New Annenberg survey results indicate that marketers are misrepresenting a large majority of Americans by claiming that Americans give out information about themselves as a tradeoff for benefits they receive. To the contrary, the survey reveals most Americans do not believe that ‘data for discounts’ is a square deal. CONT. […] Read more »
How Not to Drown in Numbers
… There is a special sauce necessary to making big data work: surveys and the judgment of humans — two seemingly old-fashioned approaches that we will call small data. … To get to these measures, Facebook has to take an old-fashioned approach: asking. Every day, hundreds of individuals load their […] Read more »
Meet the 21st-Century Political Alchemist Who’s Been Data-Mining for Hillary for the Past Two Years
When Mitch Stewart first became a field organizer, in 2002, it looked like the most anachronistic job a young man could seek out in a 21st-century campaign: managing and training volunteers for the work of phone banks and door knocks. At that point, the glamour job in politics was making […] Read more »
Twitter’s Evolving Plans to Make Money From Its Data Stream
Late on Friday, Twitter announced that it would no longer license the full stream of half a billion daily messages on its service to third-party resellers. … This is far different from four years ago, when Twitter struck licensing deals with Gnip and DataSift. Back then, Twitter didn’t see much […] Read more »
Amazon Cloud Introduces Artificial Intelligence Service
Websites are set to get smarter after Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud division added an artificial intelligence service that lets people add predictive and analytical capabilities to their applications. Andy Jassy, the head of the Amazon Web Services business, on Thursday announced the Amazon Machine Learning service. … The new product is […] Read more »
A Data-Driven Guide To The Oscars
… The Oscars are tricky to predict for a number of reasons, the main one being that — compared to election forecasting or sports prognostications — it’s very difficult to get relevant data; the awards are determined by the views of a small, tight-knit group of voters. No one polls […] Read more »