I believe this is called “shaping the discourse.”
Draw your own conclusions.
My friend Leon has a great article on the increasing use of statistical technology to predict criminal behavior:
“This is the nightmare that I have,” Berk said. “Supposing I am able to tell a mother that her 8-year-old has a one in three chance of committing a homicide by age 18. What the hell do I do with that information? What do the various social services do with that information? I don’t know.”
Very thought-provoking and not a use of data that often emerges in the conversation. We worry more frequently about the ads we’ll get served, and the Facebook posts our employers will see.
Towards the more insidious end, I’m worried what health insurance companies will do if they build a trail of unhealthy based on Foursquare (or credit card data) and inflate our premiums based on this behavior.
Leon’s article suggests that data is only used thus far to track recidivism rates, but it’s not unlikely that it will creep out into “at-risk” populations as well.
Simple, brilliant.
An x-ray shows the internal workings of the Barbie Video Girl Doll.
Multitudes, the New York Times contains them.
(Alternate blurb: The New York Times does not judge. It simply watches.)
Spencer Fry on the definition of “normals:”
A Normal is maybe not an everyday person in every way, but has limited Internet knowledge. They certainly don’t read TechCrunch, they haven’t heard of RSS feeds, they probably don’t have a smart phone or at least don’t have many apps installed, and although they surf the Web a lot, they have little clue what a web browser really is. Another telltale sign is that instead of going directly to web pages, they use the search bar. You know these people if you’re reading this blog.It’s more important to reach normals:
Normals make up far more than 99% of Internet users. If you fail to reach the masses then you’ll simply fail. You can be the hottest startup on the block with 100,000 active early adopters, but I’d trade every one of those users for Normals in all cases.Focus on normals. So simple and often overlooked.
This makes sense, but so does Bijan Sabet’s suggestion in this post that the line between early adopters and normal users is blurring. (He doesn’t outright say it, but that seems to be the subtext.)
Microsoft’s server farms definitely resemble something out of The X-Files.
