Talent Works analysed 6000+ applications across 118 industries and have found that applicants are as likely to get an interview when meeting 50% of the advertised job requirements as meeting 90% of the requirements. The also found that women who match at least 30% of the requirements have increasing chances of getting an interview.
This is a fascinating long read by The Verge about the cut-throat goings on between super-competitive Amazon Marketplace sellers. A sub-industry has formed of "Amazon Lawyors" that help sellers recover from attacks by other sellers. Sellers have learnt to use new rules and terms against each other whenever Amazon introduces new legislation to their marketplace. When the hoverboards started exploding, Amazon cracked down on flammable products.
Bill Gates has published a post on gatesnotes.com describing his work learnings for 2018. The interesting read highlights trends he noticed with Alzheimer's disease, Polio and the global energy landscape. Gates also ponders the future of gene-editing and dealing with global epidemics, as well as defining his focus topics for 2019, privacy and innovation, and technology in education.
Coglode are back with another great behavioural pattern called Reactance. This is the scenario where controlling people's sense of freedom can trigger an angry motivation to regain it. An example in commerce is an online shop to uses too many scarcity game dynamics to scare the user into purchasing because there are only "2 seats left at this price" and the "offer ends in 2 minutes 12 seconds". Reactance occurs when the user is so put off by this that they decline to purchase anything out of spite.
Andreessen Horowitz have published a handy post listing the different types of metrics that can be used to measure network effects in software and marketplace businesses. The list progresses from the basic organic vs paid users metric up to metrics like market depth and unit economics.
Data scientist Albert-Lázló Barabási analysed the sales patterns of 4,493 fiction and non-fiction books that made the New York Times bestseller list for hardcovers over thee last decade. The findings show the most popular categories of fiction and non-fiction books, that most book sell the most in their first week and that new-comers are best placed for success with book launches in February of March.
Taylor Pearson has a great post on overcoming failure, which he terms the Bucky Method after Buckminster Fuller. I won't spoil the article for you, it's worth reading to see how Taylor does a fine job of combining theories and thoughts from multiple sources into a structured methodology of advice and a practical framework to repeatedly work on projects while building constructive failure into the mix.
Quartz have put together a list of the 600 courses recently released online by 190 universities. The courses cover programming, engineering, computer science, social studies, science, art & design, mathematics, humanities, business, health & medicine, data science, education & teaching and personal development.
Stripe is partnering with The World Bank to produce a digital entrepreneurship index, to allow policymakers to access self-reported entrepreneurship data from around the world.