Andrew Pole had just started working as a statistician for Target in 2002, when two colleagues from the marketing department stopped by his desk to ask an odd question: “If we wanted to figure out if a customer is pregnant, even if she didn’t want us to know, can you do that? ”
Pole has a master’s degree in statistics and another in economics, and has been obsessed with the intersection of data and human behavior most of his life. His parents were teachers in North Dakota, and while other kids were going to 4-H, Pole was doing algebra and writing computer programs. “The stereotype of a math nerd is true,” he told me when I spoke with him last year. “I kind of like going out and evangelizing analytics.”
As the marketers explained to Pole — and as Pole later explained to me, back when we were still speaking and before Target told him to stop — new parents are a retailer’s holy grail. Most shoppers don’t buy everything they need at one store. Instead, they buy groceries at the grocery store and toys at the toy store, and they visit Target only when they need certain items they associate with Target — cleaning supplies, say, or new socks or a six-month supply of toilet paper. But Target sells everything from milk to stuffed animals to lawn furniture to electronics, so one of the company’s primary goals is convincing customers that the only store they need is Target. But it’s a tough message to get across, even with the most ingenious ad campaigns, because once consumers’ shopping habits are ingrained, it’s incredibly difficult to change them.
Have the 839 GOP debate questions reflected the ‘citizens agenda’?
By studying the 20 Republican presidential debates of this election season, we can better see if the questions being asked correspond with the issues voters actually care about
Wait! Before you answer, you may want to know what the journalists who have moderated these debates have chosen to ask about so far. We can tell you because we, NYU’s Studio 20, have studied it. There have been 20 debates among the Republican candidates since the first one last May. Some 839 unique questions have been put to the men (and one woman) who would be president. Here’s how they broke down.
So this is what the press thought the candidates should be talking about as they competed for votes in the early stages of the 2012 election: two questions were about climate change. Two were asked about Occupy Wall Street. Four made any reference to the Arab spring. Twelve were about education. If you wanted to know about abortion and gay rights, the candidates were asked about those things 46 times, or 5% of the total. Interested in campaign strategy and the way the candidates responded to each other’s negative ads? That was asked about 113 times (13% of the total).
But a whole lot more was almost never asked about. Small business got one question. Women’s rights (beyond the abortion battle) got one question. How to prevent another crash like the one in 2008: one question. Super Pacs, a huge factor in the 2012 campaign, were asked about twice.
Department Of Homeland Security Tells Congress Why It’s Monitoring Facebook, Twitter, Blogs
At a Congressional hearing this morning that veered into contentious arguments and cringe-worthy moments, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spilled the beans on their social media monitoring project.
DHS Chief Privacy Office Mary Ellen Callahan and Director of Operations Coordination and Planning Richard Chavez appeared to be deliberately stonewalling Congress on the depth, ubiquity, goals, and technical capabilities of the agency’s social media surveillance. At other times, they appeared to be themselves unsure about their own project’s ultimate goals and uses. But one thing is for sure: If you’re the first person to tweet about a news story, or if you’re a community activist who makes public Facebook posts–DHS will have your personal information.
The hearing, which was held by the Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Intelligence headed by Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA), was highly unusual. Hacktivist collective Anonymous (or at least the @AnonyOps Twitter feed) sent a sympathizer to the visitor gallery to liveblog the proceedings under the #spyback hashtag.
The mighty pen, instrument of mojo
Love Letters: 2000 Years of Romance. Edited by Andrea Clarke. The British Library; 128 pages; £7
“HOW do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s sonnet to her future husband Robert may be the most famous love letter in English. Never mind that she did not send it—or even show it to him—until after they were safely wed in 1846. Writing words of fervent passion was the way that even the most tongue-tied wooed for centuries. Alas, the form has fallen out of fashion. Rare are those who pick up a pen to declare, “I am in love. Deeply. Un-endingly, for ever and ever,” as Mervyn Peake did to his wife Maeve Gilmore in the 1940s. Today we Skype, send texts or outsource the job to Hallmark and heart-shaped emoticons.
The hollow emptiness in social media numbers – most accounts are fake or empty
Increasing numbers of studies of social networks point to much smaller numbers of real and active users — sharply reducing the value of the platforms, and social media marketing.
The numbers of users reported by Facebook, Twitter, Google, and many other sites, are closely watched. They reveal trends in adoption and they are one of the few public metrics available to analysts trying to assign value to companies preparing an initial public offering.
But how accurate are these numbers?
In some anecdotal cases, the number of users, active and actual, could be as small as one-third. And nearly one-half of user accounts could be fake or contain no user profiles.
Lights, action … iPhone? Film-makers turn to smartphones
The decisive moment for smartphones overtaking point-and-shoot cameras occurred last summer when the iPhone 4 became the most popular device for picture uploads to the image-sharing site Flickr. At the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, camera makers were scrambling to adapt to this new order, adding internet connections and more powerful zoom lenses to even basic models.
But it is not only photographers who have been quick to realise the potential of the camera in devices such as the iPhone 4 and 4S, and Nokia N8; film-makers have also been working with smartphones to produce not only quality shorts, but in some cases full-length feature films – shot completely on a mobile phone.
My Application: Head of Public Relations, Goldman Sachs
Now that your public relations chief, Lucas van Praag is (finally!) retiring, it is time for the executive committee to seriously rethink the position of PR head. To be blunt, your efforts have not been up to the level of excellence that one would expect from Goldman Sachs. It would be impolite to speak ill of the job done by LVP has done under challenging circumstances, but you gentlemen need to face the facts, and fast. On his watch, the firm’s reputation has suffered, its ability to recruit top talent has been compromised, and its market cap has gotten shellacked.
In short, your PR efforts have performed about as well as ABACUS 2007-AC1 — the John Paulson created mortgage bundle that cratered. Or, about as well as John Paulson’s fund in 2011, which also cratered (I am seeing a pattern here).
All of which says, you guys have really stunk the joint up.
Thus, it is with great pleasure that I toss my hat into the ring for the position of Director of Communications for Goldman Sachs. Not only do I have the requisite skill set to help rehabilitate the image of the 100+ year old firm — media savvy, legal smarts, netizen, with just a dollop of snark — but I believe I can help you move gracefully into the new century.
Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the new World Order
The world is drowning in debt. Greece is on the verge of default. In Britain, the coalition government is pushing through an austerity programme in the face of economic weakness. The US government almost shut down in August because of a dispute over the size of government debt.
Our latest crisis may seem to have started in 2007, with the collapse of the American housing market. But as Philip Coggan shows in this new book, Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the new World Order which he will talk about in this lecture, the crisis is part of an age-old battle between creditors and borrowers. And that battle has been fought over the nature of money. Creditors always want sound money to ensure that they are paid back in full; borrowers want easy money to reduce the burden of repaying their debts. Money was once linked to gold, a commodity in limited supply; now central banks can create it with the click of a computer mouse.
Time and again, this cycle has resulted in financial and economic crises. In the 1930s, countries abandoned the gold standard in the face of the Great Depression. In the 1970s, they abandoned the system of fixed exchange rates and ushered in a period of paper money. The results have been a long series of asset bubbles, from dotcom stocks to housing, and the elevation of the financial sector to economic dominance.
Famous Photogs Pose With Their Most Iconic Images
Reading About the Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review
The recent financial crisis has generated many distinct perspectives from various quarters. In this article, I review a diverse set of 21 books on the crisis, 11 written by academics, and 10 written by journalists and one former Treasury Secretary. No single narrative emerges from this broad and often contradictory collection of interpretations, but the sheer variety of conclusions is informative, and underscores the desperate need for the economics profession to establish a single set of facts from which more accurate inferences and narratives can be constructed.