The surprising complexity of orange juice production:
Revenue Analytics consultant Bob Cross, architect of Coke’s juice model, also built the model Delta Air Lines uses to maximize its revenue per mile flown. Orange juice, says Cross, “is definitely one of the most complex applications of business analytics. It requires analyzing up to 1 quintillion decision variables to consistently deliver the optimal blend, despite the whims of Mother Nature.”
HT: Centives
As a result, I won’t be around to answer comments over the next few weeks. If you really want to say something and get a response flick me an email – although I will only see that very occasionally.
However, I’m just pointing this out as an explanation for why I won’t be replying to comments – I still love you, I just can’t see the comments and so can’t reply 🙂
Because it looks fancier and more expensive.
9 wine judges from France, Belgium and the U.S. tasted French against New Jersey wines. The French wines selected were from the same producers as in 1976 including names such as Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Haut Brion, priced up to $650/bottle… Although, the winner in each category was a French wine (Clos de Mouches for the whites and Mouton-Rothschild for the reds) NJ wines are at eye level. Three of the top four whites were from New Jersey. The best NJ red was ranked place 3. An amazing result given that the prices for NJ average at only 5% of the top French wines.
A statistical evaluation of the tasting, conducted by Princeton Professor Richard Quandt, further shows that the rank order of the wines was mostly insignificant. That is, if the wine judges repeated the tasting, the results would most likely be different. From a statistically viewpoint, most wines were undistinguishable. Only the best white and the lowest ranked red were significantly different from the others wines.
See The New Yorker’s piece for all the details and make sure you decant your plonk and serve it in appropriate glasses. It makes much more of a difference to your guests’ perception of the wine than spending up on a fancy bottle!
HT: MR
I only just found out that Elinor Ostrom died last week. She is the only woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics (although Joan Robinson probably should have got one) and the magnitude of that achievement is magnified by the fact that she didn’t train as an economist! If you’re not familiar with her life then have a read of her obituary over at the NYT.
As I was taught it, her work deals with the conditions under which communities will be able to avoid a tragedy of the commons in managing common resources. Tyler Cowen said of it:
Elinor Ostrom may arguable be considered the mother of field work in development economics. She has worked closely investigating water associations in Los Angeles, police departments in Indiana, and irrigation systems in Nepal. In each of these cases her work has explored how between the atomized individual and the heavy-hand of government there is a range of voluntary, collective associations that over time can evolve efficient and equitable rules for the use of common resources.
…
For Ostrom it’s not the tragedy of the commons but the opportunity of the commons. Not only can a commons be well-governed but the rules which help to provide efficiency in resource use are also those that foster community and engagement. A formally government protected forest, for example, will fail to protect if the local users do not regard the rules as legitimate… Ostrom’s work is about understanding how the laws of common resource governance evolve and how we may better conserve resources by making legislation that does not conflict with law.
Steve Wozniak may be a brilliant technician, but this quote shows why Jobs was so important to Apple’s success. Wozniak is talking about how much he preferred Siri before Apple bought it.
“I start telling everyone I knew and speaking around the world about how this was the future of computing, speaking things in normal ways, feeling like you’re talking to a human,” Wozniak said of the original Siri program. When asked for an example of how Siri used to be better when it was just a third-party iOS app, Wozniak said that he used to be able to get Siri to list prime numbers greater than 87, but when he asks Siri to do that now it thinks he’s talking about prime ribs.
Yep, he thinks that it’s more useful to interpret ‘prime’ as referring to numbers than ribs. Technicians should really recognise the importance of designers!