Using Algorithms to Determine Character - The New York Times - 0 views
bits.blogs.nytimes.com/...orithms-to-determine-character
algorithms NYT character Upstart data womenslearningstudio
shared by Doris Reeves-Lipscomb on 27 Jul 15
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Increasingly, they judge our character.
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Upstart has over the last 15 months lent $135 million to people with mostly negligible credit ratings. Typically, they are recent graduates without mortgages, car payments or credit card settlements.
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ZestFinance, is a former Google executive whose company writes loans to subprime borrowers through nonstandard data signals.
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someone has ever given up a prepaid wireless phone number. Where housing is often uncertain, those numbers are a more reliable way to find you than addresses; giving one up may indicate you are willing (or have been forced) to disappear from family or potential employers. That is a bad sign.
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Character (though it is usually called something more neutral-sounding) is now judged by many other algorithms. Workday, a company offering cloud-based personnel software, has released a product that looks at 45 employee performance factors, including how long a person has held a position and how well the person has done. It predicts whether a person is likely to quit and suggests appropriate things, like a new job or a transfer, that could make this kind of person stay.
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Algorithms are written by human beings. Even if the facts aren’t biased, design can be, and we could end up with a flawed belief that math is always truth.
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blog post by Quentin Hardy, NYT, on how new companies developing algorithms are using them to loan money to people who are better risks than their financial circumstances might suggest, track high performers in sales jobs to find the indicators of their success for export and use by other employees, etc. July 26, 2015