CNBC reports that Goldman Sachs flags employee emails based on a long list of "offending" phrases. If an employee types a profanity, apparently a window pops up to confirm that the person really truly wants to say that word. The other objective given is to detect fraudulent behavior. The list they published apparently came from 2008, so very aged, but I think it is a hoax. Many of the terms…
In any discussion of ethics , someone is bound to bring up the law: it is okay to do something if something is not against the law. The logical conclusion of this belief is that ethics is irrelevant in the presence of the law. The recent stories relating to minimum wage and the overtime pay rule changes (for example, link) argue strongly against such a point of view. The law…
Last week, I gave some brief remarks at the INFORMS New York Metro Student-Practitioner Forum (link), attended by a large group of enthusiastic students eager to enter the field of data science and analytics. (By the way, if you are at the INFORMS Analytics Conference in Orlando, come and find me. I am speaking on Ethics on Tuesday morning.) I told the students that it is not too early to…
The news is out that Uber got fined by the New York Attorney General's office for data breaches and privacy concerns. The headline writer for ZDNet nailed this one: "Uber fined peanuts in God View surveillance" (link). And the sub-lead has the kicker: "For a company with a valuation of over $50 billion, a $20,000 fine over user data protection is laughable." This settlement tells us one of the following…
My friend Liliane pointed me to this HBR article about "machine learning." (link) As a basic introduction, the article is pretty good. Here are 3 things you learned and 2 things you didn't learn from this article. 3 Things You Learned Machine learning is not the same as learning as you know it. At the end of step 5 ("Iterate"), the author proudly states "It has learned." But what does…
It appears that Google Flu Trends (GFT) has slipped quietly into the night. In a short post to the Google Research blog, the team behind GFT announced that they are "no longer publishing" flu estimates, effectively ending the seven-year-old experiment. The GFT home page now links to some historical datasets. The post was dated August 15, and it appears that mainstream media completely missed it. GFT was one of the…
My latest piece in HBR (link) deals with the uncomfortable truth that digital marketing is just as wasteful as off-line advertising. This waste is a result of the prevalence of fake data. Because so much money is channeled into digital these days--all the big Web companies are essentially advertising agencies, scammers are everywhere siphoning off the advertisers' dollars. As I demonstrate in the piece, these scammers can make a good…
Really enjoying Propublica pieces lately. There are several articles about topics of great interest to me, and those who read my books will be familiar with these themes. My favorite is an article that speaks a truth about data projects -- much as we sweat about data collection, data integrity and statistical models, the true challenge is in persuading the rest of the world to adopt our endproducts. The title…
For this week's Statbusters (link), we opine on that astounding report from a few weeks ago about how Google could manipulate the next elections by biasing search results. We walk you through our vetting process, starting with face validity ("the magnitude of the reported effect is too large to be believed!"). The crux of the article is about the experimental design. You start with a group of people who have…
On Labor Day, our new Statbusters column appeared. This one concerns a popular news story from some weeks ago, saying science has proven that there are four types of drunks. The four refers to four "clusters" formed by running a cluster analysis algorithm. But four is decided by the analyst. Some algorithms won't run unless the analyst specifies the number of clusters; other algorithms generate the best structure for every…
