Category: Uncategorized
Are Our Intelligence Agencies Getting The Wrong Advice?
As even our most austere institutions buy into the hype and hyperbole of the “big data” era, it may simply…
Data Science Is Now Bigger Than 'Big Data'
In a world in which “big data” and “data science” seem to adorn every technology-related news article and social media…
What Will Replace The Fading Hashtag?
The hashtag appears to have emerged on Twitter as a response of the shift from conversation to sharing, but as…
Does Twitter's Decline Mean The End Of The Global Town Square?
Twitter has shrunk almost in half, shed its vaunted geotagged resolution, centralized around an ever-older set of elite accounts and…
Facebook's Deletion Of Warren's Ad Reminds Us It Can Silence Debate About Itself
We must confront the most existential question of the digital age: has Facebook grown so powerful that it is now…
Social Media Isn't Faster Or Better Than The News
In a world in which data is increasingly seen as a bulwark against misinformation, perhaps we should spend a bit…
Global Mass Surveillance And How Facebook's Private Army Is Militarizing Our Data
In our rush to livestream our lives into Facebook’s walled garden, we are signing away the rights to our privacy,…
It Turns Out We've Been Concerned About Facebook's Privacy Since The Beginning
Is our conversation about Facebook and privacy something new, born of the Cambridge Analytica scandal or did the events of…
Deep Learning-Powered 'Fake Faces' Will Transform Catfishing
As deep learning approaches increasingly allow the creation of entirely artificial faces and voices, we are fast approaching an era…
Our Digital Revolution Is Making Our Past Ever More Fragile And Destroying Our Trust In Information
The rise of the digital era has contradictorily both made it easier to preserve the past and easier to falsify…
Do We Even Care What Our Data Says Anymore?
If our data mattered, we would be spending the time to understand it and adjusting our methodologies and research agendas…
The Shift From Open Source To Commercial Data Analytics Is Placing Cost Over Accuracy
As data science matures, we need to carefully balance the convenient opacity of turnkey analytics platforms with the more complex…
Could Venezuela's Power Outage Really Be A Cyber Attack?
While the reality is that Venezuela’s blackout this week was most likely due to chronic underfunding of its electrical infrastructure…
Cohen, Not Trump, Dominated Coverage Last Month
February was a busy month in Washington. President Trump’s summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and the testimony…
Why We Need To Encourage Replication And Data Description Studies
If we don’t start spending more time actually understanding our data, we will increasingly undermine the house of cards upon…
How Streaming Is Bringing Us Closer To 1984's Memory Hole
As we increasingly shift towards streaming and e-books, that externalization of information and centralization to an ever-smaller number of streaming…
How Data Science Became About Chasing Fads Instead Of Delivering Insight
How is it then that over almost seven years all of our statisticians, programmers, disciplinary experts and other data scientists…
Was The Era Of 'Big Data' Social Media Based on False Hype?
The public narrative has been that social media embodied "big data," holding some of the largest datasets in the world…
Twitter Users Mostly Retweet Politicians And Celebrities. That's A Big Change.
Kalev's summary for the Washington Post's Monkey Cage offers an overview of some of the biggest findings of Twitter's evolution…
Zuckerberg's Privacy Vision Is Nothing More Than Misdirection
Mark Zuckerberg's grand privacy manifesto appears to be nothing more than a masterful work of marketing misdirection at a time…
How Data Scientists Turned Against Statistics
Our great leap into the world of data has come with a giant leap of faith that the core tenets…
Twitter Reminds Us How Much Of The World Is Absent From Geotagged Social Media
The siren song of GPS-tagged social media has led us to artificially narrow our focus to the parts of the…
The Era Of Precision Mapping Of Social Media Is Coming To An End
It turns out that the grand vision of mapping GPS-tagged tweets was based on an assumption that proved false and…
Twitter Reminds Us That We Still Care About Our Location Privacy
In a world in which our cell companies sell our realtime locations for profit and Facebook stalks select users to…