The Duck of Minerva

Bill Petti

Petti is Associate Director of Insights and Analytics at Alexion . Previously, he served as Lead Data Scientist in the Decision Sciences group at Maritz Motivation and a Global Data Strategist and Subject Matter Expert for Gallup.

Recent Posts

The Individual Utility of Incompetence

by Bill Petti | 20 October, 2010 |

There are many reasons why organizations (government, businesses, etc) grow dysfunctional and stagnant.  One major reason lies with the promotion and retention of less capable workers.  There have been a number of studies that explored this dynamic (for example, The Peter Principle, which theorizes that people are promoted as long as they are competent, which means at some point they reach a position of incompetence).  In general, though, the promotion and retention of incompetent workers would seem to run counter to the rational interests of the larger organization.  So why does this...

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Happy 75th Anniversary to the Gallup Poll

by Bill Petti | 20 October, 2010 |

"A unique anniversary is upon us. Seventy-five years ago today -- Oct. 20, 1935 -- the Gallup Poll published its first official release of public opinion data.Here we are three-quarters of a century later, still working to fulfill the mission laid out in that first release: providing scientific, nonpartisan assessment of American public opinion.The subject of that first release? Well, given the fact that 1935 was smack dab in the middle of the Depression, it may come as no surprise that the topic focused on public opinion about “relief and recovery,” or in other words, welfare. President...

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And the AL Cy Young Award Should Go To…

by Bill Petti | 8 October, 2010 |

Time for a little baseball blogging.There is quite a lot of buzz surrounding the AL Cy Young award this year. While there are a number of pitchers that possess a high number of wins (17, 18, 19, and even 20 games), there are many who believe the award should go to Seattle's Felix Hernandex.  Despite only winning 13 games and losing 12, Hernandez's performance this year has been nothing short of amazing.  His problem is that he played on one of the worst teams in the league.  He was 8th in the league amongst starters in terms of runs support (86 runs over 34 starts) and was actually dead last...

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You can’t create national security policy in a vacuum

by Bill Petti | 29 September, 2010 |

Stephen Biddle has a spot-on piece over at Foreign Policy on how Presidents, and Obama in particular, must take into account domestic politics when setting national security strategy.  With the release of Bob Woodward's latest book, Obama's Wars, many have jumped on the President's alleged quote that he can't lose the entire Democratic Party to justify the need to set a troop draw-down date for Afghanistan as evidence that he's putting politics above national security (as if anything can be separated from politics).Biddle responds:...I do know that it's no sin for a president to consider the...

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Applied Signaling: Pajamas and 3-year olds

by Bill Petti | 29 September, 2010 |

Every night, about 15 minutes or so after we've put my 3-year old daughter to bed, we inevitably hear a knock at the door.  She's typically knocking because she needs to go the bathroom.  She's also knocking because she wants to scope out what we are doing, find out if she is missing anything.  One thing that bothers her is if me or my wife leaves the house after she goes to bed.  In order to go to sleep she needs some kind of guarantee that we aren't leaving and are getting read to go to bed just like her.  It appears she's found one--whether me or my wife have gotten changed into our...

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Revolving Doors, Lobbyist Edition

by Bill Petti | 24 September, 2010 |

Via Marginal Revolution, an interesting new paper that explores what happens to an ex-staffer's lobbying revenue when the politician they worked for leaves office.Our main finding is that lobbyists connected to US Senators suff er an average 24% drop in generated revenue when their previous employer leaves the Senate. The decrease in revenue is out of line with pre-existing trends, it is discontinuous around the period in which the connected Senator exits Congress and it persists in the long-term. The sharp decrease in revenue is also present when we study separately a small subsample of...

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To explain the origin of exchange, you must explain the origin of trust

by Bill Petti | 23 September, 2010 |

I've just started reading Matt Ridley's The Rational Optimist.  So far, it is an excellent, through-provoking read.  A key to Ridley's argument is that the innovation of exchange--the trading between two parties of separate items or services that both parties value--that led to mankind's dominance of the planet and the explosion of knowledge and technology.Ridley explains how exchange--or barter--is qualitatively different from reciprocity (an activity that can be found in other species):at some point, after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing...

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“We should not see moving out of academia as a failure”

by Bill Petti | 22 September, 2010 |

Via Drew Conway, a great quote this morning from Stephen Curry, a professor at Imperial College London:Students should think more broadly about what a PhD could prepare them for. We should start selling a PhD as higher level education but not one that necessarily points you down a tunnel...We should not see moving out of academia as a failure. We need to see it as a stepping stone, a way of moving forward to something else.Curry was commenting here on changing the mindset of the students, but I would argue in many disciplines the problem isn't the students, but the professors.  There are...

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Predicting flu outbreaks, fashion trends, and political unrest with social networks

by Bill Petti | 20 September, 2010 |

[Cross-posted at Signal/Noise]Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler have released a new paper that looks at the potential predictive power of social networks.  They claim that current methods of contagion detection are, at best, contemporaneous with the actual epidemic.  What is needed is a true early detection method, one that would actually provide an accurate prediction of a coming epidemic.Christakis and Fowler claim that social networks can be used as sensors for various types of contagions (whether biological, psychological, informational, etc).  In an inventive twist, they leverage...

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Book Blegging

by Bill Petti | 17 September, 2010 |

Loyal Duck readers, I was hoping you might be able to help me out. Do you have any recommendations for books about the inventive ways that people (scientists, designers, business folk, etc) have evaluated hard to test subjects? I am looking for something that is less about methodology, per se, and more about testing ideas in a practical way where either the environment or subject matter makes testing difficult (thinking here of astrophysics, for example). I am not looking for something that looks at the subject from a philosophical standpoint, but is more of a collection of examples that...

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