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Sunday, June 10, 2012
Saturday, June 9, 2012
Data Sampling in Google Analytics
Data sampling in Google Analytics (GA) has always taken place, and occurs by default ? most commonly when running a report containing?more than 500,000 visits?and requesting advanced segments or a combination of dimensions which GA doesn?t store pre-calculated by default ? particularly, any custom segmentation, but also commonly-used reports such as keyword and top content reports.
Another less common trigger for sampling is any query that exceeds 1,000,000 unique dimensions (e.g. keywords, URLs, etc). In this case, GA serves up a sampled report containing 1,000,000 unique URLs (or any other dimensional value) for a given request, divided by the number of days requested; for example, a three-month timeframe would give you a sum of 1,000,000/90, so 11,111 unique URLs.
Even if all you?re interested in is a single URL or keyword, with a number of visits far below these thresholds, the data may still be sampled because GA has to process all visits to the site in the date range given.
A recent addition to the GA interface is the ability to adjust sample size from the default 250,000 visits up to 500,000 visits for greater accuracy, or down to 1,000 for faster processing of results, but with lower precision; a smaller sample size means a greater margin of error.
Google used to return a confidence interval (eg. ?5 per cent) against each sampled metric as a statistical measure of the accuracy of sampling, but this value has?long since been removed as ?it was thought to be confusing?. So, how accurate is the sampled data?
A quick bit of analysis on one website with 1.5 to 2 million visits per month shows that? well, it depends. Below, I?ve compared the true metrics for two PPC campaigns for the first three months of the year, determined by exporting unsampled data to Excel in nine to 12-day batches before recombining them with the sampled data. For a campaign with high traffic volume (12 per cent of all site traffic) the results weren?t bad even at the default sampling level, overestimating the number of visits by just one per cent, and sales and revenue by five per cent. When my sampling preference was switched to maximum precision, the margin of error decreased even further. Using this data to optimise a campaign should be okay.
However, for a low volume campaign (0.04 per cent of total traffic), the results were way off. Even at the highest sample size, the visit count was still underestimated by almost four per cent. More seriously, not one of the nine sales in this three-month period was picked up. Using this data to make decisions on this campaign?s future would be disastrous.
Sampling is very accurate for top-level metrics like total visits, total page views and such, and for shorter data ranges or lower traffic sites it may not be a problem at all. However, but if you have a high traffic website and a desire for granular data then you need exact metrics rather than a statistical sample. There are a few options to consider when trying to reduce Google?s use of sampling, if not eliminate it entirely:
- Select date ranges with fewer than 500,000 visits. Data from successive periods can be exported and recombined in Excel if necessary ? but this is time-consuming and impractical for sites with very high traffic volumes
- Try and use the default reports rather than advanced custom segments whenever possible
- Create multiple profiles?that track a smaller part of your site, e.g. PPC-only traffic. Sampling occurs at the profile level, so within these profiles you won?t hit the 500k limit as soon as in the main profile
- Google Analytics Premium allows access to unsampled data for those willing to pay for it
- Grab the data from GA using the API, or a third-party tool that will do it for you such as Excellent Analytics, a free and easy to use add-in for Excel. Apparently some of the API data is sampled depending on the query, but in my own testing discussed above, this was not the case: Excellent Analytics? reported figured agreed 100 per cent with the true vaules.
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Activists jab Obama and Romney on economy
Syrian troops shelled the southern city of Daraa early on Saturday, killing at least 17 people, activists said. And in Damascus, residents spoke about a night of shooting and explosions in the worst violence Syria's capital has seen since the uprising against President Bashar Assad's regime began 15 months ago.
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Physicists Invent First Tabletop X-Ray Source
From Nature magazine
The pressurized, cylindrical chamber fits in the palm of Margaret Murnane?s hand. Yet out of one end of the device comes an X-ray beam that packs almost as much punch as the light generated by massive particle accelerators.
Murnane and Henry Kapteyn, both physicists at JILA in Boulder, Colorado, a joint institute of the University of Colorado and the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, have reported the first tabletop source of ultra-short, laser-like pulses of low energy, or ?soft?, X-rays. The light, capable of probing the structure and dynamics of molecules, was previously available only at large, billion-dollar national facilities such as synchrotrons or free-electron lasers, where competition for use of the equipment is fierce. But the report by Murnane, Kapteyn and their colleagues, published in the 8 June issue of Science (T.?Popmintchev et al. Science 336, 1287?1291; 2012), suggests that the devices might soon lie within the grasp of a university laboratory budget. ?For us, it?s incredible that we can do this at all in a tabletop system,? says Murnane. ?Three years ago, people would have said ?only large facilities can do that?.?
Murnane and Kapteyn, a husband-and-wife team who also head the Boulder-based company KMLabs, already sell a similar tabletop source of extreme-ultraviolet light. Murnane thinks that a future soft X-ray source should cost about US$1 million, and hopes that its relatively low cost and small size will open up X-ray studies for materials scientists, biologists and others. The beams generated by the device could, for instance, help materials scientists to make better solar materials by tracking the paths of electrons through solar cells, and might allow chemists to trace the ultrafast dynamics of photo?synthesis and catalysis. ?This is something people have been waiting for for a very long time,? says Oleg Shpyrko, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego. Shpyrko often waits months to get his experiments accepted at the Advanced Photon Source, a synchrotron at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, and must then fly his students halfway across the country to do the work.
The tabletop sources rely on a technique called high-harmonic generation, in which laser light is passed through a medium that converts it to light of shorter wavelengths and higher frequencies. Shine a ruby laser into a quartz crystal, for example, and a beam of ultraviolet light comes out ? albeit dimmer, but still focused like a laser beam.
Murnane and Kapteyn have pushed high-harmonic generation to its limits, with a system that uses an infrared laser as the source and pressurized helium gas as the medium. The laser creates a strong electric field, which draws electrons away from the helium atoms, allowing the electrons to absorb energy from the electric field. When they slam back in to the helium atoms, they release that absorbed energy as shorter-wavelength photons ? but only about one photon comes out for every 5,000 infrared photons that are put in.
The result is light at wavelengths almost as short as those delivered by synchrotrons. By increasing the pressure in the gas ? something theorists thought might defocus the light beam ? Murnane and Kapteyn can produce light with a wavelength of 0.8 nanometres. Around these wavelengths, many of the chemical elements used in magnets and superconductors absorb a characteristic band of light. Kapteyn says that this could be used by chemists to discern the spin states of nickel atoms that make up the bits of information in magnetic computer hard drives, for example.
The tabletop systems have already surpassed the larger light-source facilities in terms of laser pulse speed. Murnane and Kapteyn?s device produces very fast pulses, as short as 2.5 attoseconds (10?18 seconds) ? faster than the picosecond (10?12) pulses of synchrotrons and the femto?second (10?15) pulses of free-electron lasers. That timescale is even quicker than the making and breaking of chemical bonds. ?At this timescale, we can start using these light sources to address questions where we have no idea what the answers will be,? says Ferenc Krausz, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, and co-founder of Femtolasers, a company that sells ultrafast light sources.
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Friday, June 8, 2012
Merkel urges giving up more power to Europe
German Chancellor Angela Merkel reacts as she arrives for the weekly cabinet meeting at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, June 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
German Chancellor Angela Merkel reacts as she arrives for the weekly cabinet meeting at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, Wednesday, June 6, 2012. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)
BERLIN (AP) ? German Chancellor Angela Merkel is calling for countries to give up more powers to Europe "step by step" as the continent tries to claw its way out of the debt crisis and says a "political union" is needed as leaders prepare for a closely watched summit later this month.
However, Merkel, who appeared on ARD public television's breakfast show Thursday amid pressure on Germany to defuse the crisis, downplayed prospects of reaching a big solution to Europe's troubles at the June 28-29 summit in Brussels. The troubles of Spain's banking system and concern over Greece's future in the 17-country eurozone are generating uncertainty.
"I don't think that there is a single summit at which the big design will appear, but what we have been doing for some time and where a working plan will certainly be presented ... is that we say we need more Europe," Merkel said.
"We need not just a currency union; we also need a so-called fiscal union, more common budget policies. And we need above all a political union," she added. "That means that we must, step by step as things go forward, give up powers to Europe as well."
Merkel, who has faced criticism for focusing on austerity as a cure to Europe's financial woes, insisted anew that she is interested in growth, but that "budget consolidation and growth are two sides of one and the same coin."
"Without solid finances, there is no growth, but solid finances alone are not enough; there are other points ? above all, questions of competitiveness," she said.
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Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Phillip Phillips To Kick Off 'American Idol' Tour After Postponing Surgery
Season 11 winner will reportedly attend all 45 dates on the American Idols Live tour despite plans for kidney surgery.
By Gil Kaufman
Phillip Phillips attends "American Idol" Season 11 grand finale show - Photo Room held at Nokia Theatre L.A. Live on May 23, 2012 in Los Angeles, California.
Photo: Michael Tran/ FilmMagic
Imagine an "American Idol" summer tour without the season's winner. It's never happened before and, after some questions about whether recently-crowned champ Phillip Phillips would be sufficiently recovered from kidney surgery to join the rest of this year's top 10, it doesn't look like it will happen this year, either.
Phillips, who battled painful kidney stones all season and underwent eight surgeries during race for the prize on "Idol" was reportedly slated to have reconstructive kidney surgery last week. That procedure was put off due to a fever and now, according to E! Online the surgery may not be happening at all.
Citing an unnamed tour rep, the site reported that Phillips will be on stage on July 6 in Detroit when "American Idols Live" kicks off. Instead of flying to New York to do press following his win and then home to Georgia for surgery, Phillips instead did his interviews remotely. And while surgery is still apparently an option, sources told E! that "alternative treatment" has been effective and doctors have given Phillips, 21, the go-ahead to join the 45-day tour.
The source said Phillips is "being treated and doing well," but so far the singer and his family are keeping details of his treatment and any future medical plans private. A spokesperson for Fox had no comment on the reports and a rep for Phillips could not be reached at press time.
"He will still be attending all the tour dates and is really looking forward to the launch on July 6," the tour rep said.
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ASTRO wins 2012 Communicator Award
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Public release date: 6-Jun-2012[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Nicole Napoli
nicolen@astro.org
703-839-7336
American Society for Radiation Oncology
The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) has been honored with a Communicator Award for its work on the fall 2011 edition of ASTROnews. This publication was recognized with an Award of Distinction and awarded the Silver Communicator Award.
The Communicator Awards is an annual competition honoring the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and identity work for print, video, interactive and audio. More than 6,000 entries were submitted this year from ad agencies, interactive agencies, production firms, in-house creative professionals, graphic designers, design firms and public relations firms. The awards are judged and overseen by the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA).
"It is an extreme pleasure to congratulate the hardworking and dedicated Communications Department at ASTRO on their award-winning publication," Laura Thevenot, ASTRO CEO, said. "ASTRO's membership relies a great deal on this publication and this prestigious Communicator Award is well-deserved."
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 6-Jun-2012[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Nicole Napoli
nicolen@astro.org
703-839-7336
American Society for Radiation Oncology
The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) has been honored with a Communicator Award for its work on the fall 2011 edition of ASTROnews. This publication was recognized with an Award of Distinction and awarded the Silver Communicator Award.
The Communicator Awards is an annual competition honoring the best in advertising, corporate communications, public relations and identity work for print, video, interactive and audio. More than 6,000 entries were submitted this year from ad agencies, interactive agencies, production firms, in-house creative professionals, graphic designers, design firms and public relations firms. The awards are judged and overseen by the International Academy of the Visual Arts (IAVA).
"It is an extreme pleasure to congratulate the hardworking and dedicated Communications Department at ASTRO on their award-winning publication," Laura Thevenot, ASTRO CEO, said. "ASTRO's membership relies a great deal on this publication and this prestigious Communicator Award is well-deserved."
###
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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