Combatting Digital Falsehoods Through Coverage Maps
An intriguing approach to combating digital falsehoods is the creation of coverage maps that capture where a claim first appeared,…
Social Media Killed Our Offline Privacy Too
Social media has led to the loss of privacy in the offline world, as historical norms around privacy and respect…
We Must Recognize That A Lot Of Data Science Comes From Teams Not Individuals
What will it take for the public and press to begin seeing data science as the teamwork it typically is?…
Social Versus News Media And Detecting The Present Versus Forecasting The Future
Social media monitoring represents detection rather than forecasting, but more sophisticated analysis of news content opens the door to true…
Editorialized Language Imperils Trust in Fact-Checking
When it comes to improving fact-checking, most of the focus tends to be on how fact checkers select the claims…
Targeted Ads Reinforce Bias By Seeing Only A Slice Of Our Lives
Can targeted advertising ever be minimally biased or does its very existence reinforce the harmful stereotypes that damage society? Read…
As Deep Learning Comes For Medicine How Do We Work Around Its Brittleness?
As hospitals undergo the same AI revolution affecting other fields, the dangers of AI bias and errors and life-or-death consequences…
Is It Time To Regulate Biased And Harmful Stereotypes In Social Media Ads?
Based on narrow slices of our lives and faulty data that can be upwards of three-quarters wrong, the ads that…
Facebook's Content Moderators As Modern Coal Miners
Our modern-day coal miners are unfortunately doomed to work themselves into early deaths until the coming AI revolution can replace…
Is Social Media Simply Too Sick And Depraved To Continue?
The Verge’s latest expose on the inhuman working conditions of Facebook’s content moderators sheds light once again on the depravity…
Ransomware Highlights The Vulnerabilities Of Aging City IT
In the past, aging infrastructure simply meant cumbersome, painful, slow and error-prone interactions with city government. Increasingly, those obsolete systems…
Could Web Archives Serve As Canonical Online Imagery Archives To Combat Deep Fakes?
One of the few approaches to combating digital manipulation that requires no fancy or fragile algorithms is the reincorporation of…
The Right To Unplug And Silence The World
The Web brought the chaotic cacophony of the entire world to our doorsteps. Perhaps the killer app of tomorrow will…
Are Smartphone Dashboards Misleading Us?
Smartphone's limited interfaces, tiny screens and brief moments of our attention has encouraged app developers to present their information in…
Our Smart Devices Should Warn Us About Cyberattacks And Data Reuse
Should smart devices should be required to provide greater awareness to their users of security and privacy issues? Read The…
Fighting Deep Fakes Through Cellular Verification
As deep fakes increasingly compete with legitimate imagery in the informational ecosystem, it is increasingly difficult to determine whether a…
Do Instagram's Ads Reinforce Harmful Stereotypes?
As society is becoming more aware of the dangers of sexist stereotypes and the immense harm such imagery can have…
App And Device Development Today Is About Data Collection
Listen to the investor pitch of any new startup today building the next big digital app or device and chances…
Is Social Media's Toxicity Because Of The Web's Shift From Enlightenment To Entertainment?
Could the key to the Web’s salvation lie in a return to enlightenment? Read The Full Article.
Are Behaviorally Targeted And Interest-Based Ads Really As Powerful As We Claim?
The modern ad-supported Web is built upon the idea that behaviorally-targeted and interest-based ads are vastly superior. There are growing…
Much Of Our Government Digital Surveillance Is Outsourced To Private Companies
From acquiring and managing the vast datasets recording our daily lives to providing analytic software and services on top of…
The Importance Of Canary Ads For Social Media Analytics
Specially crafted social media ads known as ‘canary ads’ can be used to assess baseline platform changes, ad selector deviations…
Sometimes Data Science Is Not About Giving Answers Its About Asking Better Questions
Rather than acting as false evangelists perpetuating misleading stereotypes, data scientists would do better to clearly communicate the risk and…
Data Scientists Need To Get Better About Communicating Uncertainty And Risk In Their Results
As the corporate and governmental decision-making process is increasingly data-driven, data scientists must learn how to better communicate risk and…