Author Archive
National Metric Day (What?!)
National Metric Week is the week including October 10th, which is (obviously) National Metric Day! (10/10/10) What?! How have I missed this so long? How shall we celebrate?! I have only a few months to plan… ~Geek~
Competence Formula
From my pals at Dictionary.com: competency means “sufficiency to satisfy the wants of life.” Isn’t that awesome? Perhaps a little more specific: competence is “the quality of being competent; adequacy; possession of required skill, knowledge, qualification, or capacity: He hired her because of her competence as an accountant.“ How appropriate that the example given is [...]
Pave the path you’re walking
I’ve said before that design and measurement can’t be separated. The right measurement of anything (training, a coffee cup, this keyboard I’m typing on) is the degree that it does what it’s supposed to do; in other words, what it was designed to do. Assuming that design is about matching the characteristics of a product [...]
Mercator Projection
I used to have a professor who ranted (seemingly at random moments in a lecture) that “the map is NOT the territory, people!” At the time I didn’t care too much what the heck he meant because those inane ramblings never showed up on final exams. Many years later however, I find that this is [...]
Faster Mommy! Faster!
I’m going to go out on a ledge and say that Toyota’s problems with out-of-control acceleration should have been caught sooner. This seems like a case of the emperor wears no clothes…everyone expects that Toyota is the highest quality auto on the road so no one is paying attention to the numbers? Apparently, while Toyota [...]
Awash in A Sea of Data
I respectfully submit that the vast majority of corporations and people are awash in a sea of data that they don’t know what to do with. For individuals, this is about life choices and priorities and yadda yadda yadda. For corporations, this is about stopping this 4 year-old obsession with more more more (data) and [...]
Know What’s Important
see more Funny Graphs
Rich Today, Poor Tomorrow
About 7.6 million more people are soon going to be poor who aren’t poor today. I wonder if they’ll get a postcard welcoming them to the club. The Obama administration is recommending for the first time in 45 years, an update to poverty definitions in America in order to accommodate more modern components like healthcare. [...]
Incenting Weight Loss
In the continuing category of When Good Measurement Goes Bad, today’s question is about Whole Foods. These nice folks, who are (in my humble opinion) the quintessential yuppie expression of enlightenment, have recently decided employees can get an even better employee discount if they are healthier, specifically if they have lower cholesterol, don’t smoke and [...]
GraphJam: Music and Pop Culture in Charts and Graphs. Let us explain them.
see more Funny Graphs I love this one! A recent gamer…(late to the party, I know) I’m getting details personally. ~Geek~