Ryan MacMillan

I’ve been looking for some software to run 3D scatter plots as part of a project to visualize RFM segmentation cells*. That may well have been the dullest sentence I’ve ever written.

In my search, I came across a product (not the right one, I must say) called Acuity 4.0 from Molecular Devices. Halfway down the page is an animated short - showing a meteor crashing to earth bearing a payload of mutant bacteria. Bacterial outbreak threatens world population. President declares emergency. A molecular biologist steps in to save the day, supported by the trusty Acuity 4.0

As he ponders the situation, he utters lines even more boring than my opening sentence:

The world is depending on me. I had better start with a Lowess normalization to remove intensity-dependent biases … millions of people might die. I’d better make sure that the statistical variability between replicate microarrays is low.

As I say, this may not be the droid I’m looking for. It’s not very like the Action Man I owned as a child (who couldn’t handle complex concepts like “intensity-dependent biases”, but could growl “give me some cover.”)

But it is a bit like a book that was slipped into my pigeon hole at university by (of all the unlikely people) representatives of the erstwhile Arthur Andersen. Called Never Say Boring Again, it told the story of a mafia-fighting accountant in an attempt to persuade us that accountancy wasn’t boring.This is an almost perfect example of the copywriting rule “never use negatives in headlines.”

Accountants and molecular biologists must learn to accept that they are not men of action (or Action Men). And so, it seems, must digital planners.

* My search was inspired by an interesting 2004 a paper I came across by Rajesh Parekh of Blue Martini and Ron Kohavi of Amazon.