Group items tagged

latest abney and associates technology news Google's Eric Schmidt Invests in Obama's Big Data Brains During the 2012 campaign, Barack Obama's reelection team had an underappreciated asset: Google's (GOOG) executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. He helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization. "On election night he was in our boiler room in Chicago," says David Plouffe, then a senior White House adviser. Schmidt had a particular affinity for a group of engineers and statisticians tucked away beneath a disco ball in a darkened corner of the office known as "the Cave." The data analytics team, led by 30-year-old Dan Wagner, is credited with producing Obama's surprising 5 million-vote margin of victory. For all its acclaim, the analytics team's main achievement is often misunderstood as "microtargeting" or some variant on wooing voters. This reverses the relationship between campaign and voter at the heart of Wagner's method. Recent campaigns have employed a top-down approach to identify what they thought were vital demographic groups such as "soccer moms." Wagner's team pursued a bottom-up strategy of unifying vast commercial and political databases to understand the proclivities of individual voters likely to support Obama or be open to his message, and then sought to persuade them through personalized contact via Facebook (FB), e-mail, or a knock on the door. "I think of them as people scientists,'' says Schmidt. "They apply scientific techniques to how people will behave when confronted with a choice or a question." Obama's rout of Mitt Romney was a lesson in how this insight can translate into political strength. Traditional marketing has the same inherent limitation as traditional campaigning: It's impossible to appeal to everybody, even among the groups likeliest to favor a product. "Budweiser might target football fans with an ad s

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/12/erwin-schrodinger-google-doodle Google's latest doodle marks the birthday of Erwin Schrödinger, the Nobel prize-winning quantum physicist whose eponymous equation lies at the heart of quantum mechanics. Born in Vienna in 1887 to a factory owner and his Austrian-English wife, Schrödinger was tutored at home as a child and went on to study theoretical physics at the University of Vienna before undertaking voluntary military service, later returning to academia to study experimental physics. Renewed military service during the first world war broke up his studies before he was sent back to Vienna in 1917 to teach a course in meteorology. However, it was not until his late 30s that he was to change forever the face of physics by producing a series of papers that were all written and published over the course of a six-month period of theoretical research. By 1925, then a professor of physics at the University of Zurich and holidaying in the Alps, Schrödinger formulated a wave-equation that accurately gave the energy levels of atoms. It formed the basis of the work that would earn him the Nobel prize in physics in 1933. In subsequent years, he repeatedly criticised conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics by using the paradox of what would become known as Schrödinger's cat. This thought experiment was designed to illustrate what he saw as the problems surrounding application of the conventional, so-called "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics to everyday objects. Other work focused on different fields of physics, including statistical mechanics, thermodynamics and colour theory. In a celebrated 1944 book, What Is Life?, he turned to the problems of genetics, taking a close look at the phenomenon of life from the point of view of physics. He died in Vienna in January 1961 from the tuberculosis that had affected him throughout his life and was buried in the western Austrian village of Alpbach.