[PLUG-TALK] Big data and what it tells us about us

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Tue May 30 14:53:38 UTC 2017


   The topic of big data has been a very hot topic for a short time and is
the intersection of the Internet, statistics, and social sciences. If you're
not aware of Seth Stephens-Davidowitz's new book, "Everybody Lies: Big Data,
New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are," there
is a full-page review in the current issue of The Economist
<http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21722612-data-mining-becoming-more-and-more-precise-how-find-out-what-people-really-think>
. The Multnomah County library has 5 copies and I'm at the end of
the line to borrow one.

   As the review starts off, "To many people Big Data is less shiny than it
was a year ago. After Hillary Clinton's defeat at the hands of Donald Trump,
her vaunted analytics team took much of the blame for failing to spot
warnings in the midwestern states that cost her the presidency. But
according to research by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former data scientist
at Google, Mrs. Clinton's real mistake was not to rely too much on
new-fangled statistics, but rather too little."

Rich





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