TCAST: The Future of Data & AI

Netflix is one of the biggest names of the Digital Age. It went from being a new way to rent movies, to a streaming service aggregating everyone else’s movies and TV shows, to being a powerhouse creator of original content in its own right. Oh, and it killed a one-time giant Blockbuster along the way and helped spawn a whole new branch of the entertainment world. However, it’s fair to ask if Netflix is really about making movies and TV shows. Is that really their main concern? The answer of course is ‘no’. The company is primarily about making money and for that, they need subscribers and in order to get the largest number of subscribers possible, they make use of a lot of data. 

Naturally, they start with what they hope you want to see and basically spam your feed with a bunch of generically popular content. Over time, they will try to narrow it down. How do they do that? They make use of algorithms to gather information on what you watch. They also pay attention not just to what you click on, that is both too simple and not terribly informative. How many times have you clicked on a movie only to get about ten minutes in and decide you don’t want to watch it? The algorithms pay attention to that as well. What you watch, how long you watch it for, when you watch it, and all of that goes into the algorithm. From there, Netflix’s hope is that they will be able to find similar movies and put them in your recommended feed. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Yes and no.

For one, there are holes in this system. Not just the occasional recommendation you would never plan on watching but major problems that can break the algorithm altogether. Say you have roommates and you all share an account but also have very different tastes in movies? Or you have kids. Chances are you watch different things when they are around. That of course is what the profiles on Netflix and every other streaming service are all about. If they can break out each person individually, the algorithm has a chance to work. However, how many people really bother with the different profiles? I’m guessing it’s not as many as Netflix would like. Also, what if you have a busy schedule and rarely have time to watch a full two hour movie? You only have fifteen minutes here, twenty minutes there and typically work on something while the movie is on. So it might take a whole week to watch one movie. That kind of person likely wrecks the algorithm entirely. 

Not to mention, how long does it take to build up a worthwhile profile of a given subscriber? One week? A month? A year? It will vary from person to person based on how much they watch, meaning how effective the recommendations are will vary a lot from one subscriber to the next. In short, Netflix’s algorithms are extremely inefficient in a variety of circumstances, and that means they are wasting time and money building user profiles that don’t work.

What should they do then? What would be a more efficient means of building those user profiles? Netflix could work with us at TARTLE. They could go directly to subscribers and ask what it is that they would like to watch. Who their favorite actors and directors are. When do they watch? Do they prefer movies or series? Do they like their series dumped all at once or would they prefer a weekly schedule? Netflix could talk directly to its subscribers and get feedback directly from them and so build a far more accurate profile than any other method. This would be faster and cheaper and in the end far more financially rewarding. Which means they could spend that extra time and money making better content to draw in more subscribers. 

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth?

Find out at: https://tartle.co/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial

Spread the word!

Netflix is one of the biggest names of the Digital Age. It went from being a new way to rent movies, to a streaming service aggregating everyone else’s movies and TV shows, to being a powerhouse creator of original content in its own right. Oh, and it killed a one-time giant Blockbuster along the way and helped spawn a whole new branch of the entertainment world. However, it’s fair to ask if Netflix is really about making movies and TV shows. Is that really their main concern? The answer of course is ‘no’. The company is primarily about making money and for that, they need subscribers and in order to get the largest number of subscribers possible, they make use of a lot of data. 

Naturally, they start with what they hope you want to see and basically spam your feed with a bunch of generically popular content. Over time, they will try to narrow it down. How do they do that? They make use of algorithms to gather information on what you watch. They also pay attention not just to what you click on, that is both too simple and not terribly informative. How many times have you clicked on a movie only to get about ten minutes in and decide you don’t want to watch it? The algorithms pay attention to that as well. What you watch, how long you watch it for, when you watch it, and all of that goes into the algorithm. From there, Netflix’s hope is that they will be able to find similar movies and put them in your recommended feed. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Yes and no.

For one, there are holes in this system. Not just the occasional recommendation you would never plan on watching but major problems that can break the algorithm altogether. Say you have roommates and you all share an account but also have very different tastes in movies? Or you have kids. Chances are you watch different things when they are around. That of course is what the profiles on Netflix and every other streaming service are all about. If they can break out each person individually, the algorithm has a chance to work. However, how many people really bother with the different profiles? I’m guessing it’s not as many as Netflix would like. Also, what if you have a busy schedule and rarely have time to watch a full two hour movie? You only have fifteen minutes here, twenty minutes there and typically work on something while the movie is on. So it might take a whole week to watch one movie. That kind of person likely wrecks the algorithm entirely. 

Not to mention, how long does it take to build up a worthwhile profile of a given subscriber? One week? A month? A year? It will vary from person to person based on how much they watch, meaning how effective the recommendations are will vary a lot from one subscriber to the next. In short, Netflix’s algorithms are extremely inefficient in a variety of circumstances, and that means they are wasting time and money building user profiles that don’t work.

What should they do then? What would be a more efficient means of building those user profiles? Netflix could work with us at TARTLE. They could go directly to subscribers and ask what it is that they would like to watch. Who their favorite actors and directors are. When do they watch? Do they prefer movies or series? Do they like their series dumped all at once or would they prefer a weekly schedule? Netflix could talk directly to its subscribers and get feedback directly from them and so build a far more accurate profile than any other method. This would be faster and cheaper and in the end far more financially rewarding. Which means they could spend that extra time and money making better content to draw in more subscribers. 

What’s your data worth? www.tartle.co

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth?

Find out at: https://tartle.co/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial

Spread the word!

Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” History of course can’t exactly repeat itself. There are too many variables at play that differentiate circumstances. However, those circumstances can still be similar. Because of that, we can still learn from the past, though we often don’t. A case in point is the similarity between various global monopolies and those of the robber barons in the later part of the 19th century. 

These men controlled vast swaths of the United States economy, giving them the ability to have a huge effect on national policy and to dictate their employees’ lives far beyond anything that most people in the Western world will have experienced. Not only would they use their large coffers to ‘lobby’ politicians, they would also buy out anyone who looked to be a competitive threat. One might reasonably point out that these start-up companies didn’t have to sell. Technically, that’s true. In reality, that underestimates the determination of the bigger companies. They would simply charge their potential rivals higher prices for goods or services they provided, or persuade their friends in business to do so. The pressure would become so great that it would sell out or go bankrupt. Should someone continue to resist, it could get ugly. Just go look into the way Edison harassed Tesla. Or the Pinkerton Detective Agency and its role in suppressing unions. 

There were of course the justly maligned company towns. While mostly associated with mining companies, there were a few variations on the theme. In their most well-known format, the company town was a place where the employees lived and bought most of their stuff. And everything was owned by the company. That meant rent was paid to the company, all of a family’s groceries, clothes, and anything else were all paid back to the company. Why couldn’t they buy their stuff elsewhere and break the cycle? Because the company didn’t pay them in cash, they paid them in vouchers or tokens that were only redeemable in the town. Other types of company towns would have certain lifestyle requirements like no drinking or smoking. Think of them as a forerunner of the modern Home Owners’ Association. 

Today, the tech companies look like they are in a similar position as the robber barons of old. They regularly buy out competition. In fact, it recently came out in a congressional hearing that the founders of Instagram felt the need to sell because they would get destroyed otherwise. Tech companies have worked together to censor pundits, governments, officials, even a sitting president. Whether you like the people censored or not, it sets a very dangerous precedent, especially when the same companies will do the bidding of China just for access behind the Great Firewall. 

And of course they can influence markets to an unprecedented degree. By controlling the flow of information and mining data they can swing the stock of whole industries just by what they allow to be said. Just look at the way Elon Musk can swing the price of Bitcoin or DogeCoin just with a tweet. 

There is also evidence that some of these companies are flirting with the idea of the company town again. Their vast sprawling campuses have a variety of services and amenities that make it tempting to basically stay right there. Some, like Facebook, are openly looking at getting into the realm of real estate. Then there are the more recent stories about Blackrock and other firms buying houses at ridiculous prices in Appalachia. The speculation is that they are intentionally pricing out the middle class and looking to force them to become permanent renters. That’s just one general store away from being a modern company town. 

Where will it all lead? It’s hard to say. We dodged a bullet in the robber baron days. It’s hard to say exactly why, but it seems likely that the various communist revolutions that swept Europe in the early twentieth century gave people a wake-up call to change a few things before the same happened here. Can we avoid the pitchforks again? Only time will tell.

What’s your sovereignty worth? www.tartle.co

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth?

Find out at: https://tartle.co/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial

Spread the word!

Mark Twain once said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” History of course can’t exactly repeat itself. There are too many variables at play that differentiate circumstances. However, those circumstances can still be similar. Because of that, we can still learn from the past, though we often don’t. A case in point is the similarity between various global monopolies and those of the robber barons in the later part of the 19th century. 

These men controlled vast swaths of the United States economy, giving them the ability to have a huge effect on national policy and to dictate their employees’ lives far beyond anything that most people in the Western world will have experienced. Not only would they use their large coffers to ‘lobby’ politicians, they would also buy out anyone who looked to be a competitive threat. One might reasonably point out that these start-up companies didn’t have to sell. Technically, that’s true. In reality, that underestimates the determination of the bigger companies. They would simply charge their potential rivals higher prices for goods or services they provided, or persuade their friends in business to do so. The pressure would become so great that it would sell out or go bankrupt. Should someone continue to resist, it could get ugly. Just go look into the way Edison harassed Tesla. Or the Pinkerton Detective Agency and its role in suppressing unions. 

There were of course the justly maligned company towns. While mostly associated with mining companies, there were a few variations on the theme. In their most well-known format, the company town was a place where the employees lived and bought most of their stuff. And everything was owned by the company. That meant rent was paid to the company, all of a family’s groceries, clothes, and anything else were all paid back to the company. Why couldn’t they buy their stuff elsewhere and break the cycle? Because the company didn’t pay them in cash, they paid them in vouchers or tokens that were only redeemable in the town. Other types of company towns would have certain lifestyle requirements like no drinking or smoking. Think of them as a forerunner of the modern Home Owners’ Association. 

Today, the tech companies look like they are in a similar position as the robber barons of old. They regularly buy out competition. In fact, it recently came out in a congressional hearing that the founders of Instagram felt the need to sell because they would get destroyed otherwise. Tech companies have worked together to censor pundits, governments, officials, even a sitting president. Whether you like the people censored or not, it sets a very dangerous precedent, especially when the same companies will do the bidding of China just for access behind the Great Firewall. 

And of course they can influence markets to an unprecedented degree. By controlling the flow of information and mining data they can swing the stock of whole industries just by what they allow to be said. Just look at the way Elon Musk can swing the price of Bitcoin or DogeCoin just with a tweet. 

There is also evidence that some of these companies are flirting with the idea of the company town again. Their vast sprawling campuses have a variety of services and amenities that make it tempting to basically stay right there. Some, like Facebook, are openly looking at getting into the realm of real estate. Then there are the more recent stories about Blackrock and other firms buying houses at ridiculous prices in Appalachia. The speculation is that they are intentionally pricing out the middle class and looking to force them to become permanent renters. That’s just one general store away from being a modern company town. 

Where will it all lead? It’s hard to say. We dodged a bullet in the robber baron days. It’s hard to say exactly why, but it seems likely that the various communist revolutions that swept Europe in the early twentieth century gave people a wake-up call to change a few things before the same happened here. Can we avoid the pitchforks again? Only time will tell.

What’s your sovereignty worth? www.tartle.co

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth?

Find out at: https://tartle.co/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial

Spread the word!

We have an innate capability to independently perform a wide variety of physical and mental functions. It’s hard-wired into our rules of our survival. However, this is not a perfect mechanism; we do have the ability to silently use language to process our lives, but we don’t really have an in-depth understanding of how it works just yet. 

This knowledge gap is what fuels the self-help industry, which has a wide variety of ideas and methods. Some are backed by scientific evidence, while others are manifested as a result of a strong placebo effect. Regardless of how these solutions are created, it’s clear that one’s mental state is key to making change happen.

So what’s it like inside our heads and how can we improve the way we converse with ourselves?

Ethan’s book, entitled Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It provides a welcome academic perspective on the power of that little voice in your head. He provides a refreshing take on how even the oft-overlooked act of talking to ourselves the inner dialogue has a science to it. that leads to obsession, overthinking, and rumination is broken down into chemicals and reactions in your brain. 

If you’ve ever found yourself obsessing over an issue that happened years ago, or staying up at night because you found yourself triggered by a passing memory, Ethan’s insights on how the immaterial manifests into material may be the key to reining those thoughts in and getting a good night’s sleep.

One common critique of the self-help industry is that most coaches and authors often sell placebos for negative ways of thinking. They cover up the problem instead of getting to the root of an idea. 

While Ethan concedes that placebos can have a powerful effect on one’s mental state, it can also prevent people from seeking the help they need to turn their life around. Mental wellbeing is an important aspect of adult life that may need attention. While his book is not a replacement for therapy, it does give people the opportunity to find sound scientific advice without having to shell out a lot on seeking psychiatric help, which can come at prohibitively high prices even with healthcare insurance.

Our inherent response to negative emotion is to avoid confrontation, or at least refrain from getting triggered. Unfortunately, negativity is an integral part of the authentic human experience. It’s the way we cope, or self-regulate, that’s the game-changer. When faced with a problem, we are challenged to pick between immediately trusting our guts, or holding back and letting it run its course first. 

We’ve all heard of how we need to trust our intuition; however, it’s not a foolproof method to solving all our conflicts. A better understanding of how our brain is wired to think—and how we wire our brains to think—can better help us distinguish between those two states.

Hindsight is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used for both good and bad. This idea of staying in the moment can be harmful because it encourages people to remain stagnant, and ignore opportunities to process important experiences.

The pressure to always stay in the moment also places restrictions on what your brain is really capable of. Your mind is constantly working on making calculations based on your past experiences, and translating it into forecasts for the future. In this way, it’s a lot like time traveling.

It’s easy to believe that our internal thought process won’t have an impact on our actions. However, the truth is that living in a constant state of harm or fear does not afford a good foundation for individuals to make good choices— not just for themselves, but also for others. 

A natural consequence of experiencing adversity is our attempt to look inward and try to analyze every facet of that event. While this may be done with the best intentions, it is all too easy to get stuck in negative thought loops; reliving the worst parts of the challenge in their head. This is a debilitating process which can quickly become a habit. 

Another aspect of this is that sadness becomes a familiar, and even a comfortable, state of being. The negative chatter is accustomed to highlighting the worst parts of our lived experience. As a result, our ability to process in a healthy way becomes affected. 

Cognitive bias is a quiet problem with a serious impact. It takes plenty of commitment for an individual to successfully change the way they think, feel, and behave about themselves despite outside pressure. 

Thankfully, Ethan points out plenty of ways for you to retrain your thinking. The key is to give yourself psychological space, or an opportunity to view yourself as another person struggling with their own unique problems. This is where the metaphorical fly on the wall idea comes in: if you’ve ever found it much easier to give advice than to follow it, distancing techniques are the key to internalizing these messages.  

Ethan and Chatter gave plenty of insight on how external divides may come from internal manifestations of unresolved emotion and cognitive bias. In a world where people are separated by a multitude of different beliefs, perspectives, and experiences, this discussion could be a step forward to more open dialogues—especially when people begin with themselves. www.tartle.co

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth?

Find out at: https://tartle.co/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial

Spread the word!

We have an innate capability to independently perform a wide variety of physical and mental functions. It’s hard-wired into our rules of our survival. However, this is not a perfect mechanism; we do have the ability to silently use language to process our lives, but we don’t really have an in-depth understanding of how it works just yet. 

This knowledge gap is what fuels the self-help industry, which has a wide variety of ideas and methods. Some are backed by scientific evidence, while others are manifested as a result of a strong placebo effect. Regardless of how these solutions are created, it’s clear that one’s mental state is key to making change happen.

So what’s it like inside our heads and how can we improve the way we converse with ourselves?

Ethan’s book, entitled Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It provides a welcome academic perspective on the power of that little voice in your head. He provides a refreshing take on how even the oft-overlooked act of talking to ourselves the inner dialogue has a science to it. that leads to obsession, overthinking, and rumination is broken down into chemicals and reactions in your brain. 

If you’ve ever found yourself obsessing over an issue that happened years ago, or staying up at night because you found yourself triggered by a passing memory, Ethan’s insights on how the immaterial manifests into material may be the key to reining those thoughts in and getting a good night’s sleep.

One common critique of the self-help industry is that most coaches and authors often sell placebos for negative ways of thinking. They cover up the problem instead of getting to the root of an idea. 

While Ethan concedes that placebos can have a powerful effect on one’s mental state, it can also prevent people from seeking the help they need to turn their life around. Mental wellbeing is an important aspect of adult life that may need attention. While his book is not a replacement for therapy, it does give people the opportunity to find sound scientific advice without having to shell out a lot on seeking psychiatric help, which can come at prohibitively high prices even with healthcare insurance.

Our inherent response to negative emotion is to avoid confrontation, or at least refrain from getting triggered. Unfortunately, negativity is an integral part of the authentic human experience. It’s the way we cope, or self-regulate, that’s the game-changer. When faced with a problem, we are challenged to pick between immediately trusting our guts, or holding back and letting it run its course first. 

We’ve all heard of how we need to trust our intuition; however, it’s not a foolproof method to solving all our conflicts. A better understanding of how our brain is wired to think—and how we wire our brains to think—can better help us distinguish between those two states.

Hindsight is an incredibly powerful tool that can be used for both good and bad. This idea of staying in the moment can be harmful because it encourages people to remain stagnant, and ignore opportunities to process important experiences.

The pressure to always stay in the moment also places restrictions on what your brain is really capable of. Your mind is constantly working on making calculations based on your past experiences, and translating it into forecasts for the future. In this way, it’s a lot like time traveling.

It’s easy to believe that our internal thought process won’t have an impact on our actions. However, the truth is that living in a constant state of harm or fear does not afford a good foundation for individuals to make good choices— not just for themselves, but also for others. 

A natural consequence of experiencing adversity is our attempt to look inward and try to analyze every facet of that event. While this may be done with the best intentions, it is all too easy to get stuck in negative thought loops; reliving the worst parts of the challenge in their head. This is a debilitating process which can quickly become a habit. 

Another aspect of this is that sadness becomes a familiar, and even a comfortable, state of being. The negative chatter is accustomed to highlighting the worst parts of our lived experience. As a result, our ability to process in a healthy way becomes affected. 

Cognitive bias is a quiet problem with a serious impact. It takes plenty of commitment for an individual to successfully change the way they think, feel, and behave about themselves despite outside pressure. 

Thankfully, Ethan points out plenty of ways for you to retrain your thinking. The key is to give yourself psychological space, or an opportunity to view yourself as another person struggling with their own unique problems. This is where the metaphorical fly on the wall idea comes in: if you’ve ever found it much easier to give advice than to follow it, distancing techniques are the key to internalizing these messages.  

Ethan and Chatter gave plenty of insight on how external divides may come from internal manifestations of unresolved emotion and cognitive bias. In a world where people are separated by a multitude of different beliefs, perspectives, and experiences, this discussion could be a step forward to more open dialogues—especially when people begin with themselves. www.tartle.co

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth?

Find out at: https://tartle.co/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial

Spread the word!

One central aspect in Linda’s career is the importance of data analytics. When it comes to data as an asset, plenty of different entities can claim ownership to it: financial institutions, vendors, banks, and even the government. With so much data going around, it’s important to know where the data is coming from, how to process it into useful information, and how it can be centralized in a way that it can be used by more parties in more projects.

The finance sector is working on capturing processes of knowledge into analytical models. As data enters these models, technology can work on computing this information and laying out analyses for us in a more efficient manner. This gives two benefits: first, the process of computing this information is not lost. Second, computing is done more efficiently. There is no need to return to square one when a longtime employee vacates a position.

Here, Linda makes several parallels between retail and finance using labels for canned goods as an example. Due to incredibly small margins in retail, it’s important for canned goods to be transparent about the content and process involved in making this product. This is because it serves as their competitive edge. 

If financial institutions were also as concerned about being transparent, then it would make maneuvering financial markets more efficient. According to Linda, the biggest problem that financial institutions had when dealing with the crash of Wall Street was in being able to uniquely identify institutions. When the Lehman brothers crashed, she described everyone to have “held their breath for about 48 hours while transactions settled, because nobody knew who all of the subsidiaries of Lehman were and they didn’t know how to uniquely identify.”

With such a catastrophic experience institutions can and should learn from, she is optimistic that the benefits of data standards will be observed and acknowledged by institutions.

Linda perceives her previous work on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve as similar to being a medic.

“I was the medic who, once the wounding was happening and people were like, hey, I need to find out this piece of information. And then we would figure out how to cobble some stuff together, look at things in a different way or produce some different sets of information. It was absolutely fascinating,” she explained.

In efforts to learn from the collapse of the Lehman brothers and ensure that it does not happen again, big banks are investing plenty of money in data management infrastructure so that they can get precise and accurate reporting on where they stand. This faster and more efficient flow of data can help financial institutions preemptively deal with ebbs and flows in the market, instead of scrambling to react.

When working on the projects, Linda noticed that her team members had to take data from several different databases before they could piece together a clear picture of the companies they needed to look at and the identifiers they needed to study. 

This inspired her to create an integrated database where all government and vendor data, their unique identifiers, and the legal entity identifier were stored. From stock prices to bond prices and financial statement information, this served as a reusable launching point for future projects that everybody in the organization could access.

It allows individuals to free up more time working on different aspects of future projects, which makes the entire process more efficient, resources more available, and human labor more open to higher-tier aspects of work such as algorithms. This is called the economies of scale.

That’s three benefits: resource efficiency, economies of scale, and ready to deploy at any time. 

One challenge of implementing this change is convincing people to change their mindset from making sure that they get the task done in the easiest, most efficient way for themselves; to finding ways to get the task done while giving the next people who will be using this data the opportunity to use it in the most efficient way — even if it can be a bigger challenge upfront. 

It’s encouraging people to look beyond merely making unique personal identifiers to data sets so that they can get the job done instead of finding a standardized identifier for the information and then applying it. 

“It's taking the larger view of things, of how do I make things more efficient for the entire ecosystem, so that we can do things that we currently can't do at all?” Linda asks.

According to Linda, it’s human nature to get excited about big and lofty goals like machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, the root of any successful and sustainable effort is found in learning how to target and harness one’s data.

While achieving enlightenment in finance is possible, it would be difficult for people and businesses to scale the process effectively because they have to start from square one every single time. 

So, when you think of the data you handle and how it can be a part of something greater with a little extra effort upfront — how much is your data worth? www.tartle.co

Data Transparency, Finance, and Governance with Linda Powell, Global Head of Data Strategy, Governance, and End User Computing at Citibank by TARTLE is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth?

Find out at: https://tartle.co/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial

Spread the word!

One central aspect in Linda’s career is the importance of data analytics. When it comes to data as an asset, plenty of different entities can claim ownership to it: financial institutions, vendors, banks, and even the government. With so much data going around, it’s important to know where the data is coming from, how to process it into useful information, and how it can be centralized in a way that it can be used by more parties in more projects.

The finance sector is working on capturing processes of knowledge into analytical models. As data enters these models, technology can work on computing this information and laying out analyses for us in a more efficient manner. This gives two benefits: first, the process of computing this information is not lost. Second, computing is done more efficiently. There is no need to return to square one when a longtime employee vacates a position.

Here, Linda makes several parallels between retail and finance using labels for canned goods as an example. Due to incredibly small margins in retail, it’s important for canned goods to be transparent about the content and process involved in making this product. This is because it serves as their competitive edge. 

If financial institutions were also as concerned about being transparent, then it would make maneuvering financial markets more efficient. According to Linda, the biggest problem that financial institutions had when dealing with the crash of Wall Street was in being able to uniquely identify institutions. When the Lehman brothers crashed, she described everyone to have “held their breath for about 48 hours while transactions settled, because nobody knew who all of the subsidiaries of Lehman were and they didn’t know how to uniquely identify.”

With such a catastrophic experience institutions can and should learn from, she is optimistic that the benefits of data standards will be observed and acknowledged by institutions.

Linda perceives her previous work on the board of governors of the Federal Reserve as similar to being a medic.

“I was the medic who, once the wounding was happening and people were like, hey, I need to find out this piece of information. And then we would figure out how to cobble some stuff together, look at things in a different way or produce some different sets of information. It was absolutely fascinating,” she explained.

In efforts to learn from the collapse of the Lehman brothers and ensure that it does not happen again, big banks are investing plenty of money in data management infrastructure so that they can get precise and accurate reporting on where they stand. This faster and more efficient flow of data can help financial institutions preemptively deal with ebbs and flows in the market, instead of scrambling to react.

When working on the projects, Linda noticed that her team members had to take data from several different databases before they could piece together a clear picture of the companies they needed to look at and the identifiers they needed to study. 

This inspired her to create an integrated database where all government and vendor data, their unique identifiers, and the legal entity identifier were stored. From stock prices to bond prices and financial statement information, this served as a reusable launching point for future projects that everybody in the organization could access.

It allows individuals to free up more time working on different aspects of future projects, which makes the entire process more efficient, resources more available, and human labor more open to higher-tier aspects of work such as algorithms. This is called the economies of scale.

That’s three benefits: resource efficiency, economies of scale, and ready to deploy at any time. 

One challenge of implementing this change is convincing people to change their mindset from making sure that they get the task done in the easiest, most efficient way for themselves; to finding ways to get the task done while giving the next people who will be using this data the opportunity to use it in the most efficient way — even if it can be a bigger challenge upfront. 

It’s encouraging people to look beyond merely making unique personal identifiers to data sets so that they can get the job done instead of finding a standardized identifier for the information and then applying it. 

“It's taking the larger view of things, of how do I make things more efficient for the entire ecosystem, so that we can do things that we currently can't do at all?” Linda asks.

According to Linda, it’s human nature to get excited about big and lofty goals like machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, the root of any successful and sustainable effort is found in learning how to target and harness one’s data.

While achieving enlightenment in finance is possible, it would be difficult for people and businesses to scale the process effectively because they have to start from square one every single time. 

So, when you think of the data you handle and how it can be a part of something greater with a little extra effort upfront — how much is your data worth? www.tartle.co

Data Transparency, Finance, and Governance with Linda Powell, Global Head of Data Strategy, Governance, and End User Computing at Citibank by TARTLE is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth?

Find out at: https://tartle.co/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/

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Hot on the heels of our last article seems like a good time to think just a bit more about FOMO and its effects and how it is often used against us. For those just jumping in, FOMO is the Fear of Missing Out, a sense of anxiety that comes from being aware of or even just thinking there are cool things happening that you aren’t a part of. It’s fear that you are being left out and left behind by everyone around you. Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby discussed it in depth with the person who coined the term, Patrick McGinnis. I highly recommend you head over to T-Cast to check it out. 

FOMO is normally associated with social media but it certainly exists outside of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. FOMO in a sense is just another term for good old-fashioned peer pressure. If you think everyone is going to a party every weekend, you naturally think you should too. If you don’t you’re missing out and if you are worried about what people think about you (and let’s be honest, pretty much everyone does to some degree) then that will cause some anxiety. So most people will go out for some heavy drinking every night on the weekends. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good beer or whisky but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Indulging too much will not only lead to you doing a bunch of stuff you might not remember the next day, it also means you will likely need a couple of days to fully recover and be productive again. 

Chris Williamson, podcast host and motivational speaker was in a similar cycle when he realized that he was wasting a lot of time. He made the choice to quit drinking for a thousand days and upped his productivity by orders of magnitude, just by not giving in to the pull of the crowd, by not giving in to FOMO. It allowed him to stop and think about what he wanted to do, independent of everyone else. Suddenly, Chris had the freedom to exclude himself and be happy with that. 

Those kinds of situations are also exacerbated by social media. People post pictures of themselves having a great time day after day but never post the aftermath. They leave out the puking in the toilet, the crashed car, the stressing over bills, and everything else. It’s a distorted view of reality and a lot more people should probably take the Williamson route and step away a bit. 

Plenty of companies naturally make use of FOMO. Nearly every ad for every product or service is built on making you think you need something to be cool. Every cigarette ad back in the day had some ridiculously good-looking model taking a nice long drag on a lung dart. It was designed to make you think all the cool kids were doing it. It’s not much different from anything else, they want to get your attention and FOMO is an incredibly powerful tool for making that happen. 

Even if you don’t quite fit into the algorithms they will still be gunning for your attention and your wallet. It isn’t like the marketers stop sending you ads, they just spam you with random stuff until you click on something. Suddenly the algorithm has a hook and you might just find yourself with more ads related to that one thing. They’re trying to draw you into the way they see the world and get you to spend your money and time on what they want. 

How do you fight that? You realize what is happening, that these companies, while useful, are not your friend. They don’t want to be, they just want you to think so. Realizing what is going on enables you to make a choice, then change your behaviors and step away from the crowd, to choose your own path with your money, your data, and your time. 

What is your sovereignty worth? www.tartle.co

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth?

Find out at: https://tartle.co/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial

Spread the word!

Hot on the heels of our last article seems like a good time to think just a bit more about FOMO and its effects and how it is often used against us. For those just jumping in, FOMO is the Fear of Missing Out, a sense of anxiety that comes from being aware of or even just thinking there are cool things happening that you aren’t a part of. It’s fear that you are being left out and left behind by everyone around you. Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby discussed it in depth with the person who coined the term, Patrick McGinnis. I highly recommend you head over to T-Cast to check it out. 

FOMO is normally associated with social media but it certainly exists outside of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. FOMO in a sense is just another term for good old-fashioned peer pressure. If you think everyone is going to a party every weekend, you naturally think you should too. If you don’t you’re missing out and if you are worried about what people think about you (and let’s be honest, pretty much everyone does to some degree) then that will cause some anxiety. So most people will go out for some heavy drinking every night on the weekends. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good beer or whisky but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Indulging too much will not only lead to you doing a bunch of stuff you might not remember the next day, it also means you will likely need a couple of days to fully recover and be productive again. 

Chris Williamson, podcast host and motivational speaker was in a similar cycle when he realized that he was wasting a lot of time. He made the choice to quit drinking for a thousand days and upped his productivity by orders of magnitude, just by not giving in to the pull of the crowd, by not giving in to FOMO. It allowed him to stop and think about what he wanted to do, independent of everyone else. Suddenly, Chris had the freedom to exclude himself and be happy with that. 

Those kinds of situations are also exacerbated by social media. People post pictures of themselves having a great time day after day but never post the aftermath. They leave out the puking in the toilet, the crashed car, the stressing over bills, and everything else. It’s a distorted view of reality and a lot more people should probably take the Williamson route and step away a bit. 

Plenty of companies naturally make use of FOMO. Nearly every ad for every product or service is built on making you think you need something to be cool. Every cigarette ad back in the day had some ridiculously good-looking model taking a nice long drag on a lung dart. It was designed to make you think all the cool kids were doing it. It’s not much different from anything else, they want to get your attention and FOMO is an incredibly powerful tool for making that happen. 

Even if you don’t quite fit into the algorithms they will still be gunning for your attention and your wallet. It isn’t like the marketers stop sending you ads, they just spam you with random stuff until you click on something. Suddenly the algorithm has a hook and you might just find yourself with more ads related to that one thing. They’re trying to draw you into the way they see the world and get you to spend your money and time on what they want. 

How do you fight that? You realize what is happening, that these companies, while useful, are not your friend. They don’t want to be, they just want you to think so. Realizing what is going on enables you to make a choice, then change your behaviors and step away from the crowd, to choose your own path with your money, your data, and your time. 

What is your sovereignty worth? www.tartle.co

Tcast is brought to you by TARTLE. A global personal data marketplace that allows users to sell their personal information anonymously when they want to, while allowing buyers to access clean ready to analyze data sets on digital identities from all across the globe.

The show is hosted by Co-Founder and Source Data Pioneer Alexander McCaig and Head of Conscious Marketing Jason Rigby.

What's your data worth?

Find out at: https://tartle.co/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/TARTLE

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TARTLEofficial/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tartle_official/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TARTLEofficial

Spread the word!