Bandai and Namco plan to merge into a multi-billion dollar entertainment company so they can beat Japan’s falling birthrate. With fewer children being born each year, the companies have fewer potential customers. By merging, the companies hope to migrate Bandai’s film characters to Namco’s game systems and arcades. Bandai owns the rights to cartoons and […]

The New York Times reports that medical patients struggle with statistics. One patient, informed that she would either respond or not respond to a medication, asked if that meant she had a fifty percent chance of success. A Harvard statistician likens the confusion to the following scenario: “Either a woman is pregnant or not. She […]

Customers and new marketers often ask me how to identify and research target markets. Today, viaDarren Barefoot, I stumbled across “Why I Will Never Have a Girlfriend” by Tristan Miller, a Canadian research scientist who works for the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence. His article, which originally appeared in the The Annals of Improbable […]

Google recently launched Google Scholar, a search engine for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports. By special arrangement, Google’s spiders index content from open and password-protected sites. However, unless users have a subscription to protected sites, they can’t read those articles. When I need to analyze consumer trends, predict […]