Thursday, March 21, 2013

Facebook’s Graph Search Makes Use of Friends and Likes - NYTimes.com

Facebook’s Graph Search Makes Use of Friends and Likes - NYTimes.com


Most Internet users have become accustomed to using Facebook to keep up with friends — or at least, Facebook “friends” — while using more specialized sites and apps to search for restaurants, books and people. But if you have built up a network of friends on Facebook, those connections can now help you find people, places and things in the real world, in ways that more specialized sites like Google, Yelp and Amazon cannot.

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Good News Spreads Faster on Social Media - NYTimes.com

Good News Spreads Faster on Social Media - NYTimes.com

BAD NEWS SELLS. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news.

Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers, based partly on data (ratings and circulation) and partly on the gut instincts of producers and editors. Wars, earthquakes, plagues, floods, fires, sick children, murdered spouses — the more suffering and mayhem, the more coverage.

But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By scanning people’s brains and tracking their e-mails and online posts, neuroscientists and psychologists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.


Urban World: A new iPad app for exploring an unprecedented wave of urbanization | McKinsey Global Institute | McKinsey & Company

Urban World: A new iPad app for exploring an unprecedented wave of urbanization | McKinsey Global Institute | McKinsey & Company The app also places urbanization in a historical context, using a view from space of the global nighttime distribution of light as a proxy for the global distribution of economic activity. Users can visualize the world’s shifting center of economic gravity during the past two millennia, to 2025. The app serves a purpose similar to a 16th-century map—a rough but helpful tool to help navigate the evolving urban world. The growth of some urban markets can exceed that of entire nations, which is why cities matter for strategy. Companies can use the data to compare the economic growth from different cities. For example, Vienna had roughly the same GDP in 2010 as Istanbul. By 2025, the scenario presented in the app shows that the GDP of Istanbul will be comparable to the entire country of Austria. Auckland (New Zealand) had roughly the same GDP in 2010 as New Delhi but, by 2025, the GDP of New Delhi will be almost as great as the GDP of the entire country of New Zealand. In 2010, 100 of the world’s largest companies headquartered in developed economies derived just 17 percent of revenue from emerging markets—despite the fact that those markets account for 36 percent of global GDP. Companies that neglect these new markets risk missing out as much as 70 percent of global GDP growth between now and 2025.

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Google Admits Street View Project Violated Privacy - NYTimes.com

Google Admits Street View Project Violated Privacy - NYTimes.com

In agreeing to settle a case brought by 38 states involving the project, the search company for the first time is required to aggressively police its own employees on privacy issues and to explicitly tell the public how to fend off privacy violations like this one.


While the settlement also included a tiny — for Google — fine of $7 million, privacy advocates and Google critics characterized the overall agreement as a breakthrough for a company they say has become a serial violator of privacy.

Monday, March 11, 2013

Computer Algorithms Rely Increasingly on Human Helpers - NYTimes.com

Computer Algorithms Rely Increasingly on Human Helpers - NYTimes.com:

Although algorithms are growing ever more powerful, fast and precise, the computers themselves are literal-minded, and context and nuance often elude them. Capable as these machines are, they are not always up to deciphering the ambiguity of human language and the mystery of reasoning. Yet these days they are being asked to be more humanlike in what they figure out.

And so, while programming experts still write the step-by-step instructions of computer code, additional people are needed to make more subtle contributions as the work the computers do has become more involved. People evaluate, edit or correct an algorithm’s work. Or they assemble online databases of knowledge and check and verify them — creating, essentially, a crib sheet the computer can call on for a quick answer. Humans can interpret and tweak information in ways that are understandable to both computers and other humans.

For example, when Mitt Romney talked of cutting government money for public broadcasting in a presidential debate last fall and mentioned Big Bird, messages with that phrase surged. Human judges recognized instantly that “Big Bird,” in that context and at that moment, was mainly a political comment, not a reference to “Sesame Street,” and that politics-related messages should pop up when someone searched for “Big Bird.” People can understand such references more accurately and quickly than software can, and their judgments are fed immediately into Twitter’s search algorithm.

Friday, March 8, 2013

Study: Facebook users sharing more personal info despite increased privacy concerns

Study: Facebook users sharing more personal info despite increased privacy concerns

Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study following more than 5,000 Facebook users over six years, from 2005 and 2011, and found that changes in the social network's privacy policies caused users to share more -- not less -- personal data. Lest you think this means that users suddenly trusted the site more, Carnegie Mellon says that Facebookers became more and more protective of their personal details as the social network grew in membership -- and that the uptick in shared information is a result of increasingly granular privacy settings. If you recall, Facebook introduced new in-depth privacy controls in 2010, and the study found that the release of these new settings corresponded to users sharing more personal data, both within their network of friends and with strangers and third-party applications.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Pissed Consumer

Pissed Consumer

Author Interview: Kenneth Cukier, Co-Author Of 'Big Data' : NPR

Author Interview: Kenneth Cukier, Co-Author Of 'Big Data' : NPR: "The example comes from Charles Duhigg, who's a reporter at The New York Times, and he's the one who uncovered the story. What Target was doing was they were trying to find out what customers were likely to be pregnant or not. So what they were able to do was to look at all the different things that couples were buying prior to the pregnancy — such as vitamins at one point, unscented lotion at another point, lots of hand towels at another point — and with that, make a prediction, score the likelihood that this person was pregnant, so that they could then send coupons to the people involved... there might be a coupon for a stroller or for diapers ...

Also to note that "why Big Data doesn't care about causes, just correlation"
"They crunched the numbers, and they found out that cars that were orange tended to not have breakdowns compared to other colors of cars ... So why might this be? Well, we can sort of concoct different scenarios. One is that orange tends to be a custom color, and if you order an orange car, perhaps the rest of the car was made in a custom way, a little bit more care was taken into it. We don't know why, and it's frankly, it's not that important. It might just bring us down a rabbit hole for us to try to find out why. But, again, if you just want to buy a car that's not going to break down, go with the correlation."

Full article at: http://www.npr.org/2013/03/07/173176488/the-big-data-revolution-how-number-crunchers-can-predict-our-lives

Unreported Side Effects of Drugs Are Found Using Internet Search Data, Study Finds - NYTimes.com

Unreported Side Effects of Drugs Are Found Using Internet Search Data, Study Finds - NYTimes.com: Using data drawn from queries entered into Google, Microsoft and Yahoo search engines, scientists at Microsoft, Stanford and Columbia University have for the first time been able to detect evidence of unreported prescription drug side effects before they were found by the Food and Drug Administration’s warning system.