Death, Dying, Data

What happens to the data of a dead man? --

Technology: Dead man’s data - FT.com: " . . . A handful of US states have passed laws addressing the treatment of digital remains. In Oklahoma and Idaho, digital data are treated like tangible property. The executor of a will can take control of social networking or email accounts the same as bank accounts and houses, and decide to continue operating them or shut them down. In Indiana, a law allows access to those accounts but not control. In Rhode Island and Connecticut, only access to email accounts is covered. . . ." (read more at link above)

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Moneyball of Economics

Moneyball of Economics: How One Man Is Knocking it Out of the Park - MoneyBeat - WSJ: " . . . . Mr. Zatlin engorges on data, from semiconductor orders to vices like escort services (yes, it’s a sign of discretionary spending). He produces a vice index he says has an 88% correlation to personal consumption figures – and a four-month lead time. Other researchers are “measuring things that don’t matter, and not measuring things that do,” he said. “We want to know how people are spending their money, how businesses are spending their money, or not, and what do we do about that?” Take his jobs prediction. Mr. Zatlin says he monitors the hiring practices of more than 1,000 companies, both large and, importantly, small; and separately monitors hiring in 50 metro areas. (While he shared his method, he would not divulge his exact sources.) . . ." (read more at link above)

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Blippex, New Search Engine

Can This Underdog Crack Google's Search Monopoly?: Video - Bloomberg: "First there were the Googles and Yahoos of the world, and now, there's Blippex. Based in Berlin, the new search engine ranks results by time people spend on a page -- and it doesn't collect personal information. Bloomberg Television spoke to the Blippex founder." (Video at Link above)

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Consumer Data, Secrets of Shopping

The secrets of shopping | The University of Chicago Booth School of Business: "What economists and marketers are learning from newly accessible consumer data . . . Now Nielsen is sharing three datasets through Booth, with a staggering amount of information. One dataset covers purchases by 40,000–60,000 households in the United States. Another contains sales results from 35,000 stores—grocery stores, drugstores, discount chains, and similar outlets—for the years 2006 through 2011. Those records span up to 3 million bar codes, and the data represent about 33% of the volume at mass merchandisers and about 55% of US retail volume from grocery stores and drugstores. The information now available is a gold mine for researchers, marketers primarily, but also economists who see the potential to explore longstanding questions about consumer behavior . . ." (read more at link above)

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Automation, HR Hiring

Machines Gauging Your Star Potential Automate HR Hiring - Bloomberg: " . . . Machines are also learning to decipher the most human qualities about you -- and help businesses predict your potential to be their next star employee. A handful of technology companies from Knack.it Corp. to Evolv Inc. are doing just that, developing video games and online questionnaires that measure personality attributes in a job applicant. Based on patterns of how a company’s best performers responded in these assessments, the software estimates a candidate’s suitability to be everything from a warehouse worker to an investment bank analyst. . . ." (read more at link above)

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Google Hummingbird, Google Search

Google Hummingbird: Where No Search Has Gone Before | Innovation Insights | Wired.com: " . . . Google tying all the information it has about its users together to improve their experience. In addition to the search query, additional information is pulled in from the user’s location (and saved locations), social connections (on G+), time of day, even previous searches. Examples of previous search data take us back to voice search, and Google Glass. Google can now understand continuity in sequential searches — the oft-cited example is a Glass user asking, “When was the Eiffel Tower Built?” followed by, “How tall is it?” Google’s Knowledge Graph, its encyclopedia of 570 million unique concepts and the relations among them, helps power these kinds of interactions.Ultimately, this is the driving force behind Hummingbird — making sure Google is prepared for a future where its users interact with it constantly, quickly, and verbally. By making its search engine better at understanding people, Google is paving the way for the future." (read more at link above)

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Big Data, Data Discrimination, Data Analytics

Data Discrimination Means the Poor May Experience a Different Internet | MIT Technology Review: " . . . In a new paper, she and a colleague propose a system of “due process” that would give people more legal rights to understand how data analytics are used in determinations made against them, such as denial of health insurance or a job. “It’s the very start of a conversation about how to do this better,” Crawford, who is also a visiting professor at the MIT Center for Civic Media, said in an interview before the event. “People think ‘big data’ avoids the problem of discrimination, because you are dealing with big data sets, but in fact big data is being used for more and more precise forms of discrimination—a form of data redlining.” During her talk this morning, Crawford added that with big data, “you will never know what those discriminations are, and I think that’s where the concern begins.” Health data is particularly vulnerable, the researcher says. Search terms for disease symptoms, online purchases of medical supplies, and even the RFID tags on drug packaging can provide websites and retailers with information about a person’s health. . . ." (read more at link above)

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Google Changes, Future of SEO

6 Major Google Changes Reveal the Future of SEO - Search Engine Watch (#SEW): "The focus now is on understanding your target users, producing great content, establishing your authority and visibility, and providing a great experience for the users of your site. Properly architecting your site so that the search engines can understand it, including using schema and related markup, addressing local search (if that is relevant to you), and work of this type still matters, too."

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More information might not improve decisions

More information might not improve your ability to make decisions: ". . . . the next time you find yourself seeking out hard-to-find esoteric information to give yourself an edge in that important decision, think hard about whether you understand the fundamentals of the situation. The more esoteric information you seek the further you move from the likely variables that will govern the outcomes of the situation." (read more at the link above)

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