ( Sales[Units Sold] ), BLANK () )

Next I add this measure to the visual and voila we get what we want:

But is it? How confusing is it for users to just see empty whitespace? Probably very. So the first thing I would do is add a background to make it a bit more obvious something should be there.

But still this not really clear is it? What if we could give the users some instructions? Well turns out we can. Of course we can with DAX :). So we will do the reverse as before, when no slicer value has been selected I want to show some text. So I will create a measure and use a Card visual to show the text. The measure looks like this:

measure text =
IF ( HASONEVALUE ( Country[Country] ), “”, “Please select a country” )

I set the background to the card to 100% opacity and now we can tell the user to select a country first:

When I do select a country the label disappears (again using BLANK):

So that is pretty much it. Some pretty neat tricks that might be useful.

Share this:

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Kasper On BI

Read More

Only a game? Sport isn't just for spectators… it's a platform

February 7, 2019   CRM News and Info
edelman mvp Only a game? Sport isn't just for spectators... it's a platform

Stephen Bourke, a thought leader in the world of sports, serves on the board of SEAT (Sports Entertainment Alliance in Technology) and runs an online educational program with the Sports Business Institute in Barcelona called “Managing Digital Transformation in Sport”. He’ has already written twice on this blog on matters of sports and the world that we all are so desperately trying to enjoy our lives in. His posts are here and here.

Now, for the first time I’ve seen it anywhere, Stephen discusses sport as a platform. The business benefit of thinking of sport as a platform is rather massive, so read on. If you want talk to Stephen after you’ve read this — and you will — you can reach him here at LinkedIn or at @sb1sport on both Twitter and Instagram.

Stephen, the ball is in your court…


As a university student I had the good fortune to study sports history from a prominent professor who taught me that “‘sport is a microcosm of society.” This article explores that concept in our digital times.

If, like me, you would need to look up “microcosm” you could come across its Oxford Dictionary definition as “a community, place, or situation regarded as encapsulating in miniature the characteristics of something much larger”. Sport as a microcosm then reflects the people, culture and history of its community. This is why sports participation and fan behaviours vary so much from country to country and even across a regions.

Since sport is a microcosm of society, it follows that the sports business is a microcosm of digital society. Here are some of these ways.

Social media is part of the sports product

The world has gone social thanks to networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Their emergence uncovered the latent desire that people have to connect with others and share their thoughts and experiences online.

In society, some of the largest and most dynamic online conversations are those that form around sports teams, leagues and events.

Also: NASCAR’s digital evolution on track 

Social media metrics show a surge in activity during live sporting events. Due to its in-the-moment relevance, Twitter has become the online sports bar for the connected world with over half of all posts being sports-related (at least they were in less complex political times). In addition, live sports are often the only time that many people post to their social accounts. 

Social sharing has become such a common part of the sports experience that teams, leagues and events have updated their business models to make social media part of their events and build team loyalty out to a year-round program.

Social media activation in sports has created a consumer (fan) engagement behaviour unique to sports called second-, and even, third-screen consumption of the event. 

Data as sports entertainment

As society has become increasingly quantified through digital data, organizations have taken steps to make analytics a part of their business by figuring out which data is most beneficial for them to capture and analyze for decision-making, real-time marketing and overall business growth. 

Consumers too have also come to rely on data to inform their purchase decisions: think TripAdvisor for travel, Yelp for dining, and mobile search for just about everything. 

Beyond corporate and consumer use, data in sports has evolved to the point that — like social media — it too has become part of the sports product. Data in sport offers entertainment value for fans that rely on team and player stats for greater immersion and investment into the match or event. 

No other industry has to bring as much of its product data into the public realm as sports to satisfy its market demands. As consumers, we don’t seek out our favourite hotel’s occupancy rate or the latte to macchiato ratio of our go-to barista.  At game time though, every possible current and historical statistic had better be at our fingertips and on our preferred device.

Sport has a digital twin

The 2017 Internet Report by Kleiner Perkins observed that society is moving towards valuing human-to-computer interactions more than direct personal contact. If sport is a microcosm of society, how does valuing computer interactions play out in the industry? The answer is in the evolution of competitive gaming into the powerhouse esports industry that it is becoming. 

Esports have become too popular and too commercially relevant to be ignored by traditional sports with many leagues now setting up their own e-leagues. Esports are creating another entry point into fandom since it is possible that the first experience youngsters have with a sport is through its electronic counterpart such as FIFA, NBA 2K or Madden NFL.

Also: Promoter to pour $ 50 million into new esports competitions CNET 

The 2017 Internet Report revealed that the same number of Millennials (27 percent) felt a strong affinity for their favorite esports team as those with the same attachment for traditional sports. 

In the future it is likely that studies will define the impact that the popularity of esports is having on younger generations of potential sports fans. Knowledgeable folks in sports and esports already know this to be true from their own observations about new fan behaviours.

Sport is no longer in competition with other sporting codes or leagues for fans; it competes with digital attention hogs that, as well as esports, include social media and video streaming.

Sport-as a-Platform 

The concept that platform-based business is the way to stimulate growth in the digital economy is now well documented and it is the inevitability of any digital transformation. 

At its simplest level, digital platforms allow organizations to exchange data and interact with their consumers. Because they are online, they offer scalability and global access. Ray Wang, Founder and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research has prophetically observed that “if a business doesn’t have at least 20 percent of its business model based around data it won’t have a business for the digital era”.

Sure, there are game changers who have revolutionized markets, and even re-defined consumer behaviours, such as Amazon, Netflix and Uber. Whilst their achievements are celebrated, legacy organizations have been quietly going about their own revolutions so that platform capabilities will improve their connection with markets and improve operations. 

Sports is no exception and even technology leaders have remarked on the industry’s level of transformation, including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella who has observed that “there isn’t another industry that is being so fundamentally transformed with data and digital technology like sport”.


Read more


Our earlier observations about social media, data and esports influence on the sports product all contribute to the industry’s unprecedented level of disruption.

In sports, fan data can come from a range of sources including ticketing, merchandise, web, social media, mobile, the event app and other digital touch points. As a result, sports properties are able to integrate data of individuals and fan segments that go well beyond traditional demographics to feature lifestyle characteristics such as attitudes and preferences. In fact, teams need to build personal relationships with fans as the price of admission that they pay for a lifetime of loyalty.

An output of disruptive forces and increasing fan demands is that sporting properties are developing powerful and insightful fan-data platforms. They are able to utilize their fan platforms for a range of purposes including customized experiences, personalized marketing and pricing decisions. 

These fan data platforms are also becoming an increasingly strategic asset for the corporate partners of teams and this is where the concept of “sport-as-a-platform” for economic partners has evolving from.

Modern sport organizations can now offer brands the lure of access to their fan data through a mutual alliance that allows the partner brand to create activations that entice fans, and their data, into the brand’s own platform. 

Also: NFL in London: How big data is helping to change the game when it comes to player performance 

Sport organizations that have pioneered the industry’s platform model to engage fans include La Liga team Real Madrid whose platform efforts have focused on bringing their 450 million online followers into the fold. Long-term sponsorship arrangements such as Real’s lucrative 10-year deal with Adidas show the possibility for platform alliances in the digital era.

Other notable platform pioneers include German club FC Bayern Munich, the most valuable team in the largest European economy, and Orlando Magic, a mid-market team in the NBA, whose platform-inspired innovation creates magical moments for their fans.  

Sponsors are moving away from “analogue awareness” —  the hope that their brand involvement would passively move fans towards loyalty-by-association. They now pursue a “digital relationship” where the brand engages with fans-cum-customers from within their own platform ecosystem. Unique offers, fantasy games and competitions are some ways that sponsors generate fan data into their platform.

The ROI on sponsorship investment shifts to the subset of a team’s fan platform that the brand is able to convert into their own customer data platform. This is not big brother at work; this is the outcome of a genuine value exchange offered from brand to fan – and how sports business is a microcosm of the broader economy!

Shifting from an analogue to digital sponsorship model modernizes the following set of circumstances.

Now that the world of sports is competing with forces external to the industry, the previously unthinkable is happening – the decline in sports viewership on traditional TV.

Also: NBA analytics and RDF graphs: Game, data, and metadata evolution, and Occam’s razor

For example, despite more than 100 million US viewers of Super Bowl 2018 on NBC, it was down by seven percent from the previous year. Numbers watching the 2016 Rio Olympics declined by 25 percent or more in some markets compared to London 2012 and it was a similar story with the Winter Olympics. 

Several of the world’s other biggest sporting events including the NBA, English Premier League and international tennis have also reporting declining numbers of traditional TV viewers. The end of this downturn doesn’t seem in sight as fewer Millennials follow sports — 38 percent compared to 45 percent of Generation X according to McKinsey research — and the rate of sports participation is also dropping off around the globe.

Against this backdrop, we could expect that corporate investment, or sponsorship, of sports properties would reflect this same trend. However, the opposite is true.

According to the World Advertising Research Center (WARC), sports sponsorship revenues were predicted to grow by nearly 5 percent in 2018 and PWC’s “2018 At the Gate and Beyond” found that sponsorship and advertising is predicted to grow at a rate of 5.5 percent. This is second only to growth of digital media rights (11 percent) and ahead of the other main revenue streams of licensing and merchandising, participation fees, ticketing and hospitality, and traditional TV rights.

Featured stories

Now that platform models offer greater economic value than traditional modes, and since sport is a microcosm of society, the sports industry has become a virtual platform for economic businesses.

To maximize this new commercial advantage of sport-as-a-platform there is a lot of new digital ground to cover. Sponsorship still seems to fit into the famous John Wanamaker marketing philosophy of “half the money I spend is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”.

WARC has reported that only 19 percent of sponsorship professionals say they can measure return on investment. They also quote research agency MKTG findings that 37 percent of surveyed executives have a standard way to measure the impact of sponsorship, with digital and social media analysis popular methods. (OK, not quite Wanamaker’s 50 percent, but you get the idea.)

Also: Magic: The Gathering launching esports league with $ 10M prize pool CNET

According to PWC’s Sport Survey 2018, “56 percent of industry leaders believe that senior management at global sponsors are behind the curve in understanding how to engage with the millennial consumer based on the shift in consumer behaviour with regards to sports media.” 

PWC respondents believe that sponsors should focus on driving ROI through personalized fan targeting through better CRM data  (73 percent) as well as branded content for own digital channels and branded content for rights holders digital channels (at 47 percent each).

In other words, sport leaders recommend that sponsors should pursue a platform-based approach to fan engagement similar to their own. Brands need to consider their sponsorship of sporting properties as sponsorship of fans. This does require a rethink on sponsorship capabilities, investments and processes to get on the right side of Wanamaker’s ledger.

Maximizing sponsorship ROI is not all on the shoulders of sponsors. A genuine partnership between rights holder and brand should be established around their respective platform value of fan-to-consumer data. From their granular understanding of fans, rights holders can target brands that match to their fan profiles in a partnership of journey and discovery rather than traditional transactions (like Real Madrid and their 10-year arrangement with Adidas).

Don’t forget the creative

For all this talk of the science around activation and commercial returns, the art of engagement shouldn’t be forgotten and nor should the reasons why fans are part of sports — for fun, enrichment and celebration.

WARC found that for 73 percent of respondents, brand awareness was the primary reason for sponsorship investment. However, the path to awareness can be a fickle one with the connected generation, i.e., all fans are no longer tolerant of passive logos and obvious interruptions.

Positive sentiment should be creatively nurtured by thinking like a fan with the sweet spot being activations that add value via the brands online and offline event presence. Sponsorship role models like Budweiser’s FIFA World Cup deal and Emirates Airlines deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers have become expert in this field.

Conclusion

It is more than a happy coincidence that social media has become a part of the sports product which has extended the event from a weekend time slot to year-round entertainment. In doing so, sports properties have found ways to monetise the online reach that they have established. 

Metrics are moving to engagement, interaction and financial return on investment (as are those of brand partners). Rights holders are becoming increasingly social businesses inspiring industry leaders to conclude that teams themselves are becoming like media companies.

As media companies, via content distributed over digital and social channels, sport organizations are evolving the value of their digital properties in ways that appeal to brands – hence the global growth of brand investment in sponsoring sports.

Media-like business models are emerging in sports with examples including:

  • Rights holders defining digital content categories and assigning sponsorship valuations to these assets such as team announcements, injury reports, game highlights, MVP and so on.
  • Rights holders introducing variable pricing structures for branded digital content with more value attached to prime-time posts, such as game day or post-victory slots. Progressive teams are also offering brand partners campaigns that are metric driven such as number of social media views or impressions.  
  • Rights holders are evolving internal structures to reflect their commitment to high-quality content, fan analytics and platform infrastructure by merging formerly separate departments like digital media, analytics and technology into an internal media house.

Sport, like society, continues to evolve and that is good news for sport organizations and brands alike who adapt to this new playing field of algorithms, analytics and fun.


Thank you Stephen. You’ll be seeing more of him here as 2019 rolls on. 

Next up, next week….The CRM Watchlist 2019 and the Emergence Maturity Index (EMI) Award Winner 2019. I know you are breathlessly awaiting it. See ya then.  — Paul Greenberg

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

ZDNet | crm RSS

Read More

The only thing we have to fear…

November 4, 2018   Humor


© Rob Rogers

Could this election get any sillier? Is the dominant topic really a small, ragtag bunch of refugees fleeing Honduras in Central America? They have just only crossed the border into the most southern part of Mexico, and their numbers are already decreasing. Apparently they are going to walk north across mountainous country full of dangerous criminal organizations. Hardly anyone thinks that many, if any at all, will even make it very far, let alone within spitting range of the US border. And yet Donald Trump is sending US troops to the border now, even though it is illegal for the military to operate as police inside the US.

This is not our greatest problem in the US. In fact, it is almost not worth any mention at all. But even Fox News is talking about it nonstop. Don’t believe me? Here’s actual footage from Faux News:



Also published on Medium.

Related

 If you liked this, you might also like these related posts:
  1. Conservatives have nothing to fear but fear itself
  2. We Have Nothing to Fear, …
  3. Conservatives and Genetic Fear
  4. Make America Fear Again
  5. Nothing to Fear

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Political Irony

Read More

Black Friday/Cyber Monday Is Coming – and It's Only the Beginning

October 20, 2018   CRM News and Info

Are you a retailer trying to get ready for the 2018 holiday season? Well, I’m afraid I can’t help you.

Just kidding. Sort of.

I could just sit here and share yet another checklist to remind you of all the standard e-commerce table stakes you need to master. Things like load testing, inventory monitoring and management, mobile site optimization, security compliance, paid ads, email drip campaigns, social media campaigns and customer support.

However, what I really want to do is help you get ready for Cyber Monday 2019. And 2020. And 2025. And all the shopping days in between.

Where to begin? Let’s take a long, hard look at your commerce infrastructure.

Big doorbuster sales may be the bread-and-butter strategy for your standard Black Friday weekend, but if you’re looking for long-term success, you’ll need to think beyond new features and promotions. You’ll need to make sure your commerce platform is capable of carrying your storefront into the future, where the world of e-commerce (and commerce in general) moves at a rapid, and accelerating, pace.

Can your commerce platform get you where you need to go? If you suspect the answer is no — don’t panic! Following are four major insights on development, internationalization, channels and data that will help you get ready for the future.

1. Continuous Improvement Allows for Flexibility

Amazon’s dev team deployed new code to production at an average rate of once every 11.6 seconds, Director of Platform Analysis Jon Jenkins
revealed at a Velocity Conference talk in 2011. What does this mean in layperson’s terms? It means that the folks at Amazon continually have been building new functionality, updating existing features, A/B testing, and fixing bugs to gradually improve their product and overall customer experience. That’s why they have such phenomenal business results.

If you’re looking to get ready for the future, you’ll want to make sure your org supports this technology-first approach to development. By merging small amounts of code frequently,
continuous integration allows dev teams to write better code, be more productive, ship faster, and respond to customer experience requests quickly.

Through
continuous deployment (or to a slightly lesser extent, continuous delivery), teams then can automate building, testing and deploying so that software continues to be released in short cycles, allowing for incremental updates.

Smaller, frequent updates offer flexibility, but they also offer the opportunity to build toward a big update without having to shut your entire site down. I recently got an email from a major retailer saying, “…we are about to code freeze for November.”

If your site is on code lockdown for two months before the holidays (that’s 16 percent of the entire year, by the way) because you don’t feel confident that your infrastructure and software can handle changes without crashing, you are falling farther behind every day. The Amazon Effect is real.

2. Tap Into New Markets by Going International

Optimizing your site for international markets means more than simply using a currency converter, or setting up international shipping options. It means personalizing your e-commerce content, defining your targeted products, and tailoring your sales strategy to specific regional markets.

If you’re a clothing retailer looking to tap into new markets, you’ll want to be strategic about the types of merchandise you market to consumers. Different types of messaging resonate with different kinds of people living in different places. Is a casual register more appropriate, or should the voice stick to being formal?

Likewise, a shopper in a sunny suburb in the U.S. has entirely different needs from a shopper living in a rainy city in the UK. It’s not just about localization. Internationalization requires considering new promotions that resonate with new markets, like
Singles Day in China. It also means accommodating shoppers in countries who primarily browse on their mobile devices, or in offline mode.

With new markets come new sales strategies. You’ll want to make sure your commerce platform can accommodate different exchange rates and taxes (e.g. value added tax), and you’ll also want to be flexible with how your reporting interprets conversion. As for shipping, you’ll want to set up the proper rules for international shipping so that shoppers don’t get blindsided by high shipping costs.

E-commerce is commerce, and commerce is global. If you can’t accommodate, respect and support the needs of your international neighbors, your conversion rates will suffer. Amazon gets this. Fortunately, there are commerce platforms out there with the technology to support internationalization. For retailers looking past the next big hit or sale, it’s worth checking out.

3. Omnichannel Reflects How Shoppers Actually Buy

It’s a bit of a buzzword now, but there’s a reason why omnichannel is so widely discussed in commerce. Savvy shoppers no longer make their purchases through one point of sale alone. Now, the customer journey may consist of several touchpoints, which may begin in-store, continue to a marketplace site accessed on a mobile app, and finally end on a desktop computer.

That’s why it’s essential for retailers to offer as seamless an experience as possible for shoppers, so that they can experience the best of the brand consistently as they continue down the channel stream.

Unfortunately, the troubling reality is that many retailers struggle with offering this seamless experience. That’s often because there’s no single source of truth for their data — not for inventory, not for customer data, not for traffic, user experience or marketing metrics.

Imagine running an online storefront that doesn’t share data with its Amazon marketplace storefront, its brick-and-mortar locations, or anything else. If the online storefront inventory runs out of shirts on Cyber Monday, that site isn’t selling more shirts. Meanwhile, in the backroom of a physical store five miles away, hundreds of shirts sit there, in stock, ready to be shipped.

Omnichannel requires customization. It requires a flexible infrastructure that won’t break when you try to launch a new loyalty program, a mobile POS, or a new fulfillment option like in-store pickup. In return, it provides retailers with a holistic view of data across channels. Imagine how nice it would be to have a centralized place to monitor and manage every order, shipment and conversion.

4. Real-Time Data Is Everything

I’m just going to put it bluntly: If your data isn’t connected in real time to what’s happening with your store, you’re flying blind.

When it comes to big shopping events like Cyber Monday, there’s no time to lose. With the major influx of traffic, sales and support inquiries, you’ll need to be on top of things as they come, second-by-second. Even relatively straightforward functions like inventory management can be hopelessly bungled if you have to wait for your system to generate an overnight cron job just to know what’s in stock.

Through algorithmic real-time data, retailers immediately can spot trends as the promotion carries on. They can use those trends to predict behavior and make timely decisions to provide a greater shopper experience, resulting in greater conversion.

Is one product type converting poorly compared to other products? Play with pricing. Is it receiving zero conversions? There may be a problem with its checkout CTA. This type of instantaneous dialogue simply would not be possible in a static model.

So how can retailers employ real-time data? Again, it all goes back to infrastructure. You’ll want to make sure your infrastructure is
event-driven and has the ability to retain and analyze data. Consider looking into NoSQL databases like
MongoDB, which account for many types of data schemas in real time.

In conclusion, do what you need to do to get through this holiday season, of course. Check off all those essential table-stakes items. Batten down the hatches! Once you’ve recovered from the frenzy of this year’s short-term promotions, though, it’s time to think about your long-term goals.

Rethink your development process. Make sure it’s flexible and allows for continuous improvement. Tap into new international markets. Reflect how shoppers actually buy, then establish a single source of truth for data. Last but not least, always maintain a real-time dialogue with your customers.

I hope this holiday season is successful beyond your wildest dreams. I also hope that when the rush is over, you’ll take a deep breath, reflect on how it all went, and ask yourself: Can this commerce infrastructure get us to where the market will be next year? Five years from now? Ten? If you don’t like the direction you’re headed, the best time to begin the process of making a course correction is now.
end enn Black Friday/Cyber Monday Is Coming   and It's Only the Beginning


Sara%20Hicks Black Friday/Cyber Monday Is Coming   and It's Only the Beginning
Sara Hicks is cofounder and CEO of
Reaction Commerce, the fastest-growing open source commerce management platform used by modern retailers.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

CRM Buyer

Read More

3D Printing Isn’t The Only Printing Tech To Pay Attention To

September 9, 2018   BI News and Info
 3D Printing Isn’t The Only Printing Tech To Pay Attention To

Over the last few years, discussions of printing technology have focused squarely on the 3D rapid prototyping and additive manufacturing spaces. It’s easy to understand why. The continuing development of 3D printing technology promises to create a fundamental change in the way companies develop and manufacture products, deliver custom industrial solutions, and even how we approach surviving in space.

While those are exciting developments, they’ve tended to eclipse the rest of the printing industry, which continues to be integral to companies all over the world. Today, that industry is still dominated by well-known hardware manufacturers like HP and Canon and online print shops like GotPrint, but there are some exciting new printing technologies coming along, which when commercialized could change a number of industries forever. They represent an evolution of traditional inkjet printing that might enable whole new products and make existing processes more precise and efficient. Here’s a look at two of the most notable new technologies in the printing space and what they could ultimately mean to businesses.

Nanographic printing

The world of digital printing has long relied on inkjet technologies. In fact, for almost 40 years, little has changed about the technology that most commercial printers use to reproduce images on a variety of substrates. Still, inkjet technology has always had inherent limitations. First, its print quality is dependent on the quality and physical characteristics of the print medium, which limits the flexibility with which inkjet printers can be deployed. That could be changing.

Through a new process called nanographic printing, it is now possible to create high-quality image reproductions on almost any substrate – with no variance in quality and without sacrificing speed. The process distributes billions of nanometer-sized ink droplets onto a heated blanket, which results in a 500nm-thick dry polymetric film. That film, once dry, may be transferred onto almost any material, creating near-perfect image reproductions in an abrasion-resistant laminated layer. Currently, the technology is being deployed for large-scale print operations, but could soon be miniaturized to displace inkjet printing as the go-to business printing technology.

Acoustophoretic printing

Another new printing technology that’s under development may end up having nothing to do with image reproduction but may revolutionize a wide range of industries all the same. It’s all based on the work of Harvard University researchers that have found a way to harness the power of sound waves to manipulate fluid droplet formation. The process, called acoustophoretic printing, makes it possible to print almost any type of liquid onto a substrate. That means that future printing systems could be freed from limitations on the viscosity or electrohydrodynamic properties that come with existing printing systems.

In the abstract, that may sound like an incremental advance, but it could revolutionize industries from pharmaceuticals to food production and many more. The heart of the system applies high-intensity, focused sound waves at the point of a printer nozzle to amplify the force of gravity on the liquid in the system. Amazingly, the force created is more than four times that found on the surface of the sun – enabling hyper-precise sizing and unparalleled fluid delivery control. Critically, it’s also non-destructive, meaning that it’s safe for applications in biosciences, where fragile cellular materials are not suitable for existing printing technologies.

Sharing the spotlight

These new printing technologies make clear that additive manufacturing and 3D printing advancements may soon be sharing the spotlight with a variety of other crucial printing breakthroughs. Their effects may echo up and down industries and supply chains, making possible innovative new products and increasing flexibility in production environments. They illustrate the fact that liquid-based printing technology is continuing to evolve in ways that seemed impossible a few short years ago – and may end up facilitating as many new business breakthroughs as their oft-discussed 3D counterparts. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

To learn more about how new printing technologies are impacting businesses, read The Impact Of 3D Printing On ERP Systems.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Digitalist Magazine

Read More

Sh*t from Shinola: Trump only hires the best enablers of his nonsense

July 29, 2018   Humor
 Sh*t from Shinola: Trump only hires the best enablers of his nonsense

“This is someone who is highly knowledgeable of women being cycled through for horrible and degrading behavior”

Someone has been hired so Trump can tell shit from Shinola


Red Hens look out, Zombie Roger Ailes comes to the White House and “Necessary Evil” has a new doorman.

Bill Shine will know what to do with random citizens yelling at Cabinet members and even bloody-eyed media members as state-run media looms… Imagine Molotov coming to mix cocktails or Goebbels coming to help Hess decorate his cell. 

Shine’s usefulness will be measured in Scaramucci units as #TrumpRussia gets closer to Lord Dampnut. He’s already been on the job for a few days and reported to be accompanying Agent Orange to Montana today and we’ll see if the schitck changes. Imagine how he’ll take John Kelly’s place.

Propaganda needs its clerks, too. Lord Dampnut only trusts those discards from the Roger Ailes regime, and Murdoch wants his own back-channel into the Oval bedroom.

Shine’s experience suppressing sex crimes will be important as the Stormy Daniels and Summer Zervos lawsuits move forward, likely revealing more 45* character flaws.

Perhaps the MSM can start asking Bill about his past at Fox News, covering up for BillO and Hannity. Or will it go all WWE with Shine attacking Carlson for kafaybe effect.

Shine is notorious for telling female executives that sexual harassment at @FoxNews was a “necessary evil”


Maggie Haberman: “Irony of Shine’s hire to a premiere post at the White House – he was considered untouchable by many other prospective employers.”

x

Since we now pay Bill Shine’s salary, feel like we’re owed a full accounting of his role in covering up nearly two decades of sexual harassment and blackmail.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 5, 2018

x

Trump has officially announced former Fox executive Bill Shine as his new comms chief, but several lawsuits against the network allege Shine was Roger Ailes’ chief protector through years of sexually harassing female staff https://t.co/8JjLQMIDhX

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) July 5, 2018

“A growing number of women at Fox News have alleged,” @davidfolkenflik has reported (https://n.pr/2u74biv ), Bill Shine “was aware of deeply inappropriate behavior against them and deflected, ignored or sought to suppress their concerns.”



www.mediamatters.org/…

x

Now that Bill Shine is running communications at the White House, reupping my piece on how Trump’s disregard for the truth goes hand in hand with with his appalling treatment of women https://t.co/WVMPiWFrfs

— Quinta Jurecic (@qjurecic) July 5, 2018

“Just Smoke”

I was in his office for one of our chats. On the wall across from his desk was a deck of TVs showing all the news networks. The volume on each was turned off. Shine was sitting at his desk, and I was in a chair facing him. The televisions were behind me. In the middle of our conversation, Shine said, “Excuse me.” He picked up the phone and dialed an extension. I heard his end of the call: “Why did you change the shot? Why did you cut away from the fire?…OK, OK. Go back to it, and stay on it.” Polite but firm. He hung up.

What was that about? I asked. Shine explained that there was an underground electrical fire near the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, and Fox had been airing a live shot of smoke rising through a grate. When Shine noticed that the director had switched to other news, he called the control booth. Shine wanted to stick with the happening-now images of billowing gray smoke—even though this was far from a dramatic image of a major blaze. It was simply smoke coming through a hole in a sidewalk. No flames. No heroic fire-fighters battling a conflagration. No soot-covered victims. Just smoke. The network followed Shine’s command and returned to the shot.

Why do you want to broadcast that? I inquired. With a wide grin on his face, Shine explained: “People will sit on their couches and watch a live shot of a fire for hours and hours. They will not switch the channel. Flames are the best. But smoke is the next best thing. We have smoke. We stick with smoke.”

He’ll fit right in.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

moranbetterDemocrats

Read More

Health care bots are only as good as the data and doctors they learn from

June 23, 2018   Big Data
 Health care bots are only as good as the data and doctors they learn from

The number of tech companies pursuing health care seems to have reached an all-time high: Google, Amazon, Apple, and IBM’s Watson all want to change health care using artificial intelligence. IBM has even rebranded its health offering as “Watson Health — Cognitive Healthcare Solutions.” Although technologies from these giants show great promise, the question of whether effective health care AI already exists or whether it is still a dream remains.

As a physician, I believe that in order to understand what is artificially intelligent in health care, you have to first define what it means to be intelligent in health care. Consider the Turing test, a point when a machine becomes indistinguishable from a human.

Joshua Batson, a writer for Wired magazine, has mused whether there is an alternative measurement to the Turing test, one where the machine doesn’t just seem like a person, but an intelligent person. Think of it this way: If you were to ask a random person about symptoms you experience, they’d likely reply “I have no idea. You should ask your doctor.” A bot supplying that response would certainly be indistinguishable from a human — but we expect a little more than that.

The challenge of health care AI

Health is hard, and that makes AI in health care especially hard. Interpretation, empathy, and knowledge all have unique challenges in health care AI.

To date, interpretation is where much of the technology investment has gone. Whether for touchscreen or voice recognition, natural language processing (NLP) has seen enormous investment including Amazon’s Comprehend, IBM’s Natural Language Understanding, and Google Cloud Natural Language. But even though there are plenty of health-specific interpretation challenges, interpretation challenges are really no greater in this particular sector than in other domains.

Similarly, while empathy needs to be particularly appropriate for the emotionally charged field of health care, bots are equally challenged trying to strike just the right tone for retail customer service, legal services, or childcare advice.

That leaves knowledge. The knowledge needed to be a successful conversational bot is where health care diverges greatly from other fields. We can divide that knowledge into two major categories: What do you know about the individual? And what do you know about medicine in general that will be most useful their individual case?

If a person is a diabetic and has high cholesterol, for example, then we know from existing data that the risks of having a heart attack are higher for that person and that aggressive blood sugar and diet control are effective in significantly lowering that risk. That combines with a general knowledge of medicine which says that multiple randomized controlled trials have found diabetics with uncontrolled blood sugars and high cholesterol to be twice as likely as others to have a cardiac event.

What is good enough?

There are two approaches to creating an algorithm that delivers a customized message. Humans can create it based on their domain knowledge, or computers can derive the algorithm based on patterns observed in data — i.e., machine learning. With a perfect profile and perfect domain knowledge, humans or machines could create the perfect algorithm. Combined with good interpretation and empathy you would have the ideal, artificially intelligent conversation. In other words, you’d have created the perfect doctor.

The problem comes when the profile or domain knowledge is less than perfect (which it always is), and then trying to determine when it is “good enough.”

The answer to “When is that knowledge good enough?” really comes down to the strength of your profile knowledge and the strength of your domain knowledge. While you can make up a shortfall in one with the other, inevitably, you’re left with something very human: a judgment call on when the profile and domain knowledge is sufficient.

Lucky for us, rich and structured health data is more prevalent than ever before, but making that data actionable takes a lot of informatics and computationally intensive processes that few companies are prepared for. As a result, many companies have turned to deriving that information through pattern analysis or machine learning. And where you have key gaps in your knowledge — like environmental data — you can simply ask the patient.

Companies looking for new “conversational AI” are filling these gaps in health care, beyond Alexa and Siri. Conversational AI can take our health care experience from a traditional, episodic one to a more insightful, collaborative, and continuous one. For example, conversational AI can build out consumer profiles from native clinical and consumer data to answer difficult questions very quickly, like “Is this person on heart medication?” or “Does this person have any medications that could complicate their condition?”

Not until recently has the technology been able to touch this in-depth and profile on-the-fly. It’s become that perfect doctor, knowing not only everything about your health history, but knowing how all of that connects to combinations of characteristics. Now, organizations are beginning to use that profile knowledge to derive engagement points to better characterize some of the “softer” attributes of an individual, like self-esteem, literacy, or other factors that will dictate their level of engagement.

Think about all of the knowledge that medical professionals have derived from centuries of research. In 2016 alone, Research America estimated, the U.S. spent $ 171.8 billion on medical research. But how do we capture all of that knowledge, and how could we use it in conversational systems? This lack of standardization is why we’ve developed so many rules-based or expert systems over the years.

It’s also why there’s a lot of new investment in deriving domain knowledge from large data sets. Google’s DeepMind partnership with the U.K.’s National Health Service is a great example. By combining their rich data on diagnoses, outcomes, medications, test results, and other information, Google’s DeepMind can use AI to derive patterns that will help it predict an individual’s outcome. But do we have to wait upon large, prospective data analyses to derive medical knowledge, or can we start with what we know today?

Putting data points to work

Expert-defined vs. machine-defined knowledge will have to be balanced in the near term. We must start with the structured data that is available, then ask what we don’t know so that we can derive additional knowledge from observed patterns. Domain knowledge should start with expert consensus in order to derive additional knowledge from observed patterns.

Knowing one particular data point about an individual can make the biggest difference in being able to read their situation. That’s when you’ll start getting questions that may make no sense whatsoever, but will make all the sense in the world to the machine. Imagine a conversation like this:

BOT: I noticed you were in Charlotte last week. By any chance, did you happen to eat at Larry’s Restaurant on 5th Street?

USER: Uh, yes, I did actually.

BOT: Well, that could explain your stomach problems. There has been a Salmonella outbreak reported from that location. I’ve ordered Amoxicillin and it should be to you shortly. Make sure to take it for the full 10 days. The drug Cipro is normally the first line therapy, but it would potentially interact badly with your Glyburide. I’ll check back in daily to see how you’re doing.

But while we wait for the detection of patterns by machines, the knowledge that is already out there should not be overlooked, even if it takes a lot of informatics and computations. I’d like to think the perfect AI doctor is just around the corner. But my guess is that those who take a “good enough” approach today will be the ones who get there first. After all, for so many people who don’t have access to adequate care today, and for all that we’re spending on health care, we don’t yet have a health care system that is “good enough.”

Dr. Phil Marshall is the cofounder and chief product officer at Conversa Health, a conversation platform for the health care sector.

Let’s block ads! (Why?)

Big Data – VentureBeat

Read More
« Older posts
  • Recent Posts

    • Accelerate Your Data Strategies and Investments to Stay Competitive in the Banking Sector
    • SQL Server Security – Fixed server and database roles
    • Teradata Named a Leader in Cloud Data Warehouse Evaluation by Independent Research Firm
    • Derivative of a norm
    • TODAY’S OPEN THREAD
  • Categories

  • Archives

    • April 2021
    • March 2021
    • February 2021
    • January 2021
    • December 2020
    • November 2020
    • October 2020
    • September 2020
    • August 2020
    • July 2020
    • June 2020
    • May 2020
    • April 2020
    • March 2020
    • February 2020
    • January 2020
    • December 2019
    • November 2019
    • October 2019
    • September 2019
    • August 2019
    • July 2019
    • June 2019
    • May 2019
    • April 2019
    • March 2019
    • February 2019
    • January 2019
    • December 2018
    • November 2018
    • October 2018
    • September 2018
    • August 2018
    • July 2018
    • June 2018
    • May 2018
    • April 2018
    • March 2018
    • February 2018
    • January 2018
    • December 2017
    • November 2017
    • October 2017
    • September 2017
    • August 2017
    • July 2017
    • June 2017
    • May 2017
    • April 2017
    • March 2017
    • February 2017
    • January 2017
    • December 2016
    • November 2016
    • October 2016
    • September 2016
    • August 2016
    • July 2016
    • June 2016
    • May 2016
    • April 2016
    • March 2016
    • February 2016
    • January 2016
    • December 2015
    • November 2015
    • October 2015
    • September 2015
    • August 2015
    • July 2015
    • June 2015
    • May 2015
    • April 2015
    • March 2015
    • February 2015
    • January 2015
    • December 2014
    • November 2014
© 2021 Business Intelligence Info
Power BI Training | G Com Solutions Limited