Could AI Replace Hollywood With Personalized Movies?
As AI increasingly helps us sort through our limitless options, might there be a day when movies and television shows,…
As Surveys Falter Big Data Polling Narrows Our Societal Understanding
The shift of societal understanding from precision surveys to the big data revolution has led not to an incredible new…
Facial Recognition Is Here To Stay
Facial recognition is here to stay no matter what the US attempts to do about it. Read The Full Article.
Why Is The Public So AI-Illiterate?
Our AI-illiterate public is bombarded with a daily deluge of glowing press lavishing AI with praise focusing almost exclusively on…
Social Media Has Taught Us To Talk Rather Than Listen
Instead of creating a place where we can all come together and engage in conversation in the global town square,…
Today's Disinformation Research Could Learn Much From Last Century's Propaganda Research
If we as a society are serious about combatting the world of false information and foreign influence, we should spend…
History Tells Us Social Media Regulation Is Inevitable
As policymakers around the world grapple with regulating social media, it seems increasingly likely that the question is not whether…
Movies And The News Media Were Once The Root Of All Evil – Today It Is Social Media
As social companies have become our modern societal scapegoats and punching bags, its worth looking back to an era when…
We See Social Media As All-Powerful Because We Can Measure It
In our metric-driven society we naturally gravitate towards the things we can most easily measure and social media’s embrace of…
Social Media Has Become The Scapegoat For All Society's Ills Just Like TV And Movies Before
Stepping back, it is worth looking more critically at whether social media is really as all-powerful as we claim and…
Fox News Can’t Stop Talking About Bernie Sanders
Dhrumil Mehta's latest piece for FiveThirtyEight explores how Fox News can't seem to get enough of Bernie Sanders. Read The…
Why Are We Still Using Century-Old Discredited Theories To Explain The Power Of Social Media?
Much of our understanding of the power of social media comes from the discredited propaganda theories of century ago that…
Why Do We Blame Social Media For Being Addictive Instead Of Ourselves?
The growing backlash against social media's addictiveness and its “behavioral engineering” and “psychological manipulation” raises the question of whether social…
Are Facebook's Privacy And Security Scandals Actually Helping It?
Facebook’s remarkable ability to escape the past year unscathed and in fact post record profits and growth numbers suggests we…
Governments Can't Regulate Social Media Because They Are Too Dependent On It
Social platforms have become indispensable staples of the modern state, used by elected officials all the way up to world…
Does Facebook Survive Because Of Its Size Or Because We Gave Up On Privacy And Security?
Facebook’s lack of consequences for its breaches leaves us with only two uncomfortable possibilities: either the company has become simply…
Facebook Demands Email Passwords Then Quietly Uploads Contact Lists But Once Again We Don't Care
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Facebook’s latest privacy scandal is not that it happened at all, but rather that…
Scientific Visualizations For Teaching Used To Mean Plaster Models
Physical mathematical models rose into popularity during the late 1800’s to early 1900’s and were once a ubiquitous sight in…
Big Data Can Help Us See Through Government Redactions
The rise of massive centralized FOIA archives, digitized news archives and a bit of statistical analysis can help scholars readily…
We Are Voluntarily Surrendering The Data We Long Fought To Protect
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the modern privacy story is the way in which we have voluntarily surrendered all…
Our Entire AI Revolution Is Built On A Correlation House Of Cards
Today's AI algorithms are merely correlation machines, sifting through vast piles of numbers to record subtle correlations among inputs without…
Cameras Construct Reality Rather Than Capture Truth
With more cameras than citizens, why do governments still find themselves unable to catch criminals and why do we as…
Once Upon A Time We Had To Convince People To Share Their Thoughts
Looking back to the rise of personal tape recorders half a century ago, it is interesting to contemplate a world…
WashPost: Actually, The Mueller Report Showed That Russia Did Affect The Vote
The Washington Post's Philip Bump explores media coverage of several key events investigated by the Mueller report. Read The Full…