Tag: analysis

Iphone App Attrition

For free applications, only 20% of users return to use the app the first day after they download it, and then it quickly drops off from there. By 30 days out, less than 5% are using the app. The chart for paid apps shows a slightly steeper fall-off rate. So there is a very brief window of time to capture people’s attention and potential revenues.

because most mobile apps suck. who needs an app to quote bible verses? the barcode scanning apps, on the other hand.

Mathematica Image Processing

wow. a potential shell of the future will do these kinds of transforms for everything in your field of view.

One of the main advantages of doing something like this in Mathematica is that you can trivially replicate operations for many images. Sure, you can write PhotoShop scripts; I’ve done that many times, and every time I end up swearing at the thing wishing I could use a real language (and now that Mathematica 7 is out, I finally can). Beyond a certain level of complexity it’s simply not efficient to mess around with dialog boxes and script editors: you want a real language with a real syntax and a real API.

Deleveraging

You could read almost all of the voluminous coverage of the present crisis in the financial markets in the legacy media without ever encountering the essential term which describes what’s going on at the “big picture” level, understanding the underlying cause for the events in the news, or comprehending the magnitude of the problem and how protracted may be its consequences. The following chart encapsulates everything you need to know about the present situation. This is not a “mortgage crisis”, “derivatives crisis”, “credit crisis”, or any of the other terms bandied about describing aspects of the larger situation—it is a debt crisis and it always has been. The United States have experienced a multi-decade bubble market, rolling over from equities and real estate in the 1980s, to technology stocks in the 1990s, and back to residential real estate in the aughties, all driven by an unprecedented explosion of debt, as illustrated below.

“bailouts” as presently proposed and implemented make no difference whatsoever in this chart. They’re just a transfer of debt from the private account to the public account.

Electoral Vote Predictor

Welcome to Electoral Vote Predictor, which tracks political polls for US federal elections. The site was immensely popular in 2004, ranking in the top 1000 Websites in the world and the top 10 blogs in the world, with 700k visitors a day. In some surveys, it was the most popular election site in the country. In 2006, it tracked the Senate and House elections. Now it is back tracking the presidential, Senate, and House elections for 2008. Unlike other sites, which track generic national polls, this site tracks the state-by-state polls. After all, the presidency is decided by 51 separate state elections, the Senate by 35 separate elections (in 2008) and the House by 435 separate elections.

tannenbaum is back

Mansion

Lawyers are upper middle class. But this lawyer grabbed the saddle horn of magnificence and hung on for dear life—until the day in 2004 when he was bucked off. There in the dust he lay, exposed—in the New Orleans Times-Picayune—for defrauding his law partners. His firm defended big companies from class-action suits. To make the kind of money he needed to live in this house, the poor guy had resorted to allegedly cutting secret deals with plaintiffs’ lawyers. He reportedly gave up his law license to avoid being formally charged. The mansion made him do it: That’s what I thought when I heard the story. As sordid as his behavior was, I’m incapable of feeling toward him anything but sympathy. He wanted this mansion, he bought this mansion, and then he discovered that the mansion owned him.

an analysis of the housing fetish, the root of all financial evil