Four short links: 21 December 2016
Topic Modeling, Datafication, Toy Spies, and Partisan Beliefs
- Gensim — topic modeling in Python for humans.
- Datafication and Ideological Blindness — Replacing strategy with metric optimization is stupid enough, but it’s even more dangerous for companies that choose the same metric as competitors.[…] A strategy is useless if your stronger competitor has the same strategy. Without differentiation there’s no advantage. Execution of the strategy matters, though.
- Listening Dolls — the conversations that Cayla records are sent to servers at a company called Genesis, which makes the doll, and to another company called Nuance, which makes voice-recognition software for this any many other products. Nuance also has a database used by law enforcement and military and intelligence agencies that matches voiceprints.
- Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics — indications that partisanship decreases in the face of a cost for being wrong.
