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Facebook Reveals its User-Tracking Secrets

Facebook logo

Facebook doesn’t track everybody the same way. It uses different methods for members who have signed in and are using their accounts, members who are logged-off and non-members. The first time you arrive at any Facebook.com page, the company inserts cookies in your browser. If you sign up for an account, it inserts two types [...]

The benefits of sorting data

sorting data

Sorting also can streamline processing. comScore sorts URL data to minimize Web site taxonomy lookups. Instead of loading the 40 URLs for Web site pages in the order they were visited during a session, sorting might reveal that 20 of those pages were on Facebook, 12 were on GMail and the balance were at NYTimes.com. [...]

How The CIA Uses Social Media to Track How People Feel

CIA-FBI agent

How stable is China? What are people discussing and thinking in Pakistan? To answer these sorts of question, the U.S. government has turned to a rich source: social media. The Associated Press reports that the CIA maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of an nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts [...]

Recap of my daily reading – 20111104

Image of Newspaper

The War Between Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple China envoy Zhang Yan in India map outburst Ireland to close embassies to Vatican, Iran and E Timor China mine disaster: Dozens trapped by ‘rock burst’  Many companies pay no income taxes, study finds Sandwich arrest stirs debate over eating in stores Too posh to push? More C-sections [...]

Jobs data improve in October

image of the word jobs

Automatic Data Processing, a payroll-processing firm, said Wednesday that private-sector employers added 110,000 jobs in October, while outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported a decline in job cuts. Source: CNNMoney Here is a simple frequency analysis of the full article: Unique words:228 Total words:491 Freq. Word 9 JOBS 8 EMPLOYMENT 7 CUTS 6 [...]

Facebook Reveals its User-Tracking Secrets

Facebook logo

  • Facebook doesn’t track everybody the same way. It uses different methods for members who have signed in and are using their accounts, members who are logged-off and non-members.
  • The first time you arrive at any Facebook.com page, the company inserts cookies in your browser. If you sign up for an account, it inserts two types of cookies. If you don’t set up an account, it only inserts one of the two types.
  • These cookies record every time you visit another website that uses a Facebook Like button or other Facebook plugin — which work together with the cookies to note the time, date and website being visited. Unique characteristics that identify your computer are also recorded.
  • Facebook keeps logs that record your past 90 days of activity. It deletes entries older than 90 days.
  • If you are logged into a Facebook account, your name, email address, friends and all of the other data in your Facebook profile is also recorded.

    Source and full article: Mashable

The benefits of sorting data

sorting data

Sorting also can streamline processing. comScore sorts URL data to minimize Web site taxonomy lookups. Instead of loading the 40 URLs for Web site pages in the order they were visited during a session, sorting might reveal that 20 of those pages were on Facebook, 12 were on GMail and the balance were at NYTimes.com. The sorted data would trigger just three site lookups whereas unsorted data might trigger many redundant lookups if the visitor bounced back and forth among just a few sites. “That saves a lot of CPU time and a lot of effort,” Brown says. It’s possible to sort data with SQL statements, and custom scripts, but sorting is also a common feature in data-integration software from IBM, Informatica, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Syncsort, and others. At truly large scale, Hadoop is an option for sorting and other processing steps.

Sources:

Article: informationweek.com

Image: john norris

How The CIA Uses Social Media to Track How People Feel

CIA-FBI agent

How stable is China? What are people discussing and thinking in Pakistan? To answer these sorts of question, the U.S. government has turned to a rich source: social media.

The Associated Press reports that the CIA maintains a social-media tracking center operated out of an nondescript building in a Virginia industrial park. The intelligence analysts at the agency’s Open Source Center, who other agents refer to as “vengeful librarians,” are tasked with sifting through millions of tweets, Facebook messages, online chat logs, and other public data on the World Wide Web to glean insights into the collective moods of regions or groups abroad.

Sources:

Article: www.theatlantic.com

Featured image: elkbuntu

Recap of my daily reading – 20111104

Image of Newspaper

Jobs data improve in October

image of the word jobs

Automatic Data Processing, a payroll-processing firm, said Wednesday that private-sector employers added 110,000 jobs in October, while outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported a decline in job cuts.

Source: CNNMoney

Here is a simple frequency analysis of the full article:

Unique words:228 Total words:491

Freq. Word

9 JOBS

8 EMPLOYMENT

7 CUTS

6 OCTOBER

6 REPORT

Source: Content Analyzer