Campaigns have several important sources of information about the electorate: publicly available voter data collected by states and counties, demographic data from the Census Bureau and other agencies, and data from businesses that can be used to build a richer profile of individuals. By asking supporters for their birthdays, the Clinton campaign can use that information to help connect individuals to those data sources. The value of this for large-scale campaigns is hard to overstate.
Little Pluto and Its Big Data
For instance, even though New Horizons got no closer than 7,800 miles from Pluto, and it zoomed past at over 30,000 mph, it collected so much data that NASA estimates that it’ll take fifteen months for it all to downlink back to Earth. Forget prompt analysis – we won’t even have all the data in our hands until October 2016.
.. Incredibly, peak transmission speed is a sluggish 1-2 kilobits per second. To put that into perspective, New Horizons’ highest resolution camera, LORRI (LOng Range Reconnaissance Imager) has a detection square that measures 1024 x 1024 pixels. Each pixel is translated into a 12-bit number – meaning each picture is a 12 million bit package, travelling over billions of miles of space. And that’s just one camera.
Top 10 data mining algorithms in plain English
Today, I’m going to explain in plain English the top 10 most influential data mining algorithms as voted on by 3 separate panels in this survey paper.
Once you know what they are, how they work, what they do and where you can find them, my hope is you’ll have this blog post as a springboard to learn even more about data mining.
The Shazam Effect: The Music is Listening to Us
Record companies are tracking download and search data to predict which new songs will be hits. This has been good for business—but is it bad for music?
.. Last year, Shazam released an interactive map overlaid with its search data, allowing users to zoom in on cities around the world and look up the most Shazam’d songs in São Paulo, Mumbai, or New York. The map amounts to a real-time seismograph of the world’s most popular new music, helping scouts discover unsigned artists just as they’re starting to set off tremors.
.. “We know where a song’s popularity starts, and we can watch it spread,” Titus told me.
.. Shazam has become a favorite app of music agents around the country, and in February, the company announced that it would get into the music-making business itself ..
.. some artists look for patterns in Pandora streaming to figure out which songs to play at each stop on a tour.
.. But data about our preferences have shifted the balance of power, replacing experts’ instincts with the wisdom of the crowd. As a result, labels have gotten much better at understanding what we want to listen to.
.. Republic Records is the most data-driven major label in the music business
in 1991, Billboard switched from DJ-reported to Sales Data and Hiphop and Country Soared.
In music, people want comfort food