Your Smartphone’s Location Data Is Worth Big Money to Wall Street

Thasos is at the vanguard of companies trying to help traders get ahead of stock moves like that using so-called alternative data. Such suppliers might examine mine slag heaps from outer space, analyze credit-card spending data or sort through construction permits. Thasos’s specialty is spewing out of your smartphone.

.. Thasos gets data from about 1,000 apps, many of which need to know a phone’s location to be effective, like those providing weather forecasts, driving directions or the whereabouts of the nearest ATM. Smartphone users, wittingly or not, share their location when they use such apps.
.. Before Thasos gets the data, suppliers scrub it of personally identifiable information, Mr. Skibiski said. It is just time-stamped strings of longitude and latitude. But with more than 100 million phones providing such coordinates, Thasos says it can paint detailed pictures of the ebb and flow of people, and thus their money.
.. Thasos says it can count the phone-carrying shoppers who ditch their regular grocers when a new Whole Foods opens, or gauge drilling activity by sizing up the crowds at oil-patch bars. By identifying the census block where each phone spends the night, Thasos algorithms estimate how far customers travel to malls and shoppers’ incomes.
.. Thasos won’t name its clients, but Mr. Skibiski says it sells data to dozens of hedge funds, some of which pay more than $1 million a year.
.. This month, Thasos is set to start offering data through Bloomberg terminals. A measure of mall foot traffic will be widely available
.. Mr. Skibiski and scientists at Sense studied movements of prepaid phones, looking for users who arrived at the airport on Monday mornings for business flights or dined in expensive restaurants.
.. Census data is the model, Mr. Pentland said—detailed enough to have value, but not so detailed that individuals can be identified… In September, as Hurricane Florence churned toward the Carolina coast Thasos watched evacuation zones and found that in well-to-do census blocks, 65% of the people fled, while only 39% left poor areas. Such information could inform disaster response or infrastructure spending, yet it might also have commercial value. “You might look at that and say, ‘Gosh, I could price insurance differently,’ ” Mr. Pentland said.

Personalism: The Philosophy We Need

Pollsters see in terms of broad demographic groups. Big data counts people as if it were counting apples. At the extreme,

  • evolutionary psychology reduces people to biological drives,
  • capitalism reduces people to economic self-interest,
  • modern Marxism to their class position and
  • multiculturalism to their racial one.
  • Consumerism treats people as mere selves — as shallow creatures concerned merely with the experience of pleasure and the acquisition of stuff.

Back in 1968, Karol Wojtyla wrote, “The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person.” That’s still true.

.. Doing community service isn’t about saving the poor; it’s a meeting of absolute equals as both seek to change and grow.

.. The first responsibility of personalism is to see each other person in his or her full depth.

.. personalism asks, as much as possible, for I-Thou encounters: that you just don’t regard people as a data point, but as emerging out of the full narrative, and that you try, when you can, to get to know their stories, or at least to realize that everybody is in a struggle you know nothing about.

.. Descartes tried to separate individual reason from the bonding emotions.

.. people are “open wholes.” They find their perfection in communion with other whole persons. The crucial questions in life are not “what” questions — what do I do? They are “who” questions — who do I follow, who do I serve, who do I love?

.. The reason for life, Jacques Maritain wrote, is “self-mastery for the purpose of self-giving.” It’s to give yourself as a gift to people and causes you love and to receive such gifts for others. It is through this love that each person brings unity to his or her fragmented personality. 

.. personalism is a middle way between authoritarian collectivism and radical individualism.

.. A company that treats people as units to simply maximize shareholder return is showing contempt for its own workers. Schools that treat students as brains on a stick are not preparing them to lead whole lives.

.. today’s social fragmentation didn’t spring from shallow roots. It sprang from worldviews that amputated people from their own depths and divided them into simplistic, flattened identities. That has to change.

PostgreSQL at 20TB and Beyond: Analytics at a Massive Scale

Speaker: Chris Travers

At Adjust, we produce near-real-time analytics on over 400TB of high velocity data. This talk is a brief introduction to how we do it, and it serves as a showcase for what PostgreSQL is capable of doing in a big data environment.

This talk will be of interest to people looking for information about how open source databases can be used at massive scales, approaches to federated data, and general open source success case studies.

Note: There aren’t enough people who are experience in Postgres because the popularity has grown faster than the pool of qualified people