Time series comparison

Baseball again..

Lee v Holiday 

Stephen Few would be proud.  Excellent time series comparison over 2 very good pitchers, but who is the best consistently?  Seems to be Roy in this case, which really does not surprise me, since he dominated the Red Sox for so long in Toronto (but at least those games were pretty short).  The question is who do you want to go in a game 7, some one who is consistent, or someone who, when hot, it better than everyone (Verlander needs to get out of D-Town).

However, I would have like to seen something that compares year over year to see if there is some sort of trend as the season goes along.  Seems to me as well that in 2008 they were essentially the same pitcher.

You know those "rewards" cards?

We all know (or at least should know) that these rewards cards that are given out by any and every retail store these days are used by their marketing departments to create really rich data.  As this post illustrates this data is very important especially now, where the average customer (is there an average customer anymore?) shops multiple channels (brick and mortar, online, phone, mobile), so what these cards allow is to attach more demographic information to the actual sale as well allow for aggregation across channels.

Read about it here: Retail and BI

Again this data is very rich, but needs to be used very carefully.  Yes, you now know that the mother of a 10 year old likes to buy jeans at Old Navy, but you do not need tell them that.  It is a very slippery slope between good direct marketing and "big brother" looking into your home and wallet.