From the monthly archives:

October 2008

How Twitter Solves Voter and Other Types of Information Asymetry

by Pete Abilla October 31, 2008

A while ago, I wrote a post on how Digg is characterized by the principles of Game Theory.  As it turns out, that post was Dugg to the front page of Digg and almost fried my server.  Today, I want to briefly discuss something along the same lines of Behavioral Economics — how Twitter solves [...]

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Sarah Palin Wardrobe Break-Even Analysis

by Pete Abilla October 28, 2008

Let’s face it: sometimes, people vote not based on character, policy position, or anything else that might be important or substantial.  Sometimes, people vote for a candidate because of the candidates’ fashion sense. So, if we were to quantify the price of a vote (in terms of revenue), the total cost of Sarah Palin’s wardrobe, [...]

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The Role of The Warehouse in eCommerce and eRetailing: Trade-off and Benefits

by Pete Abilla October 20, 2008

Efficiently optimizing inventory, storage space, labor, costs, and time in eCommerce (e-retailing) is required to attain customer satisfaction and economic profit.  For the Operations Researcher, this is no easy task; for the in-the-dirt manager with competing priorities and pressures from her chain-of-command, it is even a bigger challenge. Most people are familiar with the front-end [...]

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Tesla Motors is not Toyota: A Contrast in Disrespect and Respect of People

by Pete Abilla October 18, 2008

Apparently Tesla Motors shutting down their Detroit office and laid-off 90% of the office.  The lucky 10% will be moved to San Jose, California.  I have no problems with letting-go of staff — business is tough and times are very tough — but the way Tesla Motors went about it was inhumane, to say the [...]

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Sarah Palin Pareto

by Pete Abilla October 16, 2008

What if we organized all of Sarah Palin’s speeches into an unstructured corpus and ran a word-frequency linguistic analysis on that corpus?  A Pareto Analysis of word-frequency in Sarah Palin’s speeches will give us a sense of what she cares about the most, assuming that [what she utters is what is on her mind] and [...]

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Customer Service Contacts are Symptoms, not Root Causes: How to Apply the 5 Whys

by Pete Abilla October 8, 2008

Most organizations believe that Customer Service contacts are what needs to be fixed or eliminated.  On the surface, that might be true.  But, when approached as a Lean Thinker, Customer Service contacts are truly only symptoms, the root causes of which are not yet fully known.  In what follows, I’ll explain the role of Customer [...]

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