Songza taps Weather Channel data to suggest mood-enhancing music
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A Review of the Data Broker Industry: Collection, Use, and Sale of Consumer Data for Marketing Purposes
The United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s inquiry sought answers to four basic questions:
- What data about consumers does the data broker industry collect?
- How specific is this data?
- How does the data broker industry obtain consumer data?
- Who buys this data and how is it used?
Based on review of the company responses and other publicly available information, this Committee Majority staff report finds:
- Data brokers collect a huge volume of detailed information on hundreds of millions of consumers.
- Data brokers sell products that identify financially vulnerable consumers.
- Data broker products provide information about consumer offline behavior to tailor online outreach by marketers.
- Data brokers operate behind a veil of secrecy.
California Preparing for Self-Driving Cars by 2015
California Preparing for Self-Driving Cars by 2015
Self-driving cars sound like fantasy to many, but regulators are laying the groundwork for the technology to hit the roads next year.
Predicting crime using Twitter and kernel density estimation
Predicting crime using Twitter and kernel density estimation
Research by Matthew S. Gerber:
Abstract
Twitter is used extensively in the United States as well as globally, creating many opportunities to augment decision support systems with Twitter-driven predictive analytics. Twitter is an ideal data source for decision support: its users, who number in the millions, publicly discuss events, emotions, and innumerable other topics; its content is authored and distributed in real time at no charge; and individual messages (also known as tweets) are often tagged with precise spatial and temporal coordinates. This article presents research investigating the use of spatiotemporally tagged tweets for crime prediction. We use Twitter-specific linguistic analysis and statistical topic modeling to automatically identify discussion topics across a major city in the United States. We then incorporate these topics into a crime prediction model and show that, for 19 of the 25 crime types we studied, the addition of Twitter data improves crime prediction performance versus a standard approach based on kernel density estimation. We identify a number of performance bottlenecks that could impact the use of Twitter in an actual decision support system. We also point out important areas of future work for this research, including deeper semantic analysis of message content, temporal modeling, and incorporation of auxiliary data sources. This research has implications specifically for criminal justice decision makers in charge of resource allocation for crime prevention. More generally, this research has implications for decision makers concerned with geographic spaces occupied by Twitter-using individuals.
The Culture of Lawlessness in DC: Why Sen. Dianne Feinstein Declared War on the CIA
The Culture of Lawlessness in DC: Why Sen. Dianne Feinstein Declared War on the CIA
This story has a simple message: The system that is supposed to maintain the balance between secrets and civil liberties has broken down. Many believed that it already had, but Feinstein, for good reason, had argued that even if changes needed to be made, the essential relationship between her committee and the agencies it oversees was operating within bounds. What she described Tuesday was a total lack of trust on both sides. The level of trust was so low that people may have felt it was necessary to break the law to fulfill their obligations. That’s not just bad for this particular relationship; it throws the balance between the two branches into even greater turmoil than it was already in.
Blushing as an asset and sign of trust
Blushing as an asset and sign of trust
To blush is to be human, vulnerable, and humble to the power of the subconscious. This BBC article synthesizes a series of studies on how, why, and what happens when we blush. In particular it focuses on the social impact of blushing, and the trust it often engenders from those observing the blush.
As we move further into an automated, robotic, and fast paced society, the inherently human characteristics we can all exhibit will and are already becoming more powerful. We desire authenticity, and we demand transparency of our leaders, perhaps the blush is a means of cultivating these qualities.
CBC.ca | Information Morning Nova Scotia | Online hacktivist group Anonymous
CBC.ca | Information Morning Nova Scotia | Online hacktivist group Anonymous
I had a chat with my friend and CBC host Don Connolly about the role Anonymous played in the Rehtaeh Parsons case.
I talked about the trust that Anonymous elicits from the public who believe that they can confide in Anonymous and have their own identity respected.
Bitcoin: Bubble or Bank?
Call it a currency without a country. Bitcoins … digital tokens that are traded over the Internet … can’t be stuffed in your wallet, or crammed in your pocket. But that hasn’t stopped the virtual coinage from sending ripples through the financial world. Early this year you could buy a bitcoin online for $15. But its value has surged — spiking upwards of $250 this week.
With more and more people looking to shelter themselves from a jittery global economy an increasing number of these virtual bucks are finding real-world homes. Just ask Alex Likhtenstein. He co-owns EVR Bar in Manhattan, and allows people to pay their tabs in bitcoin.
For more on this, we were joined by Jesse Hirsh. He is a technology correspondent for CBC. He’s also co-founder of Academy of the Impossible, a peer-to-peer learning facility in Toronto.