On anonymity of the social graph—Lars Backstrom, Cynthia Dwork, and Jon Kleinberg, “Wherefore Art Thou R3579X? Anonymized Social Networks, Hidden Patterns, and Structural Steganography,” Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery, December 2011, p. 133.
[>] Cars’ “black boxes”—“Vehicle Data Recorders: Watching Your Driving,” The Economist, June 23, 2012 (http://www.economist.com/node/21557309).
NSA data collection—Dana Priest and William Arkin, “A Hidden World, Growing Beyond Control,” Washington Post, July 19, 2010 (http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/print/). Juan Gonzalez, “Whistleblower: The NSA Is Lying—U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails,” Democracy Now, April 20, 2012 (http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/whistleblower_the_nsa_is_lying_us). William Binney, “Sworn Declaration in the Case of Jewel v. NSA,” filed July 2, 2012 (http://publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration/).
How surveillance has changed with big data—Patrick Radden Keefe, “Can Network Theory Thwart Terrorists?” New York Times, March 12, 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/magazine/312wwln_essay.html).
[>] Dialogue from Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg, DreamWorks/20th Century Fox, 2002. The dialogue we cite is very slightly abridged. The film is based on a 1958 short story by Philip K. Dick, but there are substantial differences between the two versions. Specifically, the opening scene of the cuckolded husband does not appear in the book, and the philosophical conundrum of pre-crime is presented more starkly in the Spielberg film than in the story. Hence we have chosen to draw our parallels with the film.
Examples of predictive policing—James Vlahos, “The Department Of Pre-Crime,” Scientific American 306 (January 2012), pp. 62–67.
[>] On the Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST)—See Sharon Weinberger, “Terrorist ‘Pre-crime’ Detector Field Tested in United States,” Nature, May 27, 2011 (http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110527/full/news.2011.323.html); Sharon Weinberger, “Intent to Deceive,” Nature 465 (May 2010), pp. 412–415. On the problem of false positives, see Alexander Furnas, “Homeland Security’s ‘Pre-Crime’ Screening Will Never Work,” The Atlantic Online, April 17, 2012 (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/homeland-securitys-pre-crime-screening-will-never-work/255971/).
[>] On students’ grades and insurance premiums—Tim Query, “Grade Inflation and the Good-Student Discount,” Contingencies Magazine, American Academy of Actuaries, May-June 2007 (http://www.contingencies.org/mayjun07/tradecraft.pdf).
On the perils of profiling—Bernard E. Harcourt, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age (University of Chicago Press, 2006).
[>] On Richard Berk’s work—Richard Berk, “The Role of Race in Forecasts of Violent Crime,” Race and Social Problems 1 (2009), pp. 231–242, and email interview with Cukier, November 2012.
[>] On McNamara’s love of data—Phil Rosenzweig, “Robert S. McNamara and the Evolution of Modern Management,” Harvard Business Review, December 2010 (http://hbr.org/2010/12/robert-s-mcnamara-and-the-evolution-of-modern-management/ar/pr).
[>] On the Whiz Kids’ success in World War II—John Byrne, The Whiz Kids (Doubleday, 1993).
On McNamara at Ford—David Halberstam, The Reckoning (William Morrow, 1986), pp. 222–245.
[>] Kinnard book—Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers (University Press of New England, 1977), pp. 71–25. This section benefited from an email interview with Dr. Kinnard, via his assistant, for which the authors express their gratitude.
[>] On quotation “In God we trust—all others bring data”—This is often attributed to W. Edwards Deming.
On Ted Kennedy and No-Fly List—Sara Kehaulani Goo, “Sen. Kennedy Flagged by No-Fly List,” Washington Post, August 20, 2004, p. A01 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17073-2004Aug19.html).
[>] Google’s hiring practices—See Douglas Edwards, I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), p. 9. See also Steven Levy, In the Plex (Simon and Schuster, 2011), pp. 140–141. Ironically, Google’s co-founders wanted to hire Steve Jobs as CEO (despite his lack of a college degree); Levy, p. 80.
Testing 41 gradations of blue—Laura M. Holson, “Putting a Bolder Face on Google,” New York Times, March 1, 2009 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html).
Google’s chief designer’s resignation—Quotation is excerpted (without ellipses for readability) from Doug Bowman, “Goodbye, Google,” blog post, March 20, 2009 (http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html).
[>] Jobs quotation—Steve Lohr, “Can Apple Find More Hits Without Its Tastemaker?” New York Times, January 18, 2011, p. B1 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/technology/companies/19innovate.html).
Scott book—James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998).
McNamara quotation from 1967—From address at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, quoted in Harvard Business Review, December 2010.
[>] On McNamara’s apologia—Robert S. McNamara with Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (Random House, 1995), pp. 48, 270.
9. Control
[>] On Cambridge University library book collection—Marc Drogin, Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses (Allanheld and Schram, 1983), p. 37.
[>] On accountability and privacy—The Center for Information Policy Leadership has been engaged in a multi-year project on the interface of accountability and privacy; see http://www.informationpolicycentre.com/accountability-based_privacy_governance/.
[>] On expiration dates for data—Mayer-Schönberger, Delete. “Differential privacy”—Cynthia Dwork, “A Firm Foundation for Private Data Analysis,” Communications of the ACM, January 2011, pp. 86–95.
Facebook and differential privacy—A. Chin and A. Klinefelter, “Differential Privacy as a Response to the Reidentification Threat: The Facebook Advertiser Case Study,” 90 North Carolina Law Review 1417 (2012); A. Haeberlen et al., “Differential Privacy Under Fire,” http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ahae/papers/fuzz-sec2011.pdf.
[>] Firms suspected of collusion—There is already work in this area; see Pim Heijnen, Marco A. Haan, and Adriaan R. Soetevent. “Screening for Collusion: A Spatial Statistics Approach,” Discussion Paper TI 2012-058/1, Tinbergen Institute, The Netherlands, 2012 (http://www.tinbergen.nl/discussionpapers/12058.pdf).
[>] On German corporate data-protection representatives—Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, “Beyond Privacy, Beyond Rights: Towards a ‘Systems’ Theory of Information Governance,” 98 California Law Review 1853 (2010).
[>] On interoperability—John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Interop: The Promise and Perils of Highly Interconnected Systems (Basic Books, 2012).
10. Next
[>] Mike Flowers and New York City’s analytics—Based on interview with Cukier, July 2012. For a good description, see: Alex Howard, “Predictive data analytics is saving lives and taxpayer dollars in New York City,” O’Reilly Media, June 26, 2012 (http://strata.oreilly.com/2012/06/predictive-data-analytics-big-data-nyc.html).
[>] Walmart and Pop-Tarts—Hays, “What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers’ Habits.”
[>] Big data’s use in slums and in modeling refugee movements—Nathan Eagle, “Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Systems,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaivtqlu7iM.
Perception of time—Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, 2006).
[>] “What’s past is prologue”—William Shakespeare, “The Tempest,” Act 2, Scene I.
[>] CERN experiment and data storage—Cukier email exchange with CERN researchers, November 2012.
Apollo 11’s computer system—David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (MIT Press, 2008).
Bibliography
Alter, Alexandra. “Your E-Book Is Reading You.” W
all Street Journal, June 29, 2012 (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304870304577490950051438304.html).
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, New Edition. Verso, 2006.
Anderson, Chris. “The End of Theory.” Wired 16, issue 7 (July 2008 (http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory).
Asur, Sitaram, and Bernardo A. Huberman. “Predicting the Future with Social Media.” Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, pp. 492–499. (An online version is available at http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/socialmedia/socialmedia.pdf.)
Ayres, Ian. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-By-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart. Bantam Dell, 2007.
Babbie, Earl. Practice of Social Research, 12th ed. 2010.
Backstrom, Lars, Cynthia Dwork, and Jon Kleinberg. “Wherefore Art Thou R3579X? Anonymized Social Networks, Hidden Patterns, and Structural Steganography.” Communications of the ACM, December 2011, pp. 133–141.
Bakos, Yannis, and Erik Brynjolfsson. “Bundling Information Goods: Pricing, Profits, and Efficiency.” Management Science 45 (December 1999), pp. 1613–30.
Banko, Michele, and Eric Brill. “Scaling to Very Very Large Corpora for Natural Language Disambiguation.” Microsoft Research, 2001, p. 3 (http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/P/P01/P01-1005.pdf).
Barbaro, Michael, and Tom Zeller Jr. “A Face Is Exposed for AOL Searcher No. 4417749.” New York Times, August 9, 2006 (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/09aol.html).
Barnes, Brooks. “A Year of Disappointment at the Movie Box Office,” New York Times, December 25, 2011 (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/business/media/a-year-of-disappointment-for-hollywood.html).
Beaty, Janice. Seeker of Seaways: A Life of Matthew Fontaine Maury, Pioneer Oceanographer. Pantheon Books, 1966.
Berger, Adam L., et al. “The Candide System for Machine Translation.” Proceedings of the 1994 ARPA Workshop on Human Language Technology (1994) (http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/H/H94/H94-1100.pdf).
Berk, Richard. “The Role of Race in Forecasts of Violent Crime.” Race and Social Problems 1 (2009), pp. 231–242.
Black, Edwin. IBM and the Holocaust. Crown, 2003.
boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. “Six Provocations for Big Data.” Research paper presented at Oxford Internet Institute’s “A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society,” September 21, 2011 (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1926431).
Brown, Brad, Michael Chui, and James Manyika. “Are You Ready for the Era of ‘Big Data’?” McKinsey Quarterly, October 2011, p. 10.
Brynjolfsson, Erik, Andrew McAfee, Michael Sorell, and Feng Zhu. “Scale Without Mass: Business Process Replication and Industry Dynamics.” HBS working paper, September 2006 (http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-016.pdf; also http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5532.html).
Brynjolfsson, Erik, Lorin Hitt, and Heekyung Kim. “Strength in Numbers: How Does Data-Driven Decisionmaking Affect Firm Performance?” ICIS 2011 Proceedings, Paper 13 (http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2011/proceedings/economicvalueIS/13; also available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1819486).
Byrne, John. The Whiz Kids. Doubleday, 1993.
Cate, Fred H. “The Failure of Fair Information Practice Principles.” In Jane K. Winn, ed., Consumer Protection in the Age of the “Information Economy” (Ashgate, 2006), p. 341 et seq.
Chin, A., and A. Klinefelter. “Differential Privacy as a Response to the Reidentification Threat: The Facebook Advertiser Case Study.” 90 North Carolina Law Review 1417 (2012).
Crosby, Alfred. The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Cukier, Kenneth. “Data, Data Everywhere.” The Economist Special Report, February 27, 2010, pp. 1–14.
———. “Tracking Social Media: The Mood of the Market.” Economist.com, June 28, 2012 (http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/06/tracking-social-media).
Davenport, Thomas H., Paul Barth, and Randy Bean. “How ‘Big Data’ Is Different.” Sloan Review, July 30, 2012 (http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2012-fall/54104/how-big-data-is-different/).
Di Quinzio, Melanie, and Anne McCarthy. “Rabies Risk Among Travellers.” CMAJ 178, no. 5 (2008), p. 567.
Drogin, Marc. Anathema! Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses. Allanheld and Schram, 1983.
Dugas, A. F., et al. “Google Flu Trends: Correlation with Emergency Department Influenza Rates and Crowding Metrics.” CID Advanced Access, January 8, 2012. DOI 10.1093/cid/cir883.
Duggan, Mark, and Steven D. Levitt. “Winning Isn’t Everything: Corruption in Sumo Wrestling.” American Economic Review 92 (2002), pp. 1594–1605 (http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/DugganLevitt2002.pdf).
Duhigg, Charles. The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Random House, 2012.
Duhigg, Charles. “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” New York Times, February 16, 2012 (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html).
Dwork, Cynthia. “A Firm Foundation for Private Data Analysis.” Communications of the ACM, January 2011, pp. 86–95 (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1866739.1866758).
Economist, The. “Rolls-Royce: Britain’s Lonely High-Flier.” The Economist, January 8, 2009 (http://www.economist.com/node/12887368).
———. “Building with Big Data: The Data Revolution Is Changing the Landscape of Business.” The Economist, May 26, 2011 (http://www.economist.com/node/18741392/).
———. “Official Statistics: Don’t Lie to Me, Argentina.” The Economist, February 25, 2012 (http://www.economist.com/node/21548242).
———. “Counting Every Moment.” The Economist, March 3, 2012 (http://www.economist.com/node/21548493).
———. “Vehicle Data Recorders: Watching Your Driving.” The Economist, June 23, 2012 (http://www.economist.com/node/21557309).
Edwards, Douglas. I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.
Ehrenberg, Rachel. “Predicting the Next Deadly Manhole Explosion.” Wired, July 7, 2010 (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/manhole-explosions).
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Etzioni, Oren, C. A. Knoblock, R. Tuchinda, and A. Yates. “To Buy or Not to Buy: Mining Airfare Data to Minimize Ticket Purchase Price.” SIGKDD ’03, August 24–27, 2003 (http://knight.cis.temple.edu/~yates//papers/hamlet-kdd03.pdf).
Frei, Patrizia, et al. “Use of Mobile Phones and Risk of Brain Tumours: Update of Danish Cohort Study.” BMJ 2011, 343 (http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d6387).
Furnas, Alexander. “Homeland Security’s ‘Pre-Crime’ Screening Will Never Work.” The Atlantic Online, April 17, 2012 (http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/homeland-securitys-pre-crime-screening-will-never-work/255971/).
Garton Ash, Timothy. The File. Atlantic Books, 2008.
Geron, Tomio. “Twitter’s Dick Costolo: Twitter Mobile Ad Revenue Beats Desktop on Some Days.” Forbes, June 6, 2012 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/06/06/twitters-dick-costolo-mobile-ad-revenue-beats-desktop-on-some-days/).
Ginsburg, Jeremy, et al. “Detecting Influenza Epidemics Using Search Engine Query Data.” Nature 457 (2009), pp. 1012–14 (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v457/n7232/full/nature07634.html).
Golder, Scott A., and Michael W. Macy. “Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures.” Science 333 (September 30, 2011), pp. 1878–81.
Golle, Philippe. “Revisiting the Uniqueness of Simple Demographics in the US Population.” Association for Computing Machinery Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society 5 (2006), pp. 77–80.
Goo, Sara Kehaulani. “Sen. Kennedy Flagged by No-Fly List.” Washington Post, August 20, 2004, p. A01 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17073-2004Aug19.html
).
Haeberlen, A., et al. “Differential Privacy Under Fire.” In SEC’11: Proceedings of the 20th USENIX conference on Security, p. 33 (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~ahae/papers/fuzz-sec2011.pdf).
Halberstam, David. The Reckoning. William Morrow, 1986.
Haldane, J. B. S. “On Being the Right Size.” Harper’s Magazine, March 1926
(http://harpers.org/archive/1926/03/on-being-the-right-size/).
Halevy, Alon, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira. “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data.” IEEE Intelligent Systems, March/April 2009, pp. 8–12.
Harcourt, Bernard E. Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Hardy, Quentin. “Bizarre Insights from Big Data.” NYTimes.com, March 28, 2012 (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/28/bizarre-insights-from-big-data/).
Hays, Constance L. “What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers’ Habits.” New York Times, November 14, 2004 (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/business/yourmoney/14wal.html).
Hearn, Chester G. Tracks in the Sea: Matthew Fontaine Maury and the Mapping of the Oceans. International Marine/McGraw-Hill, 2002.
Helland, Pat. “If You Have Too Much Data then “‘Good Enough’ Is Good Enough.” Communications of the ACM, June 2011, p. 40 et seq.
Hilbert, Martin, and Priscilla López. “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information.” Science 1 (April 2011), pp. 60–65.
———. “How to Measure the World’s Technological Capacity to Communicate, Store and Compute Information?” International Journal of Communication (2012), pp. 1042–55 (ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/1562/742).
Holson, Laura M. “Putting a Bolder Face on Google.” New York Times, March 1, 2009, p. BU 1 (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/business/01marissa.html).
Hopkins, Brian, and Boris Evelson. “Expand Your Digital Horizon with Big Data.” Forrester, September 30, 2011.
Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think Page 25