Visa already does predict the probability of divorce based on credit card purchases

Everybody knows that a baby is due roughly nine months after conception. However, few people know that the standard deviation is fifteen days.

Both the wine dealers and writers have a vested interest in maintaining their informational monopoly on the quality of wine. The dealers use the perennially inflated initial rankings as a way to stabilize prices.

Misdiagnosis accounts for about one-third of all medical error.

Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein worries that there’s a social cost to exploiting the long tail. The more successful these personalized filters are, the more we as a citizenry are deprived of a common experience.

On the one hand, this is a massive amount of information—it’s roughly equivalent to more than half the information contained in all the books in the Library of Congress.

In fact, because the algorithm is not public, it is possible that eHarmony puts a normative finger on the scale to favor certain clients.

As the size of datasets balloons almost beyond the scope of our imagination, it becomes all the more important to continually audit them to check for the possibility of error.

The timing is best explained by the digital breakthroughs that make it cheaper to capture, to merge, and to store huge electronic databases.