You should definitely check the other episodes if you’re planning to start a business or you’ve just started one.

Why the growing imbalance between the cost of people and the cost of machines? What prices are going up the fastest? Health care — the cost of maintaining human beings. What prices are going down the fastest? The cost of information and machines. What, really, is health-care reform? Human beings are being cared for by a dysfunctional, antiquated system, and we hope that this can be reformed by adopting efficiencies from the domain of machines. Where will this lead? Are we using computers to sequence, store, and more faithfully replicate our own genetic code, or are computers optimizing our genetic code (and health) so that we can do a better job of replicating them?

Theory Of Games And Economic Misbehavior

Taking into account the annual feeds for work horses (1,300 kg of corn grain, 1,600 kg of alfalfa and 500 kg of harvested roughage) and the national yields for these crops during the past decade, they conclude that the 23 million horses would require 9 million hectare of agricultural land for food, or 6 percent of US cropland. To “feed” the tractors with crops, 7.4 million hectares of agricultural land is needed, or 5 percent of cropland, which makes tractors slightly more efficient than horses.

To make a fair comparison, however, it should also be taken into account that horses make their own fertilizer without any extra energy input and that they reproduce themselves, while tractors need artificial fertilizers and have to be manufactured (and replaced). The researchers express these energy needs in terms of cropland requirements, to be able to compare them with the other results (they take the view that the fertilizers and tractors are produced with energy delivered by energy crops). They also included the energy needed to turn crops into fodder.

The cropland needed to feed the horses then rises to 16 million hectare or 11 percent of US cropland (because of the energy needed to produce fodder from crops), while the cropland needed to “feed” and manufacture the tractors rises to 38 million hectares or 26 percent of American cropland. Conclusion: when everything is taken into account, powering agriculture with tractors requires almost 2.5 times more energy than powering agriculture with horses.

More here: Bring Back The Horses

Social, “realtime” tracking seems to be where it’s at nowadays. The technology is pretty difficult to pull of, but the best part is that it can be used for a lot of purposes. News discovery, buzz tracking, comment plugins are starting to develop. But one has to ask, WHAT ABOUT COMMUNITY?

Read the full post here: The State Of Social Tracking

In an interesting E-Consultancy report on Online-Reputation-Monitoring-Buyers-Guide-2008, the E-consultancy experts noted:

Whether it is web analytics, market research information or online monitoring data, companies ultimately need outputs which can be translated into something actionable for their business.

It makes sense that the data doesn’t really matter, it’s what you do with the data that drives results for you and your company. That’s what every marketer seems to be after – actionable insights.

Read the rest here: Does More Data Lead To Better Actionable Insights?

Bent – I Love My Man

YouTube recently finished a huge mutivariate experiment (1024 variations) on their home page. They used Google Website Optimizer and found a variation that performed some 15% better than their previous homepage.

These are some of their key takeaways:

While we could have hypothesized which elements result in greater conversions (for example, the color red is more eye-catching), multivariate testing reveals and proves the combinatorial impact of different configurations. Running tests like this also help guide our design process: instead of relying on our own ideas and intuition, you have a big part in steering us in the right direction. In fact, we plan on incorporating many of these elements in future evolutions of our homepage.

What I wonder is, if you’re not YouTube and have billions of pageviews, if your site or app is just starting out, what and how do you do A/B testing?

Here are some suggestions:

• Setup some goals you might have and prioritize them. You could start with the sign-up conversion and optimize around that. Once you’ve improved it massively, you can start optimizing other events on your site or product
• Test for maximized learning. If you have to choose between a test that teaches you nothing about your users, although it improves something, and a test that teaches you something new about your users, chose the latter
• Do A/B instead of multivariate. A/B requires less traffic exposed to the test and is easier to setup, as you don’t have to figure out which variables are independent.

I’m sure there are lots more and that you also have your own suggestions. Shoot in the comments and let’s discuss.

This is usually because that’s what the default dashboard provides you with when you first log into, say, Google Analytics. But Google Analytics have spend years devising their dashboard, how can anyone say it’s not good enough?

Google Analytics (and most other vendors) show you a dashboard that’s very general. That works for a “general” website. However, no site is “general”. And living by a general dashboard screams mediocrity to me. This is why.

Visitors: are more better?

You look at the most basic graph showing your visitors. Better is when the graph goes up and to the right. So if your graph has gone up since yesterday, you’re doing a great job. Not necessarily so.

A higher number of visitors does not tell you why they came to the site or if more of them converted. It does not tell you whether they managed to complete what they came to the site to do. It does not tell you who they are. And worse, it does not show you how to replicate that result.

Page Views: is more better?

Engagement is a fashionable word right now and a lot of people measure engagement by page views. Usually, more is better. Well, if you’re a newspaper, selling advertising, that might be the case. If you’re an e-commerce site, more page views might mean people aren’t finding what they’re looking for, or you’re not helping them decide on a product. If you’re a social application, it might mean they’re really having fun, or that they’re lost in your navigation and can’t find what they’re there after. So are you sure more page views is better?

Bounce Rate: Is less better?

You have a site with an aggregate bounce rate of 90%. One of the first things to do, is to lower the bounce rate. However, do you know how that bounce rate is measured by your analytics solution? Some products, for example, measure it as single page visits. If your site is a blog, most people find the newest content on your home page, read a bit and never visit another page. They’re actually qualified visitors that are counted as bounced visitors. If your visitors come from a search engine page, they consume the content they got to your site for and then leave. Bounce visitors again, although they came to your site to get something which you actually provided quickly and easily.

The takeaway is this: when starting out with analytics of any kind, make sure you understand what kind of site you have, what your goals with the site are, how those goals fit in the reports and how the numbers in the reports are measured.

The 4 months of training passed quickly. It was fun at times, but not usually. You go out at first, excited by the novelty of the activity and of your goal. Excitement gets you through the first couple of weeks. As the weekly distance gets longer and longer, you start to grasp what a marathon means. By that time, habit and giving yourself the benefit of the doubt is what keeps you going.

People around me had the most peculiar of attitudes. Running a marathon does not shock them, nor does it seem like a very big deal. “You’re running a marathon in two months. That’s nice”. An understandable lack of interest and cynicism about actually meaning what you say have never been so apparent. Stating your intentions and giving your word never means much these days. Running a marathon is a one person sport, but it does not have to be a one person experience. I got the sense that solitude is what I should expect when trying anything out of the ordinary.

Two weeks before the marathon, I ran 20 miles. The run was way less rewarding but it taught me something interesting. Doing it when no one is watching, when you’re only accountable to yourself is a must if you want to get through the training and have fun.

Soon enough, marathon day morning greeted us with cloudy skies. Thousands of people were at the starting line and the crowd spread as far as I could see. I could not even make out the starting gunshot, by the time we crossed the starting line, the first runners had already started for more than 5 minutes.

Mile after mile passed as the crowds got more sparse. The sun turned into a cold drizzle which, by mid race had numbed my hands. People turned out even in the rain to cheer us through our efforts.

The race actually started during the last 10km. After all that pounding, my feet felt rubbery and moved at their own will. It was harder to stop than to keep going. Every step was painful, yet there was something so familiar in that pain. Every movement was robotic yet very fluid.

As a race, the marathon is very peculiar. There are people all around you, and it’s considered to be a singles sport. However I got mixed feelings about this throughout the race. You pick your pace and you end up around people going it the same. Sometimes, you lose sight of them by going too fast or too slow, or stopping for longer at an aid station.

Finding them again later on is very refreshing. You’re all like comrades doing something painful just for the hell of it. You are brothers in a fight against yourselves.

By the end of the race, things change. During the last 10km, a lot of people are walking. Passing them is a great morale boost. They’re not enemies or anything. You’re not happy that they’re suffering. The fact that you can still keep your stride and pace just makes you feel more motivated to keep going.

The last few km are the longest. During mid-race, I was unaware when 5km had passed. By the end of the race, I was hoping that the km signs popped up every time I turned a corner.

Finishing did not give me a high orders of magnitude greater than what I felt during the race. Running, it seems, is its own reward.

What you get, however, is the feeling that you just “know” you can now do anything. It’s not something intellectual, which anyone can rationalize. It’s something very visceral and superb. Self-confidence without any hint of arrogance.

Thinking about what I had just done made me burst into laughter. I could not help it. It was happiness.

Dripping away, the clearest blue, tiny streams, heading for the grasslands. Millions of streams follow their course. They are one, but don’t know it yet. They’re heading for destruction, yet that’s where they’re meant to go. No wrong can taint their way.

They see mountains along their course. Impressive slopes end in subtle planes. It all seems to fit in a strange way.

Mountains fade away. The high plateau bears no life. No life, but for the lava. Lava fields accompany the grey water to its ultimate achievement. It all turns to stone. Ash and stone. An ash plane is a mirror for the sky.

The water cuts the horizon. It’s like a compass, pointing to the direction that makes sense. It’s going where it’s all going to end.

The road takes turns, following a strange course. You know you’ll be there, yet the road takes its time. It’s preparing you. Ash and stone around. You’re on Mars and it feels like home. Time stops for a while. It’s all so intimate.

The air feels different. It’s fuller in this ash desert. Your breath is full and it feels weird. You don’t know you’re going to need it. An universe of vapor is waiting. It’s far, but you can feel it. It’s what gives sense to this desert. It’s what makes it feel like home.

It’s there, and it’s breathtaking. Grey vapor on a grey plane under a grey sky. Somehow it’s perfect. The noise makes the silence absolute. The chaos of bursting water makes the stillness full.

Anyone who’s been to Dettifoss feels free. It’s how we should be feeling…