In our largely segregated cities, geography is a highly effective proxy for race.

Simpson’s Paradox: when a whole body of data displays one trend, yet when broken into subgroups, the opposite trend comes into view for each of those subgroups.

Smart people would win. And dumber people, the providers of dumb money, would wind up holding billions (or trillions) of unpayable IOUs.

As I write this, about two-thirds of American adults have a profile on Facebook. They spend thirty-nine minutes a day on the site, only four minutes less than they dedicate to face-to-face socializing. Nearly half of them, according to a Pew Research Center report, count on Facebook to deliver at least some of their news, which leads to the

A University of Maryland study showed that in Harris County, which includes Houston, prosecutors were three times more likely to seek the death penalty for African Americans, and four times more likely for Hispanics, than for whites convicted of the same charges.

Apollo Group, the parent company for the University of Phoenix, spent more than a billion dollars on marketing in 2010, almost all of it focused on recruiting. That came out to $2,225 per student on marketing and only $892 per student on instruction.

However, when you create a model from proxies, it is far simpler for people to game it. This is because proxies are easier to manipulate than the complicated reality they represent.

If a system designates a worker as a low idea generator or weak connector, that verdict becomes its own truth. That’s her score.

I keep in my head, my informal internal model, into a formal external one. In creating my model, I’d be extending my power and influence in the world. I’d be building an automated me that others can implement, even when I’m not around.