Interesting Links for 17-05-2012
May. 17th, 2012 12:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker- When a local pizza parlour buys ads on Facebook, how well do they do?
- Children's shows to leave BBC One
- Fury as blind people hit by benefit reform
- How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit
- Quantitative easing brings down yield on gilts, pushes pension funds into debt, so they need to be topped up.
- Some clarity on how the numbers on doctors and nurses have changed in the last few years.
- People can guess sexual orientation in just 50ms. 57% accurate for men, 65% for women.
- The USA has already had a gay president
- Apparently actual twincest is really big. Who knew?
- The Story of the Five Year Old Who Met The Avengers
- 60 Percent Of Young American Adults Are Misinformed About Birth Control's Effectiveness
- The olympic torch - first lit by Nazis.
- The UK's new volunteer national service looks actively positive.
- The WTO hates dolphins
- Too Hot for TED: Income Inequality
- A good piece on why Class is entwined in privilege
- Meet the worst 8th grade math teacher in NYC (Standardised testing at its worst)
- Non-Hispanic white births the minority in US
- Tidal power gets a stormy birth off coast of Scotland
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How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit
Date: 2012-05-17 11:24 am (UTC)People can guess sexual orientation in just 50ms. 57% accurate for men, 65% for women.
Date: 2012-05-17 11:29 am (UTC)http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036671
no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 11:37 am (UTC)It is so ridiculously easy to game the system on Facebook in order to get completely inappropriate and amusing ads.
I recently spent probably less than two hours time total over the course of three days and managed to get Facebook to the point where the only ads they sent me were for guides on how to make your own bullets, ads for shotguns and kits to build log cabins the woods to prepare for the coming Apocalypse.
How did I do so? By using Timeline to take credit for killing JFK, RFK and MLK and for the Patty Hearst kidnapping. (And listing my occupation as "Rumsfeld Black Ops.")
The only way their targeted advertising could possibly work is if people are always 100 percent honest with their Facebook posts (and who the fuck is 100 percent honest when posting stuff that will be seen by their peers, parents and whoever the fuck else they decided to "friend") and if people never, ever use irony, snark or sarcasm in their posts.
Re: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit
Date: 2012-05-17 11:40 am (UTC)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Execution_Channel
no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 11:58 am (UTC)Also people keep repeating that Facebook is far better at targeting ads because they have so much personal data. Yeah they do, but Google, Bing etc. know what I am searching for. The chances of me clicking on an ad for a specific product I just searched for are far greater than me clicking on a random tech ad Facebook threw onto the screen because it thought that I was interested in Computers.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 12:00 pm (UTC)By definition, about half of all teachers will add value, and the other half will not."
No. This is not a question about students scoring above the median (which would be half/half) it's about students scoring above what they are predicted - you could in principle get ALL students to improve on predicted achievement.
“They did phenomenally,” Abbott said. “If they did so well, I don’t see how they can say I added no value whatsoever.”
If that is how well they were predicted to do, then you may not have added much value; although you presumably have added to their knowledge, because the prediction assumes they will gain knowledge. If a school selects on ability-to-do-well-on-exams the students doing well on exams in subsequent years is not a surprise; it is expected, and this sort of teacher evaluation works very poorly in that circumstance.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 12:27 pm (UTC)Because people in business get bored, just like anyone else.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 01:23 pm (UTC)There are ways to make money out of Facebook - I know people making thousands of dollars a *day* (self-reported, but on industry forums where there's no real reason to lie) using Facebook ads. But you need a lot more testing - and, sadly, a big cash loss in the beginning - to do it.
(In the case of the Pizza Guys, I'd strongly suspect that their landing page was to blame. Their self-reported CTR isn't awful, but a conversion rate of less than 1% from a click is, well, abysmal.)
Still, I doubt any serious PPC experts are going to be complaining about all the bad press Facebook ads are getting. Bad press = lower ad costs.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 01:37 pm (UTC)Facebook hows me ads so irrelevant I can barely remember them. Oh apart from Russian girls, possibly because my profile has said I'm single for long lengths of time?
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Date: 2012-05-17 01:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 08:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 09:03 pm (UTC)Re: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit
Date: 2012-05-17 09:43 pm (UTC)I've sprinkled some of my factuals on Everything2 with utter tripe with little reaction. Mr. O'Leary had 15 minutes of internet fame there when his article on Pete Doherty was picked up as fact by an eager DJ: http://everything2.com/title/Pete+Doherty?author_id=697763#bol