Sunday, October 06, 2024

SCOTT SMITH'S FIGHT AGAINST CANCER: INFORMATION about this Run-Off Election for Mesa Mayor ...Health Issues Are Important

Questions will come from The Republic and Members of the Public.

As the story goes, Qualtrics is a product born in the head of Ryan’s father, a Ph.D. who consulted on the side. Instead of relying on laborious human market research capture, his father had written a program that sought feedback on their preferences about brands. It analyzed the data in real time.

When his father was diagnosed with cancer, Ryan came back from university to be with his father.
. . .The other thing that helps to get through tough times is having a bigger mission than the company. And for Ryan that is what brought he and his father together in the Provo basement in the first place– his father’s fight against cancer

The debate will take place just one day before mail-in ballots begin to arrive. Tune in to find out why they think they are right for this role.

Smith, Freeman square off in Arizona Republic debate on Oct. 8. How to watch

AZCentral

11 hours ago

Mesa mayoral debate on Oct. 8 hosted by Republic. How to watch

Mesa voters will get a close-up view of the direction the two mayoral candidates want to take the city in a forum hosted by The Arizona Republic.

The studio debate will run from 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.

It will be broadcast live on Mesa’s Channel 11 and livestreamed on Mesa’s YouTube account.
It will be available for viewing later on those platforms as well on azcentral.com.

After term-limited Mayor John Giles leaves the post, a new mayor will take the helm of Mesa for the first time in 10 years.

Councilmember Mark Freeman, who represents the northcentral area of the city is a former 31-year Mesa Fire Captain who served two terms on the Mesa City Council, and Scott Smith, formerly Mesa mayor and Valley Metro, will appear at the forum.

Blogger Notes: Scott Smith resigned from office to get elected as Arizona Governor - where he was defeated by two-term Republican Doug Duce paving the way for John Giles, a personal injury/accident law attorney to take the seat in City Hall 2 years before the next General Election in 2016

NATE SILVER'S NEW BOOK "On The Edge" >> If we want to keep up, we’ll have to learn the mind-set of the successful gambler.

The insight that there can be an optimal way to respond to uncertainty has successfully guided poker sharks, venture capitalists, and A.I. developers.

But using the method to reach decisions in light of their effects on human society centuries into the future is not a safe gamble.Illustration by Josie Norton

The Power of Thinking Like a Poker Player
Nate Silver’s “On the Edge” applies the lessons of modern gambling to the arenas of tech startups, artificial intelligence, and ethics.
By Idrees Kahloon

September 2, 2024

". . .Probability and gambling have always been intimately intertwined. The mathematics of probability can be traced to a well-known stumper about how best to divide a pot, which a seventeenth-century gambling enthusiast posed to two leading mathematical luminaries of the time, Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat.

Their inquiry would spawn the powerful idea of “expected value”—the average outcome of an uncertain event, calculated by multiplying the outcome in every possible state of the world by the chance of it happening.

How powerful?

The once alien notion that humans could be precise about uncertainty gave rise to the discipline of statistics. A model in which people were treated as rational actors trying to maximize the expected value of their utility became the cornerstone of modern economics.

And systems based on feeding statistical prediction models with gargantuan helpings of data and computing power have already started to roil this century.

A man struggling to balance on a large poker chip.

The Things Nobody Tells You About An $8B Acquisition with Ryan Smith fro...

From $0 to $2.5 billion with Qualtrics CEO, Ryan Smith

SaaStock

From $0 to $2.5 billion with Qualtrics CEO, Ryan Smith - SaaStock

When his father was diagnosed with cancer, Ryan came back from university to be with his father.

To spend time together, they worked on that tech project in the basement that later became Qualtrics. He instantly got hooked to the product and began developing and selling it.

Selling had been his forte from an early age. At a very young age, instead of using the five dollars his parents gave him to see a football match with his brothers, they used the money to trade tickets. They would come home with a couple of hundred dollars.

. . .To Qualtrics and Ryan experience management (XM) platforms, are as essential as CRM platforms are. Measuring, optimizing and acting upon the findings of experience data is the last true competitive advantage organizations have, and most are not maximizing their advantages.

. . .As he puts it himself, Ryan Smith has attention deficit disorder as much as anyone else, yet something has powered him through everything, including many lows. Somehow he finds a way to remain positive within the rollercoaster ride of emotions of being an entrepreneur.

. . .The other thing that helps to get through tough times is having a bigger mission than the company. And for Ryan that is what brought he and his father together in the Provo basement in the first place– his father’s fight against cancer