April 2012

"A significant constraint on realizing value from Big Data will be a shortage of talent, particularly of people with deep expertise in statistics and machine learning, and the managers and analysts who know how to operate companies by using insights from Big Data," according to a report published last year by McKinsey. "We project a need for 1.5 million additional managers and analysts in the United States who can ask the right questions and consume the results of the analysis of Big Data effectively." What the industry needs is a new type of person: the data scientist.

[Commentary] Charges of media bias have been flying like a bloody banner on the campaign trail.

Newt Gingrich excoriated the “elite media” in a richly applauded moment during one of the Republican debates. Rick Santorum chewed out a New York Times reporter. Mitt Romney said this month that he faces “an uphill battle” against the press in the general election. Meanwhile, just about every new poll of public sentiment shows that confidence in the news media has hit a new low. Seventy-seven percent of those surveyed by the Pew Research Center in the fall said the media “tend to favor one side” compared with 53 percent who said so in 1985. But have the media really become more biased? Or is this a case of perception trumping reality? In fact, there’s little to suggest that over the past few decades news reporting has become more favorable to one party. That’s not to say researchers haven’t found bias in reporting. They have, but they don’t agree that one side is consistently favored or that this favoritism has been growing like a pernicious weed.

AT&T’s shareholders didn’t require the telecommunications giant to implement network neutrality on its wireline and wireless networks.

The proposal lost with a mere 5.9 percent of the vote. But based on an interview I had two weeks ago with Jonas Kron, Vice President of Trillium Asset Management, the goal of the shareholder proposal was to get 3 percent of the vote so they could bring it back next year. So in that case, Trillium and other shareholders in favor of the proposal (including Mike D of the Beastie Boys) won. In fact Kron told me that anything over 5 percent would be a substantial victory because it means that the company would have to pay attention to the issue. Regardless of change coming from this particular vote, in our talk Kron offered me something far more interesting, an economic justification for broadband companies to embrace network neutrality. So despite Wall Street analysts who argue that such rules would turn the nation’s largest wireline and wireless phone companies into commodity utilities with the profit margins to match, Kron explains why American’s capitalists should be fine with network neutrality.

Cablevision was sued by two consumers -- Alyce Serrano and Andrea Londono. They accused the company of violating a federal anti-hacking statute by accessing their computers without authorization in order to throttle peer-to-peer traffic.

Serrano and Londono, who sought class-action status, also alleged that Cablevision violated consumer protection laws by using phrases like "blazing fast speed" in its ads. The company insisted that the lawsuit against it should be dismissed. Late last month, U.S. District Court Judge Dora Irizarry in Brooklyn (NY) agreed with Cablevision. Judge Irizarry granted the ISP summary judgment, ruling that its terms of service gave it the right to take action to prevent consumers from using "excessive" bandwidth. "Plaintiffs cannot now claim that Cablevision acted 'without authorization' when it restricted their bandwidth," Judge Irizarry wrote. The judge also dismissed the consumer protection claims, ruling that Cablevision's statements about its fast speeds were "mere puffery," as opposed to legally binding terms. Now the consumers filed an appeal. It could take the appellate court more than a year to issue a decision. Meanwhile, the case shows that consumer lawsuits against individual ISPs are anything but a surefire way of enforcing neutrality principles.