Google plans solar energy to offset Alabama, Tennessee data centers
To ensure that electricity used by their new data centers in Alabama and Tennessee is matched 100 percent by renewable energy, Google has announced plans to purchase the output from two new solar farms. “Located in Hollywood, Alabama and Yum Yum, Tennessee, the two biggest solar farms will be able to produce around 150 megawatts each,” Amanda Corio, Google’s Senior Lead of Energy and Infrastructure wrote in a blog post. “These solar sites will be among the largest renewable energy projects in the Tennessee Valley region, and the largest solar farms ever to be built for Google. Thanks to the abundant solar power generated by these new farms, electricity consumed by our data centers in Tennessee and Alabama will be matched with 100 percent renewable energy from day one, helping us match our annual electricity consumption as we grow.” Data Center Dynamics reports that google has invested nearly $5 billion in renewable energy with more than 30 long-term contracts. The Alabama solar farm will be in Hollywood near Scottsboro and the data center, expected to be online later this year, will be near Huntsville.
Rauf Bolden: Finding out what residents want in Orange Beach
Without sophisticated polling and surveys to guide decision making our cities will become intellectually bankrupt, and politically rudderless in a sea of data. The constant purr of good news from City Hall has yielded an imaginary hashtag, #NoPublicData, where the wildfires of rumors can only be quelled with real proof. Orange Beach should be the data-mining leader in Baldwin County, shirking from its role does not do anyone any good. Customer-service surveys are not tealeaves suggesting harmony. They are an easy way to get feedback from residents, having a link on the website for “Take Our Survey”, allowing survey designers to change the survey monthly, gathering different sorts of information. Orange Beach is already paying for Google and Seamless Forms. Both are built for data collection. These are not your only options. Survey Monkey, PollDaddy, SurveyGizmo, Zoho Survey, LimeSurvey, and SurveyLegend are all free, with restrictions. The reasons for improving customer service are real. Collected data can target the needs of a city’s constituents, utilizing taxpayer dollars in the most productive way instead of assuming people want to give government the keys to the castle, and constituents won’t ask too many questions. What do you want out of the survey? Here are sample questions from Survey Monkey: How likely is it that you would recommend this city to a friend or colleague? Overall how satisfied or dissatisfied are you with our city? Which of the following words would you use to describe our city? How well did our city meet your needs? How would you rate the quality of your experience in our city? How would you rate the value for money of our city? How responsive have we been to your questions about our city? How long have you been visiting our city? How likely are you to visit our city again? Do you have any other comments, questions, or concerns? The questions above target general-customer satisfaction, but they can be focused, and applied to issues like short-term rentals in residential areas, the need for a hospital, public safety improvements, or what trees to plant in the beach median. Now that you have collected lots of data, the results need to be collated. Seamless Forms has a built-in engine for evaluating data. Google’s Cloud Machine Learning (search “Google cloud machine learning”) is free for testing on a project like the 56 video-surveillance cameras at the Art Center, analyzing video feeds and facial recognition, understanding how people use the facility. Privacy is certainly going to be a talking point. “Online surveyors commit multiple violations of physical, informational, and psychological privacy that can be more intense than those found in conventional survey methods. Internet surveys also invade the interactional privacy of online communities, a form of privacy invasion seldom encountered with traditional survey methods,” according to Social Science Computer Review. Squaring the circle with privacy is important. The City of Orange Beach’s privacy policy outlines how they will secure your information like name, email, telephone number, family members, home address, SSN and direct-payment info. DIY surveys don’t produce reliable results. “Employees and their relationship with your company are different from your customers and their relationship with your company,” according to InfoSurv a marketing-research firm. Raw data is often skewed in DIY surveys. Orange Beach conducted one DIY Survey in 2015, yielding the following results from 1,424 residents: 5.76% completely satisfied; 36.80% mostly satisfied; 26.19% were neutral; 23.74% mostly dissatisfied; 7.51% dissatisfied, according to this survey’s designer. It looks as though 36 out of every 100 people living in Orange Beach are mostly satisfied. In contrast, Pensacola is reporting a 77% satisfaction rate, according to the Pensacola News Journal. Obviously numerical analysis is not enough. Other techniques must be applied to make sense of human behavior in big datasets. We can provide better data for our businesses, residents, and visitors, simply applying technologies that are within our grasp, and making the data public for topics like business-owner satisfaction, rating the quality of the beach, flood-insurance pricing, traffic statistics, and employee contentment. These data give constituents a better understanding of what is going on under the hood. Orange Beach should be the data-mining leader in Baldwin County, shirking from its role does not do anyone any good. ••• Rauf Bolden is retired IT Director at the City of Orange Beach, working as an IT & Web Consultant on the Beach Road. He can be reached at: publisher@velvetillusion.com.
On cutting-edge voter data, Donald Trump critically behind Hillary Clinton
Donald Trump trails Hillary Clinton by months, even years, in using fast-evolving digital campaigning to win over voters, data specialists working with the GOP say. The presumptive Republican presidential nominee has dismissed the science that defines 21st-century political campaigns, a tool that President Barack Obama used effectively in winning two terms and the Clinton campaign has worked on for nearly a year. And while it is too early to tell whether the late start signals trouble for Trump, it illustrates the difference between Trump’s proudly outsider campaign and the institutional knowledge within Clinton’s. “She’s been able to prepare a general election campaign since the beginning,” said Alex Lundry, former senior technology adviser to Mitt Romney‘s 2012 Republican presidential campaign. “That head start in terms of time is extraordinarily valuable.” Precision digital marketing data, a person’s online footprints, have become an electoral science that Democrats have dominated, and Republicans have chased, for a decade. Campaigns used the data at first simply to track supporters. The information now guides a range of decisions, like the types and volume of advertising, where to deploy campaign staff to mobilize voters and where a candidate should visit. Trump’s team has been unclear about its use of data in the general election. Trump told The Associated Press this month the tool was “overrated” and he planned “limited” data use during the general election, though his campaign has worked with firms and a small in-house staff to track voters during the primaries. Later, senior adviser Rick Wiley, who was hired in April, suggested Trump would run a “state of the art” campaign and use data strategically, relying on Trump’s own list of supporters, the Republican National Committee’s voter list and a data service financed largely by the RNC called Data Trust. “All of the data points — whatever they are — our ability to harvest that data is invaluable,” said Wiley, the RNC’s former executive director. He has since left the campaign, after what a source close to the matter said were disagreements with Trump loyalists about who should lead campaign efforts in key states. The person spoke on condition of anonymity, lacking authorization to discuss internal campaign matters publicly. Given how Republicans have long trailed Democrats in digital campaigning, Trump’s grudging talk and Wiley’s departure hardly signal a rush to catch up. Trump spent more than $1 million in April on campaign paraphernalia like caps, T-shirts and signs. Even as he was effectively seizing the nomination, he spent less than a third of that amount on data and related functions such as telemarketing. Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign revolutionized the way technology could be used to identify and keep track of supporters who attended his campaign events and gave money to his candidacy. In 2012, Obama’s re-election campaign profiled potential voters by monitoring what online, mobile, reading and shopping choices they made. The data helped them project election outcomes based on advertising decisions in specific markets aimed at select voter types. Obama’s 2012 re-election was viewed as a breakthrough in the political application of what had been a commercial tool, while Romney’s own data effort started late, was more limited in scope and ultimately crashed. Clinton’s campaign has been collecting data since she announced her candidacy 11 months ago. Elan Kriegel, an analytics director for Obama in 2012, now heads Clinton’s analytics team. And, Jeremy Bird, credited with using the data in 2012 for decision-making that preceded the president’s re-election, is advising the Clinton campaign. Kriegel said the nearly yearlong preparation has allowed his team to build intricate voter turnout models aimed at predicting voter behavior, especially in potential swing states. “If you weren’t doing it several months ago, then you really are starting from scratch,” Kriegel said. Trump’s challenge may be even more difficult, said Andy Burkett, the Republican National Committee’s former chief technology officer. As the party’s nominee, Trump will have full use of the committee’s data program, in which it has invested heavily in recent years. Still, capitalizing on that resource will require Trump’s campaign to view data as central to its bid — and to put its own money behind it to tailor the data to preferences related to would-be Trump voters. The Republican National Committee has recently added data scientists to its staff to assist with the general election. Also, an RNC data specialist first began working directly with the Trump campaign this month. But it takes time to turn raw data into meaningful models, Barkett said. “It would take them six months to build and integrate the systems,” said Barkett, who advised Jeb Bush’s GOP primary campaign. The election is in five months. Republished with permission of The Associated Press.
