11 critical questions you should ask about election polls
The most important lesson I learned in journalism school:
Question everything.
And that’s why Andrew Balemi’s elegant post, “All about election polls,” makes me happy.
(Posted by Mac Slocum)
Big Data at work: Google's speech recognition
Google’s impressive speech recognition is one of the best examples of big data’s practical application. Farhad Manjoo explains:
How does Android’s speech system work so well? The magic of data. Speech recognition is one of a handful of Google’s artificial intelligence programs—the others are language translation and image search—that get their power by analyzing impossibly huge troves of information. For the speech system, the data are a large number of voice recordings. If you’ve used Android’s speech recognition system, Google Voice’s e-mail transcription service, Goog411 (a now-defunct information service), or some other Google speech-related service, there’s a good chance that the company has your voice somewhere on its servers. And it’s only because Google has your voice—and millions of others—that it can recognize mine.
This is why the Financial Times will be fine
From Reuters:
“We don’t want to lose our direct relationship with our subscribers. It’s at the core of our business model,” Rob Grimshaw told Reuters in an interview on Monday. He said he was hopeful of a positive outcome to negotiations with Apple, but added: “If it turns out that one or another channel doesn’t mix with the way we want to do business, there’s a large number of other channels available to us.”
No chest thumping. No talk of iPad “salvation.” Just a level-headed perspective of the current opportunities and how they may or may not benefit the Finaicial Times. This is how all publishers — news, books, film, etc. — should approach digital channels. Does it work for us or does it not?
