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hexmode's entries filed under { analysis }
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Why the 17th street (and others) canal levee failed
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10/15/2005 02:21 | ||
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At 17th Street, the soil moved laterally, pushing entire wall sections with it. Bea and other engineers say that as Katrina's storm surge water filled the canal, water pressure rose in the soil underneath the wall and in the peat layer. Water moved through the soil underneath the base of the wall. When the rising pressure and moving water overcame the soil's strength, it suddenly shifted, taking surrounding material - and the wall - with it. "Think of a layer cake - in the middle I've got my icing. All of a sudden, I push on the top of my piece of cake, and what it's moving on is this weak, slick icing. The whole thing moves," said Thomas Zimmie, a civil engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who is on the National Science Foundation team and surveyed the levees this week. |
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Incompetence is bliss
In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to ``grossly overestimate'' how well they had performed.
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10/12/2005 17:44 | ||
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Eight years of email stats, pass 1
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10/11/2005 17:22 | ||
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The totals in Table 1 tell me that the subjective 'quantum leap in spam' in 2002/3 that led me to install SpamAssassin as a full-time companion is certainly corroborated by the numbers. There's simply no other way to cope with the large volume of junk. But now (auto)strip away that nasty spam, and we're still looking at some scary numbers. Let's call the emails that are left over, after stipping away the nasty spam, "OK emails" (let's face it, they are never going to be "GOOD emails", right?). What we see then is an increase from 5-6K annual "OK emails" in the late nineties (15-ish daily) to 8-9K annual "OK emails" today (25-ish daily). A bright note in all this is that the numbers for 2004 are surprisingly steady compared with 2003, i.e. there's no exponential growth, even though things are clearly getting 'intense'. 25 emails daily (and thereare many I know who have WAY more than this) is a lot to deal with, especially since the emails don't cluster evenly throughout the week. To get to a 25-per-day average, you're looking at more like 30-40 per working weekday, if you're the kind of person who switches off at the weekend (ha!). If each email requires 3 minutes of thinking/response time (you're lucky if you can average that), then you've got a guaranteed two hours straight down the tubes every day. But wait a minute, "down the tubes" is incorrect: surely your emails involve key interactions, networking, brainstorming, appropriate drudgery and admin, in short what you get paid to do, right? Well, that's not clear... and requires drilling down a bit deeper into the data. |
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| An Analysis of Netflix's DVD Allocation System | 09/14/2005 20:20 | ||