"Dataclysm" by Christian Rudder is about data and data analysis using records on the web site OK, Cupid. He cuts the data by sex and race, and discusses his findings. OK, Cupid is a free online dating service that has been in business for 14 years and has accumulated plenty of data about its customers and their choices.
The social media such as Match.com, Facebook, and the many other online communication groups collect more information on people, their communications, timing, habits and goals that has ever been collected before. Just Facebook alone has more than 1 billion users. The population of the US is one third of a billion so you can see that they interact with people for all over the globe.
I tend to highlight a book that has interesting comments. With a Kindle, you can make highlights with a fingertip and then have a file of your highlights emailed to you. Here are my highlights from this book:
People make choices from the information we provide because they can, not because they necessarily should. You often get the feeling that people just don't want to know. He interviewed people blind from birth and found the same attitudes about race as in the sighted world. Say something especially cutting, and your followers applaud your wit. As I pointed out earlier, by 2015, Twitter users will have exchanged more words than have ever been printed. I have to say, just pausing to write this book, I'm sure I've lost ground. The hardest courses I ever took were often entirely skipped by these real mathematicians. The teaching assistants in my high-level courses, the people who handled a lot of the actual instruction and all of the grading, were not only often younger than me (one was sixteen) The citizens of most countries are usually only concerned with one constitution—their own—but Google has assembled all nine hundred such documents drafted since 1787. |
