Recently I have become interested in spatial effects on house prices (how where you are in town affects your house value). I haven't quite gotten to the spatial elements yet but I was able to run a quick analysis on house prices vs. square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, and acres. Data was taken on 11-1-2009 and includes the vast majority of MLS listings for Bozeman at that time. I made a calculator based on the regression that can be found here.
n=931
Price
Sq. Foot
Bedrooms
Bathrooms
Acres
Min.
19,900
437
1
1
0
Median
$329,900
2,214
3
3
0
Mean
$530,991
2,676
3.373
2.84
3.086
Max
$10,950,000
16,428
9
9
185
**Update 11-6-2009: The predictive algorithm has been much improved. I also added an option for Belgrade homes on the calculator which can be found here.
In an effort to make our page a little more personal and colorful I added an image rotator to our index page with pictures that I had taken around our office. There are about five million rotator scripts on the internet but I hadn't posted to the blog in a while so here is mine!
<html>
<body onLoad = "setImg();"><!-- Calls the setImg() function after the page has loaded -->
<span id="images"></span><!-- Image html will appear between these spans when the onLoad event is triggered -->
<script type="text/javascript">
//This is the array where you store the location of the pictures you would like to rotate through. var imageArr =newArray("gfx/artofprogramming_small.jpg","gfx/thinkpad_small.jpg","gfx/theoffice_small.jpg","gfx/whiteboard_small.jpg","gfx/park_small.jpg","gfx/apple_small.jpg");
var numImages = imageArr.length;
function setImg(){ var randomNumber=Math.floor(Math.random()*numImages);//Selects a random number between 0 and the number of images in the array minus 1
document.getElementById("images").innerHTML="<img src ='"+imageArr[randomNumber]+"' alt='rotating images from the office' />";//Adds img html to your page between the two elements with id="images" }
The new HTML 5 specification is now operating under its 25th revision of the working draft so I have to assume that it will be finished here pretty soon. Some of the browser manufacturers are trying to get a head start by implementing some of the new features outlined in the draft. One new feature that really has me excited is the browser based geolocation API. Mozilla apparently implemented the geolocation functionality in version 3.1 of Firefox so I had to test it out.
Geolocation Testing Page (You will be asked if you want to allow Digital Engine Software to find your location at the top of the browser).
It's not perfect but it's not horrible either. The location it gives me is about 5 miles away from my actual location, but it is in the right direction. As of this posting I was only able to get the script to work in Firefox. Hopefully the other major browser providers will be following suit in the coming months as the html5 spec is finalized. Code after the break.
Edit: Testing the site from work my listed location is eerily close to my actual location, within about 50 feet.
Today was my first day attending the Bozeman Chamber of Commerce leads meeting. Leads groups are composed of 15-30 members (business owners or representatives) that meet once a week to share leads with one another and discuss what is happening with businesses around town. Today's meeting was cut a little short because the presenter couldn't make it but overall it seemed like a very valuable use of my time. Owners of a couple of businesses were able to ask questions of other business owners regarding their areas of expertise and there was some very useful information floating around. Granted I have only been to one meeting, but so far I am fairly impressed with what the leads groups have to offer.
Digital Engine Software joined the Bozeman Chamber of Commerce a couple of weeks ago. We had been waffling back and forth on whether or not to join (the cheapest membership is over $300) but considering that we got a little bit of a discount on the insurance plan that we will probably get and due to the fact that we pretty much exclusively provide services to other businesses we figured we would give it a try. We did choose to opt out of joining the US Chamber of Commerce due to their strict copyright and intellectual property lobbying that we don't necessarily agree with. So far I have been fairly impressed. We went to the new members lunch a couple of days after we joined. They had very good food and we got to meet some really nice business owners. We gave out two two hour programming certificates along with five free consultations. Handing out seven prizes in a group of 15 or so business owners was probably a little excessive but we did get to converse a little with some of the winners and at the very least it got our name out there a bit. I am signed up for the Thursday noon leads group, my first meeting is tomorrow so we'll see how that goes. From what I understand it is just a bunch of business owners that share leads with each other but who knows. The leads group is an extra $15 per quarter for the memberships where it is not included but I'm thinking it will probably be money well spent. Overall the staff has been very pleasant to work with and the Chamber of Commerce seems like a pretty decent deal.
Kevin and I have been looking to purchase group health
insurance for the company.I contacted
several local agents, over e-mail, asking for rough quotes based on our ages,
marital status, number of dependents, etc.We received a litany of replies ranging from a quick e-mail with rough
rates to a couple of agents insisting on meeting with us in our office who then
had us fill out detailed insurance application forms.The quotes we have received so far have all
been fairly comparable ranging from approximately $250/month for $2,600
deductible and 0% coinsurance with Companion Life to $85/month for $5000
deductible 0% coinsurance with Assurant.So much more after the break…
Summary: This study looks at
correlations between advertising expenditures, brand awareness and perceived
quality.The authors arrive at some
pretty interesting conclusions.First,
and most importantly, advertising does not appear to have any statistically
significant effect on perceived quality.Brand awareness does show a positive, statistically significant
correlation with advertising expenditures up to $400M, from $400-$800M the
effect of advertising expenditures on brand awareness is not statistically
different from 0 and beyond $800M per year in advertising expenditures the
effect on brand awareness is actually negative.The rate of brand awareness carryover depreciation (the amount of brand
awareness that is lost by not advertising for a year) varies by product but is
in the range of 12% to 25% per year.And
finally, a one-standard-deviation increase in advertising spending increases
brand awareness by between .0340 standard deviations and .0408 standard
deviations.
Take Away:Advertising increases brand awareness but
not perceived quality.Consumers
forget about you when you don’t advertise but only at a rate of about 17% per year.
Summary:This paper talks about the 7 myths of
Affirmative Action: Affirmative action can involve goals and timetables while
avoiding quotas, color-blind policies offer an efficient substitute for
color-sighted affirmative action, affirmative action undercuts investment
incentives, equal opportunity is enough to ensure racial equality, the earlier
in education or career development affirmative action is implemented, the
better, many non-minority citizens are directly affected by affirmative action,
and affirmative action always helps its beneficiaries.
Review: I did not care for this paper very much. The authors did not contribute any new research, they simply aggregated the research done by other economists, to no great effect.
Take Away:Empirical evidence has shown quite
consistently that wealth builds on itself.If you start out well-to-do you have a much greater chance of success
later in life.Likewise, minorities that
have faced poverty and discrimination have to overcome greater hurdles to reach
the same levels of success.Affirmative
action can be an effective tool in tearing down hurdles but it is not perfect
and needs to be tempered with common sense.
Summary:This paper examines the correlation
between innovation (measured as cited-weighted patents) and institutional ownership.The authors also study two possibilities for
lack of innovation within firms: career-concern and managerial laziness.Career concern arises because innovation
requires risk.If a project fails the
manager is held responsible and could potentially lose her job.Innovation also requires motivation.A manager that prefers to “live a quiet life”
will not innovate and succumb to the lazy manager problem.The authors ultimately find that a 10%
increase in institutional ownership leads to a seven percent increase in the
probability of obtaining an additional cite-weighted patent, which does prove
to be statistically significant.The
authors also come to the conclusion that the career-concern model of innovation
is most likely to describe the increase in innovation correlated with an
increase in institutional ownership.
Take Away:Innovation is risky and failures, when
attempting to innovate, should not be punished.Instead owners should encourage their managers to innovate and take an
active role in observing and evaluating their manager’s abilities outside of
success or failure in previous innovation efforts.
Hello!
I'm Mike Archer and I am in charge of the "business" side of Digital
Engine Software. Being pretty new to this whole "running a business"
thing I have been reading a ton about business and marketing since we
got started. My degree is in economics which has been very helpful in
certain
aspects of our business but the scope of economics definitely isn't at
the
level that it encompasses all of our business questions. To that end my
main
contribution to this blog will be in the summary and review of
different
business related literature. To get started, however, I would like to
post the results to my very own research project that I conducted a
couple of weeks ago looking at who has the cheaper advertising rates in
the area (in terms of probability to buy based on the advertisement
medium as well as cost per impression): radio or Televsion.
