What this article misses out is that the metrics will be present and used whether they are articulated or not. By making them explicit they can be improved, validated, debated, and removed. Standards are consistent. When they're implicit, you get none of those benefits and instead promote an insider culture of unspoken biases that get no scrutiny at all.
The choice isn't between metrics and human intuition, it's between explicit and implicit metrics.
Of course there are bad metrics; to use an example from the article - measuring the output of analysts finding OBL on a binary metric is simply a bad metric. But if we start from there, we can improve it. How many leads do they have at the current time? What stage is each lead at? What intelligence has it generated to this point?
This sounds very much like OCD. One of the nastier traits of OCD that I experienced with a partner was the tendency for the OCD to hide itself, by convincing the sufferer that they were just a terrible person, or that what they were doing was normal. And this was post-diagnosis. My interpretation was that accepting you have OCD is the first step to acknowledging that the repetitive behavior isn't necessary, which of course the disease fights against.
It was very hard at times and there was often hostility but it was always recognizable to me as a symptom of the disease and not an intrinsic quality of the person.
I met another person with OCD who didn't know they had it - 5 hrs of cleaning each day and they didn't know, they just knew things needed to be clean.
I strongly encourage you to do what you can to get to a diagnosis. What helped the person I was close to in the end was cognitive behavioral therapy and a lot of hard work, to get to a point where things were manageable.
Finally - the biggest mistake I made as a carer was not talking to others about it or recognizing and acknowledging the effect on me. Get support for yourself if nothing else.
Almost certainly because it increases engagement. By optimizing purely on metrics, psychologically undesirable effects creep in (guilt, in this case). c.f. online gaming apps and their addiction inducing behaviour.
I think it's important to acknowledge the distinction between chatting to a bot and not being convinced that it's a human, and having two conversations simultaneously, one of which is with a human, one with a computer, and figuring out which is which. Humans too can be surprisingly obtuse, go off at tangents, ignore your points, be boring and repeat themselves.
As for the questions around the utility - automating support functions for various non-critical services seems like an obvious potential application (think of all those "click here to chat to a live representative" dialogs on various websites).
Rather than starting with an assumption on avg revenue per user, start with the valuation, figure out what that would imply about revenue/revenue growth, and you'll probably learn something about their likely avg revenue per user (i.e. it's a lot higher than your estimate).
Aside from medication, for OCD in particular there are therapeutic options that can be (life-changingly) effective. The OCD centre [http://www.ocdcentre.com/about-us] is one such place. If you think you might have OCD (last I read the incidence was around 1/30) talking to someone about is the best first step. Especially as one common and pernicious effect of OCD is that it will convince you that you do not have it.
The scope of Elite was so impressive - and the novella that came with it added so much to how big the universe felt. What sticks in my mind is that the only way to make any real money, quickly - was trading in either narcotics or slaves, and hoping that you could outshoot the police :). Of course, as a 7-year old I didn't really know what narcotics were, only that for some reason they were very cheap on Leesti...
The retina display on the 13" MBP actually results in less application real estate at native resolution than the 1440x900 on the MBA. It's also half a pound heavier, more expensive and with significantly poorer battery life. In my opinion, the 13" MBA is the best laptop Apple makes, and is the best computer I've ever owned.
Sorry, but no. The conditions of your entry to the US will state pretty clearly whether or not you can work. If you're on a tourist visa, you can't work, if you're on a business visa, you can have meetings and similar, but you can't work. If you're on VWP you can't work. Freelancing is work, however you slice it.
The ways for a non-US citizen to be able to work in the US are to either have a work visa (L, H, E etc) or a work authorization via a spouse who has the appropriate visa (L1, J1).
I remember reading several years ago that in the UK lottery 10000 people every week play 123456. And thus would be very disappointed at their £500 payout.
At an atomic level, water plays critical roles in very small quantities and understanding these role requires detailed simulations. See this recent paper [1] for an example of how water molecules affect potassium channel inactivation, a key process in cardiac electrophysiology and other areas.
That's not to say that you can't get useful results by treating solvent as a continuum (or even ignoring it entirely), they'll just have a different kind of explanatory power.
Round the corner from my house in Richmond Park (London), there is a large population of deer who carry the bacterium that causes Lyme disease (and apparently several other exciting ailments) and is spread by ticks. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond_Park.
Some other contributing factors: cultural attitudes to failure, and as a consequence cultural attitudes toward entrepreneurs, heterogeneous audiences (the USA has ~300M people speaking mostly the same language), far less advanced ecosystem - success breeds success in terms of both experienced founders, broader angel investment, stronger networks etc.
Of these, I suspect the cultural attitude toward failure is by far the most significant. I think the USA breeds more successful startups primarily because it breeds more startups, due to failure being viewed much less negatively.
GPA - absolutely. If it's not there, the assumption will be that the reason it isn't there is because it's bad (especially as a new grad). Like when you look at a 2nd hand car listing and they leave off mileage - you know it will be huge. Transcripts, no - they just add unnecessary padding at this stage, nobody wants to read those unless they absolutely have to, so they'd only be asked for at the end of the process, if at all.
But more importantly than either of these - you should write your resume differently depending on what you are applying for. Highlight what is most valuable to the organization you are applying to. If this means you have to reduce the number of applications you send out, that's fine, it's much better to have fewer well targeted applications.
And try to state facts, not claims. By which I mean - don't claim to 'work well in a team', or have 'excellent X'. Show what you've done and the impact it had. If you wrote something cool at the age of 10, I can infer that you're smart and self-directed from that.
Can't go too far wrong with a solid brand like Lowe Alpine, or Berghaus. Pick one up on sale if you can, backpack technology moves pretty slowly so you hardly lose anything from buying previous years models.
Extension: what if Monty tosses a coin to decide whether to open a door, conditioned on you having chosen the prize door?
Specifying Monty's behaviour matters, I think.