The Financial Philosopher:

“I do nothing but go about persuading you all, old and young alike, not to take thought for your persons or your properties, but and chiefly to care about the greatest improvement of the soul. I tell you that virtue is not given by money, but that from virtue comes money and every other good of man, public as well as private. This is my teaching, and if this is the doctrine which corrupts the youth, I am a mischievous person.” ~ Socrates

Every time I see news coverage of street protests in today’s Greece or of political leaders discussing Greek Austerity, I imagine if Socrates would be there among the protestors and, if so, what he might say or do. Would he support the protestors? What might he say to the government leaders? Would he approve of Greek Austerity measures?

Jason Boog:

orbes has joined a group of 30 clients using Narrative Science software to write computer-generated stories.

Here’s more about the program, used in one corner of Forbes‘ website: “Narrative Science has developed a technology solution that creates rich narrative content from data. Narratives are seamlessly created from structured data sources and can be fully customized to fit a customer’s voice, style and tone. Stories are created in multiple formats, including long form stories, headlines, Tweets and industry reports with graphical visualizations.”

The New York Times revealed last year that trade publisher Hanley Wood and sports journalism site The Big Ten Network also use the tool. In all, 30 clients use the software–but Narrative Science did not disclose the complete client list.

Barry Ritholtz:

Facebook is valued at “plenty”

By Wall Street’s tech cognoscenti,

Take 1 billion friends

Times 5 dollars, then

Times IPO multiple: 20!

— Limericks Économiques

Last week, I made a surprising discovery about Facebook: It has far fewer “active” users than it claims. I learned this from a note buried deep in the company’s S1 — the IPO document it filed with the SEC in order to go public. Based on its S1, the social-networking giant’s value is probably much less than most investors seem to think.

One advantage of working in finance is that you get to meet lots of very nice, really smart people such as David Wilson, who writes the Chart of the Day column for Bloomberg. His column is my Sudoku, as I challenge myself to poke holes in the correlations it identifies between various assets. It’s good wonky fun.

On Feb. 3, the column used Facebook’s SEC data to show how fast the firm was growing. FB was becoming a “daily habit for more users,” and the numbers from the IPO filing were extraordinary: 845 million Monthly Active Users and 483 million Daily Active Users.

Ateqah Khaki:

“As technology advances, so does the government’s surveillance powers. If we want to protect our privacy rights, the exercise of this power has to be subject to limits,” writes ACLU deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer in The New York Times “Room for Debate” discussion about the use of drones domestically, and whether they pose a threat to privacy.

As a recent report we issued makes clear, the ACLU believes it is crucial that we adopt clear rules for the use of drones to conduct domestic surveillance. Jaffer writes,

Josh Harkinson:

Yesterday, a group affiliated with Occupy Wall Street submitted an astounding comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Point by point, it methodically challenges the arguments of finance industry lobbyists who want to water down last year’s historic Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. The lobbyists have been using the law’s official public comment period to try to kneecap the reforms, and given how arcane financial regulation can be, they might get away with it. But Occupy the SEC is fighting fire with fire, and in so doing, defying stereotypes of the Occupy movement. Its letter explains:

Occupy the SEC is a group of concerned citizens, activists, and professionals with decades of collective experience working at many of the largest financial firms in the industry. Together we make up a vast array of specialists, including traders, quantitative analysts, compliance officers, and technology and risk analysts.

Charles Duhigg:

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.

Jay Rosen:

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.

Neal Ungerleider:

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 Economist:

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.

Tom Foremski:

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.