Confidence as a marketing ploy

That's what GM's clearance event is about, as discussed in my latest blog post for theCMOsite 

A fitting solution?

Analytics applied to the problem of finding clothes that fit: Does This Look Good on Me?
 my latest post on All Analytics.

Robots and Retention

Even the most conscientious student sometimes drifts off in class. Some literally fall asleep, but more often, their thoughts just carry them away from the classroom. Good teachers learn to observe the signs that indicate a student is zoning out and know how to get them to focus by recapturing their attention. But is it possible to get a student to stay focused when a teacher cannot respond in a personalized way? That is becoming a very practical concern when classroom sizes expand and as online courses remove the teacher from the classroom altogether.

A study proved robots can be programmed to regain students attention. Children who had the robot intervention performed better in answering question on what they heard than children in the control group.  I wrote about it for EducationalIT.

Of related interest: http://mashable.com/2012/07/15/human-robot/ and  http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/11/health/uncanny-valley-robots/index.html 

following the 9 yard trail

Today, when I looked up something else, I happened across several theories for the origin of the phrase "the whole 9 yards." If you would like to see them in a nutshell, check out the source for this graph http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-whole-whole-nine-yards-enchilida.html. It did leave out the suggestion that it was linked with wedding veils, as one of the writers quoted in  http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/504/whats-the-origin-of-the-whole-nine-yards/ declares. It also leaves out the idea that "A mediaeval test requiring the victim to walk nine paces over hot coals" which is mentioned in http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-whole-nine-yards.html However, that is rejected on the site because the presenter doesn't buy that a phrase from so long ago would only show up in print for the first time in 1962.