Quotes & Sayings About Data Mining

These days, there are sheriff squads whose full-time job is to carry out eviction and foreclosure orders. There are moving companies specializing in evictions, their crews working all day, every weekday. There are hundreds of data-mining companies that sell landlords tenant screening reports listing past evictions and court filings.2 These days, housing courts swell, forcing commissioners to settle cases in hallways or makeshift offices crammed with old desks and broken file cabinets - and most tenants don't even show up. Low-income families have grown used to the rumble of moving trucks, the early-morning knocks at the door, the belongings lining the curb. — Matthew Desmond

The Bill of Rights was written before data-mining," he said. He was awesomely serene, convinced of his rightness. "The right to freedom of association is fine, but why shouldn't the cops be allowed to mine your social network to figure out if you're hanging out with gangbangers and terrorists? — Cory Doctorow

We Facebook users have been building a treasure lode of big data that government and corporate researchers have been mining to predict and influence what we buy and for whom we vote. We have been handing over to them vast quantities of information about ourselves and our friends, loved ones and acquaintances. — Douglas Rushkoff

Signals always point to something. In this sense, a signal is not a thing but a relationship. Data becomes useful knowledge of something that matters when it builds a bridge between a question and an answer. This connection is the signal. — Stephen Few

If you mine the data hard enough, you can also find messages from God. [Dogbert] — Scott Adams

The difference between human dynamics and data mining boils down to this: Data mining predicts our behaviors based on records of our patterns of activity; we don't even have to understand the origins of the patterns exploited by the algorithm. Students of human dynamics, on the other hand, seek to develop models and theories to explain why, when, and where we do the things we do with some regularity. — Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

! want to leverage the creativity of researchers across mathematics, statistics, data mining, computer science, biology, medicine, and the public at large. — Tan Le

1973 Fair Information Practices:
- You should know who has your personal data, what data they have, and how it is used.
- You should be able to prevent information collected about you for one purpose from being used for others.
- You should be able to correct inaccurate information about you.
- Your data should be secure.
..while it's illegal to use Brad Pitt's image to sell a watch without his permission, Facebook is free to use your name to sell one to your friends. — Eli Pariser

Ultimately, I hypothesize that technology will one day be able to recreate a realistic representation of us as a result of the plethora of content we're creating converging with other advances in machine learning, robotics and large-scale data mining. — Adam Ostrow

Online games for data-mining have a short virtual shelf life. People get bored, especially if the game seems stagnant. — Peter Diamandis

Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data. — Jan Koum

You know something is wrong when the government declares opening someone else's mail is a felony but your internet activity is fair game for data collecting. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Some research suggests that collecting vast amounts of data simply can't predict rare events like terrorism. A 2006 paper by Jeff Jonas, an IBM research scientist, and Jim Harper, the director of information policy at the Cato Institute, concluded that terrorism events aren't common enough to lend themselves to large-scale computer data mining. — Julia Angwin

If there are questions that are unanswered by research, they will be answered by a strategy division, a data-mining group or someone else within the organization. We need to be more effective at collaborating with these groups. — Stephen Jin-Woo Kim

data mining is the act of digging into large amounts of raw data to discover unique nontrivial useful patterns. — Anil Maheshwari

For example, you could build many companies based on applying the cutting edge predictive analytics and data mining techniques commonly used at consumer web startups, quantitative hedge funds, etc., to less advanced industries. — Chris LoPresti

Corporations [gained] direct access to what we may think of as our humanity, emotions, and agency but, in this context, are really just buttons. — Douglas Rushkoff

Everything that informs us of something useful that we didn't already know is a potential signal. If it matters and deserves a response, its potential is actualized. — Stephen Few

To find signals in data, we must learn to reduce the noise - not just the noise that resides in the data, but also the noise that resides in us. It is nearly impossible for noisy minds to perceive anything but noise in data. — Stephen Few

The longer someone ignores an email before finally responding, the more relative social power that person has. Map these response times across an entire organization and you get a remarkably accurate chart of the actual social standing. The boss leaves emails unanswered for hours or days; those lower down respond within minutes. There's an algorithm for this, a data mining method called "automated social hierarchy detection," developed at Columbia University.8 When applied to the archive of email traffic at Enron Corporation before it folded, the method correctly identified the roles of top-level managers and their subordinates just by how long it took them to answer a given person's emails. Intelligence agencies have been applying the same metric to suspected terrorist gangs, piecing together the chain of influence to spot the central figures. — Daniel Goleman