November 2012

Microsoft launched scroogled.com and plans a TV and newspaper ad campaign to make its point. According to a spokesperson, that point is that "the search results consumers are getting via Google Shopping are really nothing more than paid ads, although people are led to think this is a form of unpaid search and Google has not been upfront with its users about this new policy."

When your son or daughter says they are doing homework on the phone, they may be telling the truth.

More than a third of tweens and young teenagers in the United States said they are using smartphones to do homework, according to a survey, with Hispanic students using them at a higher rate than African-Americans or whites. "These middle school students are using mobile devices for more than entertainment purposes," said Kristi Sarmiento, research director at TRU. "They have grown up with this technology." Smartphones were used at home for schoolwork by 39 percent of 11 to 14 year olds, 31 percent of those surveyed said they did assignments on a tablet while nearly 65 percent used laptops, the poll by research firm TRU, which specializes in data on tweens, teens and twenty-somethings, showed.

Just as the Christmas rush season puts a strain on Amazon today, or how Mother’s Day inundated the phone company last century, political fundraising requires maximum effort for a relatively short amount of time and failure isn’t an option. At least that’s the message behind Kyle Rush’s post on how he built the infrastructure to support President Barack Obama’s fundraising API.

That API helped the Obama team raise $250 million of the $1.1 billion total it raised for his re-election campaign. The post details the evolution of the fundraising platform from a hosted service provided by Blue State Digital to a redundant, dual-platform API that had the lowest latency possible. Rush, who was the deputy director of front end web development at Obama for America, lays out how the six engineers working on the fundraising side created a web-based API for accepting donations for the Obama campaign in early 2012. The goals of the team were to make sure the API was always available (when a platform can take in $3 million in donations in a single hour, downtime is pricey), that it scaled and that it was fast, since millisecond delays make people second-guess their decision to spend/give money.

[Commentary] Ninety percent of the world's data has been created in the last two years alone. Big data can and will be a big help in addressing the world's urban challenges, but big data raises big questions.

1. Crowded Agendas - Government has limited agenda space, that is the number of issues that policymakers can meaningfully address at any one time. Big data will clearly identify many gaps in existing policies and programs, but it will also identify issues not yet on the agenda and mobilize latent interests that had yet to organize and demand attention. While it is ultimately "good" to address these "silent" gaps, will big data possibly overload the very policymaking process we had hoped to make better with more information?
2. Organizational Capacity - Data are resources, but they are not information. Translating data into information and knowledge takes organizational capacity that does not exist in most of the world's urban centers, e.g., a new generation of "data professionals," processes and tools to gather, digest and transform big data into information that can be understood and used to make mundane urban operations such as ensuring that the traffic signals are working to making major investment decisions to determine whether a new rail systems should be built.
3. Objective Data, Subjective Analysis - Data are objective; however, how those data are weighted and how the analysis is used is not. Better information does not relieve the public or decision makers of making value judgments on any number of urgent problems facing today's cities. Consider just a few. How much are we willing to pay for what level of environmental quality? How safe is safe enough? How clean is clean enough? At what point has housing equity been reached? Is an average delay of three minutes in transit operations acceptable but five minutes throws up a red flag on the big data dashboard?
4. Public Trust - If your phone, along with everyone else's, provides useful GPS data to better understand transportation behavior within the city -- is that your data? Where does it go, who owns it and who is responsible to ensure that your "data of one" remains private? Will your data ever be sold? Will it ever be used to detect illegal or undesirable behaviors? Given the worldwide decline in public trust in public and private institutions the case for unfettered personal data sharing on the basis of regional economics or public good alone may not go far.
5. Can Big Data Make Us Happy? - Big data is often discussed in the context of helping public and private organizations make better decisions. But, decisions about what? Will big data simply make what cities do today more efficient, effective and environmentally sustainable? Yes, but is that enough?