Comment Re:The Wave? (Score 1) 239
The Hawks are going to walk all over the Pats. The only real question is whether they'll hit any of the numbers I drew in our office pool.
Well obviously my Slashdot account must've been hacked or something...
The Hawks are going to walk all over the Pats. The only real question is whether they'll hit any of the numbers I drew in our office pool.
Well obviously my Slashdot account must've been hacked or something...
They could certainly send 50 times as many messages, but they'll improve their return on investment if they target all of them at people who are more susceptible to their message in the first place. Given the cost of the Big Data systems they may only be able to afford to send 10 times as many instead of 50 times, but as long as their message is 5% effective instead of 0.1%, it's still a vast improvement on ROI.
That's a great question. Do you think 80% accuracy is good enough for medical use? If you're a doctor facing an unfamiliar situation, and your data says treatment X helped 40% of patients it was tried on, treatment Y helped 35% of them, and all other treatments (Z, W, etc.) helped no more than 30%, but you know the data might only be 80% accurate, what treatment do you choose? Are those ratios even meaningful in the presence of so many errors?
Consider the case where the patient's condition is critical, and you don't have time for additional evaluation. Is X always the best choice? What if your specialty makes you better than average at treatment Y? Maybe that 20% inaccuracy works in favor of the doctor who has the right experience.
It could it be used for ill, too. What if you know you'll get paid more by the insurance company for all the extra tests required to do treatment Y? You could justify part of your decision based on the uncertainty of the data.
In the end, historical data is just one factor out of many that goes into each of these decisions. Inaccurate data may lead to suboptimal decisions, so it can't be the only factor.
You seem to be belaboring this mistaken impression that analyzing Big Data somehow replaces thinking in the board room. It does not. Big Data is a tool that can help provide evidence of what people have done in the past, statistically correlated to potential causes. Big Data doesn't decide "hey, let's buy GM." People make those decisions, and they try to make them based on the information they have -- and Big Data can be a good source of that info. But people can be idiots, they can be talented, they can be anywhere on the spectrum. Do not blame the tool, or the accuracy of the tool, just because it's capable of being swung by an unqualified, incompetent idiot.
As a friend of mine is wont to say, "A fool with a tool is still a fool."
If you're doing the Wave, you deserve to get stuffed back in that locker. Or worse.
As far as Deflate Gate goes, in the end it won't matter. The Hawks are going to walk all over the Pats. The only real question is whether they'll hit any of the numbers I drew in our office pool.
When you're dealing with statistics, you ought to recognize that 92% accuracy is a huge improvement over a random distribution. You do not use big data to select a target for a sniper rifle, you use it to point a shotgun.
And just like your faulty GM CEO analogy (I assume you felt the need to apply a car analogy for the benefit of the slashdot crowd) only an idiot would send someone off in the woods blindfolded and have him fire his shotgun in a random direction hoping to bring home some kind of food animal. You still have to know what you're hunting for, you still have to know how to hunt, you still have to make wise decisions. It's just a tool, not a sage.
This is what scares most people, or at least me, about ideas of using big data to predict criminals or otherwise mess up people's lives.
It's not a problem to use big data to try to figure out where to focus. But you have to subject the results to some sanity checking, and before you actually impact someone's life, perhaps even some common sense. Shocking idea, I know, and the reason why it's still a problem.
That phrase "fair share" is dishonest. It is vague and subjective,
A tax code which permits corporations to hide profits while taxing citizens normally is dishonest.
The difference between "92% accurate" and "accurate enough for my task" are profound.
If you were using these kind of analytics to bill your customers, 92% would be hideously inaccurate. You'd face lawsuits on a daily basis, and you wouldn't survive a month in business. So the easy answer is, "this would be the wrong tool for billing."
But if you're advertising, you know the rates at which people bite on your message. Perhaps only 0.1% of random people are going to respond, but of people who are interested, 5.0% might bite. If you have the choice between sending the message to 10000 random people, or to 217 targeted people (only 92% of whom may be your target audience), both groups will deliver the same 10 hits. Let's say the cost per message is $10.00 per thousand views. The first wave of advertising cost you $100. The second costs you $2.17. Big Data, with all of its inaccuracies, still improves your results by a wide margin.
Way too often people like this point out that perfection is impossible. They presume that "because it's not perfect, it's useless." The answer is not always to focus on becoming more accurate, but to choose the right tool for the job, and to learn how to recognize when it's good enough to be usable. At that point you learn how to cope with the inaccuracy and derive the maximum benefits possible given what you have.
Or put another way, If big data is so great "Why didn't Watson see IBM's crash coming ?"
You're assuming it didn't.
problem with Noscript et al, is the same problem with softwalls like Zonealarm - the content is already downloaded to your computer for the parser to analyse before it's passed to the rendering engine. It's already in your system.
Well, yes and no. The script embedded in the html or whatever is already in your system, but any linked script files hosted on a dodgy domain don't actually get downloaded at all, at least on Firefox. In the past this was impossible on chrome by design, but I'm told it works properly now. The flash and most of the script is never in fact downloaded to your PC at all.
Thanks for the info. I went with the premise that they were the only Android phones guaranteed to get software updates. Now I am just confused as how to know a good Android phone that will be in the front running for getting system updates, without having to jailbreak.
What you do get with Nexus devices is unlockability. But you also get that with Motorola and even Sony devices. You void your warranty in the process, which probably isn't strictly legal for them to do to you. You can relock your phone so that it can get OTAs again, though... at least in the case of Motorola. Dunno about others. What you just can't assume you get is quality.
Because "a while" might be like 10 15 minutes. When all you want to do is unplug, go out and start jamming, that sucks as UX.
So if you care, then you use a tool. But being forced to use a tool is still bullshit, and you are still a useful idiot apologist.
plus no worrying about what happens if the device writes garbage to the config, or what happens if power is lost mid write, etc.
Actually, all that stuff can still happen to iPods.
Just like they tell you that you any time you think you might be being pulled over by someone who's not a real cop (say, an unmarked car), you can drive to the parking lot of a police station before pulling over.
Disclaimer: That only works if you are white.
And it should be the law: If you use the word `paradigm' without knowing what the dictionary says it means, you go to jail. No exceptions. -- David Jones
