On the Bookshelf: Dataclysm: Who We Are
Published on in Vaccine Update for Healthcare Providers
Published on in Vaccine Update for Healthcare Providers
Dataclysm: Who We Are was written by Christian Rudder, co-founder and president of OkCupid. In Rudder’s role at OkCupid, he has access to large quantities of data about people. Using aggregated data from his and other social sites on which people reveal information about themselves, such as Google and Twitter, Rudder explores the new opportunity to understand humanity as a conglomeration. Describing his effort as the “opposite of outliers” (p. 219), Rudder discusses what data from social sharing sites suggests about the beliefs and attitudes of large groups of us and points out that unlike psychology experiments of the past, the numbers are greater and the setting more apt to show real feelings because the data are being entered into a computer and not being given to a person conducting a study.
Graphs and color are used to show aggregated data and discuss the findings of topics, such as:
If big data interests you or if you spend a lot of time on social networking sites, reading Dataclysm: Who We Are will make you think about how electronic communications will change what we know about people and their tendencies.
Contributed by: Charlotte A. Moser, MS
Categories: On the Bookshelf, Vaccine Update Jan. 2015
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