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Virgirl Griffith Shows Off WikiiWatcher 2 At HOPE To A Standing Room Only Crowd

Virgirl Griffith Shows Off WikiiWatcher 2 At HOPE To A Standing Room Only Crowd

Date: Friday, July 18, 2008 - 10:37am
Keywords: data mining, Virgil Griffith, mashup, hackers on planet earth, wikiscanner
Shutter Speed: 1/50
Aperture: 5.6
Focal Length: 24.0mm
ISO: 800
Exposure Program: Manual
White Balance: Auto
Metering Mode: Multi-segment
Flash: Off
Make: Canon
Model: Canon EOS 5D
Location: United States, New York,
Links: Add new comment, 139 reads

Virgirl Griffith Shows Off WikiiWatcher 2 At HOPE

Virgirl Griffith Shows Off WikiiWatcher 2 At HOPE

Date: Friday, July 18, 2008 - 10:35am
Keywords: Alberto Gonzalez, data mining, Virgil Griffith, mashup, hackers on planet earth, wikiscanner
Shutter Speed: 1/50
Aperture: 5.6
Focal Length: 105.0mm
ISO: 800
Exposure Program: Manual
White Balance: Auto
Metering Mode: Multi-segment
Flash: Off
Make: Canon
Model: Canon EOS 5D
Location: United States, New York,
Links: Add new comment, 143 reads

Virgirl Griffith Shows Off WikiiWatcher 2 At HOPE

Virgirl Griffith Shows Off WikiiWatcher 2 At HOPE

Date: Friday, July 18, 2008 - 10:33am
Keywords: data mining, Virgil Griffith, mashup, hackers on planet earth, wikiscanner, wikiwatcher
Shutter Speed: 1/50
Aperture: 5.6
Focal Length: 105.0mm
ISO: 1600
Exposure Program: Manual
White Balance: Auto
Metering Mode: Multi-segment
Flash: Off
Make: Canon
Model: Canon EOS 5D
Location: United States, New York,
Links: Add new comment, 138 reads

Other Scores Financial Institutions Use To Track You

Date: Sunday, February 3, 2008 - 10:50am
Keywords: data mining
Links: Add new comment, 132 reads

Recently my husband and I received nearly identical balance-transfer offers from our respective Bank of America cards. The offers were identical, that is, except for the rates we'd be given. He was enticed with a 0% rate. Mine was 2.99%.

We live at the same address and share the same income. We both have high credit scores (although his are, annoyingly, a few points higher than mine).

So are these different offers evidence of rampant sexism on BofA's part? Hardly. The pitches were the result of complex and largely secret scoring systems that most financial institutions use to boost profits while limiting losses.

You've heard by now of credit scores, the three-digit numbers lenders use to gauge your creditworthiness. Credit scores predict how likely you are to default on a credit account or loan; they're used to help set interest rates and terms.

What you may not know is that credit scores are just the start of the way financial institutions evaluate you, and they're not even the most commonly used scores -- far from it.

While a credit card issuer might check your credit scores once a month as part of its regular account review process, the same company probably checks other kinds of scores every time you pull out your plastic.

Aristotle Data Mines For Politicians

Date: Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 3:04pm
Keywords: electoral process, freedom to privacy, data mining, aristotle inc, choicepoint, axciom
Links: Add new comment, 143 reads

Last month VanityFair.com published an enlightening article that unfortunately got lost in the holiday shuffle and didn't get a lot of play. It's worth reading so I want to highlight it here.

The article examines a voter registration data broker named Aristotle, which buys voter registration lists from counties and states. It then combines that information with highly personal and detailed information about voters that it mines from various other sources before reselling the data to candidates, political operatives, and commercial entities.

The company has quietly become the largest voter registration data broker in the country and is the go-to source for people like political mastermind Karl Rove to learn everything about you, such as how much money you make, whether you own a gun and potentially even what medical procedures you've had done.

Unlike data brokers such as Choicepoint and Axciom, Aristotle has managed to remain under the radar for more than two decades. But it's just as powerful as these other brokers, if not more, because the information it sells has the ability to directly influence presidential elections and public policy decisions.

Data Mining Facebook For Books That Make You Dumb

Date: Sunday, January 27, 2008 - 3:09pm
Keywords: data mining, mashup, social networking, facebook
Links: Add new comment, 141 reads

  1. Get a friend of yours to download, using Facebook, the ten most popular books at every college (manually -- as not to violate Facebook's ToS). These ten books are indicative of the overall intellectual milieu of that college.
  2. Download the average SAT/ACT score for students attending every college.
  3. Presto! We have a correlation between books and dumbitude (smartitude too)!

They Track The Politics So You Don't Have To

Date: Monday, October 8, 2007 - 8:01pm
Keywords: data mining, mashup, Wonkosphere
Links: Add new comment, 156 reads

Welcome to Wonkosphere, the best place to keep a finger on the pulse of the 2008 Presidential election. We use patented technology to scour the blogosphere and analyze what is being said, who is saying it, and whether they're ranting or raving. Updated every 4 hours.

I especially like their "conservative buzz", "liberal buzz", "independent buzz" groups. Be interesting to see how this site does over the next year. (And what they do with themselves, if successful, once the election is over.)

Google Won't Be Evil, Just The Digital Backend Of Big Brother

Date: Monday, October 8, 2007 - 1:27pm
Keywords: Google, totalitarianism, data mining, dystopia, big brother
Links: Add new comment, 147 reads

"It started in China," she went on, finally. "Once we moved our servers onto the mainland, they went under Chinese jurisdiction."

Greg sighed. He knew Google's reach all too well: Every time you visited a page with Google ads on it, or used Google maps or Google mail—even if you sent mail to a Gmail account—the company diligently collected your info. Recently, the site's search-optimization software had begun using the data to tailor Web searches to individual users. It proved to be a revolutionary tool for advertisers. An authoritarian government would have other purposes in mind.

Correlating Legislation With Lobbyists' Dollars

Date: Monday, October 8, 2007 - 12:49pm
Keywords: data mining, mashup, impartiality, campaign finance, MAPLight
Links: Add new comment, 229 reads

Is there a link between donations given and bills passed? MAPLight.org aims to help you find out, giving you the ability to compare contributions with how legislators voted.

See Who Is Whitewashing Wikipedia

Date: Monday, October 8, 2007 - 12:48pm
Keywords: Wikipedia, data mining, open processes, Virgil Griffith, mashup
Links: Add new comment, 235 reads

WikiScanner, developed by California Institute of Technology graduate student Virgil Griffith, traces the IP addresses that get stored when anonymous editors make their changes to Wikipedia articles and links them back to the organizations they came from. So, if U.S. Senate staff members were to repeat the editing efforts they undertook last year to remove information that made certain senators look bad, for example, everyone would know it.

This is an awesome way to data mine already available data (due to Wikipedia's open processes) and mash it up. This list of Fox's changes to Wikipedia is pretty interesting.

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