Archive for January 7th, 2009

David Sedaris – pee in my pants!

Posted by Adam Ainbinder in Humor on January 7, 2009

this is for you Johnson!

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Liskula Cohen – is this lawsuit worth it?

Posted by Adam Ainbinder in Life on January 7, 2009

Lynx Australiathe book groundswell starts out with a story about Barbara Streisand complaining about a photo project that covered the entire California coast. she wanted pictures of her house taken down. of course, this spread throughout the internet, and there was a lot of publicity (mostly negative) about her. was the complaint worth it?

today, a model demanded that google take down remarks about her that were written on someone’s blog (hosted on google – nothing to do with search) – article here. now, when you search her name, the first 10 to 15 links on google are all articles about her lawsuit. the main article, “Skanks in New York”, was #2 on LA’s Buzz List for January 7th. No image links. She is a model, right?

this may be good publicity for her. i never heard of her, and i’ve just blogged about her. but is all publicity good? will this be good for her career? think about, one person wrote something nasty about her (maybe true, maybe not), probably 30-50 people read it. She takes offense, sues, and now millions of people read it.

it just goes to show, you can’t control what’s said on the internet. if you try to correct something, depending on how you do it, you’ll most likely end up exacerbating the problem. be careful with what you say! also be careful with how you react! don’t forget Liskula Cohen!

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best tool for an analyst

Posted by Adam Ainbinder in Business Analytics on January 7, 2009

ilustra-construindo-macro-excelWhat is one tool an analyst needs to have to make his or her life easier? the excel array. it is truly a lifesaver! if you want to work with data in excel, you have to learn to use it.

it’s very difficult to describe an array. imagine this…you have 38 cells in Column A and 38 cells in Column B. You want to divide all of the column A by Column B and sum them. You can do this two ways

1. Divide A/B in Column C…add at bottom

2. enter the formula =sum(A1:A38/B1:b38) and hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter to exit out of the cell

Of course, 1 may be easier in this case, especially if you don’t use the mouse. However, this is a simple example of an array

Imagine now that you have descriptor values in column A, column B, and column C, units in Column D and dollars in Column E. You want the sum of units for a unique combination of descriptors. There are 44,000 rows, and 10,000 unique combination of descriptors. by using an array that looks like this:

=sum(if((column A=Descriptor1)*(column B=Descriptor2)*(column c=descriptor3),column4,0)) close with ctrl+shift+enter

you get your answer. what it’s doing is going through each value in column A and comparing it to what you’re looking for, same with columns B and C, then adds the matches in column 4. Very sophisticated!

if you’re an analyst, learn to use arrays. they’ll make you look like a genius to your bosses when you can crunch data very quickly

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