Big Data: Is it Artificial Intelligence or Authentic Stupidity?

The backlash has begun against all that 'hype,' PC World declares (Feb. 14, 2015)

 

I didn't like a State Fair oil painting, so I became an enemy of Big Oil. Wow! That's astute!

    (June 2014) It's chilling, and quite entertaining, to see firsthand how the Big Data process is manifested. Just for fun, maybe you should Google yourself and find out if a grandiloquent, power-mad computer mastermind named Kalev Leetaru has created detailed profiles about you yet. If not, just wait awhile.
    He has posted several delightfully inaccurate web pages ABOUT ME, and the extent to which I pose a threat to Big Oil (and other energy giants) even though all I ever do is sit here quietly, hating Big Oil and other murderers of the environment. He claims I am "associated" with the Dalai Lama, Anderson Cooper, and Beyonce. I love that!
    He swears his analysis of more than 10 billion people, places, things, and activities -- connected by over 100 trillion relationships -- enabled him to predict the "Arab Spring," as well as where Osama bin Laden would be found. So I bet he knows where you are! Like hundreds of profit-crazed data-collectors, he intends to learn everything about everybody, so he can forecast the future for his clients. But it only took me two days to reverse-engineer his algorithm and find the fatal flaw in his surreptitious machinations.
    
     A Feb. 14, 2015, article in PC World on the "backlash" against this growing phenomenon, announced, "Big data (with all its 'marketing jive') may have just crested the wave of inflated expectations and be barrelling towards the trough of disillusionment." I've thought it was "jive" from the beginning, even before I inadvertently got swept up in it.
     (On June 13, 2014, an NPR Morning Edition story proclaimed, "America is in the midst of a Big Data moment." Then it proceeded to elaborate on how shockingly inaccurate, over and over again, our "data miners' " predictions and analyses have turned out to be.
      UPDATE August 18, 2014: Those who went into the Big Data field because it's "cool and sexy," not realizing that 50 percent to 80 percent of their time would be spent as grudging, brain numbed "data janitors," are grumbling loudly (www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/technology/for-big-data-scientists-hurdle-to-insights-is-janitor-work.html). I'm having a Schadenfreude moment right now. Sorry -- that's rude.

THANK YOU, BIG DATA, FOR WATCHING MY EVERY MOVE
    I've always been very gratified to be included in FBI "watch" files and on "enemies lists," based on my affiliation with the Students for a Democratic Society, marches against the Vietnam War, my presence (photographed and archived) at the Black Panther Constitutional Convention at Temple University in 1970, my speech at the National Student Conference on Poverty (i.e. class warfare -- yay!) and other modest civil and human rights activism in my younger days. 
    I calmed down for awhile, but I sure hope and expect that the Bush White House had its creepy intelligence tentacles all over me in the wake of my viciously anti-Administration emails to everyone I could think of. 
    UPDATE June 22, 2014: Soon, Big Data will not just be monitoring our workplace productivity, but also our every gesture and interaction. Why? Because they can -- and it might somehow increase profits! According to the New York Times, "Sociometric Solutions advises companies using sensor-rich ID badges worn by employees. These sociometric badges, equipped with two microphones, a location sensor and an accelerometer, monitor the communications behavior of individuals — tone of voice, posture and body language, as well as who spoke to whom for how long." Many bosses are now monitoring live video feeds of their employee, as well as their computer keystrokes. Oh great! Have a nice day! (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/technology/workplace-surveillance-sees-good-and-bad.html?hpw&rref=technology&_r=0)

BIG OIL THINKS I'M SLICK!
    I never dreamed that the oil industry, thanks to its Big Data-collection apparatus, would have any interest in me, though, and I'm very touched. It's sad that they're having to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

    There's even a web page about Levi, Texas, that names Newt Gingrich, Nicholas Geranious (an Idaho journalist), Rick Perry and ME as having "measurable impact" on the issue of Big Oil in that city. I have never been to Levi, Texas, written about it, or even heard of it. But thank you anyway.     
   (I do wonder why Big Petroleum hasn't taken note of me. I am probably one of the world's greatest consumers of petroleum jelly. No need for expensive wrinkle creams, ladies. Vaseline really does the job.)
   (I am also surprised but relieved that Big Gas hasn't singled me out. The less said about this the better. Suffice it to say that I don't inflict it on anyone but my cat, and it doesn't even make her jump anymore.)

GHADAFFI AND I CREATE 'NEGATIVE UNDERCURRENTS' 
    The innocuously named Carbon Capture Report, created by baby-faced whiz kid Kalev Leetaru, says that I have a "contextual association" with oil.
    Who doesn't?
    I am on a list -- headed by Barack Obama, Dow Jones and Moammar Ghadaffi -- of those who influence the present and future of the oil industry. 
   "This page summarizes all known activity of the person Sylvia Kronstadt related to Oil," it says.
    I think I rank about three millionth, or maybe it's three hundred thousandth, I don't remember. I'm pretty powerful, I know that.
    The daily report, which was vaingloriously masterminded by Leetaru in 2009, provides data "not as a massive pile of documents, but as higher-order knowledge." It includes geographic intelligence, advanced analytics, interactive timelines, biographical databases (that's where we come in), and so much more. 

"HE BLINDED ME WITH SCIENCE"
    The Report's site is representative of the very tiresome Brave New Breed of web-based consulting firms that revels in massive quantification and dazzling jargon. These outfits, like the University HealthSystems Consortium (http://kronstantinople.blogspot.com/p/consortium.html)  gain clients by using a sort of stun-gun approach. They portray their data-driven services in such overwhelmingly glorious, domineering, all-encompassing terms that one doesn't dare proceed in today's cutthroat world without their assistance.

See, the whole "workflow" hassle can really be simplified with the right "interface."

     The Consortium promises to provide “interoperable workflow solutions“ in its “robust array of resources and tools.” Everything, it seems, is part of a “suite” that is comprehensive, exclusive, benchmarked, trademarked, high-impact and integrated. It promises a  sheen of order, ease and rationality to institutions that are “at the crest of the wave,” facing “The Threat of Incrementalism.” 

    A Nov. 3 2013, article in the New York Times  -- "No Morsel Too Minuscule for All-Consuming N.S.A." -- chillingly documents where all this Big Data obsession leads. 

    "The National Security Agency emerges as an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. …The N.S.A. seems to be listening everywhere in the world, gathering every stray electron that might add, however minutely, to the United States government’s knowledge of the world…It sucks the contents from fiber-optic cables, sits on telephone switches and Internet hubs, digitally burglarizes laptops and plants bugs on smartphones around the globe…The language is corporate: “Our business processes need to promote data-driven decision-making.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/world/no-morsel-too-minuscule-for-all-consuming-nsa.html?pagewanted=4&hp)

THEY'VE GOT YOUR NUMBER
    The Carbon Capture Report is cut from the same glittering cloth. It gives a numerical value to my tone ("specially-tuned linguistic algorithms are used"), personalization ("measures the degree to which the writer attempts to bring the reader into the fold as "part of the story") (do I bring you in?) and polarization ("measures the overall 'emotional charge' of a text"), my attention and loyalty, my positivity, negativity and activism ("whether the writer is encouraging the reader to take action"), and my news/social ratio. 

I admit it: I'm negative No algorithm required.

    It lists the cities, regions and countries of the world with which I'm associated (0) and all of my tweets and retweets (0). It also enumerates related persons, organizations and news outlets (0). 
    It lists famous people whose names are mentioned in articles that also name me, such as Rosie O'Donnell, Robert Redford, The Happy Hooker, Suze Orman, Michael Caine, a meat plant (I'm vegan), Gloria Vanderbilt, Rihanna, Truman Capote (that prankster...I thought he died 28 years ago!), Ed Abbey (he died 26 years ago) and Thoreau (he died in 1862, but I do still love him) (I love all those dead guys, but I'm not "associated" with them) -- a pretty hip posse, I'd say. But why did he exclude pop star Bruno Mars, who is my sweetie-pie adopted son? A professor of computer sciences at Duke University, John Reif, implies that Leetaru is jealous of my affection for Bruno.
    "His attention to you might reflect an interest or fascination in you (which perhaps is natural)," Dr. Reif explains.
    That is such a nice thing for the professor to say, but Leetaru has no interest in individuals whatsoever. His interest is in turning humanity into data that can be exploited. 
    (UPDATE: Leetaru's restless computer spy bots have generated exciting new findings that confirm my "association" with Bruno Mars, and add that I am also "associated" with Leetaru. Seems like a bit of triangulation is going on, and I couldn't be more thrilled.)

IT'S GRAPHIC, BUT NOT OVERLY EXPLICIT
    It even has a very cool, dynamic graph that depicts all these aspects of my life, as they relate to Big Oil. I can't imagine what all the dramatic ups and downs in various colors portray, since olive oil is my only significant oil-related interest, and my pantry is full of it already, so it's a non-issue. 

This graph is about ME -- I'm so honored! You deserve one, too.

    The web page about me also has colorful gauges that illustrate various aspects of my temperament.  It has big lovely maps that show all the countries (10) in which articles appear that mention me (I rather doubt it). The mapping for each person and topic "automatically identifies and disambiguates all globally geographic references down to the centroid city level" ("centroid" sounds like a terrible city to me, where robots are in charge),  (although, come to think of it, everyone has been seeming badly programmed around here). 

I KNEW I FELT SOMEBODY'S FINGER
    The Report claims to have its finger on the pulse of "the remotest hilltop" as well as all those centroid cities.
    It breaks down my "activism" into documentaries (100 percent) and other projects (100 percent). I don't have any of either, but maybe it's  forecasting my future, and it sounds quite interesting, especially since I'm going to be operating at 200 percent of capacity.    

Tumbleweed oil painting. Not my thing.

 HERE'S WHERE THE PATHETIC FRAUD BECOMES CLEAR
     Meanwhile, back at the Tumbleweed Ranch, I had an exhilarating breakthrough in comprehension about how Leetaru leapt upon my relationship with Big Oil. 
    His ruthless yet nuanced data-mining apparatus, in its painfully "sensitive" crawl through all those "trillions" of documents, must have discovered that I denigrated an "oil" painting of a tumbleweed in one of my blog posts. In fact, his summary of my influence specifically refers to that entry as "representative" of my attitude.
    I don't see how he can call that reference representative, since I recommended "natural aromatic oil" instead of synthetic perfume in another post. I have also mentioned the hearty flavor of toasted "sesame oil" for Asian cooking, and my boyfriend's dutiful "oiling" of my weight-training machine.
    I recalled the Sixties, when "oily hair and skin" were profoundly taboo, and I urged young ladies who want flat tummies to avoid the "mineral oil" remedy. It's not worth it!
    I wrote that a former Miss America told me she used "corn oil" on her skin, and also that  nothing except for "Vitamin E oil" soothed my lupus rash. I confided that "oil of oregano" and "flaxseed oil" are useful nutritional supplements, and I heartily recommended throwing a mess of greens in a pot with "olive oil" and garlic.)

How does my love for olive oil make me relevant to Big Oil?

     So now it's obvious why Leetaru's breathtaking, omniscient, insatiable, ever-snooping and supremely discerning high-tech monstrosity decided that  I AM A PERSON OF INTEREST TO THE OIL INDUSTRY.
   Here's something else that's hilarious: I figured out why his majestically masterful computer program tied me to Levi, Texas. In one of my posts, I said I was wearing Levis.
   It's hard to believe Leetaru's claim that his subscribers include most large energy, environmental, policy, governmental, and environmental financial and legal services firms in the world, as well as venture capitalists, researchers and even private citizens in more than 120 countries. 
    He's slick -- and they're being inundated with inaccurate and irrelevant information.

 IT'S NOT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - IT'S AUTHENTIC STUPIDITY
    Actually, I'm relieved to learn how fallible are all these stupid efforts to document and pigeonhole humankind.
    Leetaru does warn his clients, in small print: All results are generated by computer and no guarantees of any kind are provided regarding accuracy or completeness.
    Duh!
    But for the time being, I wonder why all the Carbon Capture Report cares about is my "contextual relationship" with Big Oil. 
    My goal is to generate a page about myself in all the other categories as well, including coal, nuclear, biofuels and geothermal. In fact, I probably just did, by typing those words. Do you think he can already tell that I'm writing about Him? His empire is so all-seeing and all-knowing, it's freaking me out. 
    Should I delete this post, just to be safe? No, my people, I must be brave, for all of us. But I hope he doesn't have a jack-booted assassin squad headed my way in a convoy of black SUVs.

IF YOU WANT IT, YOU'LL HAVE TO CRAWL FOR IT
    In the future, I do aspire to score much higher in the Report's measures of tone, intensity and personalization, once I manage to get its uniquely creepy (but ever-so-perceptive) web crawler's attention again.    

Creepy crawlers and their sticky fingers plundering the Web.

     (The Report is now using a "specialized tonal analysis module," which offers unique features like intensity of “language personalization,” a "key indicator of popular mobilization," and the person database now recognizes names transliterated from more than 7,500 languages. It also calculates the “resonance” of each social media outlet to that community. I love resonance, and I am determined to become more resonant as I become better-versed in the Report's algorithms.)
    I am not the limp-wristed milquetoast that my Oil profile portrays. I want to be seen as a Major Threat or no threat at all.

A RAVENOUS BEAST PROWLS THE PLANET

    The Carbon Capture Report site, according to Leetaru, has become "the premiere source of global insight on climate change, carbon capture and sequestration and the energy industry," with about 20 million hits a month. 

The menacing beauty of today's super-dooper super computers.

     Leetaru, who is assistant director for Text and Digital Media Analytics at the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (and so much more, as he describes in excruciating detail), explains that his demonically invasive computer system "automatically builds profiles of persons, organizations, news outlets and locations through time, and uses crowdsourcing techniques to autonomously evaluate available information sources."
    It did a pretty pathetic job trying to figure me out, but I admit that I can be baffling, even to myself. 

DON'T TAKE THAT TONE WITH ME, YOU OILY HELLION!
    Anyone can sign up to receive one or more free daily status reports on the "tone and mood" of various energy sectors and the multitude of players in those sectors.

All these gauges are about me. What do they mean? Who knows?

    Leetaru has been into achieving dominion over technology since he was in the eighth grade, when he tore apart a robot his parents had given him and rewrote the software, so the robot would behave the way he wanted it to. 
    Naturally, he started his own web company within months, and -- doesn't this always happen? -- sold it two years later so he could launch a little venture that included "a vertical reseller network spanning multiple continents."
    He was the cutest kid! Don't we love prodigies?

FRESHMAN YEAR REALLY GOT HIM INTO GEAR
    His freshman year in college at the University of Illinois was quite productive. According to him, he created "a global web crawling, analysis, and monitoring service designed to monitor the entire web."

Artist Lisa Jevbratt's depiction of pixelated web-crawling.

     Before Google was a household name, and before “social media” and “industry mining” were even on the horizon, his project "monitored mailing lists, USENET groups, and the entire web, and collected every public piece of information on a given topic, extracting key information like company names and people, and generating detailed analysis and trending reports summarizing entire fields."
    Needless to say, he won all sorts of awards for this. It appears that the respect for individual privacy has never been an issue for Leetaru.

COULD HE BE A ROBOT, OR MAYBE A SPACE ALIEN?
    In the ten years since then, he has conceptualized, designed, organized and launched so many provocative, sweepingly PLANETARY ventures that I haven't been able to actually read through his entire resume. Even his list of current duties and projects puts me to sleep -- not because it's boring, but because it's exhausting.
    Is he an adorable young impostor, messing with everyone's minds, or a dangerously talented and power-mad global conquistador? 

Kalev Leetaru looks so earnest and harmless, but he is a high-tech
imperialist whose domain is the entire planet and everything on it.

    Isn't it amazing that he has been able to characterize -- for every day since the Forties to the present moment, and into the future -- the "tone" of so many people, movements and nations? 
    Maybe what's amazing is that he's convinced so many people he can do it.
    In his work at the  National Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee, Leetaru looked at 1,500 dimensions of emotion before deciding tone was the most reliable metric.
    I am just speechless to learn that there are so many dimensions of emotion. I'm afraid I must be quite defective, because I really don't think I have more than three or four hundred. 

QUITE A BIT OF THE TIME, I FEEL NOTHING
    Memo to self: Work on that.
    "Tone mining uses an algorithm that creates a numeric measure of overall tone in a document," Leetaru says.  

    Oh great -- more algorithms. These things really should be outlawed by some international commission. You can't argue with algorithms -- they just kind of slam you into the wall with their ponderous certainty -- so they're inherently unsuitable for democratic discourse.

A PRANCING  'ACTION FIGURE' SELLS 'DISAMBIGUATION'
    Leetaru is just as savvy at self-promotion as he is at monstrously huge data-mining schemes.     

    "The Carbon Capture Report was built for this purpose: to transform news from textual reports to actionable insights that you can use," he proclaims. "Its (sic) like having your very own intelligence analyst at your fingertips, digging through hundreds of billions of pieces of content and making sense of it for you.....a platform that reads through every news article and social media posting, searching for any reference to a person, organization, location, disambiguating based on context, and builds profiles for every one of those entries." 
    Can you understand why someone might regard such a resource as indispensable, and even essential to SURVIVAL, especially assuming his competitors are subscribers?

I don't know why Magritte titled this "Megalomania,"
but it somehow made me think of Leetaru.

         "The Carbon Capture Report," Leetaru goes on (and on) "uses machine-learning language-modeling techniques to precisely cluster articles by 'storylines' and a hyperlocal global geocoding system to geographically position coverage by source and focus to explore critical questions in public perception of climate change and energy."
    See what I mean by "exhausting"?

MERGING ALL OF US INTO ONE BIG, FAT BRAIN
     But Leetaru has lots of other projects, plowing through the collective unconscious and the collective conscious, and who knows what else.
    Using a large, shared memory supercomputer in Tennessee called Nautilus, Leetaru has "analyzed the tone and geographic dimensions of a 30-year archive of global news to produce real-time forecasts of human behavior such as national conflicts and the movement of specific individuals," according to the National Institute for Computational Sciences.
     A range of advanced analysis techniques was used to produce a network 2.4 petabytes in size. A petabyte, which sounds so darn cute it could be a baby name, is actually "a unit of information equal to one quadrillion bytes."
    (But what's a quadrillion? Is it more than a Brazilian?)
    "Leetaru is able to push the envelope of the 'petascale humanities,' letting the machine find interesting patterns in the bulk of data. With patterns in hand, he then recreates them using a more traditional targeted and smaller-scale approach that others can follow," the NICS article explains (or attempts to).

This is a snapshot of the intense magnetic field that enables petascale computing

PUTTING MUSCLE INTO THE ISSUE OF TONE  

    Leetaru's research report -- "Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting Large-Scale Human Behavior Using Global Media Tone in Time and Space” -- was published in the open access, peer-reviewed electronic journal First Monday, this past September.  
     The most ballyhooed aspect of Leetaru’s analytics is the addition of "spatial and tonal dimensions."
     “Almost every Fortune 500 company monitors the tone of news and social media coverage about their products,” Leetaru explains. “There’s been a huge amount of research coming out of the business literature on the power of news tone to predict economic behavior, yet there hasn’t been as much work in using it to predict social behavior.” 
    In Leetaru's world, the news has little to do with objective facts -- journalists take note -- and everything to do with tone and emotion. 

WE'RE A MOODY BUNCH, BUT HE'S GOT AN APP FOR THAT
     Leetaru's First Monday paper involved gathering more than 100 million articles, which were scrutinized for their mood -- whether they represented good news or bad news -- and location: where events were happening and the location of other participants in the story.
    "Mood detection, or 'automated sentiment mining' searched for words such as 'terrible,' 'horrid,' or 'nice,'" the paper explained.
    Doesn't this seem like a rather simplistic -- perhaps even immature -- view of homo sapiens?  It sounds like he's got a rather cross British housewife doing his assessments. 

"You're being horrid! Stop it at once, and let's be nice."

KINDLY INVENT A PILL FOR TOTAL JARGON OVERKILL     
    He repeatedly reminds clients that "the web is interconnected." Does he think we're a tiny bit defective, intellectually? It wouldn't be a web if it weren't interconnected. This is just one of dozens of examples of redundancy; poor grammar, syntax, usage and punctuation; and a sweeping effort to boggle the reader's mind with Total Jargon Overkill. That way, prospective clients just say, "OK, I surrender -- you win!" 
    He must be having a blast as "an architect of cyberinfrastructure and cyberenvironments."   
    His next step is not simply to document the past exhaustively or portray the present in minute detail, but to use his gargantuan data mining and analysis to predict the future.

DIVING RECKLESSLY INTO THE DEEPS OF FORTUNE-TELLING
    Exciting! Or is it scary? 

(It's scary.)

    "It will be like diving beneath the ocean -- we’ve been so focused on the surface that we’re only just beginning to start exploring the entire new world that’s underneath,” he says ominously. 
   Kalev claims to have more than twenty global projects under way on news flows and public perception. One involves modeling all global news interactions across all countries in the world over the last several decades, resulting in tens of trillions of connections. 
    In his bio, he describes the effort thusly: 
    "The SPEED project is an effort to compile a global event database codifying every major social, political, and economic event in the world from 1946 to present. Textual news reports are transformed into codified database entries with date, latitude/longitude location, and more than 1,600 variables, including connections to related events."

A PAIR OF SCISSORS PLUS 'INTERPRETIVE SOPHISTICATION'
    "This required building a global news monitoring infrastructure from scratch capable of capturing news from every country of the world and constructing a workflow that leverages the efficiency and scalability of automated text mining in concert with the interpretive sophistication of trained human analysts. 

     "From an initial pilot project clipping articles out of the paper New York Times with scissors, I transitioned the project into a turnkey digital infrastructure, developing tools such as a document categorization system capable of filtering out irrelevant articles from a collection of more than 70 million documents at greater than 98 percent accuracy. Automated reliability checks, queuing systems, historical geocoders, and flexible lexicon and XML protocol management tools are all available from a single web-based portal." 
    Get it?

    UPDATES: An August 2013 New York Times article wonders if "Big Data will be a big dud" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/sunday-review/is-big-data-an-economic-big-dud.html?hpw):  "I think it’s conceivable that the data era will be a bust for the things people expect it to be useful for,” said Scott Wallsten, a senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute and the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.  Other economists believe that Big Data’s economic punch is just a few years away, as engineers trained in data manipulation make their way through college and as data-driven start-ups begin hiring. And of course the recession could be masking the impact of the data revolution in ways economists don’t yet grasp. Still, some suspect that in the end our current framework for understanding Big Data and “the cloud” could be a mirage..... “The promises that are made around the ability to manipulate these very large data sets in real time are overselling what they can do today,” said the president of masFlight, Josh Marks. 

UPDATE: Cities are using federal dollars to create central repositories of surveillance information, and gather data about the everyday movements and habits of law-abiding residents, raising legal and ethical questions about tracking people so closely. It's Big Money for Big Data. "Oakland has a contract with the Science Applications International Corporation, or SAIC, to build its system. That company has earned the bulk of its $12 billion in annual revenue from military contracts. The company’s contract to help modernize the New York City payroll system, using new technology like biometric readers, resulted in reports of kickbacks. Last year, the company paid the city $500 million to avoid a federal prosecution. The amount was believed to be the largest ever paid to settle accusations of government contract fraud." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/technology/privacy-fears-as-surveillance-grows-in-cities.html?hp&_r=0

    National Public Radio began a two-part series on the issue of "Big Data" on November 29.
    http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142521910/the-digital-breadcrumbs-that-lead-to-big-data

For major U.S. companies, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?pagewanted=all

Illustration by Tom Gauld

MORE: metadata is terrifying, and not merely because of what we’re being told that all that information is being gathered and collated and purposed for (our safety and security). On a deeper level, the metadread of metadata stems from its unlimited nature (gathering data on people without end) paired with its awesome immutability, like the mysterious black slab in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There’s no dialoguing, no interacting, no reasoning with metadata. It is what it is. Without quotes. Without a wink or a nudge. It’s a meta meta meta meta world. 
 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/when-meta-met-data.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

PATHETICALLY -- AND DANGEROUSLY -- FALLIBLE
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514591/the-dictatorship-of-data/

BIG DATA WILL RENDER US IRRELEVANT AND UNEMPLOYABLE: Computer scientist Jason Lanier describes the future of automation as big-data “puppetry,” where the actions of humans are replicated once the set of data is big enough. Bill Gates adds: “Software substitution, whether it’s for drivers or waiters or nurses” is coming. Twenty years from now, labor demand for lots of skill sets will be substantially lower. I don’t think people have that in their mental model.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/magazine/hey-robot-which-cat-is-cuter.html?hp&_r=0

OH GREAT, NOW THEY'VE FOUND ME AGAIN:
     As of January, 2012, I have also been cited by Leetaru as a person who has a "contextual relationship" with the subject of carbon capture. The page dedicated to me regarding this issue characterizes my relationships, my tone and my level of polarization, using an extensive array of lists and gauges.
    At least the site admits that my "personalization" of this issue has been low. I know very little about it, except that it sounds like an easy and dangerous way out of the greenhouse-gas problem. Now that I am actually on record, as of this very moment, for having commented on carbon capture, lord knows what they're going to be saying about me. 


POSTSCRIPT:

 All it took for me to become "associated" with Bruno Mars was 

to complain that Big Data had not associated me with him

Dreams really can come true, mi nieto.

     The Leetaru web page listed a whole bunch of fancy people I'm supposedly "associated" with, including the Dalai Lama, Beyonce and Robert Redford. In my post, above, I complained that those Big Data freaks didn't include my adopted "Save the Children" son, the adorable pop star Bruno Mars, among my associates.

    I am thrilled to report that Bruno and I are linked at last on the "Big Oil" page, and also on pages about my "pivotal role" in "Carbon Sequestration" and "Climate Change." 

   Why did I have to manipulate -- ruthlessly and self-indulgently -- the huge architecture of Big Data to get myself linked to the sweet superstar who brings out tender, nurturing instincts I've never felt before?
   It's abominable! 
   Big Data ties me to Newt Gingrich and to a meat plant in Brazil. That's even more abominable -- I'm an old left winger, and a vegan, you dopes!
   Leetaru's documents about me imply that I hang out with Moammar Khadafy, Dow Jones and Barack Obama, even though one is dead, one isn't a person, and the third is someone I wouldn't want to have a beer with.
    How can they take this shit seriously? Seriously!
    The large heap of data about my relevance to the oil industry implies that I  have a global impact that is quite riveting. Leetaru implies that entire peoples are standing in the bush, the steppes, the caves, the deserts, the marshes -- not to mention London and Barcelona -- awaiting my next pronouncement. I guess I should put my influence to better use, but really -- what a hassle!

    And now there are two more of these titillating compilations of insights about my life, my impact and my mindset: the aforementioned Carbon Sequestration and Climate Change pages. In them, Leetaru sneaks his own name in among the many fancy-pants people who are in my glittering circle of associates (Rihanna, Michael Caine, Anderson Cooper and (?) Thoreau). That's OK, kid. I'd probably do the same thing if I had a 10 billion tetrabyte computer at my disposal.
    All that matters is that I am now officially associated with Bruno Mars. And all it took was for me to complain that I wasn't associated with Bruno Mars. 
    Thank you, Big Data! You aren't so cold and sinister after all -- you can make dreams come true.

     UPDATE: The whole Big Data thing has become so absurdly invasive and unwieldy that a $100 million startup, inBloom, is folding after just 18 months, according to the April 26, 2014 edition of the New York Times. The firm was hindered by the fact that it collected billions of factoids about the learning process and progress of unsuspecting young students. When parents heard about this invasion of privacy and potential marketing bonanza for the firm, they raised hell. Most Big Data operations don't spy on little kids, so they are charging ahead full-speed, turning everything about our lives into commercial and political fodder. It would be scary if it weren't being done in such a stupid, sloppy way.     
    InBloom's demise indicates, according to the Times, how the industry has been rushing to sell its expansive visions before establishing evidence that automated data-mining produces useful outcomes. “If this is still an ‘emerging concept,’ why are we implementing it?” one superintendent asked. The same could be said of the industry as a whole. Like the NSA, it's scooping up everything it can find, and selling it to clients who are sure they can contrive some brilliant way to manipulate us with it.

A DAY IN THE LIFE 
    Here is one tiny fragment from the Carbon Capture Report's many-thousand-paged coverage of one day in the life of Big Oil,  summarized by all English-language monitored mainstream and social media coverage worldwide (including YouTube). Look at all those concepts! Look at how few blogs he includes. How did mine get in there?:

Persons	5438
Organizations	4718
Worldwide Cities	1828
Countries	190
Global Regions	662
US States	52
Concepts	26987
News Outlets	1192
	114 Nov 25, 2011 published