Justin Guy Souter

Pupils have been struck by a mysterious Tourette's-type illness at a school in New York, leaving doctors baffled. Up to 15 girls at Le Roy High School have developed the ailment over the past few months. It causes twitching and uncontrollable verbal outbursts - including swearing in some cases. Doctors say the symptoms could be due to conversion disorder - once known as mass hysteria. Even though it is a psychological condition, the symptoms are real. However, campaigner and environmentalist Erin Brockovich is now investigating whether it could have something to do with pollution. - Justin Guy Souter

First seen at Sundance last year, Martha Marcy May Marlene has been a talking point ever since for its unsettling look at a young woman haunted by her time as a member of a cult-like group. The names of such 'cult' leaders as Charles Manson, Jim Jones and David Koresh conjure up some of the most dramatic news images of the 20th Century. Yet new UK release Martha Marcy May Marlene may be one of the first dramatic features to explore what happens in this highly secretive world. - Justin Guy Souter

If you’re a Mac user like me (Macbook Air all the way!) then you might want to try some of these apps listed below for your writing needs that specifically connect to WordPress, Blogger, etc. Check them out! - Justin Guy Souter

And he told the Deptford schoolchildren how his foundation was methodically working to get rid of every last case of polio, a scourge which had paralysed hundreds and thousands of people each year. There's a hit list of 12 diseases which he wants to target - and he told the Deptford pupils that what had really surprised him was that these preventable illnesses had not been stopped before and that there had not been more innovation in vaccines. "I was stunned how little resources had gone into this," he said. His foundation's work is carried out with a "hard-nosed mathematical" approach, he says, calculating the impact in terms of "dollars per year of life saved". - Justin Guy Souter

A dirt poor rickshaw puller in a slum in India once told me that he was the luckiest person alive. His hut was made out of bamboo sticks and plastic tarps, with raw sewage trickling out front, but still, Manoj Singh said he was happy, very happy, in fact. Though sometimes he only had only a few bowls of rice to feed his family, he said "I feel that I am not poor, but I am the richest person in the world." - Justin Guy Souter

A failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a procedure in product development and operations management for analysis of potential failure modes within a system for classification by the severity and likelihood of the failures. A successful FMEA activity helps a team to identify potential failure modes based on past experience with similar products or processes, enabling the team to design those failures out of the system with the minimum of effort and resource expenditure, thereby reducing development time and costs. It is widely used in manufacturing industries in various phases of the product life cycle and is now increasingly finding use in the service industry. Failure modes are any errors or defects in a process, design, or item, especially those that affect the customer, and can be potential or actual. Effects analysis refers to studying the consequences of those failures. - Justin Guy Souter

I prefer to try to analyze repeat pruchase behavior, and hence, estimate lifetime value, by doing cohort analysis. This is approximate by definition, but it can give you some sense of lifetime value well before you actually see a full customer lifetime, which can help in accelerating decisions about marketing and customer acquisition.  I recently posted about how you can improve LTV and CAC for your subscription or repeat purchase business.  But how do you estimate Lifetime value? - Justin Guy Souter

And what you find is that the deferred-life plan which is based on retirement and redeeming these experiences, that are most valuable in your peak physical years, is a false paradigm. It’s a very Faustian bargain and bad bet. So when I say that having incredible experiences, once in a lifetime experiences, is generally less expensive than people think, it simply results from sitting down and costing those out. So if you want an Aston Martin DB9, there are definitely ways you can do that for 1,500 dollars a month, even if you purchase. And to postpone all of these bucket list experiences until 50, 60 years old or beyond is, I think, a very bad wager. - Justin Guy Souter

So while funnels are a great visualization tool, funnels alone are not enough. The analytics tools today work well for micro-optimization experiments (such as landing page conversion) but fall short for macro-pivot experiments. The answer is to couple funnels with cohorts. - Justin Guy Souter

While measuring overall Acquisition is easy, optimizing it is quite another story. Measuring the effectiveness across all campaigns in Google Analytics is a lot of work because the relevant data is spread out across multiple screens. I am not really at this stage yet, but I have come across 2 new services in private beta (KISSmetrics is one of them) that show a lot of promise here. KISSmetrics fundamentally uses people versus page views as the basic unit which makes funnel and conversions visualization a snap. - Justin Guy Souter

Starting in 2008, Jeff Hammerbacher (@hackingdata) and I sat down to share our experiences building the data and analytics groups at Facebook and LinkedIn. In many ways, that meeting was the start of data science as a distinct professional specialization (see the "What makes a data scientist" section of this report for the story on how we came up with the title "Data Scientist"). Since then, data science has taken on a life of its own. The hugely positive response to "What Is Data Science?," a great introduction to the meaning of data science in today's world, showed that we were at the start of a movement. There are now regular meetups, well-established startups, and even college curricula focusing on data science. As McKinsey's big data research report and LinkedIn's data indicates, data science talent is in high demand. - Justin Guy Souter