The article “Math Will Rock Your World”, a cover story featured in BusinessWeek and published on January 23, 2006, talks about the increasingly important role that mathematics and data analysis have played in industries and daily lives. In particular, subjects seemingly incongruous with analytic, such as linguistics, have become intertwined. This was discussed in the startup company Inform Technologies LLC, in which the algorithm “combs through thousands of press articles and blog posts” and “analyze each article by its language and context.” At the foundation of this data analysis are mathematical algorithms. Subjects and relationships between subjects combine to construct the polytope, “an object floating in space that has an edge for every known scrap of information.” This development is today’s informational revolution.
Technology companies, from Google to Facebook, are increasingly trying to make use of the gigabytes of information they have. The challenge is to use the information, most of which are stored as qualitative idea, into quantitative algorithms that can be propagated. These developments can be observed presently through efforts such as personally-targeted advertisement on Google searches or Facebook profiles. The article stresses the importance of data analysis in today’s business when it talks about how Ford Motor “could have sold an additional $625 million worth of trucks if it had lifted its online ad budget from 2.5% to 6% of the total.” Online advertisement allows companies to “profile customers” as the companies “know where their prospective customers are browsing, what they click on, and often, what they buy.” These ideas altogether illustrate the idea that access to information and the efficient mathematical analysis of the information can lead to great business solutions.
While this development fosters efficiency, it also raises some concerns that the article addresses. Utmost concern is privacy, which companies from Google and Facebook have all grappled with in the recent years. The inevitability of the “power of mathematicians to make sense of personal data and to model the behavior of individuals” will compromise privacy, and this is a concern not just for the individuals who data are being utilized. If the individuals fear for their data being manipulated beyond their range of comfort, they may lock the information up and prevent them from being utilized. This would hamper efforts of the mathematicians to develop algorithms and determine business or practical solutions. Another concern is the complexity of the new development. Managers must “understand enough about math to question the assumptions behind the numbers,” given that it becomes much easier to deceit “someone by having analysis based on lots of data and graphs.” As a result, this is the challenge for United States, as the article mentions. The country “must breed more top-notch mathematicians at home” by revamping education and simultaneously “cultivate greater math savvy” as the subject becomes more prevalent in the business profession.
For students studying mathematics and related fields, now is a great opportunity to foster these interests. Computer scientists and quantitative analysts are in high demand, and there is much room for development in this inchoate field. But even for those not directly working in this field, an understanding of the subject becomes increasingly important as well. A solid knowledge foundation allows for critical analysis of the technological improvements. As the field of data mining continues to revolutionaries business and the way society progresses, it is in the best interest of individuals to not only know how to best utilize these developments, but also to protect one’s own information to ensure that privacy is not greatly compromised in the reach for progress.
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Friday, February 1, 2013
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