Seeing stars

As the text below says, this is the second time the writer is contacting me asking me to do him the favor of posting an Amazon review of his book. Notice, he never asks me to read it, and he certainly doesn't offer to send me a copy to make sure I have access to it in order to read it and review it. On the contrary, he says, the favor he requires would take a mere 30 seconds. Now, I'm a fast reader, but not that fast. It would take me at least an hour to read even a very short book, and I believe I have no business reviewing a book I have not read.

Lest you think that I'm misrepresenting the request, I've copied the email in full. In light of this unwitting disclosure, one should add more than the usual number of grains of salt in assessing how accurate the starred reviews are. It's also interesting to see how the author plays into all the persuasive tactics to get someone to feel good about bestowing a favor while in effect playing into a lie.

I could really do with your help Recently I emailed about my attempt to get some reviews for The End of Certainty, on Amazon. The response was incredible and I now have 48 reviews. I really was humbled by the response and can't thank you enough. I do however have one last request. If you weren't able to give me a quick review last time, just pressing the 5 star button would be enough, then please please help out now and do it. Amazon has a rule that it starts promoting books that get at least 50 reviews. As a result I'm tantalizingly close to getting on their list. Just a few more reviews is all I need. Below is the email I sent before, to help jog your memory on all this. The End of Certainty has been doing quite nicely since I published it, and many of the people who've read it have said extremely nice things about it. Over 25,000 people have copies. The success of it has amazed me. However I have a problem and I could really do with your help. It seems the Millennials are all fantastically good at the social media world and as a result they like and review lots of materials. However my audience is people like you. You're older than your average millennial, and as a result don't feel so obliged to get involved in the whole scoring and reviewing stuff. I understand, because frankly, I think the same way. However it's causing me a problem, which I hope you can help me with. To get the Amazon AI  to notice the book, and therefore get it to a wider audience I need to get over 100 reviews. These don't need to be in depth reviews, something as simple as, it was interesting, or simply giving it a star rating is enough. You'd be doing me a huge favor by getting involved. I just need 30 seconds of your time. Because of the odd way Amazon works, US reviews show up in the UK Amazon store, but NOT the other way around. As a result putting the review, or giving it a star rating on the US Amazon Store would make a huge difference to me. Thanks again for your support, it really does help. Please click here to go to the correct page on Amazon

Not your grandfather's video

Given the dramatic increase of video content on social channels, marketers are working out strategies to capitalize on the medium. To stand out in such a sea of video content, they key is to not just attract viewers but to keep them engaged. The key ingredient for engagement is interaction, according to Wyzowl, a video explainer company that boast of having created videos for over a thousand companies.

Read more in

Video Gets Interactive

IoT security guidelines

Hello Barbie, one of the connected toys that raises secuirty concerns

The IoT Security Foundation is a "vendor-neutral, international initiative aspiring to be the expert resource for sharing knowledge, best practices and advice." Those resources include the best practice guides, one of which is "IoT Security Compliance Framework." The first version of the framework covers consumer products and markets, but future iterations will cover several other categories, such as medical, automotive and critical infrastructure.

"The IoT is the next evolutionary wave of the internet and, with dwindling costs of technology and low barriers to entry, new products are flooding the market," declared John Moor, managing director of the IoT Security Foundation. The internet of things extends to all kinds of new wearables, as well as connected appliances and smart toys.

The toy category has already raised data privacy concerns, but all types of businesses have to think about privacy issues when designing anything that connects to the internet. What is first hailed as "the 'internet of treats,'" Moor explains, can easily develop into "the 'internet of threats' if these new products do not have sufficient security capabilities."

The question is, What is sufficient security? That's a question the framework seeks to answer with a checklist for users.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/innovation/internet-of-things/building-a-framework-for-iot-security-compliance.html#sthash.WPkYNvNz.dpuf

A virtual assistant you can bank on

In early 2016, SEB, one of Sweden's largest banks with a presence in 20 countries around the globe, started integrating Amelia, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform from IPsoft, into its help desk. Amelia is represented by a blond female avatar and is always referred to as "she" rather than "it."

The artificial intelligence platform is built on semantic understanding, which enables Amelia to interact with users through natural language to determine what actions to take in order to answer a question, fulfill a request or solve a problem. She is also designed to learn through observation.

At SEB, Amelia serves as a customer interface with automated interactions that can scale up to meet expanded support needs. "The driver is to find a way to improve the experience for our customers," explains Mikael Andersson, the bank's IT strategy transformation lead.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/innovation/banking-on-ai-to-offer-better-customer-service.html#sthash.Mk05GLW5.dpuf

Voice powered shopping

Like the captain of the Starship Enterprise, we too can now ask a computer for information by talking to it. We can even order tea, Earl Grey, though maybe not at the preferred temperature just yet. As voice activation is being directed toward shopping, there are new opportunities for marketers to explore.

With Siri, Cortana, Alexa, or the Google Assistant available, voice activation and queries have become an integral part of smartphones and smart home technology. According to Thrive Analytics, voice search among smartphone user hit 65 percent in 2015 in the US. That's more than double what it was just two years before, which indicates a very rapid rate of growth. The voice control option is also growing  among users of smart home products. 

Taking note of this trend, Google is now nudging its Google Home customers to start using their voices for shopping. It recently announced that Google Assistant could not be used by people with Google Home to order a variety of products from over 50 participating Google Express retailers. 

Read more in OK Google Goes Shopping

Shining light on the dark side of big data

Does the shift toward more data and algorithmic direction for our business decisions assure us that organizations and businesses are operating to everyone's advantage? There are a number of issues involved that some people feel need to be addressed going forward.

Numbers don't lie, or do they? Perhaps the fact that they are perceived to be absolutely objective is what makes us accept the determinations of algorithms without questioning what factors could have shaped the outcome.

That's the argument Cathy O'Neil makes in Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. While we tend to think of big data as a counterforce to biased, just decisions, O'Neil finds that in practice, they can reinforce biases even while claiming unassailable objectivity.

 “The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong.”   The math destruction posed by algorithms is the result of models that reinforces barriers, keeping particular demographic populations disadvantaged by identifying them as less worthy of credit, education, job opportunities, parole, etc. 

Now the organizations and businesses that make those decisions can point to the authority of the algorithm and so shut down any possible discussion that question the decision. In that way, big data can be misused to increase inequality. As algorithms are not created in a vacuum but are born of minds operating in a human context that already has some set assumptions, they actually can extend the reach of human biases rather than counteract them.  

“Even algorithms have parents, and those parents are computer programmers, with their values and assumptions, “Alberto Ibargüenhttps://www.knightfoundation.org/articles/ethics-and-governance-of-artificial-intelligence-fund,  president and  CEO and of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation wrote.  “As computers learn and adapt from new data, those initial algorithms can shape what information we see, how much money we can borrow, what health care we receive, and more.”

I spoke with the foundation’s VP of Technology Innovation, John Bracken about its partnership with the MIT Media Lab and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society as well as other individuals and organizations to create a $27 million fund for research in this area. 

The idea is to open the way to “bridging” together “people across fields and nations” to pull together a range of experiences and perspectives on the “social impact” of the development of artificial intelligence. As AI is on the road “to impact every aspect of human life,” it is important to think about sharping policies  for the “tools to be built” and how they are to be implemented.

Read more in 

Algorithms' Dark Side: Embedding Bias into Code

V is Video Marketing for Valentine's Day

The National Retail Federation estimates that consumers in the U.S.  will spend $18.2 billion this Valentine's Day. Large though the figure may appear, it's actually down from last year's record high of $19.7 billion. It works out to an average of $136.57 per person. The bulk of it, $85.21, is earmarked for one's romantic partner, and the rest is divided among parents and children, teachers or classmates, friends, pets, and coworkers.

Though gifts of jewelry, flowers, chocolates, and dinners out, still make up the bulk of anticipated spending, there are also other options considered, particularly in light of the expanded categories for recipients of gifts on this holiday. And that means expanded opportunities for marketing around the holiday. The medium of choice for many marketers is video, because of its reach, its engagement, and the metrics on both.

photo from https://www.goodfreephotos.com/albums/vector-images/arrow-with-heart-vector-clipart.png

read more in Why Marketers Heart Video for Valentine's Day

The Digital Advance of a Venerable Medical Journal

Since 1840, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has been associated with health care expertise. Now the brand includes 60 specialist medical and allied science journals with millions of readers around the world.

As a global brand, the BMJ relies on a digital platform to reach its worldwide audience. To keep up with the demands of this growth, it needed a partner to help it meet its needs.

The printed copies of the venerable journal are still mailed out, but the journal also embraces digital technology and expanded reach. It was the first medical journal in the world to go online 21 years ago, says Sharon Cooper, chief digital officer at the BMJ.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/cloud-computing/virtualizing-a-venerable-medical-journal.html?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=BL_NL_BB_20170202_STR2L1&dni=393649804&rni=25396992#sthash.qU3lEl7D.dpuf

Billboards are getting smarter

Ariella Brown, Freelance Contributor

January 26, 2017

The Future of Smart Billboards

Share this content:

• facebook
• twitter
• linkedin
• google
• Email
• Print

Want to get a smoker's attention? Try a smart billboard that coughs. That's what a responsive billboard designed to promote smoking-cessation products from a Swedish pharmacy did.  As the video of the billboard in actions shows, it looks like a static picture of a man until a smoker gets close enough to trigger the digital screen to shift to showing the same man coughing. That's followed by a picture of the promoted products.Picture a billboard, and likely you think of a static picture with a slogan or some other words on it, or maybe a sort of revolving picture in a more dynamic version. That's old school billboards. Today's technology allows billboards to pick up on essential cues that enable them to tailor responses to the people in front of them. These are smart billboards equipped with responsive  abilities. And there are more developments ahead.

Read more in 

The Future of Smart Billboards

Is Apple going American?

f there’s any lesson we should have learned from our presidential election, it’s that we should not jump to conclusions based on our own possibly faulty assumptions. So I’ll stick to facts and avoid speculation about the report that Foxconn, a major supplier to Apple, is considering a $7 billion factory in the United States.

Though the timing of this news indicates a deference to Trump’s push for manufacturing American products to take place on American soil, in reality, choice for factory sites are not made simply to agree with or defy a presidential preference. In fact, the reports of Foxconn’s exploration of American possibilities predates the present administration.

Back in December 2012, several reports like the one in PC Magazine quoted what Louis Woo, a Foxconn spokesman, told Bloomberg Businessweek in a phone interview: "We are looking at doing more manufacturing in the U.S. because, in general, customers want more to be done there."  

This was a month after the reports about the company’s looking into the possibilities of some American cities as a site for its factory. Of course, nothing has come to fruition, but it is very likely that the seed of possibility emerging at present was already planted over four years ago. This is something to remember when we see headlines that reference Trump.

Read more in 

Foxconn Factory Potentially U.S. Bound

Live Video Streaming for Marketing

photo at https://www.jisc.ac.uk/sites/default/files/periscope.jpg

“Real time feedback rocks!” wrote one of the participants in the audience to a Periscope presentations by Scott Adams. That observation was prompted not just by the flurry of comments, but by Adams' responses to some of them on the air.

The beauty of live streaming lies the feeling of immediacy and active engagement that is absent in prerecorded programs. That's why live video is gaining popularity in social media. Marketers are taking note and we can expect to see a lot more of it used for brands aspiring to deliver authentic experiences in 2017.

Read more in Marketing Goes Live

It takes more than snow to work out a ski vacation

Vail Resorts, a leading global mountain resort operator, manages nine mountain resorts and three urban ski areas through its subsidiaries. Given the seasonal nature of the business—during ski season, the staff grows from about 8,800 to 25,000 individuals—managers got overwhelmed by the need to explain the calculations behind the payouts to workers.

Vail Resorts was using the PeopleSoft Human Capital Management (HCM) system. The problems were that data was distributed across multiple systems, and the compensation processes entailed manual inputs with Excel spreadsheets. As a result, there was no easy way to track compensation, which left workers unsure about what their salary and bonus amounts should be.

Tammy Mollhoff, Vail Resorts' HRIS director, explains that this process caused some frustration for employees, and even more for managers, who were asked to provide explanations to workers about what went into the numbers when they didn't fully understand it themselves. To solve that problem, the company wanted to centralize the process in way that would allow the managers to review the figures and then show workers the statements on base wages, discretionary bonuses, long-term incentives and other adjustments.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/cloud-computing/resort-integrates-on-premise-and-cloud-systems.html#sthash.srQB3T9c.dpuf

Warehousing innovations take off

We’ve arrived at 2017.  Though I don’t recall seeing any technological predictions anchored on this particular year, we can look at what we’re supposed to be working toward with respect to the predictions for 2020 and what has come to light last year.  From that perspective, you can see that warehousing tech is a really hot area right now....

Though clouds refer to the computer kind, there now is the possibility of moving warehousing to actual cloud in the sky. That’s a possibility that Amazon seems to be considering based on the patent for an “airborne fulfilment center utilizing unmanned aerial vehicles for item delivery”  that  that came to light this past December. The airborne fulfillment center (AFC) based on an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) is no mere drone. It is something much larger like the LCA60T flying whale airship discussed here, though with a variety of options.

Image courtesy: Flying Whales

Read more in 

Sky’s the Limit for Tech Innovations in Warehousing

Related post: http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2016/08/up-up-and-away-way-its-done-today.html

BI when and where it's needed

That was a critical factor in adopting WebFOCUS, Thiery says, because so many people rely on their phones more than on their desktop units. Consequently, reports that are not designed to be mobile-friendly are not as useful.

Generally, the visualizations are reviewed on a weekly basis at leadership meetings. Thiery explains that these meetings are where management "wants to see where we're at and where we're going." The meetings are also where managers make decisions about how many people they would hire.

As a result of the growth AudioNet has been experiencing, it's been adding on a large number of support people to keep up with the workload. "As our volume increases, so does our revenue," Thiery says.

The firm also uses WebFOCUS to analyze financial data. That includes revenue dollars, accounts and claims counts that factor into identifying an upward trend.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/business-intelligence/getting-business-intelligence-when-where-needed.html#sthash.BMoWyczs.dpuf

The perks of personalized marketing: Starbucks' use of AI

photo from https://c6.staticflickr.com/4/3133/2873861973_995e8a7902_b.jpg

“Would you like fries with that?” That one-size-fits-all recommendation was about as far as upselling at the point of sale used to go.  Starbucks has come a long way from that with marketing powered by data — and AI.  It's marketing that is uniquely tailored to the behaviors, preferences, and context of each customer.

Matt Ryan, Starbucks EVP and global CSO, and Gerri Martin-Flickinger, EVP and global CTO discussed the strategy at the company's Investor Day.  He explained the impact of digital on Starbucks sales, while she explained what their algorithms do, in The Digital Flywheel: Strategy and impact.

Ryan began by saying that for Starbucks digital represents the “core customer experience.”  He sees it as what distinguishes their business approach from “the rest of the retail world,” and what “gives us the advantage we have.” As proof he showed how the "digital flywheel" contributed to Starbucks' growth in the past three years, and the increase in its rewards program from five million to 12 million customers.

The incentives in the rewards program is one of the ways Starbucks personalizes its marketing.   Martin-Flickinger demonstrated the evolution of the personalization by showing how it has progressed in just a single year. Its baseline is the form of marketing that many businesses still use today, rooted in historical data that they view in spreadsheets, which in turn powers algorithms to fit their general customer base.

In January 2016, Starbucks' marketing messages were limited to 30 variants of weekly email messages that were based on data that was already two weeks old. In June last year, Starbucks moved to a to a real-time personalization engine capable of producing of 400,000 variants of hyper-personalized emails each week. The company continued to tweak its AI engine so that in October, it was able to launch real-time 1:1  personalized offers that are uniquely generated based on each individual customer's behaviors and marked preferences.

Read more in A.I. Informs Personalization for Starbucks

Making attractions more attractive: digitizing the CN Tower

photo: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/CN-Tower_Skypod.jpg

To celebrate its 40th anniversary, Canada's CN Tower deployed new wireless infrastructure, a mobile app and 150 beacons with location services capabilities.

One of the top tourist attractions in Canada is the CN Tower, which is 553.33 meters (1, 815 ft., 5 in.) tall. It opened in 1976 as a communications towers, and to reflect that role in today's digital age, it planned on celebrating its 40th anniversary with a new wireless infrastructure and the CN Tower app.

Read more in Digital Tech Enhances the CN Tower Experience

IoT and the power of location data

Among the buzzwords of today, the popularity of IoT is definitely up there with all sorts of predictions about how many billions the market will grow to by 2020. When it comes to improving logistics, though, IoT is already making a measurable difference. That’s why the companies in the logistics arena are turning to software that capitalizes on the real-time capabilities of IoT.

Earlier this year, AT&T and Eye for Transport (EfT) published their 2016 research findings in a report called The Internet of Things (IoT) in Supply Chain and Logistics. Fifty-nine percent of its 600 respondents identified as logistics providers. Among all respondents, 41% said they already had an IoT solution in place and 23% were planning an IoT strategy.  The overwhelming majority, about four out of five, look for IoT solutions for location information.

Location information is of such concern because so much depends on knowing where the cargo in question is at a particular time. That frictionless stream of data allows for more accurate predictions about time of delivery and precludes the need for a person to have to manually check- in – either by calling the driver or having the driver call or text to let their managers know where they are. 

Read more in 

Tapping into the Power of IoT for Real Time Location Data

Data science training to fill the skills gap

 Datanami article looked at various estimates about how many more data scientists from firms like Gartner and McKinsey to arrive at a range of 100,000-190,000 shortfall by 2020 and 2017, respectively. That's about 60% more demand than available supply in the US. The upside is that salaries for those jobs go up, but the downside, of course, is that the businesses cannot progress on the data front as much as they would like to without the skilled people in-house.

The obvious solution to that problem is to get more people qualified for these jobs. If they didn't learn the skills in college programs, they can now get trained in specialty programs like the NYC Data Science Academy (NYCDSA). Vivian Zhang, the CTO of the school, set it up specifically to meet industry needs and get people the data science training needed to fill those open job slots.

Read more in 

Mind The Gap: Minting New Data Science and Analytics Professionals

The key to digital real estate marketing

“Location,” that key word emphasized how important  physical location was by repeating it twice in identifying the three most important factors in real estate. However, that may be outmoded in today’s trend for shoppers to seek out what they want online. To reach that market, it’s necessary to locate them via the web. That’s what Union Street Media (USM) is all about.

USM is a marketing firm that applies the model of capitalizing on social media to convert sales with targeted ads and communications through these platforms to the real estate industry. It has a staff of campaign managers whose job is to expand the reach of their clients’ sites through digital marketing strategies, including demographic analysis and reporting and tailored ads and communication to their target market.

Read more in 

Location, Location, (Virtual) Location

Marketing email fail

File under "Irony" or maybe just "Whoops!"

The following is something I just got in my email copied exactly as it came. Yup, they left in the code and failed to insert the name that is supposed to show how they really know what they're talking about in terms of getting data right for effective marketing.

Hi {lead.First Name:default=}, When you look at recent statistics around social media, marketing, and customer care, what story do they tell? At Sprinklr, we believe the enormous shifts in technology and marketing over the past decade mean that customer experience (CX) will soon be the central focus of every company that wants to stay relevant and stand out from the crowd. Customers are already asking for it, and now it’s time for brands to catch up. RECENT DATA BACKS THIS UP Sprinklr - 29 West 35th Street 7th Floor New York NY You received this email because you are subscribed to emails from Sprinklr. Unsubscribe from all future emails

AI revs up Harley-Davidson sales

pic from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harley-Davidson_Sales_Co.jpg

After doing some research, Jacobi discovered artificial intelligence technologies working in the sales and marketing space. Among them was Adgorithms with its AI platform, "Albert."

"Then I had a synchronistic moment," Jacobi recalls. On a walk, he met "this guy, Or, and started chatting with him." That was Or Shani, the CEO of Adgorithms. When Shani explained what he did, Jacobi "told him I had been planning to be in touch with him."

So it was the combination of planning and serendipity that formed the basis of the business relationship between Harley-Davidson and Adgorithms.

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/innovation/harley-davidson-boosts-digital-marketing-with-ai.html#sthash.PkNzrCBL.dpuf

Learning to go paperless

picture from Pixabay

U.S. New and World Report ranks the MBA program at Temple University's Fox School of Business among the best part-time programs in the nation. Technology's role in increasing the efficiency and speed of the process plays a role in that ranking, according to William Rieth, director of Graduate Enrollment Management, because it enables the school to increase enrollment with the most qualified applicants.

About 1,500 students are enrolled at the Fox School, though the number of applicants is close to double that figure. Working with thousands of paper application documents—including student essays, letters of recommendation, test scores and transcripts—consumed a great deal of time and resources. "Our recruiting team was drowning in the documents," Reith reported....

"Many people have a sense that things can be better, but change management is hard," Reith points out. He reports that the biggest challenge in the paperless experiment was "shifting the culture from a physical paper orientation," and adds that the success of the experiment is the school's part in "driving the digital transformation."

- See more at: http://www.baselinemag.com/crm/an-education-in-paperless-efficiency.html#sthash.bxCNedXQ.dpuf

Data visualization: you have to C it to believe it

 credit https://c1.staticflickr.com/9/8075/8448339735_e6626c28ff_b.jpg

I wrote this blog a couple of months before everyone started decrying the proliferation of fake news. Notice just about every fake news piece is accompanied by some sort of visualization, whether it is a graph or photo or video. They all capitalize on the "seeing is believing" concept, and one has to be extra vigilant about the lure of visual evidence.

As a regular big data blogger for several years now, I’ve noticed that in the last couple of years, data visualization has become a major focal point.  The old maxim of “Seeing is believing” is the real driving force behind visualizations of data.  While not all of us relate to spreadsheets, we tend to respond well to graphs, charts, and other visually appealing renderings of those numbers.  

As Brian Gentile, Senior VP and General Manager, TIBCO Analytics Product Group, TIBCO Software, wrote here there are business benefits to data visualizations.  They include making it easier to take in information, manipulating, data in various ways, and showing relationships.  On the latter, Gentile observes, that “finding these correlations among the data has never been more important.”

Indeed, the demand for that kind of instant insight that data visualizations can deliver is what drove Google to build its own data visualization product (currently in beta) called Data Studio. I saw a presentation of the features, including a report on the effectiveness of Olympics ads. It was that particular visualization that made me think of the danger inherent in relying completely on the story presented graphically.

In that analysis of the effects of ads on consumers, the report stresses that it asked people who saw the ads of particular brands what effect it had on their perception of them. Of course, the graphs are what grab your attention and that show that that 34.9% of viewers recall seeing the Coke ad. The graph does not show what the text admits that overall “only about 8% of viewers can recall both the brand and product in a specific advertisement.” So the graph here implies a much more positive effect for ad recall than the overall data actually shows.

 The next bar graph shows you that “Consumers who saw the ads were 18% more positive about the brand and were 16% more likely to find out more or purchase the product in the ad.” These are fairly modest numbers that don’t necessarily promise much bang for sponsor bucks. So this is followed by a third graph with the title “Which ads showed the greatest response?” That shows really impressive numbers ranging from 112%- 142% for the top 3 brands.

A mere glance would make you think that these show amazing results for the marketing efforts. Then when you read a bit, you realize that they merely reflect the increase in search.  In other words, the graph does not show that the McDonald’s commercial resulted in an increase of 42% in sales, merely an increase of that amount in online search that includes the brand. Still, you may say that is a positive metric that could possibly translate into improved sales down the road. But the chain of causation here is missing a few links. 

I got to speak to the Google people about Data Studio and asked if they had even determined if the people who were doing the search were the ones who had seen the ads as was the case for the first two graphical presentations. They had not.  True, it doesn’t say that the graph refers to the people who had seen the ads, but the context would make the viewer think that it does, and not everyone would even think to ask annoying questions like I do.

Ultimately, what makes data visualization so effective at conveying a point is that they don’t require much analysis on the viewer’s end because they’ve already done that kind of thinking for you. That’s both seductive and potentially misleading.

That’s exactly why we have to be careful about not merely accepting the visually expressed story at face value. Any data visualization should be subjected to a triple C test. 

Read about it here.

Also check out http://www.clickhole.com/article/greatest-all-time-statistical-portrait-babe-ruth-3983 

The one on the Babe versus the #12 may be my favorite example of the abuse of data visualization, and I'm not even a sports fan

Related post: 

EVERYBODY LIES WITH VISUALIZATIONS

Better tracking for better results

A nonprofit adopts a health information technology platform to decrease challenging conduct and restrictive residential living for people with behavioral issues.

Services for the UnderServed (SUS) is a New York City-based nonprofit organization that provides $185 million in services to individuals with disabilities, people living in poverty and those facing homelessness. The organization, which has a staff of close to 2,000, needed a way to track measurable results for people with behavioral issues, so it adopted a health information technology (HIT) platform.

HIT platforms make it much easier for health care organizations to gather and report results of value-based care delivery to governmental organizations and foundations. Proven success rates can also pave the way to get program funding

Read more in 

Health IT Platform Results in Better Patient Care

Cost effective social media marketing

Reaching one's target market efficiently is one of the most appealing aspects about placing ads on social media. But to keep those ads effective takes a combination of accurate measurements and human creativity working together at a pace that keeps up with the demand for effective reach through new content. That's what ReFuel4, a Facebook 2016 Innovation Spotlight winner in the Creativity Category award, offers marketers.

Vernon Vasu, ReFUEL4's CMO says that two principle underlie the way the platform operates:

1. The vast amount of data associated with marketing campaigns are best dealt with by machine learning and AI, but
2. Creativity is still the province of humans.

Setting up a way for the two to work together with maximum impact and efficiency is what their Automated Creative Refresh platform is all about.

Read more in A Pay-for-Performance Platform for Marketers

A smart solution for restoring independence to wounded veterans

from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ce/Reliance_Smart_Client.jpg

Smart homes represent a new level of convenience with the added cool factor of “look what I can do with this technology.” But for people who have limited mobility or prosthetics in place of limbs it can mean reclaiming an independent life. That’s why the Gary Sinise Foundation, created by actor Gary Sinise, launched the RISE program.

Read more in 

Smart Homes Restore Independence for Veterans