As Pole's computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a 'pregnancy prediction' score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to…
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Tyler Cowen
Tyler Cowen (/ˈkaʊ.ən/; born January 21, 1962) is an American economist, philosopher, and writer, who is a professor at George Mason University, where he holds the Holbert C. Harris Chair of economics. He hosts a popular economics blog, Marginal Revolution, together with his co-author, Alex Tabarrok. Cowen and Tabarrok have also started the website Marginal Revolution University, a venture in online education. Cowen writes the "Economic Scene" column for the New York Times, and since July 2016 has been a regular opinion columnist at Bloomberg View. He also writes for such publications as The New Republic, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Newsweek, and the Wilson Quarterly. He serves as general director of George Mason's Mercatus Center, a university research center that focuses on the market economy. In February 2011, Cowen received a nomination as one of the most influential economists in the last decade in a survey by The Economist. He was ranked #72 among the "Top 100 Global Thinkers" in 2011 by Foreign Policy Magazine "for finding markets in everything." 2Education and personal life Cowen was born in Bergen County, New Jersey. At 15, he became the youngest ever New Jersey state chess champion. He graduated from George Mason University with a bachelor of science degree in economics in 1983 and received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987 with his thesis titled Essays in the theory of welfare economic
It's the manager who is the scarce input...
As in chess, we can expect to see dramatic gains in the personal and professional lives of people who interpret machine feedback—of all kinds—quickly. A particular personality trait that doesn't come easily to everyone will be needed in a lot of situations: the ability to handle or maybe just ignore…
It's interesting to see how Cleverbot convinces a lot of people that it is human. It doesn't try to respond logically to every query, or to correctly parse every sentence from the human. Instead it tries to mimic how an incoherent or slightly crazed human would converse—or perhaps how a pickup…
Outsourcing is still a smaller phenomenon than many people think. Currently imports from China are measured at about 2.7 percent of US consumer spending. Furthermore, for each dollar of imports from China, about fifty-five cents was ultimately spent in the United States preparing the import in some…
Immigration is vital to the future economic vitality of the United States. If that immigration is Latino, as indeed it often is in the United States, the longer-run effect is to build up entrepreneurship and democratic values in the other countries in this hemisphere.
Southern Germany is an extremely productive region and we can expect it will become more crowded and also more productive. The top German firms are generating some impressive learning curves.
...studies of spelling bees show that the winning spellers are those who not only work hard, but who engage in disciplined forms of study that do not always yield immediate positive feedback.
Of course, educational institutions aren't ready to admit how much they share with churches. These temples of secularism don't want to admit they are about simple tasks such as motivating the slugs or acculturating people into the work habits and sociological expectations of the so-called educated…
It is rumored that Richard Eng, one of the leading tutor kings, pulls in $1.5 million a year; his face is on billboards, he drives a Lamborghini, and his license plate reads simply 'Richard.'
An intelligent machine might come up with a new theory of cosmology, and perhaps no human will be able to understand or articulate that theory. Maybe it will refer to non-visualizable dimensions of space or nonintuitive understandings of time. The machine will tell us that the theory makes good…