off the leash

WashPo’s Baron: The Future of News is About Entrepreneurs and Ideas

Posted on November 19, 2014 by Ken Dowell

Marty Baron is the executive editor of a big newspaper.

(photo by chelle)

The Washington Post is a big media company. And it is one of the pillars of what has come to be known as traditional media.

So in making a presentation on the future of news, you might not expect him to talk about entrepreneurs and their ideas. That is unless he had chosen to bemoan how his publication’s audience was being spirited away by the Googles and Facebooks of the world, or challenged by the likes online upshots Buzzfeed or Upworthy. That’s not what he talked about. But he did talk about why journalism needs entrepreneurs and ideas.

Speaking before students at Florida International University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Baron ticked off those attributes that you are going to need if you are planning to go into journalism.

The ability to report well
Know how to write
Curiosity about the world around you
Contemporary skills like audio, video, data collection and basic coding
Knowledge of the new forms of storytelling
Expertise in social media to promote your own stories

Those are the no-brainers for aspiring journalists. But Baron emphasized that the future of journalism depends upon finding a different kind of person. “We need entrepreneurs, not just employees.”

I suspect that the individual will, and to some extent is already is, assuming some of the roles that were part of the purview of the media brand in the past. The journalist as individual brand may become the primary way his or her work is accessed when the distribution means are social media accounts and search engines. When the distribution was throwing the newspaper on your front lawn, it was the masthead brand that mattered. So from a marketing perspective, the media company of the future may be the sum of individual brands rather than a single company brand.

The point that Baron was focusing on is that more than anything else what journalism needs is ideas. “We used to hire people who would learn from us. Now we hire people to teach us something we don’t know.”

Referencing a previously noted fact that we sent a man to the moon before we put wheels on luggage, he said we don’t need a “moonshot.” He dismissed the idea that there is a silver bullet to save journalism. Instead we “need to do a lot of things.” Hence the paramount importance of ideas.

Baron also dismissed the notion that data holds the key to the future of news. “Nothing is more important than having a good idea. This has gotten lost in a world consumed with metrics. Metrics tell you how you did not what to work on.”

In other words, data is all about the past, ideas are about the future.

Posted in Digital publishing | Tagged entrepreneurs, journalism, media, news, Washington Post | 2 Comments

Hockey Night in Newark

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Ken Dowell

Pre-Game

Could there be a more aptly named place for Devils fans to congregate

The Fans

Just as a point of clarification, this is not me, nor did I come with this guy.

Presumably the other members of the 7 Dwarfs party were still in the seats.

I don’t know what to say about this one.

The Rock

The Legends

There’s a lot more where these came from…and three Stanley Cups

After winning the Stanley Cup in 2005, the Devils brought it to my Jersey City office building for a visit.

Posted in Sports | Tagged arenas, hockey, New Jersey Devils, Newark, Prudential Center, sports | 2 Comments

A Couple of Days In and Around Denver

Posted on November 9, 2014 by Ken Dowell

The Atomic Cowboy

Voodoo Doughnut

The Geology Museum at Colorado School of Mines

Coors Brewery

Argo Mine and Mill, Idaho Springs

Idaho Springs

Idaho Springs Town Hall

Tommyknocker Brew Pub

Keeping the Mile High

Posted in Travel | Tagged Argo Mill and Mine, beer, Colorado, Coors, Denver, Golden, Idaho Springs, pot shop, travel, Voodoo Doughnut | 29 Comments

Digital Deception: Is Fake News a Laughing Matter?

Posted on November 9, 2014 by Ken Dowell

(photo by wintersixfour)

It was Oct. 30, 1938 and Americans were glued to their radios awaiting further news about a reported invasion by Martians. They heard about how a meteorite had landed in Grovers Mill, N.J. An onsite reporter described how a crowd had gathered around a Martian who was sighted inside the vehicle and who incinerated all present, including the reporter. They awaited further bulletins on casualties and heard about how an army of Martians were preparing to invade New York City.

Orson Welles adaptation of the H.G. Well’s novel “War of the Worlds” is the pinnacle of fake news. At the time it was treated as an outrage by some journalists who claimed it created havoc. But we now think of it as brilliant drama.

Seventy-five or so years later, the tools to publish are available to everyone, as is the ability to promote what you publish through social media. The Web is full of fake news sites, the most popular of which is probably The Onion. While it calls itself “America’s finest news source,” its substantial following knows full well what the deal is.

But fake news also has a dark side. A recent story by the relatively unknown National Report carried the headline “17 Texas Kindergarteners Contract Ebola After Exposure to Liberian Foreign Exchange Student.” This prompted a story in Fast Company “Friends Don’t Let Friends Share Fake News About Ebola” which began: “This is a public service announcement about Ebola. If you see a story from a source called the National Report, ignore it.” The site dnaindia.com commented: “These sites claim to be satirical but lack even incompetent attempts at anything resembling humor.”

What motivates a nothing publication like the National Report to publish this kind of crap? The two million clicks it got in one day on this story, most of which were generated from Facebook. (Remember those statements from Facebook about elevating quality content in their news feed?) Fake news operations are using the same kind of clickbait tactics popularized by services like Buzzfeed and Upworthy, but without going to the expense of employing a real editorial staff.

Big American News is another fake newsjacker trying to produce clicks by feeding the potential panic over the spread of Ebola. These guys published a picture that they claimed showed an Ebola victim rising from the dead. Turns out the photo was a screenshot of a zombie from a movie. Imagine how the trend meter would percolate when you combine Ebola and zombie apocalypse.

Some other stuff that has gone viral recently includes another National Report story with the headline “The Big Lebowski 2 Filming Begins in January 2015.” It doesn’t really. And a site called Huzlers.com chipped in with “NASA Confirms That the Earth Will Experience 6 Days of Total Darkness in December 2014.”

But it is not just clickbaiters that use fake news to accomplish their goals. It has also reportedly been a tactic of both the FBI and the Republican Party.

(photo by nightfall)

Just last month, the FBI used fake news to nab a bomb threat suspect. (FBI Under Fire for Fake News Site to Nab Suspect.) They created a news story with an AP slug and posted it on a site that looked like the Seattle Times. They then sent it to the suspect on his My Space account. Since the story was about the suspect, he clicked on it, as they expected, and the file included malware that allowed the FBI to track his location. The Seattle Times called this an “affront to a free press.” But one also needs to consider that if catching this guy saved even one life does that result justify the tactics used?

In the ugly world of Washington politics, the National Republican Congressional Committee was reported earlier this year to have used fake news sites to attack Democratic congressional candidates (NRCC Launches Fake News Sites to Attack Democratic Candidates.) They created one page sites with names like “North County Update” to give the impression of a local news site. There were disclaimers at the bottom of the page acknowledging that the site was paid for by NRCC. The story in the National Journal also states that the NRCC had been the subject of a Federal Elections Commission complaint earlier for creating fake Democratic candidate sites.

Let us not forget, however, that there is some good satire out there, fake news that is both funny and insightful. Here are some examples:

After the governors of New York and New Jersey announced Ebola quarantine rules that went beyond what was being recommended by the CDC and the President, The Borowitz Report in newyorker.com reported “Christie Sworn In as Doctor.”

The staff at NewsMutiny apparently took note of the military arsenal available to the police dealing with demonstrators in Ferguson, Mo., and took it one step further with this story “Local Police Department Acquires Nuclear Weapon to Fight Crime.”

And as football season draws to a close and sports reporters start to look at post season awards, the Onion felt this group worthy of recognition: “Penn State Honors Legendary 2012 Legal Team During Halftime.”

Posted in Digital Deception, Digital publishing | Tagged clickbait, Digital Deception, digital publishing, fake news, FBI, GOP, Orson Welles, RNCC, satire, The Onion, War of the Worlds | 26 Comments

Digital Deception: Social Media’s Identity Conundrum Pt. 2

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Ken Dowell

While Facebook has stepped up its efforts to purge profiles without real names, Google+ has been moving in the opposite direction. Google+ was established with a policy of real names only. Like Facebook, they were embarrassed by their efforts to enforce that policy. One of Google+’s users was Vahid Online. Vahid Online is an Iranian activist, a man who lives in a country where you get arrested if you say the wrong thing online. Google deactivated his account because he was using a pseudonym.

This incident led to a change in policy in 2012 in which Google said it would allow “established” psuedonyms, but still required the user to provide his or her real identity. Vahid ended up back on line. Two years later, in July of this year, Google dropped the real name policy altogether, stating that it had led to “unnecessary difficult experiences for some of our users.”

Twitter and LinkedIn are at opposite ends of the real identity issue. That is clearly a result of the way these services are used. Twitter is probably the most widely followed social network when it comes to real-time on-the-ground news. Arab Spring was one example of that. News of the uprising against the Mubarak regime in Egypt was tweeted by citizens on the streets of Cairo. How much of that information would have been made public if everyone was required to use their real name and real identity?

LinkedIn on the other hand is above all else a professional database for job seekers and recruiters. There is obviously no advantage to changing your identity in that environment and the very efficacy of the service demands real people and real profiles.

Like Facebook, Twitter is a public company with financial reporting and disclosure requirements. In its SEC filing, it estimated that 5% of the profiles on Twitter are fake. Some other researchers have suggested that the real number may be double that. Twitter accepts pseudonyms and also allows users to have more than one account.

There are some safeguards in place to deter fraudsters. The service rules state “you may not create multiple accounts for disruptive or abusive purposes, or with overlapping use cases. Mass account creation may result in suspension of all related accounts.” They claim to have controls in place to identify spam accounts. They also enforce a follower to following ratio and prohibit following more than 1,000 accounts in a day. This is intended to stop the automated services that follow thousands of accounts and when a certain percentage follow back it builds an audience.

The rules also cover impersonation. “You may not impersonate others through the Twitter service in a manner that does or is intended to mislead, confuse, or deceive others.” There is a form on the service to report impersonation.

You wouldn’t expect there to be many fake accounts on LinkedIn. You’re not going to find catfish there, kids aren’t bullying their classmates on LinkedIn and it’s not the service you would use to take revenge on a former significant other. But there are fake accounts and they are in place for the purpose of scraping data, a pirating activity made attractive by the detailed profiles on this service. LinkedIn itself has been accused of creating fake accounts for the “people you may know” section in order to get users to prompt their friends and associates to join. (How LinkedIn creates fake accounts for your contacts, and uses you to solicit them into joining.)

Earlier this year LinkedIn filed suit in San Francisco against hackers who they claimed were using software to create thousands of fake accounts and capturing data from other LinkedIn user accounts. One issue that was a little foggy in that legal action is that they don’t actually know who these hackers are.

LinkedIn’s rules are simply that you use your real name and provide accurate information. Like the others they have functionality for users to report “inappropriate” profiles. They have a reputation for being the most responsive of the social media networks in dealing with reports of fake accounts.

Both LinkedIn and Twitter have policies that reflect the way their services are being used. If, however, you want to be everything to everybody (Facebook) or if you are running from behind (Google+) the way forward is not so clear.

For details on how Facebook has dealt with this issue see Part 1.

Posted in Digital Deception | Tagged Digital Deception, fake profiles, Google, impersonation, LinkedIn, social media, Twitter | 3 Comments

Digital Deception: Social Media’s Identity Conundrum Pt. 1

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Ken Dowell

One of the reasons for the explosive growth of social media in the last few years is that it provided the opportunity to share, to network, to converse with real people using their real picture and real name. If you think of the predecessors of social media like Yahoo message boards, news commenting sections and before that USENET newsgroups, they often devolved into a hodge podge of spam, racist and sexist vitriol and various other forms of stupidity and unpleasantness. No one was accountable for what they said because they hid behind a generally unidentifiable user name.

Social media changed all that. You could see and identify your friends, your family, your business associates. But as the social networks user base stretched into the millions we started to see profiles like these “zombie blondes.” These “girls” all had the same interests, the same favorite sport, they each put up three photos and “friended” each other. No one knows who was behind the zombie blondes but it is suspected that if you accepted their friend request they would consummate that friendship by dropping by (virtually of course) with a little malware.

There are a lot of reasons why the social networks want you to use your real identity. And the integrity of their services requires a level of trust that is undermined by fake profiles. If you’ve read my earlier Digital Deception posts, you know about some of things fake profiles have been used for:

To defraud and defame
To bully or stalk classmates, old flames or workplace rivals
To misrepresent someone’s influence, a Web site’s reach or user reviews of books, movies or businesses.
To send spam

But there are also some pretty compelling reasons to use hidden identities. This story, She Tweeted Against the Mexican Cartels. They Tweeted Her Murder , appeared in the Daily Beast recently. It is about a woman in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas who adopted the name Feline and used cat woman as an avatar and who used social media to expose information about the drug cartels that no journalist would print. She sent alerts warning people of locations of violent incidents. She had half a million followers on Facebook and more than 100,000 on Twitter. Eventually her identity was discovered and she was murdered.

Not all hidden identities represent crooks, hackers or scammers. They might be:

Political dissidents who live in repressive societies
Victims of abuse
Members of the LGBT community
Members of religious groups who have suffered discrimination

Or it might be something as simple as a person who uses a slightly changed named in order throw off a prying employer or relative. Or suppose you happen to be known as Jay-Z or Lady Gaga.

The major social media networks are in something of a quandary about how to deal with this. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ have all taken different approaches. I don’t think any of them have found the solution.

No one has gotten pulled into the muck on this issue more than Facebook. According to the rules in Facebook’s account settings, “Facebook is a community where people use their authentic identities. We require people to provide the name they use in real life; that way, you always know who you’re connecting with. This helps keep our community safe.”

Earlier this month Chief Product Officer Chris Cox elaborated: “Our policy has never been to require everyone on Facebook to use their legal name. The spirit of our policy is that everyone uses the authentic name they use in real life.” Does that clarify things?

Cox’s comments were in response to a furor that Facebook created, mostly in San Francisco, when they deleted the accounts of drag queens because they weren’t using their real names. That is only one of a series of gaffes Facebook has been drawn into as it has attempted to crack down on fake profiles.

In an SEC filing in 2012 Facebook estimated that 8.7% of its accounts were duplicates or false accounts. At the time that amounted to 83 million Facebook members. That was a problem for Wall Street. If Facebook doesn’t have real information about real people what does that do to its ability to target ads? What does that do to its ability to expand its business based on its database of users?

So as a public company Facebook has stepped up its efforts to clean up its user database. They claim to investigate any user reported irregularities. But really, Facebook has one employee for every 239,000 members.

One victim of Facebook’s campaign for authenticity was Salomon Rushdie. Apparently the first name on Rushdie’s passport is Ahmed, a name he never uses. Facebook deleted his account. That is until Rushdie let everyone know about it on Twitter.

More recently Facebook has gone after the DEA (Facebook Demands DEA Stop Using Fake Profile Pages in Investigations). This came about after a New York woman who had a cocaine conviction sued the DEA because they used her photo and personal data from her phone to create a Facebook account that they used to get her associates to disclose information.

I don’t really think Facebook knows what direction to turn. Just recently they launched an app called Rooms that accommodates anonymous users. So while Facebook is trying to enforce its real identity policy, it doesn’t want to lose touch with those who want to hide behind a pseudonym.

In my next post I’ll look at how Google, Twitter and Linked In are dealing with their identity conundrum.

Posted in Digital Deception | Tagged Digital Deception, Facebook, fake profiles, social media | 21 Comments

Upholding the Constitution With a Sense of Humor

Posted on October 28, 2014 by Ken Dowell

My Tour of Jury Duty in Newark

I arrived 15 minutes ahead of my 8:15 appointed time and first went through the X-ray scanner. They just need to make sure no one is packing heat as they enter the Essex County Courthouse. Personally, I was more concerned by the guy in front of me eyeballing my iPhone than I was about getting shot.

I checked in and got my parking ticket stamped, because no one pays to park for jury duty, and then had a seat. I was surprised to see on the video screen that there was what in effect was a customer satisfaction survey you could fill out because it said they wanted to know how they could make jury service better (more on that later).

The real action didn’t start until 9. It started with a video about CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates). It was a pretty effective video that had interviews with children who were abandoned by their parents and shuffled around in foster care until a CASA volunteer helped them get adopted into a stable home. Then a woman from Essex County CASA made a pitch and handed out pamphlets.

That was followed at about 9:20 by the juror orientation video. That one started with a judge telling us how fortunate we were to live in a society that has jury trials. The morale of that story was of course that we should see jury duty as a privilege and honor rather than an inconvenience. After that we got some jury trial 101 explaining what words like plaintiff, defendant and prosecutor meant. There was some slightly more advanced stuff like an explanation of the jury selection process. (Don’t take it personally if one of the attorneys doesn’t want you on the jury even though you didn’t say anything stupid that made you seem unacceptable.)

Then we got a live orientation by an energetic dude with a sense of humor. He set forth some of the more practical issues, such as, sit in Room A to watch HGTV, Room B to watch ESPN or Room C for CNN. Lunch was from 12 to 1:30. One thing you can always count on in the courthouse is a robust lunch ‘hour.’ He also noted that you shouldn’t ask for an advance on your five bucks to buy lunch. (The per diem rate for jurors in New Jersey is $5.) He also encouraged us to fill out the survey questionnaire and promised to read them all before he left work that night. That’s customer service you can’t get in the private sector.

We all then stood up, raised our right hand, and took an oath to uphold the Constitution. And by god, that is exactly what I intended to do, although I admit to being a little sketchy about the right to bear arms bit. Seems to me there were probably some trials going on in that very courthouse involving some folks who were in deep shit for bearing arms.

By then it was 10 a.m. and after all of that activity we sat down to take a break. By 10:30 they started calling names to go up to a courtroom. The second group was at 10:40, they called more at 10:55 and at 11. And then at 11:10, my name was called. Being on the list at this point was a mixed blessing. On the one hand you held out the hope that after calling three or four jury groups, they would say, well that’s it folks thanks for coming but we won’t be needing you. On the other hand I was thinking that the highlight of my day was going to be heading down into Newark where there were some excellent lunch options. And while 90 minutes seems a good amount of time for lunch for non-judicial workers, once you get up into a courtroom they don’t like to cut it that tight.

It took until 11:30 to get the 90 or 100 people who were called to this courtroom upstairs and in place. It was a criminal trial and the judge went over some of the details. Hours would be 8:30 to 5. He mentioned that in his 16 years on the bench no one ever stayed past 5. Good news for jurors but I’m sure a lot of people in the room were thinking “when’s the last time I got out of work at 5?”

Then he said the trial would last 7 days and described a schedule that would take it to Nov. 6. Bear in mind that it was Oct. 22. Try to do the math. Start with Oct. 22 and count out 7 days. Try it not counting weekends and Fridays. Try it not counting weekends, Fridays and Mondays. It still doesn’t stretch to Nov. 6. I suspect there probably aren’t any judges who follow my blog, but if you are a judge reading this can you explain to me why you guys can’t work at least a four-day week. Even a three-day week?

So since I had a trip planned and paid for in early November, when the judge asked anyone who couldn’t serve on this case or anyone who just didn’t want to serve on this case to stand, I got up, told him my name, and left along with at least half the other people in the room. Just in time for lunch and my trip down Market Street into downtown Newark.

In the back of my mind was the fact that the Cuban at Dinosaur Barbeque was perhaps the best sandwich I had ever had, but I decided instead to try Hobby’s deli, an old-school Jewish deli that somehow has managed to survive for decades in downtown Newark. I was richly rewarded with a cup of mushroom barley soup and a classic corned beef sandwich. Adding to the ambiance was a wall full of framed Devils jerseys and big “Henrique! It’s Over!” photo. (If you’re a Devils fan or a Rangers fan you know what “Henrique! It’s Over!” is.)

So then it was back to the jury assembly room, after taking a couple pictures for this blog post.

I would like to tell you what happened that afternoon, but in fact nothing happened. So I’ll interrupt this chronological narrative to talk about the Essex County Courthouse. I’ve also done jury duty in Paterson and Jersey City and I can tell you that the Newark courthouse is the Taj Mahal of North Jersey judicial buildings. It is a new, modern complex with a spacious garage, walkways between buildings so you don’t have to go outside in bad weather and lots of elevators that work. The jury assembly room has good wifi, state of the art audio visual gear, a computer lounge and a coffee lounge with free tea and coffee all morning. You don’t often hear about things being nicer in Newark but for jury duty that is in fact the case.

After a full afternoon of non-activity, at 3:25 they called a large group of names to the front desk. They were then given some good news and some bad news. They were dismissed for the day, but they needed to be back the next day at 9:30. Based on the grumbling as they left, the bad news seemed to override the good for this group. The people who run the jury room are pretty nice folks so they waited until this group cleared out so as not to hurt their feelings when they advised the rest of us that we were done. Done for the day, done for this term of service. We high-tailed it out of there with smiles on our faces, overlooking for the moment the thought of being fortunate to live in a society with jury trials.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged court, Jury duty, justice, law, Newark | 2 Comments

When Big Data Comes Up Small

Posted on October 23, 2014 by Ken Dowell

When you pretend the subjective is objective.

The first time I detected a slightly fishy smell in how data was used came from hanging around human resources. At some point the old fashioned employee evaluation which involved having the boss sit down with the employee and discuss his or her performance was replaced by online forms that you fill out staring at your screen rather than your employee.

These software apps produce an evaluation that is numerical. So subjective evaluations of things like leadership or teamwork, attitude or aptitude, are converted into numbers on a form. That way calculations can be made comparing employees in departments or industries, they can be used to determine promotions, firing or raises and they can be used within an organization to stack rank employees. If your goal is to destroy the morale of your staff, no tool is more effective than stack ranking.

I’ve been involved in dozens, if not hundreds of these evaluations. For example I have had three different bosses evaluate my ability to communicate by plugging a 1-5 number in a form. The results from the three were wildly different. Do you think that is because my ability to communicate went up and down like a roller coaster? Or did the form tell you more about the evaluator than the evaluated? If you do this on a companywide basis and have dozens of different evaluators tryng to interpret behavior with statistics, what are you likely to find out? Perhaps that the software company that sold you that HR system took you for a ride.

If you want to let your imagination loose on what this could eventually look like read Dave Eggers novel The Circle. In his story, the Circle is a massive technology company that evaluates its employees in real time on a scale of 1-100. If you think that is a good idea, this post is for you.

When the system in gamed.

There seems to be no more straightforward use of online data than to gauge the popularity and effectiveness of content, whether it is a news story, advertisement or Web page. By looking at what gets the most views you’ll find out what was most widely read. That is, unless you only want to consider views by human beings.

You can buy views for just about anything, online articles, ads, video. This is something that publishers have been found to do. They buy thousands of views which make it appear they have more reach than they really have and then charge advertisers accordingly. What do advertisers get for their high rate? They get pinged thousands of times by robots.

Using crowdsourcing to produce numerical ratings for anything from restaurants to businesses to books again appears to be a pretty attractive application of data. Until you find out there are people in places like the Philippines getting paid a buck a shot to hype certain entities and trash others. Yelp at one time estimated that up to 25% of its reviews were fake (Digital Deception: Astroturfers).

Another application of big data that caught on quickly is using data to identify online influence. This is done through a calculation of followers, connections, like, retweets, comments, etc. I’m not certain that actually tells you how influential someone is but I can say with some certainty that if you’ve bought those followers and likes, and the Internet is full of offers to do just that, it really has nothing to do with influence.

The gold standard of online influencer ratings is Klout. As I mentioned in an earlier post (Digital Deception: The Illusion of Influence), my Klout score will go down if I’m travelling for a couple weeks and ignore my social media accounts. But if I catch my dog in a cute pose, post it on Facebook, and get a few dozen likes, my Klout score goes up. Neither of these things have anything to do with whether or not I am influential.

When you need a little context

The one application of big data that most of us have experienced is the recommendation engine. Most commonly this is used on ecommerce sites. If you bought this, you might want this. Just like being prompted to get fries with your burger.

Amazon is well known for this. If I look at my Amazon account history, I’ll find purchases of books about architecture. There will be books intended for young readers that are fantasy fiction. There will be fashion-oriented coffee table books. And when I look at what Amazon recommends to me, there is nothing that I find of any interest. That’s because the missing piece of information here, the piece that big data is powerless to identify, is the fact that all of the above purchases were gifts for different people. The absence of context makes the recommendation engine fail. Except that maybe it reminds me that since I bought my sister a book for Christmas last year I should get something different this year. Not what Amazon is going for.

Another example of a data-driven recommendation engine that is being used by publishers and Web-site operators is to recommend content that is supposedly of interest to persons reading what is on the currently viewed page. Outbrain is one of the leading providers of this type of recommendation service. They are used by CNN. I went to CNN and took a look at this story about the U.S. trying to combat the Islamic State. And then I looked at what stories Outbrain recommended at the bottom of the page. They included “Celebrities Who Have Turned Heads With Their Sense of Style” and “How Much House Can You Afford.” Are you kidding me? Likely this may be more about what Outbrain is getting paid to promote than it is about what their supposed recommendation engine finds to be contextually relevant.

When the data becomes the goal in itself

One area where the growth of big data offers some promise is in education. Standardized tests have been around since the SAT’s were created in the 1920’s. But today’s standardized tests and our ability to absorb, analyze and interpret the data that comes from them (especially if administered online) is starting to be used to evaluate teachers and school systems. The promise is it will tell us what school systems are underperforming and need help and identify the best teachers and the worst.

My concern with that whole process is that the education our children get starts to be geared toward the tests. Considering how they are being used, are schools and teachers focusing on preparing students to score on these tests instead focusing in the classroom on literature or math or science? I suspect that those teachers who are most insecure about their abilities would be the ones who have the most to lose and hence would be the most focused on assuring their students do well in these tests. That in turn probably makes them less effective as teachers even if they are able to get their students scores up.

—

The world of data that we have at our fingertips really does give us the potential to understand things we didn’t have access to before, to evaluate the way we do things to find the best approach and to manage more effectively whether in the shipping department or the classroom. But that potential is realized only when we use data in an appropriate way. It is not a substitute for vision, for effective decision making or for leadership. And if you don’t bring that to the table, no amount of data is going to be big enough.

Posted in Technology | Tagged big data, education, human resources, marketing, recommendation engines, standardized tests, technology | 21 Comments

The Use and Misuse of Big Data

Posted on October 21, 2014 by Ken Dowell

What is big data? It’s a lot of data. There is no need to try to come up with some more sophisticated definition. That’s all there is to it. It is what it is.

Big data got big because so much more of the world’s knowledge is now stored digitally and because data scientists have developed increasingly more sophisticated methods for capturing, calculating and analyzing it.

With this growth has come an enormous interest in how big data can be used to manage businesses, govern countries and control epidemics, not to mention sell everything under the sun to just the right folks.

What can big data accomplish?

It is given some credit for the reelection of Barack Obama in 2014.
By studying where and when most crimes occur, it can be used to determine the most effective deployment of law enforcement resources.
If Moneyball is to be believed, it is the reason the Oakland A’s made the playoffs despite a minimalist payroll.
Supposedly it can map out the best routes for package delivery systems, although the performance of the delivery companies during the last holiday season makes you scratch your head over this one.
Most of us are familiar with how Amazon and Netflix recommend products based upon our purchase history.
Target demonstrated (to the horror of some) that it could identify which of its customers were pregnant by analyzing their purchase history.
Google used an analysis of search terms by region to predict the location of flu outbreaks (although it was later determined that the study was flawed because of inaccurate reports of cases of influenza).

And yet, according to Matt Asay writing in Information Week (8 Reasons Big Data Projects Fail) “for those (organizations) who kick off big data projects, most fail.” Asay goes on to describe some failures in the design and implementation of these projects. But I would suggest another more overarching reason. In our enthusiasm to embrace the potential for intelligence to be gleaned from big data we have become blind to its limitations.

Conclusions are drawn from data by identifying correlations. But big data cannot tell us anything about the reasons for those correlations. For example, we might analyze purchase patterns and find that women who buy a lot of shoes also buy a lot of handbags. The data has no clue why. Do they just buy a lot of everything, do they travel a lot, do they love leather? We have no idea. If we did know why that correlation would have far broader implications. Data also cannot necessarily tell you what correlations are meaningful. Women who buy a lot of shoes may also drive automatic transmission vehicles, but that means nothing to anybody.

Writing in CIO, Jonathan Hassell elaborated on “3 Mistaken Assumptions About What Big Data Can Do For You.” They are:

Big data cannot predict the future. It is all about past behavior.
“Big data is a poor substitute for values – those mores and standards by which you live your life and your company endeavors to operate.”
Big data tells you very little about individuals because you can’t quantify behavior. (Can you hear that one HR people?)

I’ve often found that the tech guys who have the responsibility for capturing and managing big data are a lot more realistic about what it can and cannot do than the business managers who are looking to use it. A couple years ago I attended at conference in Silicon Valley which included a session with search engineers. The audience for this session was mostly CEOs and marketers who were chomping at the bit to hear about how big data could be used to find exactly those customers who would buy their product.

One of the participants, a search guy from Yahoo whose name I can’t recall, commented that the main thing the data tells you is that “people are weird.” What he meant was that there really is no evidence that you can use data to predict what people are going to do, including what they are going to buy. Why? Because data can’t deal with individual differences, can’t deal with context, can’t understand why.

In my next post I’ll discuss some of my own experiences with the use and misuse of big data.

Posted in Technology | Tagged big data, marketing, technology | 4 Comments

Digital Deception and the Law

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Ken Dowell

From a legal perspective, sockpuppets are like guns. They aren’t illegal but many of the ways people use them are.

As the number of unethical, fraudulent and criminal acts perpetuated by online imposters grows, state legislatures in the U.S. have begun to enact laws to cover crimes that may not be clearly outlined in the lawbooks of the analog past.

Several states have enacted online impersonation laws. One of the first was in California (2011). It is fairly representative of the statutes created in many states. California SB1411 states: ‘Any person who knowingly and without consent credibly impersonates another actual person through or on an Internet Web site or by other electronic means for the purposes of harming, intimidating, threatening or defrauding another person is guilty of a public offense.”

There are two issues with the California law, and the substantially similar ones that were enacted in Texas (2009), Louisiana (2012), Washington (2012), South Carolina (2013) and several other states. One is the definition of what constitutes harm. The other is whether these laws also apply to the creation of completely fictitious personas, as opposed to the simple adoption of someone else’s identity. The answers to these questions, which will determine the breadth of these statutes, are only likely to come over a period of time as more cases of this nature come before the courts.

The Case of Lori Drew

Perhaps the most widely followed case of sockpuppetry is that of Lori Drew. In 2006 a 13-year-old Missouri girl committed suicide after a 16-year-old boy she had befriended on My Space sent her a message about how “the world would be a better place without her.” The author of that message wasn’t really a 16-year-old boy named Josh Evans, but rather a 40-something Missouri woman named Lori Drew who was a neighbor of the victim and the mother of another 13-year-old who was at one time the victim’s friend.

While local authorities in St. Charles County, Missouri, did not press charges against Drew, citing lack of evidence, federal charges were brought citing violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). A jury found Drew guilty of misdemeanor violations of the CFAA but the verdict was later overturned by a District Court judge who reasoned that while Drew violated the terms of service of My Space, it would be a overbroad interpretation to consider that a violation of CFAA. The ruling was generally recognized by the legal community as establishing that violating the rules of a social network does not it itself constitute a violation of law.

Partly in response to this case the Missouri legislature in 2008 passed what was known as the cyberbullying bill. This was essentially an update of existing statutes about bullying that had specified that the communication would be via telephone or in writing.

Violators of Online Impersonation Laws

The arrests and convictions made under these new online impersonation laws give some indication as to how police, prosecutors and judges are interpreting what constitutes harm.

A 22-year-old Los Angeles man was believed to be the first person convicted under California’s online impersonation law. Jesus Frank created 130 Facebook accounts which he used to harass a 16-year-old former girlfriend. He created online profiles that included sexually explicit photos and the girl’s contact details. Frank got five years probation, a one-year suspended sentence, 30 days on a road crew and counseling.

In Denton, Texas, a 32-year-old woman went to work on her husband’s ex. She hacked into the woman’s Goodreads account and created a fictitious Facebook page in her name. She posted items about the woman on a gossip site, theDirty.com, and emailed her employer entreating him to fire the victim. She was arrested and charged under the Texas online impersonation law, although I was unable to find the outcome of those charges.

Another case in Texas involved two juvenile girls in Hood County. They created a Facebook page in the name of one of their classmates who didn’t have one. They headed the page with a crass nickname for the girl and used the page to threaten other students. Despite being juveniles they were charged with two felony counts of online impersonation and sent to a juvenile detention center.

Online Impersonation Laws vs. The First Amendment

Not everyone is ready to jump on the online impersonation laws bandwagon. In fact there are some who see these laws as a threat to First Amendment rights. They cite the possibility that these laws could be used to go after parody accounts on Twitter or Facebook that are used for social commentary or satire.

There was a interesting case in Louisiana that addressed that point. A woman in Priarieville, La., who had previously been the parish president’s chief executive assistant, created a Facebook page in the name of “Kimmie Broad.” Kim Broad was the parish president’s top deputy. She filled the page with what appeared to be self-derogatory comments about such things as being unqualified to hold her post and preferring to be scantily clad at work.

The woman was charged with online impersonation under the 2012 Louisiana law. Her defense attorney argued that the Facebook page was a form of satire and that the online impersonation law was a restraint of free speech when applied to public figures. Charges were dismissed.

What’s Next?

So far there has been no federal legislation along the lines of the state laws. Will Congress weigh in on the issue? Or will the state legislatures try to expand or refine the online impersonation laws?

One would suspect that these new laws are starting to pop up on the radar of personal injury lawyers. Will we see the creation of cottage industry of cyberspace ambulance chasers?

And what about the online social networks? If they have rules about fake online profiles but fail to identify and delete such profiles, are they accountable?

We are still a long way from finding an answer to some of these questions. But the best summary I found on the state of digital deception and the law was on an Australian Web site called Lawstuff Australia. It is a site of the Australian National Children’s and Youth Law Center and offers legal tips for teens and young adults. Their advice: “Creating a fake account, profile or ad about someone else might seem like a bit of fun. But using someone’s personal information to create a fake account that threatens, intimidates, harasses or offends them can be a crime.”

Posted in Digital Deception | Tagged Digital Deception, fake profiles, law, onlne impersonation, social media, sockpuppets | 26 Comments