Kim - They're both motivational tools and tools for gathering otherwise unavailable data.
Keeping a food journal requires a person to be mindful of what they eat. Mindless eating is a leading cause of obesity -- sitting in front of the TV and half-consciously consuming an entire bag of Doritos. The act of thinking about each meal and snack, deciding what to eat, measuring and weighing it, and recording it, is the very definition of mindfulness. Plus, you learn what foods are satisfying without being calorific, and which foods are calorific but unsatisfying (for example, I love nuts but they have a lot of calories and leave me still hungry. Alas.)
It's the whole process that's important, not just the resulting data.
Note that the more you automate the process, arguably the less valuable it becomes. If it becomes completely transparent to the user, it's completely worthless too.
Yes, Schmidt is putting a very rosy political gloss on the use of analytics to manage society, but it's not hard to imagine the opposite. Although I am sure he means well, I am concerned that technocrat babble of this kind can distract attention from primary problems in under-developed societies: food, shelter, protection from harm.
If I have the Internet, but no bread, I am selling my Internet connection.
Without questioning your experience, Mitch, I wonder how much information you gathered which you wouldn't really have more or less known anyway? Such diaries seem to be motivational tools rather than tools to gather otherwise unavailable data.
Right, Chuck. As soon as you've got this hypothetical microbot gathering data about...your body, you also have the potential for the microbot to be breached and your data stolen. Talk about intrusive.
It is certainly possible that technological advances will be put to evil uses, Mary. I'm pretty sure that just about every invention has been abused somewhere along the line. Yet if we (all of us) are vigilant we can keep them (the few who want to run everything) we may be able to help positive uses outweigh the negative ones. I meant to warn, not to predict...
As far as that joke, you know from my other posts here how much I love to be politically incorrect ;)
Couldn't agree more on the need to take vendor CEO pronouncements with caution. But where there is smoke, ie a potential market to be mined, vendors will gather. Those gathering places are worth focusing on, I think, though you may disagree with the specifics.
So, chuckgregory, you're seeing technology marching ahead unfettered, put to as many evil uses as good, and perhaps to more evil uses before the good even gets going?
I'm going to ignore that quip about Pandora and Eve. :/
Schmidt has reason to speak to the greatness of analytics. That's his business. And a profitable one at that, thanks to the free data collected from "customers" - you and me.
It would be prudent to take pronouncemts from industry executives with a little caution lest we be persuaded the speaker has found the holy grail. Let's take the middle road.
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Social media has been with us for a decade -- but employer policies and the law are anything but firm about the most appropriate usage of this powerful tool.
Businesses often struggle to decide which domain to use. When it comes to purchasing a domain name, you have plenty of extensions to choose from, ranging from .com and .net, to .me, and even .mobi. But which one should you pick?
I've been writing about how the next evolution of the Internet might just be an advertising revolution, and how corporate IT can stay involved as the enablers and providers of the technologies that make this possible.
In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
