Tweets Tell Whether You Have A Job - InformationWeek

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Comments
Tweets Tell Whether You Have A Job
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asksqn
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asksqn,
 User Rank: Ninja
11/28/2014 | 5:24:29 PM
Sad
It's a sad commentary when social media is a much more accurate gauge of Main Street, USA than the bloated, corrupt bodies collecting paychecks for being federal employees at the BLS dot gov.
jastroff
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50%
jastroff,
 User Rank: Ninja
11/21/2014 | 10:47:16 AM
Socio-Political Use of Big Data
Here's a quick summary of how the study worked and what they found:

>> Studied Variables: diurnal rhythm, mobility patterns, and communication styles

>> Data Set: we examine a country-scale publicly articulated social media dataset, where we quantify individual behavioral features from over 145 million geo-located messages distributed among more than 340 different Spanish economic regions, inferred by computing communities of cohesive mobility fluxes

>> Results: Our results show that cost-effective economical indicators can be built based on publicly-available social media datasets.

Some academics had an interesting idea to analyze twitter utterances by these variables, by region, according to formulas. I suspect it won't wipe out the Conference Board job numbers any time soon, unless Spain uses this data to solve its unemployment problem within the year.

But these kinds of studies can be refined, and replicated so they are proven to be accurate, and only then they can give us reliable data. Otherwise, they don't work and don't add to what we know, and don't contribute to policy and what problems we can solve. They are academic exercises for tenure or dissertations.

These researchers are a long way off from proving anything, but time will bring forth more of these studies. Harnessing big data for policy making is a good idea.
jgherbert
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50%
jgherbert,
 User Rank: Ninja
11/20/2014 | 11:45:50 PM
Re: "Digital Exhaust" is being misused
@SachinEE> "because "wryteeng lyk dis" does not mean one does not have proper education and employment"

 

It may not be 100% accurate but as this is the Internet and we're all entitled to make quick sweeping judgments on other people, so let's assume that anybody writing like that either does not have English as a first language, or has poor education and - by implication - perhaps a lack of employment.

 

Ok, I'm kidding, but some people truly believe that Tweets are an insight into the soul. The Samaritans in the UK recently launched the "Samaritans Radar" app, which monitored Twitter feeds of subscribers' friends and notified the subscriber if they believed their friend was sending tweets indicative of an impending suicide. The Samaritans have since suspended the service after many people and organizations expressed deep concerns about the intent and operation of the app (and perhaps rightly so).
SachinEE
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50%
SachinEE,
 User Rank: Ninja
11/20/2014 | 10:30:53 PM
Re: "Digital Exhaust" is being misused
"I think almost all can be digged up from digital traces. Simply, people will be revealing their woes in social media to garner sympathy. In anonymous user profile, people can try to act 'cool', in friend circle, everyone knows who you are, how much you earn, whether you had a daownfall -so people tend to be straight froward. Though, there are some 'show off' but it can be inferred, however."

@Zaious: I recently saw a junior of mine post on facebook that he has got a job in one of the core software companies with a six figure annual salary and all I could think of is "wow this would make for a great story for the data mining software to know the demographic of the region from where you belong". Data mining is really hitting gold with social media digital exhaust.
SachinEE
50%
50%
SachinEE,
 User Rank: Ninja
11/20/2014 | 10:27:00 PM
Re: "Digital Exhaust" is being misused
"Althought the findings sound promising, individuals can post inacurate information.  What would happen to the other segments of population which do not use social media.  Should we assume that twitter post are a true reflection of the population of study? I think twitter should help those that do not or are searching for a job instead of the opposite."

Twitter posts should not be the base of this study because "wryteeng lyk dis" does not mean one does not have proper education and employment. What the analytic engines do instead, is thrust the data to some data analyzing algorithm to get the most probable result.
PedroGonzales
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50%
PedroGonzales,
 User Rank: Ninja
11/20/2014 | 9:43:37 PM
Re: "Digital Exhaust" is being misused
Althought the findings sound promising, individuals can post inacurate information.  What would happen to the other segments of population which do not use social media.  Should we assume that twitter post are a true reflection of the population of study? I think twitter should help those that do not or are searching for a job instead of the opposite.
zaious
50%
50%
zaious,
 User Rank: Ninja
11/20/2014 | 8:39:55 PM
Re: "Digital Exhaust" is being misused
As the article says, "a proof of concept for how a wide range of behavioral features linked to socioeconomic behavior can be inferred from the digital traces that are left by publicly available social media."

I think almost all can be digged up from digital traces. Simply, people will be revealing their woes in social media to garner sympathy. In anonymous user profile, people can try to act 'cool', in friend circle, everyone knows who you are, how much you earn, whether you had a daownfall -so people tend to be straight froward. Though, there are some 'show off' but it can be inferred, however.
D. Henschen
50%
50%
D. Henschen,
 User Rank: Author
11/20/2014 | 4:22:00 PM
"Digital Exhaust" is being misused
From what's described, it sounds like they're misusing the phrase "digital exhaust." Twitter tweets are human expressions of information, opinion, and insight. It's Twitter's social network, and to my knowledge it has never treated tweets as "exhaust." That data is their life blood, and they've made APIs to that data widely available. Aggregators capture that data and offer it as well.

The term "digital exhaust" was coined to describe the data that most enterprises used to routinely throw away. It was described as exhaust because it was not seen as being "business data." Log files, for example, contain super high-scale machine data. IT might have kept this data on a short-term basis as a way to monitor the functioning of IT systems.

Now that Hadoop and other high-scale platforms are available, it's possible, economically speaking, to store this "exhaust data" and analytics firms such as Splunk and others have found ways to correlate this data with business events and customer data to develop business insights. To sum up, Tweets aren't exhaust data. That term describes types of data that used to thrown away because there was no perceived value and there was no economically sensible way to store that information.


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