Data-Mining

    In an Associated Press article about Aug. 18, 2012, Evan Vucci and Judith Ausuebel criticize Presidential Candidate Romney, with the following headline. "AP Exclusive: Romney uses secretive data-mining".

    Notice the choice of wording in the above headline. "Exclusive" implies that this is something special; perhaps unknown by others and possibly dishonest. "Romney" is the object of disdain. "Uses" implies some sort of abuse. Secretive conveys the idea that something (possibly objectionable) has been hidden. "Data-mining" is a newly developed term, which in context with the previous words, implies that Romney is using some sort of devious device.

    The article goes on to say, "The unprecedented success of Romney to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in the costliest presidential race ever can be traced in part to a secretive data-mining project that sifts through Americans’ personal information _ including their purchasing history and church attendance _ to identify new and likely, wealthy donors."

    With that said and Romney now well castigated by innuendo, let's go on to see what anonymous CJ has to say about "data-mining" and determine whether that changes the picture.

    "We are now learning that the Romney campaign indulges in data mining. Just think about that. Almost everyone does it when they query a search engine such as Google.
    Back when I was raising money for the Chemical Engineering Department at the University of Illinois, we used whatever data bases were available to identify graduates who had done well in their careers and also to identify those who were highly placed in corporations. Obviously this permitted us to focus our fund raising activities on the most likely individuals and companies.

    That was data mining, but it was not called that at the time.
    If you were running the Romney campaign, would you not use data mining to identify the most likely major donors to your campaign and to identify voting groups that should be approached? Of course you would. It would be foolish not to use every tool available to foster the campaign.
    By the way, you can be certain that the Obama campaign is using data mining as much as possible. There is nothing sinister or wrong with that. However, as usual, the Obama campaign is preying on what they perceive as the stupidity of some voters.
    I am sure that you are not among them."