Big Data
Faris (2013) speculates as to whether NSA leaks will compromise big data's future. The article, published on the website Dataversity, notes that there is public concerns about data leaks at NSA. Consumers are becoming more aware about just how much of their information is available to the government. The author calls into question the dichotomy of private data and public data, in particular were corporate entities are gathering data, and then that data finds its way into the hands of government. The author concludes by noting that big data is a growing field, but there are still going to be customers who are wary.
The point Faris makes about customers being willing participants is valid in that most people are perfectly willing to divulge information. Only when they overtly know that this information is being used to market to them may they have a problem with it, but only maybe. The Nordstrom anecdote provides valuable evidence that consumers tend to separate online from real life, and invasions that seem reasonable online are acceptable in real life, probably because their physical body is there. This is an interesting concept that can be explored in greater detail in research studies about big data.
Harris (2012), writing on the website Gigaom, discusses the use of big data in the political domain. He describes the 2008 Obama campaign in particular as a landmark for the use of big data, which was used to raise money and build a strong grassroots element to the campaign. Politicians are major ad buyers, so it is only natural, Harris argues, that big data becomes a political tool. Ads can be created specifically for the recipient, even online, highlighting one of the uses of big data. The author notes that while voters say they are turned off to targeted ads, marketers can easily mask the fact that a person is being targeted.
Given the importance of advertisements to politics, it is not surprising that big data has become involved in a big way. Harris implies that big data will only become more important. We know that presidential elections are often seen as coming down to a handful of swing voters in key swing states; big data can help parties to refine the messages that they present to these voters, which has significant implications for democracy that Harris could discuss in his next examination of the subject.
Herodotou et al. (2011) introduce Starfish, which is a self-tuning system for big data analytics. The authors note that big data analytics is becoming increasingly complex with time. The idea is that such analytics systems are difficult to tune for the best performance, so there is new software called Starfish that allows the system to "self-tune" to deliver the best results. The authors discuss some of the challenges and benefits to this.
This article is important for two reasons. The first is that it highlights where the technology is with respect to big data. The second is that it identifies some of the key issues that constrain the performance of big data analytics systems. Computer scientists are working to resolve these problems and hopefully unlock the power of big data.
Kantorwitz (2012), writing on a Forbes blog, discusses the role of big data in Presidential elections. Noting that the Obama re-election team advertised publicly for big data analysts, he attempts to sort out how big data is used in election campaigns. Kantorwitz identifies something akin to a credit score for politics, which aggregates a variety of demographic information that is correlated with voting patterns. This helps parties to form a profile of an individual voter, and in that way ensure that the right voters are being targeted. The campaigns are...
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