Wow... did I just predict this? Yesterday, in my Problems at Facebook? post I referenced (somewhat jokingly) how I was kinda surprised that in the current economic conditions, the EU hadn't tapped into the Microsoft cash machine using some anti-trust excuse. Lo and behold, a few minutes ago Microsoft issued a press release in response to a 'Statement of Objections' it received from the EU about - you guessed it - European anti-trust law. Obviously, I had no knowledge of this when I posted yesterday - I'm just a foot soldier. The timing is a little spooky though... maybe I should muse of some good things happening. ;)
I wonder if this is the beginning of another run on the Bank of Microsoft by the EU...
Update: More coverage in the Wall Street Journal. This thing is probably going to go on for a while. Sigh!
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Politics. Show all posts
Friday, January 16, 2009
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
More Food For Thought About Google And Exit Polls
A couple of months ago I conjectured that Google might be able to produce a very accurate exit poll for the '08 Election. Today's post on the Official Google Blog shows some information that's very close to what I suspected they could generate - very cool. Particularly interesting is analysis of traffic from swing states. I'm sure they could do much more here - trending by counties, for instance.
In that previous post of mine, I guessed that they won't publicly release a prediction, but bits and pieces of information and trends like these are a good stand-in for a full blown exit poll.
In that previous post of mine, I guessed that they won't publicly release a prediction, but bits and pieces of information and trends like these are a good stand-in for a full blown exit poll.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Can Google Predict Election '08 Results?
Today's post on TechCrunch about possibly predicting election results using web traffic analysis reminded me of my thoughts from a few months ago.
Over the course of election season, starting with the presidential primaries through Super Tuesday and going into the national conventions, Google began releasing increasing amounts of election-related content and services. Reading the blog posts linked above and noticing the trend from Google leads to me the conclusion that the most relevant exit-poll for November's presidential election this year might actually come from Google.
Google likely already tracks user searches and email data from GMail. Combine that with some pretty basic data mining around traffic analysis, comments on their targetted election sites and popularity of their election related content/services and you could now get a pretty good 'pulse-of-the-nation' with respect to red state-vs-blue state. My guess is that the big push around election related content and services is an attempt to not only increase pageviews, but also harness large amounts of interesting data that can be mined for various interesting purposes. Additionally, this gives them a large data set to use to refine their own data mining technologies. I strongly suspect that Google will hold on to the raw data past election time and used it as test-data to track progresses in their mining technologies. Good data to test your technologies is *very* hard to to come by, and it would be foolish to let such rich data simply fall by the wayside.
Whether they publicly release their 'exit-poll' is another story altogether. I don't think Google really has much to gain by releasing the data even if they do manage to mine it. I know I wouldn't - I would mine the data, distribute predictions among team members for entertainment purposes only, see how close I got to the result, refine my algorithms and run it over the same data again to see how much closer I am now, and repeat. Releasing the data publicly, even if it turned out to be dead-on accurate, wouldn't buy me much. If it wasn't dead-on accurate, there is some amount of geek-cred that would be lost.
I guess November will prove if my theory above is correct.
P.S. I hope you picked up on the paradox in that last sentence above... :)
Over the course of election season, starting with the presidential primaries through Super Tuesday and going into the national conventions, Google began releasing increasing amounts of election-related content and services. Reading the blog posts linked above and noticing the trend from Google leads to me the conclusion that the most relevant exit-poll for November's presidential election this year might actually come from Google.
Google likely already tracks user searches and email data from GMail. Combine that with some pretty basic data mining around traffic analysis, comments on their targetted election sites and popularity of their election related content/services and you could now get a pretty good 'pulse-of-the-nation' with respect to red state-vs-blue state. My guess is that the big push around election related content and services is an attempt to not only increase pageviews, but also harness large amounts of interesting data that can be mined for various interesting purposes. Additionally, this gives them a large data set to use to refine their own data mining technologies. I strongly suspect that Google will hold on to the raw data past election time and used it as test-data to track progresses in their mining technologies. Good data to test your technologies is *very* hard to to come by, and it would be foolish to let such rich data simply fall by the wayside.
Whether they publicly release their 'exit-poll' is another story altogether. I don't think Google really has much to gain by releasing the data even if they do manage to mine it. I know I wouldn't - I would mine the data, distribute predictions among team members for entertainment purposes only, see how close I got to the result, refine my algorithms and run it over the same data again to see how much closer I am now, and repeat. Releasing the data publicly, even if it turned out to be dead-on accurate, wouldn't buy me much. If it wasn't dead-on accurate, there is some amount of geek-cred that would be lost.
I guess November will prove if my theory above is correct.
P.S. I hope you picked up on the paradox in that last sentence above... :)
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
$10,000,000,000 == $1
I'm no economist, but it's hard to not have seen this coming. From the article:
Zimbabwe will drop 10 zeros from its hyper-inflated currency -- turning 10 billion dollars into one -- the country's reserve bank said Wednesday. President Robert Mugabe threatened a state of emergency if businesses profiteer from the country's economic and political unraveling.
Just a couple of weeks ago, Zimbabwe introduced a 100-billion dollar bill, and it didn't buy nearly enough. People are suffering in Zimbabwe while a corrupt government mismanages the economy. I truly hope their economy recovers soon...
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