How To Avoid Articulate Ignorance
Highly intelligent people often pontificate about things they know very little about. Tom Holler
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Home » Archive by category "Metrics"
Should I Sprint Like Crazy?
Good data should be used to guide our understanding and actions in projects, pandemics, and life.
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Of Pandemics And Project Management
In any emergency or simply a chaotic situation like the typical software intensive project, I always looked to find data that helped me anchor my understanding of the situation.
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How To Do Agile Estimation The Right Way
What had worked for us? Velocity, or better stated, the methodology behind velocity, the average. It always drove people crazy that I'd use averages on my projects.
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Data Is A People Problem
I've found that "having the data" is about half the effort. The other half is not how to make it compelling. The data was always compelling in my experience because it generally showed that we were making poor decisions. That rarely went over well.
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Yes, We Should Keep Our Data For A Long Time
Modern ethos is that all data is valuable, should be stored forever, and that machine learning will one day magically find the value of it.
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Dealing with the Uncertainty in Scientific Results
MOST EVIDENCE IN the empirical sciences is statistical in nature, and scientists rely on a variety of statistical tests to distinguish valid scientific discoveries from spurious ones. Unfortunately, there is a growing recognition that many important research findings based on statistical evidence are not reproducible,...
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Doing The Impossible By Using Simple Math
This is not to say Musk will realize his most ambitious goals: landing on Mars, electrifying much of the world’s transportation fleet, and accelerating the transition from a fossil-fuel to a carbon-free economy. But each is closer than most thought possible in such a short...
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Keeping It Simple For A Reason
Problems stemming from such errors can be very costly and have contributed to a wider concern about the reproducibility of research findings, most notably in medical research.
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Lies, Damn Lies, and Project Statistics
Harvey’s term for torturing the data until it confesses is “p-hacking,” a reference to the p-value, a measure of statistical significance. P-hacking is also known as overfitting, data-mining—or data-snooping, the coinage of Andrew Lo, director of MIT’s Laboratory of Financial Engineering. Says Lo: “The more...
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The Magic of Just Putting a Spotlight on a Problem
I'll take the credit, but it was simply the magic of finally giving people the information and insight they needed to then get their jobs done.
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Murder He Calculated
Threats of federal intervention aside, it will be difficult to fix the problem of high murder rates without first addressing clearance rates. So it’s fortuitous, perhaps, that we are living in an age in which the analysis of data is supposed to help us decipher,...
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A Little More Science And A Little Less Politics
When it comes to economic data, it can be difficult to separate what people believe to be true from what they want to be true.
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Use Your Dark Data
In the same way that dark matter is an unseen but very large part of the cosmos , dark data represents the unseen but very large part of the data that most corporations collect and store.
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When Your Data Doesn’t Accurately Predict Your Progress
This is the message that American University history professor Allan Lichtman has been screaming at the world since 1981: It’s not that the polling system itself is broken — instead, polls behave exactly as they’re designed. The problem is they aren’t designed to predict the...
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