L.L. Bean is a savy big-data user

A century ago, in Freeport, Maine, a shrewd outdoorsman named Leon Leonwood Bean decided to dox the guts out of some out-of-state hunters in hopes of taking their money.

Dox, that is, in 1912 terms. In that steampunk framework, doxxing meant that Bean got his hands on a mailing list of men who held nonresident Maine hunting licenses.

.. Many in the audience — programmers from around the world — had never heard of the Bean boots. But they knew about the company’s ravenous appetite for data. Specifically, they packed the standing-room-only Bean session at the Strata + Hadoop World “Make Data Work” conference to hear about L.L. Bean’s 10+ TB on-premise enterprise data warehouse and its newer deployment of (still more extensive) cloud data, fully 100 TB, which can be collected and used in realtime by customer-service reps on the phone, online and in stores.

.. As Chris Wilson puts it, the meticulous use of Big Data, running at top speed, results in — of all things — customer “delight.” More relevant content, better shopping and better service.

Companies and insurers love fitness trackers. Should you?

Health analysts estimate that around 70 percent of the annual $2.6 trillion bill for health care costs in the U.S. are the consequence of potentially changeable human behavior. The avoidable price tag for complications from obesity and diabetes alone adds up to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that lifestyle changes in diet and behavior resulting in the sustained loss of just 10–15 pounds can reduce the risk of getting diabetes by 58 percent.

.. A much-debated study published in Health Affairs in 2013 said the programs may actually “shift costs to workers who can least absorb them” because healthy workers end up getting discounts while sick workers pay the maximum premium.

.. The auto insurance industry has been leading the way on the integration of tracking and insurance for years. Almost every major auto insurance provider now offers discounts for drivers who allow their driving habits to be tracked.

..  Let your teenage son go joyriding in the bad part of town at midnight…. and maybe you lose your discount.

..

The data gathered on your driving habits, suggested Birnbaum, will be detailed enough to suggest whether you are the kind of person who wouldn’t blink if your premium was raised.

“Predictive analytics,” says Birnbaum, crunching the “big data” generated by telematics, will be able infer quite a bit about you from where and when and how you drive — whether, for example, you might be a good candidate for other products, like life insurance. Or whether you might be a bad risk, not because of how you drive, but because of where you live or what your income level is. And then, of course, there’s the inescapable flip side to getting a discount for participation. If you don’t participate, you are effectively paying a higher rate.

.. Peppet also has concerns about whether bottom line considerations will result in pressure from insurers and employers for ever greater levels of participation in these programs. What happens to privacy when “wellness” becomes a condition of your employment? After the drug test, here’s your tracker. Don’t take it off.

 

Brooks: Death by Data

Data-driven politics assumes that demography is destiny, that the electorate is not best seen as a group of free-thinking citizens but as a collection of demographic slices.

.. Of course, data sets are important. Obviously demography matters a lot. But, at heart, politics is a personal enterprise. Voters are looking for quality of leadership, character, vision and solidarity that defies quantification. Candidates like Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Jerry Brown can arouse great loyalty in ways that are impossible to predict.

.. Data-driven candidates sacrifice their own souls. Instead of being inner-directed leaders driven by their own beliefs, they become outer-directed pleasers driven by incomplete numbers.