Free Republic

A blind man in a dark room is looking for his black cat, and he can't find it. He calls in a sighted person for help. He can't find the cat either but is more confounded than the owner. Because the room is dark and the cat is black, the sighted person can't presume the cat isn't in the room. Anthony Scriffignano and his data science team at Dun & Bradstreet Inc. work on problems like this all the time: They search for data that is elusive -- maybe hiding in plain sight or not there at all. Scriffignano, SR...

Your life is dominated by algorithms and you know next-to-nothing about how they work or what consequences they have.With Facebook's news feed controlling the (fake!) news we see and the algorithmic robo-debt debacle engulfing Centrelink, it's time we knew more about the algorithms having a growing impact on our lives. Has an algorithm affected your life? Do you work with any algorithms we should investigate? Tell us about it. Key points: We're looking into how algorithms are changing our lives It's more interesting, important and complicated than you might imagine We've collected some interesting reporting on how algorithms are influencing...

Leaked e-mails published by WikiLeaks show that the mainstream media are not the only media going out of their way to push the election to Hillary Clinton. While the collusion between the Department of Justice and the Clinton campaign/Clinton Foundation and between the mainstream media and the Clinton campaign/Clinton Foundation have done much to help Clinton, social media has played a big part in the game, as well.In the modern age, data is a more valuable asset than most realize. Those who decide what you see can — to a large extent — manipulate what you think, or at least...

The artificial intelligence system known as Watson is going to supercompute your health. IBM and CVS announced on Thursday that they will work together to come up with algorithms that use physiological indicators and red-flag behaviors to predict whose health is fine and whose may be on the decline. The first stage of the deal will focus on patients with chronic conditions, such as heart disease and obesity, but after that the sky's the limit. Here's why the deal is poised to shake up the way you think about health care. CVS has 7,600 retail stores, about 1,000 walk-in medical...

Anand Iyer, after reading the article I wrote in Wired with Jon Stokes, emails with a couple of questions: The age of analysing a company’s stats, looking at its balance sheets, researching the market the company operates in, and looking at the people running the company seems to be gone. It’s all bots (highly sophisticated ones) who operate the financial world. What I wanted to ask was would it make sense for a single person to be doing investing the good old fashioned way in this scenario (I do and I guess I will even if your answer tends to...

ALGORITHMS sound scary, of interest only to dome-headed mathematicians. In fact they have become the instruction manuals for a host of routine consumer transactions. Browse for a book on Amazon.com and algorithms generate recommendations for other titles to buy. Buy a copy and they help a logistics firm to decide on the best delivery route. Ring to check your order's progress and more algorithms spring into action to determine the quickest connection to and through a call-centre. From analysing credit-card transactions to deciding how to stack supermarket shelves, algorithms now underpin a large amount of everyday life. Their pervasiveness reflects...

Today’s New York Post (27 August) carries a story by Niles Lathem entitled “Military ‘Spied’ on Rice.” The good news is that the story ran at all. The bad news is the reporter demonstrated a brass-plated ignorance of how the Able Danger program operated. The lede from this article says, “Cyber-sleuths working for a Pentagon intelligence unit that reportedly identified some of the 9/11 hijackers before the attack were fired by military officials, after they mistakenly pinpointed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other prominent Americans as potential security risks....” Able Danger is/was a computer program which does not target...

(Belated) congratulations to Senior Fellow David Berlinski for being included amongst the best science writers for 2002. David's article What Brings a World Into Being? from Commentary Magazine is included in Matt Ridley's The Best American Science Writing 2002. Congratulations David! David is author of the now historical The Deniable Darwin. His books include A Tour of the Calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm, and Newton's Gift. His new book, Secrets of the Vaulted Sky, is forthcoming from Harcourt later this year. From the publisher: If, as Matt Ridley suggests, science is simply the search for new forms of ignorance,...