Comments on: Here’s why we are soon going to be flooded by data

By: Daniel Lemire

Daniel Lemire — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 12:29:29 +0000

Great link Robin!

By: Robin

Robin — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 05:48:53 +0000

Vincent-Olivier Arsenault calls this Formal Nakedness if I got him right : http://www.up4.com/archives/000069.html

By: Ed

Ed — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 18:14:40 +0000

Oh, I agree that data and transparency are both important in fighting corruption. They help dissuade people from doing the wrong thing on the basis that they will (probably) get caught.

I guess the idealist in me would rather that people avoid doing the wrong thing because, well, because its wrong!

Put another way, rather then monitoring the system and providing negative feedback machanism to control output, I’d rather it was properly programmed from the beginning!

By: Daniel Lemire

Daniel Lemire — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:41:57 +0000

Of course, data can be tampered with, but Bill Gates doesn’t have time go fiddling with data traces, and this is exactly why Microsoft got nailed with email traces. The more data we gather, the more people are needed to tamper it, and the more traces you have that you have tampered with the data.

Suppose you wanted to delete all traces you visited my blog… how would you do it? Of course, I could have made up this comment you just added, I could… but then I would need to doctor other traces, like my server logs and so on… it becomes increasingly more difficult to do as more data is being gathered.

So, what you are likely to end up with are conflicting reports… some data is saying something, other data is saying something else… this is a lot better than having no trace of this big check that was offered to your congressman.

By: Ed

Ed — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 13:32:13 +0000

I think we have to be careful about putting too much faith in data.