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If Lagos state were an independent country, its economy would rank as the fourth-largest in Africa.
How big data is transforming football: “Today’s footballers face the kind of data scrutiny more often associated with astronauts. Wearable vests and straps can now sense motion, track position with GPS and count the number of shots taken with each foot. Cameras at multiple angles capture everything from headers won to how long players keep the ball. And to make sense of this information, most elite football teams now employ data analysts, including mathematicians, data scientists and physicists plucked from top companies and labs such as computing giant Microsoft and CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.”
Why Instagram is losing Gen Z: “Imagine you’re a dying app. The cool kids used to adore you, but they’ve grown up and the new generation has moved on. The only ones left are your parents and boomers. Luckily, you still have piles of cash and a crack team of data scientists. Surely you can A/B test your way to coolness and the hearts of teenagers again? So you pick a metric to optimize – video watch time – and set your teams to work. Your engineers lock themselves in a war room, and emerge with 10 experiments designed to increase it. Time passes. Your exec team sees more and more time spent watching videos! They clap their hands and treat themselves to a day of golf. And yet each time you launch a change that boosts all your metrics, your 16-year old daughter only rolls her eyes more and more.”
Freddie deBoer: “The whole notion of the death of Twitter seems like a minor tantrum that will probably blow over in time, and the people who are making grand declarations about how they’ll leave because of Elon Musk are the same sort of people who are deeply addicted to the service.”
