The Marina at Picton.

A seal playing.  Royal Albatross centre, Otago Peninsula.

Mark of the seagull. Royal Albatross centre, Otago Peninsula.

New Year Rodeo, Wanaka.

View over Wanaka from Mt. Iron.

An earnest Dork impression. Fox Glacier.

Franz Joseph Glacier.

Inside an abandoned Gold Mine. Near Greymouth.

Steps carved into the Pancake Rocks. Punakaiki.

Sea-spray through a blow hole. Punakaiki.

There are no photos from the Ferry crossing at the end of the trip, but it was eventful enough to remember without them.  We crossed in 50-55 knot gales, so at least half of the passengers got seasick …Myself included.

Confidence Bias: Evidence from Crowdsourcing

The key take-out: over 75% of contributors overestimated their ability to answer multiple choice questions correctly.  The Dunning-Kruger effect is alive and well!

Let us then employ properly this moment of time allotted us by fate, and leave the world contentedly; like a ripe olive dropping from its stalk, speaking well of the soil that produced it, and of the tree that bore it.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Google appears to be experimenting with a new paywall-esque content roadblock for publishers, and it’s not One Pass. For lack of a better name, let’s call it a “survey wall,” because instead of dollars the system asks readers a question before they can move on to continue reading what they like.

This could get interesting.  Instead of a standard paywall, people may be able to ‘pay’ for content by answering survey questions.  The publisher gets valuable information it can on-sell to advertisers, and Google dulls the old-media knives that are increasingly aimed at its vital organs. A natural extension of this would be that the publisher would become a survey panel provider of sorts.  Survey companies would be able to buy access to the survey-wall to ask their own questions for a fee-per-answer.  There is also no reason why independent panel companies could attempt to step into the role Google appears to be playing as the third-party technology provider.

Of course, there are big questions about the quality of data that may come from these distributed surveys.

• Would people answer honestly?
• What can reasonably be done with one or two answers from each visitor? (e.g., it would be difficult to examine relationships between more than a couple of variables)
• Why would we expect people who visit survey-wall sites to be representative of a given population?

Another feature of the pattern is that the average small brand buyer tends to be less favourable towards that brand than the average large brand buyer.   Indeed, it appears that Double Jeopardy even applies to hotel rating data presented in a recent post in the Data Miners blog by Michael Berry.  Here is the key quote:

It is hardly surprising that the Bellagio in Las Vegas has about 250 times more reviews than say, the Cambridge Gateway Inn, an unloved motel in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It may or may not be surprising that these oft-reviewed properties tend to be well-liked by our reviewers. Surprising or not, it’s true: the hotels with the most reviews have a higher average rating than the long tail of hotels, motels, B&Bs, and Inns with only a handful of reviews each.

If you’ve travelled here from the future because you saw the presentation and want the files I referred to, here they are.

• KiwiPycon Presentation with Full Notes (pptx, 1.7MB)
• KiwiPycon Import Enron Data (Python Code)
• KiwiPycon Enron Classifiers (Python Code)

• Michael Berry at Data Miners Blog describes how to use SQL common table expressions (i.e., WITH statements) to simplify complex queries by creating on-the-fly temp tables (named subqueries) prior to the full query definition.
• Designer Andrei from 37Signals describes the outcomes of a number of A/B tests they did on their Highrise signup page, along with the variants they tested.