This week one of our sample suppliers said “no” when we asked if we could re-contact respondents for a purpose other than our original request. Good thing I asked, and you know what? I’m glad they said no. I want suppliers to think carefully about seemingly simple requests, and to point out ways in which…
If there is one thing I hope you remember from your college statistics class, it’s this: Correlation does not imply causation. This is especially important to remember in our world of big data. Any large dataset will have hundreds of thousands of correlations, but most of those correlations will reflect purely random occurrences that mean…
Last year, Gartner, which charts new trends and emerging technologies via its “Hype Cycle” tracking, decided to abandon its tracking of Big Data. The reason? Big data, they said, has become so ubiquitous and embedded in so many other technologies, that it is no longer a thing of its own. And yet, how many of…
Here is a brilliant thought experiment about big data, published as a one-paragraph short story in 1946 by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges: “. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the…
Every year I peruse the listings of summer college training courses on research methods. Part of it is nostalgia—I loved school. But I’m also looking for courses that will keep me and our Versta employees at the forefront of new knowledge and research techniques. (I didn’t learn R in graduate school, so yes, I took…
A vivid illustration of a statistically spurious relationship is this: People who wear hats tend to drive slower. But there is no causal relationship, as hats don’t cause people to drive slower. It’s just that older people wear hats more than younger people, and older people tend to drive slower. That’s actually kind of interesting,…
Every two years marketing executives from more than 60 corporate members of the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) vote on the most important marketing topics they need to understand better. They represent companies like Kraft, Colgate-Palmolive, Bank of America, Nielsen, and Walmart. MSI—a think tank, of sorts, whose mission is to “bridge the academic and business…
Ever wonder what all those big data companies, who make tons of money selling information about you, actually know? With newly heightened concerns about data privacy, some companies will finally give you a peek. And it’s not too impressive. Maybe it’s good enough for mass marketing, but for those of us in research who sometimes…
The New York Times Magazine ran a feature article in June implying that big data and quantitative algorithms are the secret of how Obama won the election. The young, technologically-savvy “Obama-wonks” who toiled in “the cave” writing thousands of lines of computer code, took advantage of huge repositories of data from the likes of Facebook…