I thank Prof. Rasheeda Madani for yet another
delightful recommend, something that’s in sync with Tim Wu’s ‘attention
merchants’.
[Well, ma’m is a delightful bibliophile of the first quarters, and she has got her own lovely blog on
books and travel HERE.]
The read is aptly titled, The Efficiency Paradox: What Big Data Can’t
Do by Edward Tenner.
Tenner’s take on harnessing the real
power of efficiency is something worth emulating!
His subtitle to the book, “What Big Data
Can’t Do” is quite intriguing, prompting me to give out a book, that’s so quite
a study in contrast, titled, Big Data: A
Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think!
This I found quite in sync with Tim Wu’s
read on the ‘attention merchants’.
Interestingly, the authors themselves
agree much with what Tenner has got to say on the efficiency and reliability of
data!
With their Kindle e-book readers, for
example, Amazon.com has the ability to tabulate which sections of books are
most highlighted, where readers tend to stop reading, and which themes prompt
the most user engagement. But since these answers don’t do anything for their
long-term business goals, the data just sits there.
Similarly, Google Flu Trends cannot
distinguish with certainty, people who have the flu from people who are just
searching about it. Google may tune “its predictions on hundreds of millions of
mathematical modelling exercises using billion of data points”, but volume is
not enough. What matters is the nature of the data points and Google has apples
mixed with oranges.
At the same time, there are convergences
and divergences too that abound! Here goes the review from Ian Pindar, for
y’all -
Big
Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
This informative introduction to the datafication of our lives looks at the
benefits of big data in medicine, science and beyond!
Thanks to the internet, social
networking, smartphones and credit cards, more data is being collected and
stored about us than ever before – a level of surveillance the Stasi could only
dream about, say Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier in this informative introduction
to the "datafication" of our lives.
Big data analysis gives big business a
competitive edge (all those Amazon recommendations), but governments have
invested heavily in it, too.
The risks to privacy and freedom are
obvious, but the authors carefully accentuate the positive, which could relate
well with Tenner’s efficiency paradox, and to Tim Wu’s ‘attention merchants’ so
very much!
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