Math Goes Pop! - CNN Light Years guest post: Data: It's how stores know you're pregnant

CNN Light Years guest post: Data: It's how stores know you're pregnant

April 20, 2012

In honor of this year's Mathematics Awareness Month, titled "Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge," I've contributed an article to CNN's Light Years blog on how corporations might use big data to infer personal details about its customers. Mostly this was inspired by the recent New York Times investigation on how Target collects and uses customer data. Here's an excerpt:

Whether you are trying to make the best decisions for your fantasy baseball league, looking to capitalize on an opportunity in a fluctuating stock market or simply filtering through the results of a Google search, it is hard to deny that we are surrounded by more data now than ever before. As such, the task of organizing and drawing conclusions from data can be a challenge, but thankfully mathematics can, in many cases, rise to the occasion.

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