Links of interest

In my class we recently discussed some of the reasons why there is an explosion of data. The WSJ reported on a couple of reasons that maybe we had not thought of:

Employees measuring their productivity

Using customer information in real time  

I found this video a while back that is along the lines of people tracking their own data; it also does a fair job explaining the ideas of correlation vs causation:

Anecdotal Evidence: Bullying edition

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article saying the recent attention given to bullying in schools is largely driven by a handful of large profile cases that have led to suicides, but not supported by any data. The article points out that data collected on bullying does not show an increase recently; in fact the opposite is true. This article is a good example of how the media (and all of us) can often be misled by anecdotal evidence into believing a claim without looking to see if the anecdotes are typical... Making decisions based on outliers might not be appropriate and a closer look at what is actually going on is likely going to lead to a more informed decision.