Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign made payments totaling $750,372 to Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics company that specializes in voter personality profiling, according to information released last week by the Federal Election Commission. … Cambridge Analytica aims to increase the accuracy of micro-targeting by adding “psychographic analysis” to widely available demographic […] Read more »
Whose Supporters Like Cheap Flights, ‘The Daily Show’ And Fracking?
… Like other companies, Resonate observes people’s online habits by putting lines of code called cookies on websites. When you visit a site, the cookie gets attached to your browser. It then keeps tabs on the sites you go to and reports that information back to the company doing the tracking. […] Read more »
Awash in Data, Thirsting for Truth
… Now, in a numbers-soaked era when the word “algorithm” seems to be on everyone’s lips and entire news outlets, like Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog or The Times’s own Upshot, are based on interpreting statistics, some core journalistic questions arise: How important is data to reporting? And does it get […] Read more »
How the GOP Can Capture the ‘Selfie Vote’
In this week’s PRESS Pass, GOP pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson discusses her new book, “Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America – and How Republicans Can Keep Up.” Meet the Press Read more »
Inside the GOP’s Effort to Close the Campaign-Science Gap With Democrats
This spring, the Cato Institute identified 600 Americans who read more than 20 books per year and made arrangements to send them each one more. … The Cato researcher behind the project explained to other members of a below-the-radar Republican group known as the Center for Strategic Initiatives, or CSI, […] Read more »
Algorithms: Based on your preferences, you may also enjoy this column
One key buzzword these days is “algorithm,” which technically means any computational formula but which has come to mean a formula that predicts our behavior. Amazon and Netflix have algorithms that predict what books a user is likely to want to read or what movies and TV shows he or […] Read more »