The Betacantrips Travelogue

An interesting article on Slashdot about the predictive power of early reviews.

‘We now know that a remarkable percentage of consumers and businesses decided to spurn Windows Vista and stay with XP. But did the reviews of Vista serve as an early warning that it had major problems? I looked back at the evaluations in nine major publications and found that they expressed some caution–but on the whole, they were far from scathing. Some were downright enthusiastic.’

As futurists, we have to re-evaluate what we thought would happen if we are to get better at predicting. My feeling is that by and large, the things we expect to happen do not happen, and the things that take us by storm are the things we never saw coming. But that’s just a gut intuition.

This leaves aside the larger question of whether Vista sucks as bad as people feel it does (as is discussed in the Slashdot comments). What’s interesting is that nobody could have predicted the user outcry based on the press — maybe even based on the quality of the software itself!

Three Panel Soul has a strip titled "On Loneliness".

Seen on pixelstyle.

As a data collection/data analysis fanboy, I have no choice but to love the OK Cupid data-mining blog, seen via this post on JWZ.

Here are the grouped match percentages for a random pool of 500,000 users. Astrological sign has no effect whatsoever on how compatible two people are.

As one of the commenters points out, the stuff about race and response rates is super-interesting.