The Real Key is People....
by
airrage
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think every major corporation has some sort of data-mining, and I find that there is a gap between the data (even scrubbed) and the person who needs to make the decisions. Also, the article suggests, that CRM is a subset of data-mining. In reality, it's the other way around, or completely unrelated, or both, unless I read that sentence wrong.
Chao
-- "This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Uber Loyalty Card in the UK (Nectar)
by
Boss,+Pointy+Haired
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Three large British retail companies have recently created a joint loyalty card.
Nectar has been set-up by Sainsbury's (a supermarket), Barclays (a financial services company) and BP (a petrol filling station company).
I didn't mind Sainsbury's knowing that I eat junk, but now that they're telling Barclays what junk I eat I end up with Barclays putting my life insurance premiums up.
Interesting stuff.
Plots that have been averted...
by
MyNameIsFred
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· Score: 5, Insightful
...I haven't heard of a single terrorist act averted since 9/11...
You haven't been paying much attention to the news have you. Let's see, we had the plot to attack ships in the Straits of Gilbrater that was averted, the possibly overblown Jose Padilla - Dirty Bomb case, and the capture of key operatives such as Abu Zubaydah, which surely put a dent in al-Qaida's plans.
Frankly the problem is attacks such as the Twin Towers are always going to stick in your mind more than a brief news report that Abu Zubaydah was captured. Also there is always more skepticism that capturing some guy actually averted a plot -- see Jose Padilla. We will never know whether he would have actually done something. There will always be second guessing on whether a plot was really averted.
The problem with automatic identification
by
Sgs-Cruz
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with automatic identification of any specific type of person within a large group (Say, the entire U.S. population - or , hey, the entire world! Why not? ) is the obscenely low false positive rate you must have. I mean to identify 100 terrorists in 270 million people, sure, a 50% false negative rate is fine (catching 50 terrorists is better than catching none, right?), but to not get those real terrorists swamped by innocent people who happen to match a profile, then the false positive rate must be lower than about 0.000037%... that's almost impossible to achieve. And that is why automated terrorist (or anything) identification is still a long way off.
--
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
Re:profiteering?
by
RDPIII
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It couldn't hurt to inform us when the spending pays off; could it?
But would you believe it if your government told you "23 terrorist plots foiled this month"? They probably couldn't be more specific than that, and without any details or corroboration, who's to say. I'm all for openness and accountability, but if it's unlikely that one would get these here (there are better areas for this, like public health care), then I can do without monthly statistics that one would have to take on faith.
In Soviet Russia official statistics were made up all the time, and dismissed just as often or more.
Slashdot Mirror
I think every major corporation has some sort of data-mining, and I find that there is a gap between the data (even scrubbed) and the person who needs to make the decisions. Also, the article suggests, that CRM is a subset of data-mining. In reality, it's the other way around, or completely unrelated, or both, unless I read that sentence wrong.
Chao
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
Three large British retail companies have recently created a joint loyalty card.
Nectar has been set-up by Sainsbury's (a supermarket), Barclays (a financial services company) and BP (a petrol filling station company).
I didn't mind Sainsbury's knowing that I eat junk, but now that they're telling Barclays what junk I eat I end up with Barclays putting my life insurance premiums up.
Interesting stuff.
Frankly the problem is attacks such as the Twin Towers are always going to stick in your mind more than a brief news report that Abu Zubaydah was captured. Also there is always more skepticism that capturing some guy actually averted a plot -- see Jose Padilla. We will never know whether he would have actually done something. There will always be second guessing on whether a plot was really averted.
The problem with automatic identification of any specific type of person within a large group (Say, the entire U.S. population - or , hey, the entire world! Why not? ) is the obscenely low false positive rate you must have. I mean to identify 100 terrorists in 270 million people, sure, a 50% false negative rate is fine (catching 50 terrorists is better than catching none, right?), but to not get those real terrorists swamped by innocent people who happen to match a profile, then the false positive rate must be lower than about 0.000037% ... that's almost impossible to achieve. And that is why automated terrorist (or anything) identification is still a long way off.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
It couldn't hurt to inform us when the spending pays off; could it?
But would you believe it if your government told you "23 terrorist plots foiled this month"? They probably couldn't be more specific than that, and without any details or corroboration, who's to say. I'm all for openness and accountability, but if it's unlikely that one would get these here (there are better areas for this, like public health care), then I can do without monthly statistics that one would have to take on faith.
In Soviet Russia official statistics were made up all the time, and dismissed just as often or more.
Marklar: marklar