[Tfug] The NET

[Bexley Hall]

--- Christopher Robbins <robbinsc at gmail.com> wrote:

> However,  if you add it all up (credit/debit card
> transactions, phone recrods, web browsing and the
> rest), you can get a pretty accurate
> picture of a person, IMHO.  What good that does the
> government remains to be seen...

In school, one exercise was to take the profssor's
cancelled check stubs and credit card statements
from the 3 month "summer vacation" period and
"deduce" as much as we could about him, his family,
his likes/dislikes/habits/etc. from just *that*
information (this predated "search engines", etc).
Each of these "deductions" had to be backed up by a
rationalization -- along with descriptions of how
those deductions could be in error.

It was a sobering exercise (which was the point of
the exercise!).

One thing "organizations" have going for them is
"numbers".  They can look at large data sets and
make deductions based on patterns observed in
that "population" as a whole (in our class exercise,
we were looking at a single individual so couldn't
benefit from that additional "knowledge").

I suspect today's actuaries are looking at a
helluvalot
of *different* sorts of information than actuaries
studied decades ago!  :-(

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