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Links for 2013-01-04

  • Dan McKinley :: Effective Web Experimentation as a Homo Narrans

    Good demo from Etsy’s A/B testing, of how the human brain can retrofit a story onto statistically-insignificant results. To fix: ‘avoid building tooling that enables fishing expeditions; limit our post-hoc rationalization by explicitly constraining it before the experiment. Whenever we test a feature on Etsy, we begin the process by identifying metrics that we believe will change if we 1) understand what is happening and 2) get the effect we desire.’

    (tags: testing etsy statistics a-b-testing fishing ulysses-contract brain experiments)

  • Lesser known crimes: do you own that copyright?

    A very interesting crime on the Irish statute books:

    Section 141 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 provides: A person who, for financial gain, makes a claim to enjoy a right under this Part [ie. copyright] which is, and which he or she knows or has reason to believe is, false, shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable on conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding £100,000, or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 5 years, or both.

    (tags: ireland copyright ip false-claims law)