Swiss weekly Sonntagszeitung’s “Multimedia” section delivers almost every weekend some insights that catch my attention. This week I stumbled upon the term microtargeting in the US presidential race. Microtargeting are datamining techniques that are used by democrats and republicans to gather, analyse data about potential voters, to predictively segment the voters market, and deliver tailored [...]
Entries from September 2008
September 21, 2008
When Artificial Intelligence Plays Havoc
How to make United Airlines bankrupt and burn 75 percent of United Airlines stock value without any human interactions involved?
1. An algorithm at Sun Sentinel puts an archived article on the UAL bankruptcy filing in 2002 to the most popular section. (due to low traffic at 1 AM )
2. Googlebot finds the article and makes [...]
September 21, 2008
No Privacy at Your Workplace?
[UPDATE: 9/23/2008/]: There are some corrections to this post in the comments by someone at oDesk concerning the privacy issues. I am too lazy to check.
oDesk ’s software allows employers to hire freelancers from a pool of thousands of workers around the world. To match the geographical and maybe also cultural distance, the employer is [...]
September 21, 2008
How Magicians Use Cognitive Science
Just a link. In today’s issue of Swiss weekly “Sonntagszeitung” there is a piece “Magie im Kopf” on the cognitive science behind legerdemains. How magicians make use of our brain’s wrong predictions to trick us. Because I am reading OnIntelligece by Jeff Hawkins I was reminded on his idea of human intelligence as the ability [...]
September 21, 2008
Two Notions OnIntelligence
Hawkins, Jeff (2004). On Intelligence. How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines.
I am currently reading “On Intelligence” by Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot who now tries to make a fortune out of his own appraoch to artificial intelligence and brain science. Keeping in [...]
September 7, 2008
The Economic Value of Personal Data
Why did people stop to value their privacy? A lot of internet users seem to be ok with giving away their personal data to third parties like Google or Facebook or everyone who’s interested. What are the economic reasons behind that?
1. Privacy has lost its value. The iron curtain fell almost twenty years ago. So [...]
