data mining

Yet another reputation management service strives to help you get a handle on how you look on the Web. But Intelius's TrueRep is a work in progress at best.

We’ve all had our youthful indiscretions. That time you “borrowed” dad’s car without asking and wrapped it around a pole. The time you drank too much at your friend’s wedding and puked all over the bridegroom’s shoes. The day you signed up for a MySpace account.

Under orders to reduce prison overcrowding, California released 10,000 inmates using a program to rate their risk of violence, using a database missing most of the relevant data.

When is that hottie finally going to dump that loser and hook up someone who can truly appreciate her? 

Everywhere you go on the Web, you leave breadcrumbs behind -- a comment here, a "like" there, a tweet, and so on.� Those tracks may one day come back to haunt you.

Using a social network is like having lunch once a month with an old friend. It’s not exciting, exactly, but it’s pleasantly predictable. You know what to expect. Then one day she shows up with a nose job.

The basic premise of Benford's Law is that certain leading digits in any random set of data will appear in a specific non-uniform manner or in a certain frequency -- anything that is outside that frequency indicates a non-compliant anomaly. There are some great tools out there that can let you apply Benford's Law to your data, including Microsoft Excel.