The very real danger

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The fundamental fact about all of us is that we’re alive for a while but will die before long. This fact is the real root cause of all our anger and pain and despair. And you can either run from this fact or, by way of love, you can embrace it. 

When you stay in your room and rage or sneer or shrug your shoulders, as I did for many years, the world and its problems are impossibly daunting. But when you go out and put yourself in real relation to real people, or even just real animals, there’s a very real danger that you might love some of them. 

And who knows what might happen to you then? 

Jonathan Franzen 

Data Science articles from July 2021

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Honing your machine learning and pattern recognition skills with a simple regression problem 

Once a useful number becomes a measure of success, it ceases to be a useful number

Goodhart’s law haunts artificial-intelligence design: just how do you communicate an objective to your algorithm when the only language you have in common is numbers?

The Pentagon has created a team of hackers to test military AI by probing pretrained models for weaknesses. Another cybersecurity team will review AI code and data for hidden vulnerabilities

Around 90% of machine learning models never make it into production—here’s why

The directional superpower of birds might be based on quantum physics—and new research suggests  idea of a quantum “compass” seem even more likely

Precise measurements of the position of a levitating nanosphere have been used to provide quantum control forces that damp the nanosphere’s motion — potentially opening the way to quantum control of larger objects

DARPA exploring benchmarking possibilities to help quantum computing development move forward

How to tell if you have trained your model with enough data

New functionality in the base R language, in key R packages and in the RStudio IDE have made it easier for native R programmers removing some headaches and aligning better with other programming languages  

GitHub’s new utilitarian time saver tool uses AI to craft code. Some developers are happy about Copilot —others are furious  

How a 70s teacher invented C, the hugely influential coding language

In the midst of a “data deluge” companies are moving data’s center of gravity is “shifting away from the data warehouse and analytics databases, and toward a networked ecosystem of data streams and the edge.”

We’re Facing a Fake Science Crisis, and AI Is Making It Worse

Keep up to date with data science here

Availability bias

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People give their own memories and experiences more credence than they deserve, making it hard to accept new ideas and theories. Psychologists call this quirk the availability bias. It’s a useful built-in shortcut when you need to make quick decisions and don’t have time to critically analyze lots of data, but it messes with your fact-checking skills.

Marc Zimmer writing in The Conversation

Faith in Numbers

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When polls have faltered in predicting the outcome of elections, we hear calls for more and better data. But, if more data isn’t always the answer, maybe we need instead to reassess our relationship with predictions—to accept that there are inevitable limits on what numbers can offer, and to stop expecting mathematical models on their own to carry us through times of uncertainty.

To recognize the limitations of a data-driven view of reality is not to downplay its might. It’s possible for two things to be true: for numbers to come up short before the nuances of reality, while also being the most powerful instrument we have when it comes to understanding that reality.

Hannah Fry writing in The New Yorker

Exponential growth bias

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Imagine you are offered a deal with your bank, where your money doubles every three days. If you invest just $1 today, roughly how long will it take for you to become a millionaire? Would it be a year? Six months? 100 days? The precise answer is 60 days from your initial investment, when your balance would be exactly $1,048,576. Within a further 30 days, you’d have earnt more than a billion. And by the end of the year, you’d have more than $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – an “undecillion” dollars.  

If your estimates were way out, you are not alone. Many people consistently underestimate how fast the value increases – a mistake known as the “exponential growth bias.”   

David Robson writing for the BBC

Tuesday Tech Tools: 15 Website Analytics Tools

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Need to get an understanding of who is visiting your website and why they come? Here are some tools that will help.

Chartbeat
Tracks reader engagement and uses dashboards, reporting systems, headline testing, and other optimization tools to show what keeps them engaged. Used by many media sites. Three tier pricing plan.

Clicky
A simple interface for this tool that helps you keep up with activity on your website. Weeds out bots and spam. Free option with more info on the paid version.

Crazy Egg
A leading visualization software that gives website administrators popular heatmap reports showing how visitors are using pages. Designed to improve UX and ultimately increase ROI and conversion rates through A/B testing. Open to integration with other platforms. Thirty day free trial then plans starting at $24 a month.

Finteza
A cloud-based analytics solution that spots bots and potential scammers and hackers. Does not do data sampling, so the results are more accurate. Thirty-day free trial then paid plans.

Google Analytics*
Detailed statistics about website performance and traffic sources and measures conversions. The most robust and largest platform. Free though there is a paid plan (Google Analytics 360) for larger enterprises.

Hotjar
A relatively new web analytics tool using polls, surveys, heatmaps and visitor recordings to paint a picture of visitors to websites. Free plan or more functionality with a monthly subscription of $39 or $99.

Inspectlet
Records video sessions of website users’ behavior. Heatmaps show what users find interesting on your site.

Majestic SEO
Find out how all the websites on the internet link to each other. Information about how the fabric of the web is knitted together--and what is connected to yours.

Mixpanel
Measures user experience on websites and product interactions to help websites to identify trends and with customer retention. Free version and plans starting at $89 a month.

Open Web Analytics

Matomo (formerly Piwik)
An open-source web-analytics platform that gives you insights into you website's visitors. Doesn’t offer anything that Google Analytics cannot provide—except the user gets full control of the data and retains ownership of it. Free but also offers a pro account.
 
Positionly
Improves SEO by tracking your keywords and how well they are performing on the search engine result pages. 14 day free trial. Starting at $19 month.
 
SimiliarWeb
Understand website metrics for a site; like how many visitors a website gets, and where it get its traffic from. Free plan though the paid accounts get more options.

Spinnakr
Real-time web traffic response tool. Lets you post a targeted response on your website.

Woopra
A way to understanding website visitors from the moment they “set foot” on your site. People Profiles offer details on individual customers. There is a free plan but you have to pay to get tools like behavioral segmentation.Find more tools here.

Tech Tools

Avoiding Failure 

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When avoiding failure is a primary focus, the work isn’t just more stressful; it’s a lot harder to do. And over the long run, that mental strain takes a toll, resulting in less innovation and the experience of burnout. Ironically, allowing for mistakes to happen can elevate the quality of our performance. It’s true even within roles that don’t require creativity.

Ron Friedman, The Best Place to Work

The pit

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You have become acquainted with disappointments, broken dreams, and disillusionment. Crisis seems to be your closest companion. Like a ten-pound sledge, your heartache has been pounding you dangerously near desperation. Unless I miss my guess, negativism and cynicism have crept in. You see little hope around the corner. As one wag put it, "The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an oncoming train." You are nodding in agreement, but probably not smiling. Life has become terribly unfunny.

Tired, stumbling, beaten, discouraged friend, taken heart! The Lord God can and will lift you up. No pit is so deep that he is not deeper still. No valley so dark that the light of His truth cannot penetrate.

Charles Swindoll, Encourage Me

Wired to blunder

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We're hardwired to make blunders and avoiding them requires nearly superhuman discipline. Four tendencies conspire to sabotage our decisions at critical moments:

OVERCONFIDENCE.

We think we're smarter than we are, so we think the stocks we've chosen will deliver even when the market doesn't. When evidence contradicts us, we're blinded by...

CONFIRMATION BIAS.

We seek information that supports our actions and avoid information that doesn't. We interpret ambiguous evidence in our favor. We can cite an article that confirms our view but can't recall one that challenges it. Even when troubling evidence becomes unavoidable, we come up against...

STATUS QUO BIAS.

We like leaving things the way they are, even when doing so is objectively not the best course. Plenty of theories attempt to explain why, but the phenomenon is beyond dispute. And supposing we could somehow fight past these crippling biases, we'd still face the mother of all irrationalities in behavioral finance...

LOSS AVERSION (and its cousin, regret avoidance)

We hate losing more than we like winning, and we're terrified of doing something we'll regret. So we don't buy and sell when we should because maybe we'll realize a loss or miss out on a gain.

These tendencies are so deep-rooted that knowing all about them isn't nearly enough to extinguish them. The best we can do is wage lifelong war against them and hope to gain some ground.

Geoff Colvin writing in Fortune Magazine 

Deliberate Practice

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Repeating a specific activity over and over is what people usually mean by practice, yet it isn't especially effective. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a properly demanding activity just beyond our current abilities. The other is the amount of repetition. 

Top performers repeat their practice activities to stultifying extent. Ted Williams, baseball's greatest hitter, would practice hitting until his hands bled. Pete Maravich, whose college basketball records still stand after more than 30 years, would go to the gym when it opened in the morning and shoot baskets until it closed at night. 

If it seems a bit depressing that the most important thing you can do to improve performance is no fun, take consolation in this fact: It must be so. If the activities that lead to greatness were easy and fun, then everyone would do them and no one could distinguish the best from the rest. 

The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won't do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more.  

The costs come now, the benefits later. The more you want something, the easier it will be for you to sustain the needed effort until the payoff starts to arrive. But if you're pursuing something that you don't truly want and are competing against others whose desire is deep, you can guess the outcome.

Geoff Colvin, Talent is Overrated