Broback's Blog

For those who help various organizations evaluate their real and potential online audiences, it’s always nice to find a promising new service that can help determine how much effective reach someone has online. There’s been a lot of conversation of late in the political sphere surrounding how “real” candidates Twitter followings are, especially in a […]

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Are you a Web data geek? Are you into scraping sites? If so, you may be one of the many people who rely on the highly-regarded Needlebase to help you in your efforts. After reading about Needlebase on RWW, (very, very cool example of the potential here.) I spent many hours playing with it — […]

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If you cash in your million dollar winning lottery ticket in Virginia like this man did, you can take it in installments of $40K a year for 25 years. If you are a retired teacher in Illinois, your pension is (on average) $45K per year. Plus it will go up annually thanks to automatic cost […]

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Found these numbers interesting. Medicare Fraud? $60 billion a year. Wall Street Profits? $13.5 billion. Bonuses? 19.9 billion.

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I don’t blog enough here about all the cool social data tools and services I use, but I frequently get a chance to demo my favorites on stage (and also blog about it at our Tweet House site.) I’ll be in San Francisco on Wednesday at The Corporate Social Media Summit serving as a moderator, […]

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Efficiency is generally thought of the relationship between inputs and outputs. Economic efficiency is defined by Paul Heyne here. “To economists, efficiency is a relationship between ends and means. When we call a situation inefficient, we are claiming that we could achieve the desired ends with less means, or that the means employed could produce […]

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I recently added ABC’s This Week back to my Tivo since ABC took my veiled and tongue-in-cheek advice and jettisoned the talented but regrettably snooze-inducing Christiane Amanpour. (Great to have George S. back, but I’d love to see the awesome Jake Tapper in the host chair again.) Today’s episode featured a mildly bullying interchange between […]

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Economics is hard. I was sent this piece written by Philosophy major Matthew Yglesias yesterday. In it he attempts to emulate thinking like an economist, and signals in a way that the untutored will likely find impressive. Phrases like “regressive”, “subsidy” and even an “at the margin” are sprinkled in liberally. (Strangely — and very […]

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It appears that Obamacare is facing an uphill battle in the Supreme Court: LA Times: Supreme Court greets healthcare mandate with skepticism Chicago Sun Times: Justices’ queries could signal trouble for health-care law CBS News: Supreme Court majority skeptical on health care law Washington Post: Supreme Court expresses doubts on key constitutional issue in health-care […]

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I’ve added Goodheart’s Law as a category. It’s well worth noting: “Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” Something to consider whenever you hear the word “targeting”.

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