Three thousand high school students from across the United States recently trekked to a university sports arena here to attend an event with an impressive-sounding name: the Congress of Future Science and Technology Leaders. … Through their schools, many students in the audience had taken a college-planning questionnaire, called MyCollegeOptions. […] Read more »
How the Math Men Overthrew the Mad Men
Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence. … In the advertising world, Big Data is the Holy Grail, because it enables marketers to target messages to individuals rather than general groups, […] Read more »
Book Review: ‘News, Numbers and Public Opinion in a Data-Driven World’
In 1954, Darrell Huff published How to Lie with Statistics, a tongue-in-cheek guide for those wanting to use numbers to deceive. The book, now widely distributed to first-year university statistics students, outlines how statistics can confuse and muddle both writers and readers. The upshot? Huff suggests that: ‘without writers who […] Read more »
Did Cambridge Analytica have anything to sell?
There’s little doubt Cambridge Analytica’s behavior was scandalous, but was it a scam? If any of what is alleged is true, the firm and its leadership behaved unethically, and possibly illegally. But prominent journalists, academics and political practitioners have gone further, pronouncing Cambridge Analytica’s work itself to be a fraud. Of […] Read more »
Facebook Users’ Privacy Concerns Up Since 2011
As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before Congress about his company’s efforts to protect user privacy, U.S. Facebook users are increasingly concerned about invasion of privacy when using the social media site. Currently, 43% of Facebook users are very concerned about their privacy being invaded, up from 30% in a […] Read more »
Does Facebook Know You Better Than Yourself?
What makes you tick, who you know, where you go, even where you might end up. The information you share in your profile is a mere snippet of what Facebook and its partners really know about you. Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The Times, explains. Ainara Tiefenthäler, Robin Stein […] Read more »