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"Going from small data analytics to Big Data analytics or to predictive and prescriptive analytics is trickier. Expanding in both dimensions is human capital intensive, requiring talented data scientists. A McKinsey report (2011) estimates that by 2018, there will be a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 workers with "deep analytical" experience and a further 1.5 million data-literate managers in the US. Technology giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon, and large investment banks and top hedge funds can afford such employees, however even now the competition is fierce, as is evidenced by the ongoing talent war in Silicon Valley. The data scientist is indeed a sexy job in the 21st century."

""The people who are on the list are not guilty until they've been prosecuted and taken to court, and the system makes that very clear", Simon says - and under the Data Protection Act "if anyone misuses that data there are very significant fines". Simon is also sanguine about the risk of misidentification. Images from the watch list will be sent with alerts so staff can check that there's a good match, he says. "

"This RFID-enabled device allowed its proud new owners to do things such as log into their computer, open doors and purchase food in the office cafeteria with a flick of the wrist. Nearly half of the company's 85 workers had the device implanted when the firm held a "chip party". YIKES!

"The company, Unacast, went live with its Social Distancing Scoreboard Tuesday. The dashboard, billed as a public health utility, includes a county-by-county breakdown of people's movement patterns. It assigns each county a grade, which Unacast based (at least in part) on how much people are traveling. "

"So, yes: the internet of things presents many new possibilities, and it would be foolish to dismiss those possibilities out of hand. But we would also be wise to approach the entire domain with scepticism, and in particular to resist the attempts of companies to gather ever more data about our lives - no matter how much ease, convenience and self-mastery we are told they are offering us."

"The other day I noticed that the little green light next to the camera built into my computer screen was on. It's perfectly possible that I had recently used some app that required the camera, and forgotten about it; but I couldn't find a way to turn it off. It's unlikely anyone was really watching me pretend to work, but my computer definitely was."

"Brain scans, however, are quite telling, especially when analyzed with an algorithm, Brent and his colleagues discovered. "We're trying to figure out what's going on in somebody's brain when they're thinking about suicide," says Brent.  These scans, taken using fMRI, or functional magnetic resonance imaging, show that strong words such as 'death,' 'trouble,' 'carefree,' and 'praise,' trigger different patterns of brain activity in people who are suicidal, compared with people who are not. That means that people at risk of suicide think about those concepts differently than everyone else-evidenced by the levels and patterns of brain activity, or neural signatures."

"Scientists say they can deduce the lifestyle of an individual, down to the kind of grooming products they use, food they eat and medications they take, from chemicals found on the surface of their mobile phone."

"A woman who held jobs at a supermarket and a halfway house took down credit card information of customers at NTUC FairPrice, created an EZ-Link mobile account with details from a halfway house resident and combined the two to make S$41,330 worth of unauthorised EZ-Link top-ups."

"Wong opened the bag later that day and took her debit card from her purse. He then used it to top up his ez-link card with S$100 through the PayWave function at Somerset MRT Station."

"Is the internet entering the era of personalisation, where web firms know so much about us that they are able to serve us up a view of the world which is like looking in the mirror?"