Wow, planning a trip to Denver and checking an Avis corporate discount rate vs. Hotwire, $100 more for 4 days! We ended up getting Avis through the Hotwire process — unreal! Sometimes I really wonder about this travel stuff… car rentals seem very expensive this summer.

… the industry-answer is that I’d spend time reading Jay Weintraub’s incredibly dense but very interesting blog/DM Confidential posts!

WSJ article [sub] about Philips attempt to do some novel advertising: they pay for 4 minutes of ad space in the movie theatre, and only use 15 seconds to say “We could have run a 4 minute commercial. Instead we chose simplicity.”

Unfortunately the company that runs these ads, Screenvision, doesn’t want people poking fun at the advertising medium itself, and so has refused to run these ads. This is too bad, publishers are going to have more players who will poke fun at the medium across all media and they should be prepared for it, embrace it as inevitable. The next (inevitable) step would be showing the user just how much their time is worth (”Four minutes of your time cost us $2,544″ or about $1.50 each or whatever) and that will actually probably help the advertiser since the consumer could figure that the movie might actually cost more without advertising. Obviously not all of it is directly transferable, but you see where I’m going with this don’t you?

Just about all data that finds its way online, or is put into an email somewhere is probably assured of never disappearing. There will always be a copy somewhere. But the past is also increasingly become referenceable through the efforts of companies (like Google!) and individuals. About a year ago, I stumbled upon some historical athletics (track and field for the US locals) results online - my grandfather competing internationally in Australia in 1921/1922. According to this, he competed in the 880 yards and the mile but did not win either. Fascinating. I recall a client I met a few years ago remarking that he saw I’d “played rugby at Dartmouth” by googling me. Indeed. My sports achievements are fairly unremarkable — my dad and brother, however, both represented their province in cricket. This is something I just stumbled across, namely scorecards from first class cricket games in the 1950’s when my dad played. As more and more information becomes available, it is the context providers who can connect the dots that will become ever more important.

Oh and I was only unable to find my brother’s sporting achievements, but did stumble upon some of his modeling photo’s (sheesh!!).

Looks like Tivo is trying hard to get more customers, offering rebates of $100 for purchases of new devices. I might pick up another one myself - I haven’t had time to hack my existing Tivo yet, even though I picked up the fascinating “Hacking Tivo” a few months ago. There a sites like Weaknees that have ready-made Tivo upgrades for you.

I apologize for the lack of information on the site recently. I’ve been rather busy getting up to speed at my new employer. In the meantime, I encourage people to shoot me any new ideas or contributions to “rob at analystblog.com”.

A friend recently pointed me to the rather interesting T-shirt he just bought, at www.savemartha.com. This seems like it could be a fun gift for a family member or friend!

Human beings are not designed to think statistically. As can be seen from concerns about airline travel, we find it difficult to combine size of effect and probability of effect to assist us in making decisions about risk. The negative effects of a war several thousand miles away on our activities and thoughts of our safety, of the likelihood of terrorism will exceed what is rational. As an example, Yamagishi (1997 in Applied Cognitive Psychology, 11) has shown that people will assess a disease that kills 1,286 out of every 10,000 people more dangerous than one that kills 24.14% of the population. Other studies have shown that warnings are more effective when presented in terms of scenarios and anecdotes than percentages, bar charts, graphics and frequencies, or in terms of proportionally comparing [Slovic's paper on Risk analysis] an unknown to something known. Since we “heuristically evaluate” probability by reducing it to simpler acts of recalling most recent (similar) events (e.g. 9/11/01), our judgement of the likelihood of the future occurence is disproportinately upwardly biased.

Brad DeLong’s fascinating blog entry on the arguments for/against selling or trading away your spot in a queue to someone else. How do you price or account for the time that we all spend in lines, what if you’re in a really big hurry? It doesn’t seem any more fair if I’ve “earned” the ability to jump ahead in line because I’ve been a frequent traveler with a certain airline (that comes down to money I’ve spent in the past doesn’t it? there’s an interesting queue-like aspect to that too though). Thoughts on this topic?