FatherPrax

How are you differentiating people who report articles as false when they simply disagree with them?

I'm interested in the cooling effects. Is it actually cooler than not wearing any, or is it just cooler than wearing the equivalent pantyhose? Do you envision people wearing these for the actual cooling effect under regular clothes, like people do when wearing cosplay outfits or mascot uniforms?

My grandfather was a railroad engineer for 30+ years. Back then, I know part of the process was a color test because color deficient/blind people were not allowed to be an engineer.

He wound up buying the book they used for testing, memorized the proper answers, and cheated his way thru it. As far as I know, he never had an issue because of his color deficiency.

My question is do they still test for this? Do you think being color deficient would actually cause you problems in the modern day of engineering?

Yes and no. I have a flight coming up to London in a couple weeks, and I have "upgraded" my tickets to business class the day I bought them almost a month ago. Cost $1,000 as well as 20,000 miles each way, and I still have not gotten confirmation that I actually am getting the upgrade. They won't know when the upgrade tickets will be released, so right now they're simply holding over $2,000 of my money and have been for a month for a CHANCE of being upgraded.

I was told the release of upgrade tickets can happen as late as the day before the flight.

Went to a convention recently where a guy who installs "Big Data" systems that mine social media that had an interesting story.

One of his customers was having increased foot traffic into their stores, but their sales of clothes were not keeping up with the rest of the merchandise. Infact it was dropping, and noone seemed to know why.

They deployed their solution and mined sites like twitter, and found people mentioning that the dressing rooms were too hot. The company made a change (not sure if they ducted AC or what) to cool those rooms off, and sales went back up to match the foot traffic.

He said it wasn't something they could really advertise "Come to Store X, now with cooled dressing rooms!" but it was a great example to me of the power of data mining social media used in a non creepy way.

He also had a story about polling for an election, and they were weak in the 18-25F housewife crowd or something like that. So they started datamining and found the target celebrities who are most popular with that crowd, then got an endorcement. Their numbers went up in subsequent polling.

Is there anything you have discovered doing this that surprised you? You're basically a slave to where the data leads, so anything interesting or unexpected that has come out because of this?