Data Mining & Wal-Mart

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Constance L. Hays takes a look at Wal-Marts massive customer/product database.

URRICANE FRANCES was on its way, barreling across the Caribbean, threatening a direct hit on Florida’s Atlantic coast. Residents made for higher ground, but far away, in Bentonville, Ark., executives at Wal-Mart Stores decided that the situation offered a great opportunity for one of their newest data-driven weapons, something that the company calls predictive technology.
A week ahead of the storm’s landfall, Linda M. Dillman, Wal-Mart’s chief information officer, pressed her staff to come up with forecasts based on what had happened when Hurricane Charley struck several weeks earlier. Backed by the trillions of bytes’ worth of shopper history that is stored in Wal-Mart’s computer network, she felt that the company could “start predicting what’s going to happen, instead of waiting for it to happen,” as she put it.
The experts mined the data and found that the stores would indeed need certain products – and not just the usual flashlights. “We didn’t know in the past that strawberry Pop-Tarts increase in sales, like seven times their normal sales rate, ahead of a hurricane,” Ms. Dillman said in a recent interview. “And the pre-hurricane top-selling item was beer.”

What do we want from our elected officials?

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Reading Jason Shephard’s excellent “Robarts Gets The Treatment” made me think about what we should expect from our elected officials.
Here are my initial thoughts:

  • Act Professionally
    Debate is essential to our form of government. Our elected leaders should engage in and value substantive debate. Nothing engages the public more than this type of dialogue.
  • Use Data to Make DecisionsThere’s a reason that the CBO (Congressional Budget Office), and LAB (Legislative Audit Bureau) exist
  • Communicate: Tell the Whole Story
    Use the internet to converse with constituents.
  • Ask Tough Questions

Ruth Robarts and Kathleen Falk seem to be two local elected officials who are willing to challenge the status quo. Shephard is correct when he refers to Robarts as “Public Ally Number 1”
I consider Russ Feingold to be nearly a perfect politician. He’s idealist, yet has classic political abilities. He’s also very smart. Idealist in terms of compaign finance and local communications, political in terms of timely, political votes (NRA and Tax Giveaway) and smart (debates: where he shows that he knows the game very well). To his credit, he’s always willing to chat and ask questions.

The Empire Strikes Back

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We certainly don’t need additional reasons to stop supporting Microsoft, but here’s another: Groklaw:Step Into My Parlor, Said the Spider to the Fly

Last year, Microsoft had 4,000 patents in total. This year, they applied for another 3,000. They are now planning at least twenty IP cross-licensing deals with other large corporations, and have made it clear that they are seeking similiar alliances with even their worst enemies. This April, they quietly offered a “Royalty Free Protocol License Agreement” on their site. It generously allows the license of “any intellectual property rights Microsoft may have in any or all of [the following] protocols”. The 130 protocols listed included Appletalk, most of TCP/IP – and everything else, from DNS to Zmodem, from DHCP to the port 9 discard service (whose sole function is to drop packets). Signing this license frees developers from being sued for IP infringements by Microsoft, but prevents you from working on GPL software (Samba already warns its contributors not to sign it). This week, Microsoft indemnified all their customers from the legal fallout of any court cases revolving around their IP. Which implies there is either about to be such a battle: or at least Microsoft wants everyone to think there’ll be one. Put this week in your diaries, ladies and gentlemen of the Internet: you don’t need Yoda to tell you that the Patent Wars have begun.

Via Dave Farber’s IP

Toilet Paper Math

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Shopping today, I came across the following math problem: Two toilet paper packages were “on sale”:

  • 24 rolls for 6.54. Each roll contains 199 sheets
  • 12 Rolls for $8.59. Each roll contains 1000 sheets.

Which is the better deal? 🙂 Which one had much larger floor space and inventory?

Carroll Shelby @ 81

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Terry Box on the legendary muscle car builder Carroll Shelby:

Sometimes late at night, 81-year-old Carroll Shelby lies awake, thinking about all the cars he still wants to build.
“I’ve got 10 different cars in my head,” said Shelby, the lanky, legendary Texan who created the fierce Shelby Cobras and Mustangs of the 1960s and was a renowned racer in the 1950s.
At a time when most men his age are settling in for the final chapter of their lives, Shelby is on the move again.
Earlier this year, he and his wife, Cleo, bought a 4,600-acre ranch outside tiny Annona in east Texas. After years of living mostly in Los Angeles, he said he expects the new ranch to become his primary home — a symbolic return of sorts to east Texas, where he was born.

He has a website, of course.