Articles
Colin Temple
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In the first two articles in this series, I compared some different approaches to organizational data design. Part I spelled out the difference between top-down (Inmon) and bottom-up (Kimball) methods of data warehousing. Part II talks about alternative approaches with data vaults and data lakes. All of this concerns how to best build a centralized…
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In Part I of this series on corporate data design, I went over a fairly old, but still relevant debate between a top-down, or Inmon method, approach to data warehousing, or a bottom-up, or Kimball method, approach. In short, the top-down method starts at the broadest view of the business and attempts to design an…
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Conceptually, there are competing versions of data warehousing strategies that are employed industrially. One (false) dichotomy that is commonly shared is between the bottom-up and top-down approaches to designing a data warehouse. The difference between these two is, essentially, the answer to this question: “Should we try and bring together all of our data into…
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I recently wrote a whitepaper on third-party cookie deprecation (3PCD), and how it affects digital marketing. I started writing this paper, in part, as a response to a lot of fear-based selling I was seeing in the market. Many ad agencies and data professionals sought to use the third-party cookie deprecation. Given the confusion around…
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What follows is a transcript of a conversation I had with the natural language model ChatGPT. In this discussion, I essentially interviewed ChatGPT about itself, to see what it would report about how it works. In this interview, I am asking ChatGPT questions about its own responses: how it responds, whether it keeps track of…
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I was in Montréal, Québec last month for the first time since just before the global pandemic. I was there for a work event, but goy some brief time for some street photography. Montréal is a beautiful city, and it inspires a cinematic approach that I enjoy. Here are a few of my shots. More…
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Much street photography portrays simplicity. Shapes and silhouettes cut out the noise and isolate a subject against a backdrop. The images are often beautiful, but they have never really been my own style because they seldom represent what the eye sees. That’s not a criticism and I enjoy it as an audience, but even in…
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Instead, let’s tout what makes everyone’s own skills uniquely valuable. This article was originally posted here on LinkedIn. Tim Wilson, of Digital Analytics Power Hour fame, recently wrote a great piece on LinkedIn about the precarious notion of a ‘Citizen Data Scientist’. This is the idea that people who work in areas outside of data science or analytical roles…
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In the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can be diagnosed with a specifier of ‘with poor insight’ whenever the individual does not recognize that the obsessions or compulsions are excessive or unreasonable” (300.3). Yet some insight must have occurred, since by definition, adults with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder have…
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The prevailing view in North American philosophical writing seems to be that the phrase ‘just in case’ can be translated into the phrase ‘if and only if’. Consequently, this view holds that the phrase ‘just in case’ is best symbolized by the logical connective known as the biconditional (↔). Now, this seems wrong to me…