Billy Boyle Blog

  • An Algorithm for Business Success?

    An Algorithm for Business Success?

    It seems that testing is the flavour of the month in business these days. All the presentations I go to talk about A/B split testing and multivariate Taguchi methods. Of course the guiding principle of testing is a good one; but I think it gives some  the misguided notion that business is a purely deterministic Continue reading

  • Intuitive Bayesian methods for portfolio selection – Part II Bayes and Jeffrey

    Bayes’ theorem in its common form describes the way in which one’s beliefs about observing ‘A’ are updated by having observed ‘B’. Bayes’ theorem relates the conditional and marginal probabilities of events A and B, where B has a non-vanishing probability. Each term in Bayes’ theorem has a conventional name: P(A) is the prior probability Continue reading

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  • Intuitive Bayesian methods for portfolio selection – Part I Background

    Introduction Disruptive platform technologies usually have a broad base of application. During early stage development, before there is a developed market, the selection of a particular product is usually a ‘high risk, low data’ decision. There are a large number of unknowns, both the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns; we seek the resolve these Continue reading

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  • Game of Life Encryption

    I have posted a previous model of Conway’s Game of Life that runs in Excel – click here to view. I’ve just been reading Daniel Dennet’s book, Freedom Evolves, which uses examples of cellular automata to help describe emergent behaviour. There are some interesting ideas and I’ve been having a play with the Game of Continue reading

  • Monty Hall -Again

    If you ever want to get people of a mathematical bent shouting at each other you should try to get them to agree the solution to the Month Hall problem. “Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You Continue reading

  • Dan Dennett TED Lecture on Memes

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  • Matching Initials

    Download the Excel Spreadsheet A while ago we noticed that our company has a surprising number of people with matching initials – whenever we were writing meeting minutes we would have to use an initial for the person’s middle name to distinguish them. Out of 18 people (as it was then) there we four pairs Continue reading

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  • A Collection of Random Clippings

    “I pity Simplicio no less than I should some gentleman, who, having built a magnificent palace at great trouble and expense, employing myriads of artisans, and the seeing it threatened with ruin because of poor foundations, should attempt, in order to avoid the sad sight of walls destroyed, adorned as they were with so many Continue reading

  • Product selector and sales tool

    I’ve just posted a new version of the TouchConvert Interactive sales tool on my main site. Check it out and let me know what you think. This builds on an earlier posting on Product Benchmarking. Launch the interactive version of TouchConvertTM Continue reading

  • Who said I was rational

    Studies in behavioural finance often highlight the ‘irrationality’ of an economic agent in making decisions. This may just boil down to the definition we use for rationality, which may not necessarily in itself be rationally justified. We can start by looking at other uses of the word ‘rational’ in the philosophy of science. The Scottish Continue reading

About Me

An entrepreneurial engineer driven by patient impact. C0-founder and CEO of Owlstone Medical with a company mission to save 100k lives. I also try to support engineers and scientists and their start-up ideas.

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