#designed to fail

It’s as if they were designed to fail.

Designed to Fail: How Planned Obsolescence is DESTROYING OUR PLANET

Designed to Fail: How Planned Obsolescence is DESTROYING OUR PLANET

So in Bose headphones two pieces of fabric aren't sewn together, they're glued.

Which means, that once the material starts to flake, this will happen at some point:

[picture is Bose headphones with the filling of one earmuff exposed and pieces of earmuff lining flaked off. the muff is partially sewn with a needle and thread also depicted]

Now, I don't care about looks, but I *do* care about function.

So, with some needle and thread I fixed the exposed muff and reinforced the other muff.

Just grab a short, thin needle try to show through the folded pieces of fabric. (So through 4 layers)

[pictured is the muff with the exposed padding. A threaded needle is seen piecing the two pieces of fabric that need to be reattached. the fabric is folded at about 3mm to the edge.]

Then, go all the way around until you meet your ends. Tie the ends with your favourite solid double knot and optionally tuck the thread in.

$21.8 million in ObamaCare tax credits awarded to individuals who were not eligible to receive them

From Fox News: The Affordable Care Act exchanges awarded $21.8 million in advance premium tax credits to individuals who were not eligible to receive them, according to an audit from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration. Advance premium tax credits are awarded to those with low to moderate income to help rein in the cost of purchasing health care insurance on the exchanges. The…

Amplify’d from searchengineland.com

You built out your new ad copy, tested out a bidding strategy, measured web and store sales to measure the online to offline effect; however, in the end you got the worst outcome possible – inconclusive results.

A negative result would have been better; at least you would have known that your hypothesis was wrong or that your strategy was not effective. But an inconclusive result tells you nothing, which can be incredibly frustrating as a marketer.

There are many reasons why a well-designed test might fail. For example, seasonal effects might be ignored, the dataset might be too small or the marketplace might change during the test.

However, a very common error in test design is not accounting for volatility – fluctuations in performance due to unpredictable events in the marketplace.

In this post, I shall delve into the issue of volatility, how it might lead to a test with inconclusive results and finally, how you can mitigate its effect on your test.

To understand the issue better, let us assume that you want to test the hypothesis that online SEM spending leads to offline store sales. To test this hypothesis, you ramp up your online budgets in increments every week.

Your plan is to run the test for 5 weeks, collect the data, do a regression analysis and answer the question, “What does one dollar spent online lead to in offline sales?”.  Now let us, put some real numbers in this thought experiment.

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