BREAKING THE BANK?
In a 1976 book, Thirteen Against the Bank: The True Story of a Man who Broke the Bank at the Roulette Table with an Infallible System, Norman Leigh claimed to have achieved the impossible and devised a system to consistently return a profit from playing roulette. It sounds too good to be true, and indeed it is, according to Graham Kendall of Nottingham University in an article in Significance (December 2018, pp. 26–29). Using computer simulation, Kendall concludes that the book ‘is a work of fiction – which is a shame as it is a very nice story – and that the system it describes cannot, and does not, consistently return a profit’.
AI HELPING ROMANCE?
Lunch Actually founder Violet Lim is banking on artificial intelligence to help keep the flame of romance alive. In a partnership with Singapore Management University and AI Singapore, a ‘romance’ chat bot called Viola has been developed that possesses the ability to send reminders of important occasions such as birthdays, offer personalised restaurant and activity suggestions and dispense relationship advice to potential courting couples. Viola is being fed with 1.1 billion data points and it will continue to draw on romance expertise from humans on a panel of experts. More at: http://bit.ly/romanceAI
DO JET SKIS SHORTEN SPEECHES
Comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel hosted the Oscar ceremonies in 2017 and 2018. After a ceremony nearly 4 hours long in 2017, it seemed that the usual tactics of mic cuts and music cues were failing to temper the ever-lengthening speeches.
So, for the 2018 ceremony, Kimmel offered a jet ski to the person with the shortest acceptance speech (timewise). However, the total runtime in 2018 actually increased by 4 minutes.
But was there a significant change in speech word-counts when compared pairwise over all the transcribed 2017 and 2018 speeches in the database? It appears not. A statistical test comparing 24 speeches showed no significant change. On average, the speeches decreased by only 7.6 words year-on-year. (See Significance February 2019, pp. 24–27)
BUSINESS ANALYTICS AT NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY
Newcastle University Business School recently welcomed Ian Griffiths, co-founder of whocanfixmycar.com, to help launch a new undergraduate module in business analysis and analytics which sees students working as teams of consultants on a live client project to build and pitch a prototype business analytics system to the company.
Commenting on the new offering, module Leader, Dr Rebecca Casey, spoke of ‘creating opportunities for our students to solve real business problems in order to develop key employability competencies in business analysis and business analytics, which are sought-after skills’. More at http://bit.ly/2E55Soe