Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
Data at TED
As you can imagine, there was much to entertain data watchers at this year’s TED conference.
Here’ s a quick roundup of the talks most relevant to what we’re talking about on this blog.
There was a live telecast with David Cameron, who in a few months time is almost certainly going to become the next Prime Minister of the UK. He claimed that the big political question of the next few years was “How do we make things better without spending more money?” (On the very sensible grounds that there isn’t going to be much.) His answer is that which we judge quality of life more broadly by including measures like happiness, health, job satisfaction and so on. (The British conservatives seem to be taking “choice architecture” as their big idea, expressed by Thaler and Sunstein in Nudge, and other behavioral economists. ) He went on to argue that a new era of transparency in government was coming which would make this much easier. His examples included crime maps like the one below, which, he argued, prompt and liberate people to make their own decisions.
Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard physician and sociologist and the author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Change Our Lives. He used social networking mapping to show, among other things, how hanging around with fat people is likely to make you fat.
John Underkoffler invented the media interface made famous by Minority Report and is now imminently being supplied commercially through his company Oblong. Check out this amazing demonstration.
My favorite piece of data visualization came from Carter Emmart, the director of “Astrovisualization” at the American Museum of Natural History. He demonstrated some of the digital universe atlas, a project that plots every satellite, moon, planet, star and galaxy precisely according to the best information and brings it alive through virtual graphics. Please, please watch it here.
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