December Meeting Topics
1. Business social networking during your work day. Do you really want your colleagues (or boss) to know what you accomplish or what you think is work-relevant? Technology pundit Jon Udell
poses this question along with a slide that shows how it might work:
2.
Facebook Beacon. Given all the excitement regarding this reasonably new development in online advertising at Facebook, is
targeted marketing a good idea? And does it even work if it switches to opt-in vs. opt-out - which was the way Facebook wanted Beacon to operate.
Labels: misleading data, privacy, social networking, targeted advertising
The New York Times slips up on sexual math
A recent article in
Slate takes issue with a New York Times
article expressing the theory that men tend to have more sexual partners than women. The results it seems are not as straight-forward as the NYT (or authors of popular studies) might make out. Read the Slate piece for an illuminating backgrounder on the crucial difference between the "mean" numbers often quoted in studies and the "median" number which is usually buried in the footnotes. The Wall Street Journal
Numbers Guy also fills in the blanks with his analysis from an
earlier blog entry.
Nigel
Labels: analysis, misleading data, surveys