by david allan van nostrand | Jun 29, 2020 | Items in the News
“Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” Media mogul Ted Turner said it, and so did General George S. Patton, but they weren’t the first. That was Thomas Paine, the revolutionary whose 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, called for American independence from...
by david allan van nostrand | Jun 22, 2020 | How to tell good research from bad, Using Information
What Do You Do When You See a Wet Paint Sign? There is a skeptic inside each of us. Tell people there’s an invisible man in the sky who created the universe and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and majority have to touch it to be...
by david allan van nostrand | Jun 15, 2020 | Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, Voodoo Statistics
Lee Lantz was a seafood merchant who found a mild and flaky fish that tasted great. Its name, Patgonian Toothfish, was as unappetizing as its looks. It was an ugly human-sized fish with a mouthful of menacing teeth. He couldn’t change its appearance, so he made up a...
by david allan van nostrand | Jun 8, 2020 | Focus Groups, How to tell good research from bad
The father of the focus group despised how his methodology had been hijacked and bastardized. Robert Merton said “Focus groups are supposed to be merely the source of ideas that need to be researched.” They were meant to be no more than a jumping off point and a...
by david allan van nostrand | Jun 1, 2020 | Conformity, Human Behavior
Are you tired of hackneyed phrases? Threadbare, moth-eaten sayings that have been used so tediously for so long that they’ve lost whatever meaning they ever had? Me, too. Recently I heard someone say “It is what it is” for the third time in a single day....
