There are examples of positive political campaigns - Ronald Reagan appealed to what America could be, for example - but even that message of hope had an undercurrent of fear, namely that if things did not change, America would stay morassed in 1970s stagflation. Fear is still used in political campaigns to steer public opinion, but a political scientist claims not everyone is equally predisposed...
read moreShortly after you began seeing television advertisements for 23andMe, they are gone again. Its aggressive marketing campaign has caused skepticism from the FDA about its accuracy - and the claims the company was making made sound a lot like a medical device. 23andMe probably wanted to avoid that kind of approval process, since it takes years but stonewalling the FDA likely did not help.Now...
read moreShortly after you began seeing television advertisements for 23andMe, they are gone again. Its aggressive marketing campaign has caused skepticism from the FDA about its accuracy - and the claims the company was making made sound a lot like a medical device. 23andMe probably wanted to avoid that kind of approval process, since it takes years but stonewalling the FDA likely did not help.Now...
read moreResearchers recently decided to see how many Lego bricks end up stuck together after they've all been spun, naturally. To see what "complexes arise" when you tumble those bricks they created "a primitive analog Monte Carlo agent." Monte Carlo procedures are ways of using algorithms to map everything that might happen in a complex event, then determine from that which events are most likely to...
read moreSelf-regulation does not always work. If someone finds an exploit then not using the exploit becomes a competitive disadvantage, and there is nothing inherently ethical about having all of your workforce go on unemployment. As finance markets have shown us, ethical self-regulation will not occur, and as Cathy O'Neil at MathBabe shows, that is unlikely in the world of Big Data either.
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