Pulse : The New Science of Harnessing Internet Buzz to Track Threats and Opportunities

by Hubbard, Douglas W.

• ISBN13: 9780470932360
• ISBN10: 0470932368
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-05-03
• Publisher: Wiley

Summary

This book will introduce how the Internet can be used to assess market trends and public opinion before the slower and far more expensive, traditional government reports and Gallup polls are published. It could be similar to having a real-time "Dow Jones" index for buzz about a company or confidence in the economy. The book will talk about how to take this raw data and validate it using some traditional methods without relying on them entirely in the future. It will discuss how this will eventually effect business and government in a much broader sense.For example, this tool allows for a new kind of real-time decision analysis that will greatly improve productivity. Pulse will describe how most major decisions are made on information that was available a long time prior to the beginning of the analysis of the decision, never mind the decision itself. Real-time information about socio-economic trends and public opinion will allow for a kind of "programmed trading" for some decisions similar to how trading firms automate buying and selling.Specific examples will include: A Canadian epidemiologist tracked Google searches on the phrase "flu symptoms". He used this information to track flu outbreaks faster than the Canadian health authorizes could keep up. His success later inspired Google's "Flu Trends" tool. Researchers at HP labs showed how tracking Twitter comments about upcoming movies could reliably predict box office success better than any other method. The number of Google searches nationwide on the term "unemployment" (publicly available through "Google trends") tracks very closely to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) unemployment reports. The difference is that BLS releases its data monthly after sampling 60,000 households while Google trends data is available weekly and for free. Research by Carnegie Mellon students show that tracking Twitter comments produces nearly the same results for consumer confidence and political polls as Gallup polls would produce except that the results are real-time and free. An introduction to the possibility that tracking auctions on eBay, ranks of books on Amazon, or job-seeking websites may become the new way to track real time data about the economy and trends in public opinion. LA County detected (with 85% accuracy) collusive fraud rings in public assistance programs based on analysis of links in social networks. Examples of "Semantic" analysis tools are being developed to process thousands of blogs and Facebookcomments that could be used to assess security threats like potential terrorism.

Author Biography

Douglas W. Hubbard is the inventor of Applied Information Economics (AIE), a measurement methodology that has earned him critical praise from The Gartner Group, Giga Information Group, and Forrester Research. He is an internationally recognized expert in the field of difficult measurements and the application of quantitative methods to complex and uncertain problems. He has written articles for InformationWeek, CIO Enterprise, and DBMS magazine and is the author of the bestselling How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business, Second Edition and The Failure of Risk Management: Why It's Broken and How to Fix It.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Acknowledgments	p. xiii
Introduction to the Pulse: A New Kind of Instrument
A New Era for Measuring and Predicting Society	p. 3
An Emerging Science: What Is This New Thing?	p. 6
What The Pulse Isn't	p. 8
The Major Areas of the Macro-Pulse	p. 12
What Does All of This Mean for Us?	p. 14
Notes	p. 15
The History of Seeing the Forest through the Trees	p. 17
The King's Surveys	p. 18
The Dawn of Stats, Theme-Maps, and Telegraphs	p. 20
The Rise of the Machines	p. 25
The Struggle to Become a Science	p. 28
Notes	p. 31
Emergence of the Pulse and the New Research Discipline	p. 33
Ubiquitous Use of the Internet	p. 34
Digital Lives: Increasing Time and Activities per Person	p. 39
Open Pastures: A New Field of Research	p. 45
Proving the Pulse: Addressing Misconceptions about the Data	p. 47
Notes	p. 52
Dynamics of the Pulse	p. 53
Incentives: Why the Pulse Exists	p. 53
The Systems behind Getting and Sharing Data	p. 55
Collaboration and Competition	p. 58
Power Law: Why a Few Sources Tell Us a Lot on the Internet	p. 59
Notes	p. 63
Sources of the Pulse
What Our Surfing Says	p. 67
Tracking Flu Outbreaks: A Faster, Better, and Cheaper Method	p. 68
A Do-It-Yourself Pulse Tracking Example: Using Google Trends for Economic Predictions	p. 73
More Searchology: The Body of Research Grows	p. 81
Caveats and Miscellaneous Considerations for Searchologists	p. 84
Notes	p. 87
ôFriendö as a Verb	p. 89
How Do Social Networks Matter?	p. 90
The Dynamic Duo of Social Connections: Two Leaders in Practical Network Research	p. 92
Forecasting the Crowd	p. 97
Social Networks in the Pulse	p. 98
Notes	p. 104
What We Say Online Matters	p. 107
An Introduction to Analyzing Buzz: Counting Tweets Predicts Movie Box Office Receipts	p. 108
Predicting the Broader Economy with Tweets	p. 112
Predicting Markets with Anxiety	p. 117
Tools and Miscellanea for Tapping into the Global Mood	p. 119
Notes	p. 123
Three Potential Pulses: Where We Go, What We Buy, and How We Play	p. 125
Our Flow and the Pulse: What the Movements of Millions of People Tell Us	p. 126
The Shopping Pulse	p. 131
Playtime and the Pulse	p. 136
Notes	p. 140
Effects of the Pulse
Making the Pulse Practical	p. 143
Rethinking Real-Time Decisions in the Pulse	p. 144
A Brief Overview of the Economics of Timely Information	p. 149
Overcoming Cultural and Conceptual Obstacles: Maximizing the Value of the Pulse	p. 154
Implementing the Pulse	p. 156
Notes	p. 159
The Future of the Pulse and Its New Challenges	p. 161
Users and the Data They Share Will Increase	p. 162
Services Will Be Better and Make More Data Public	p. 165
Research and Models	p. 169
From Communicators to Tricorders-for Everyone	p. 171
Evolving Opportunities and Challenges for Users of the Pulse	p. 173
Notes	p. 177
About the Author	p. 179
Index	p. 181
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