Rather than write out a long post today I wanted to link to a bunch of interesting data related developments:

1. IBM Watson released five new services to its developer cloud - Speech to text, text to speech, visual recognition, concept insights, and tradeoff analytics. There are some fun mini-demos on the website but if you want to take advantage of visual recognition today one of the cool things you can do is upload a photo set to your Google Drive and search for unlabled images using text descriptions.

2. The White House released an interim big data and privacy report

3. Lex Machina is using data and machine learning to help companies win lawsuits - This software uses data from litigation to help attorneys ascertain what the most effective litigation strategies are. I think software like this can give new attorneys a leg up against more experienced attorneys who instinctively build this knowledge base over time.

4. Planet Money investigated Amazon Mechanical Turk - If you need a large volume of data entered inexpensively then Amazon mechanical turk is probably the best solution. However many of the workers are not making much money from it.