There’s a meme going around on Facebook, saying that you should post a certain legal incantation on your Facebook wall, to reclaim certain rights that Facebook would otherwise be taking from you. There’s an interesting counter-meme in the press now, saying that all of this is pointless and of course you can’t change your rights […]
CITP Call for Fellows, Postdocs, and Visiting Professors for Fall 2013
November 26, 2012 by
The Center for Information Technology Policy (citp.princeton.edu) is an interdisciplinary research center at Princeton that sits at the crossroads of engineering, the social sciences, law, and policy. CITP seeks Fellowship and Postdoc applicants for the 2012-2013 school year from academia, industry, government, and civil society. These are one year appointments — usually from July 1st […]
Smart Campaigns, Meet Smart Voters
November 19, 2012 by
Zeynep pointed to her New York Times op-ed, “Beware the Smart Campaign,” about political campaigns collecting and exploiting detailed information about individual voters. Given the emerging conventional wisdom that the Obama campaign’s technological superiority played an important role in the President’s re-election, we should expect more aggressive attempts to micro-target voters by both parties in […]
My NYT Op-Ed: "Beware the Smart Campaign"
November 17, 2012 by
I just published a new opinion piece in the New York Times, entitled “Beware the Smart Campaign”. I react to the Obama campaign’s successful use of highly quantitative voter targeting that is inspired by “big data” commercial marketing techniques and implemented through state-of-the-art social science knowledge and randomized field experiments. In the op-ed, I wonder […]
The Silver Effect: What We Can Learn from Poll Aggregators
November 9, 2012 by
For those who now think Nate Silver is god, here’s a question: Can Nate Silver make a prediction so accurate that Nate Silver himself doesn’t believe it? Yes, he can–and he did. Silver famously predicted the results of Election 2012 correctly in every state. Yet while his per-state predictions added up to the 332 electoral […]
