Back when we were more optimistic about the effects of technology on society and everyday life, the joke was that if we don’t get jet packs, all that technology isn’t worth the effort. The joke facilitated the naming of a great Scottish indie group formed in 2003, and lots of social media about personal air […]
It may not have been as entertaining as a Star Trek fan convention, but last February in Munich, the European Space Agency and a handful of other EU organizations hosted the Big Data from Space conference, where hundreds of papers were read on the methods and applications of big space data. The conference brought together […]
It wasn’t a “roast” like Dan Robitzski of Futurism says it was, but in February, Harish Natarajan, a former championship college debater, won the audience vote over Project Debater, an IBM program designed to respond to its opponents in a debate and crystalize and summarize the issues in summation. The debate was about education subsidies. […]
“Anything that was in the world when you were born,” Douglas Adams wrote, “is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you’ll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.” We don’t know […]
Machine learning is that branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI) devoted to “teaching” computers to perform tasks without explicit instructions, relying on inferences gained from the absorption and processing of patterns. There’s been pretty amazing analysis in the world of machine learning just in the last month. Citing Crunchbase, Louis Columbus at Forbes puts the number […]
Last year, the average consumer spent 38 minutes per day on Facebook, and that number will remain unchanged this year, before falling to 37 minutes next year. While some of this is attributable to loss of younger adult users, fairness also dictates that we recognize that Facebook invited this shift by emphasizing “time well spent” […]
Health technology is an ancient concept. There were prosthetics in ancient Egypt a thousand years before the birth of Jesus, stethoscopes and x-rays emerged in the 19th century, and in the mid-19th century, transistors were developed to aid in implants and computers (which, like most of what we’re discussing in this post, facilitated data-sharing). Now, […]
Sapa Profiles, an Oregon-based metals manufacturer, supplied fake data along with its materials to NASA, causing rockets to burst into flames and costing hundreds the agency of millions of dollars. A report alleging fake votes in the recent Indian elections is, in turn, accused of providing fake data. Another report shows cryptocurrency exchanges wildly exaggerate […]
Five years ago, in The Data Revolution, Rob Kitchin defined “Big Data Ethics” as the construction of systems of right and wrong in relation to the use of (in particular) personal data. The magnitude of data use, and its effect on things like elections and public policy, might have seemed exotic or quaint in 2014, […]
Well, we spent almost two billion dollars on political digital ads last year around the world, and that’s a low number compared to what we’ll spend next year. We don’t need to walk through the dozens of articles published every month on the implications of this, except to say that people who think about the […]