When Autodesk, a software company, moved into a an open-plan building in Waltham, Mass., three years ago, it installed what is known as a pink-noise system: a soft whooshing emitted over loudspeakers that sounds like a ventilation system but is specially formulated to match the frequencies of human voices.
Autodesk ran the system for three months without telling the employees — and then, to gauge its impact, turned it off one day.
“We were surprised at how many complaints we got,” said Charles Rechtsteiner, Autodesk’s facilities manager. “People weren’t sure what was different, but they knew something was wrong. They were being distracted by conversations 60 feet away. When the system’s on, speech becomes unintelligible at a distance of about 20 feet.”
Knowing the relationship between platform and metrics isn’t just a matter of proving ROI, but rather, crucial to aligning your strategy for a new social media platform with the strategy for that part of your business it can reasonably be expected to enhance. To achieve that kind of alignment, you have to go beyond the aggregated stats on visits and users that any trending platform produces to dazzle its potential business audience. You have to hear about the platform’s impact from the users themselves.
We are working with a pest management team, which is conducting a sweep of the property to ensure there is no additional rattlesnake activity.
isomorphismes:
What would you do with infinite data? I submit that, for analysis, you’d throw most of the 10²⁵ bytes away
Another reason you’re probably safe ignoring the bleeding edge of ML research is that most papers develop general techniques, test them on famous data sets, and don’t make use of domain-specific knowledge. You want a specific technique that’s going to work with your customers, not a no-free-lunch-but-optimal-according-to-X academic algorithm.
But the short head of the book market isn’t the future–it’s the long tail. And in the long tail world, overcoming obscurity is the single biggest hurdle. If only piracy was a problem…
IBM discovered that by applying machine learning to the full data stream, they were able to diagnose some dangerous infections a full day before any symptoms were noticeable to a human.
If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to “disrupt” them, and whose chief executive said recently “even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation” (where “innovation” is code-speak for “opportunities for me to turn a profit”).
