This week's issue of The Economist has a very interesting article.

No hiding place: A plan to assess people's personal characteristics from their Twitter-streams



Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Centre in San Jose, California think they can determine a person's presumptive personality from just 50 Tweets:

"In a test of the new system, Dr Haber analysed three months' worth of data from 90m users of Twitter.
His software was able to parse someone's presumptive personality reasonably well from just 50 tweets,
and very well indeed from 200."

So… marketers will finally be able to determine truly effective ways to target consumers?

We should be so lucky if it were just marketers.

Here's another Economist article from April.

How might your choice of browser affect your job prospects?



According to "Big Data" — you'll be a better employee if you use a non-default web browser.

One shudders to imagine how HR recruiters will use people's presumptive personalities.

(Targeted ads will be the least of our worries.)

It's enough to make you want to cut your tail off: Delete Your Oldest Tweets Using Twitter Archive Eraser