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Big Data Knows When You Are About To Quit Your Job
HughPickens.com writes Quentin Hardy reports at the NYT that a leading maker of cloud-based software for running corporate human resources and financial operations has announced new products that provide the kind of data analysis that Netflix uses to recommend movies, LinkedIn has to suggest people you might know, or Facebook needs to put a likely ad in front of you. One version of the software, called Insight Applications, predicts which high-performing employees are likely to leave a company in the next year; it then offers possible actions (more money, new job) that might make them stay. In another instance, expense reporting software can predict which employee populations are most likely to exceed their budgets. "We've applied machine learning to affect consumer tastes," says Mohammad Sabah, director of data science at Workday. "Putting it to career choices, to pay and employment, have a huge upside if we do it right." Already, Sabah says, "we're surprised how accurately we can predict someone will leave a job." The goal is to predict future business outcomes to take advantage of opportunities and cut risk levels. One future product may be the ability to predict who will and won't make their sales quotas, and suggest who should be hired to improve the outcome. "Making an employee happy, improving the efficiency of a company these are hard problems that affect corporations."
Why have public relationships? Public internet relationships are a fad of fake, self-destructive behavior, like the way women dressed in the 1950's.
All of the LinkedIn requests I've ever received have been attempts to pretend that a relationship exists that is more meaningful than in reality.
Sometimes a large percentage of people do crazy things. Don't follow them. I have friends, customers, and business contacts who sometimes read and reply to only the first paragraph of an email, and don't read the rest. It's part of the nonsense of the times.
I told a dentist with a Facebook page that Facebook was showing an ad for another dental clinic on his Facebook page. The dentist just accepted the abuse.
The free open source diaspora* social network software allows privacy.
This book is about the development of Diaspora: More Awesome Than Money: Four Boys and Their Heroic Quest to Save Your Privacy from Facebook. The book is poorly written by someone with no programming experience and no interest in learning, but it does tend to show the difficulties of developing software.
Are you too happy? Is it uncomfortable being happier than everyone else? Facebook is the answer. Read Facebook use predicts declines in happiness, new study finds. Or download the scientific paper.
The first result in a Google search for 50's clothing and hairstyles says, "Ever ready to suffer for the cause of soft feminine looking Fifties styles, after the perm, we still had to roll, curl our hair." A Wikipedia article says, "One ingredient in 1950s hair spray was vinyl chloride monomer; used as an alternative to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), it was subsequently found to be both toxic and flammable."
Avoid the craziness you see around you.