For Sale: Survey Data on Millions of High School Students

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 »

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 »