The Romney campaign outsourced their data management, Obama campaign built an inhouse data mining

[HipChick]

I've worked in IT for a long time, working with 'Big Data' data mining for big corporations - the Romney campaign outsourced all their data management efforts..these predictive models are the bread and butter for some companies - Walmart,Home Depot - The Romney campaign relied on hate,lies, and Billionaire money...and they got their arses handed to them on a plate...

http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fnerd_world+%28TIME%3A+Techland%29&utm_content=My+Yahoo

But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. “We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,” he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official “chief scientist” for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotion

Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret. “They are our nuclear codes,” campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. The “scientists” created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romney’s campaign: its data.

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/11/07/inside-the-secret-world-of-quants-and-data-crunchers-who-helped-obama-win/#ixzz2Beo3qK8Q

[FarPoint]

1. The new, smarter generation.

Fabulous article.

[exboyfil]

2. Will be hard to keep this secret

but will they pass it off to the next Democratic nominee or will it be used in the primary by one or more as the techs scatter to the various campaigns.

[exboyfil]

3. I was wondering if the IRS has data mining

techniques like these to go after fraud. Given Romney's taxes it might be a good time to circle the biggest 500 for special attention. It would be worth paying big dollars to some of the finest tax lawyers and accountants (perhaps we could pay them by commission of taxes recovered). Also they could be used to craft iron clad legislation and tax rules.

One of Greece's biggest problems is getting individuals to pay.

[HipChick]

5. IRS recently did a huge upgrade of hardware and software

It would be pretty easy for them to use predictive models

[HipChick]

4. LOD covering this now