Getting to "just right"

It's not just Goldilocks who tests out what's too hot or too cold or too hard or too soft in the pursuit of what's "just right." RUTH is a robotic arm that does the same for car interiors, checking what is there against the data of what humans prefer. Read more about it here.

The intelligence behind content is not always obvious

I'm a stickler for correctness, and really have to hold myself back from alerting people about mechanical mistakes that appear in their posts and gaining an unwanted reputation as a grammar or spelling Nazi. Really, the only time people may feel thankful is if you catch it before it is published.

As a general rule, the most professional image for a business calls for correctly written content, but in terms of what actually is good for business there are always exceptions to the general rule.

In The Joys of Yinglish, (pp. 60-61) Leo Rosten  includes a story about mistakes appearing in a sign. I've modified it somewhat, but kept the gist:
The sign of a store read: "EVRYTING FOR THE KICHEN" One of the men passing on the street walked in and told the owner, "There are three mistakes in the spelling on your sign." The owner calmly responded, "I know."
 Surprised, the man asked, "If you know, why don't you correct it?"
The owner said, "Why should I? Each day, several people come in to tell me there are mistakes on the sign. Once they're in the store, at least half of them end up buying something."
So you see in this example, spelling errors prove good for business because they achieve a marketing objective: they get people in the store where they can actually make a purchase.

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.

Major video fail

My blog on the video that spurred a storm of negative reviews, the trending hashtag #sciencegirlthing and a viral status that the EU Commission would have been happier without is posted here.  There is additional information, like the fact that the video cost 102,000 Euros to produce, and more links in the comments.