Last week I participated in a data and gov tech roundtable hosted by Nick Sinai at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard Kennedy School. Nick brought together an all-star panel with Lynn Overmann, Todd Park, Aneesh Chopra, and newly-named U.S. Chief Data Scientist D.J. Patil. Entrepreneurs, academics, and officials exchanged ideas on the challenges of collecting, structuring, and …
Friday 5 — 12.12.2014
Facebook is surging ahead on mobile revenue as well as mobile market share. Facebook now accounts for about one-fifth of all data used on mobile phones, and owns four out of the top ten apps in the Apple iOS store and Google Play. More over at Quartz. Dark social is a term introduced by Alexis Madrigal two …
Friday 5 — 4.18.2014
Now that we’re all shooting more photos and videos than ever before, Dropbox is hell bent on storing them for you. Dropbox knows there’s a high switching cost for moving all your personal stuff (hassle, trust) so they’re making it easy and appealing to store and share, particularly via mobile. And yesterday Dropbox purchased iOS photo app Loom to continue …
Try it: Visualize search worldwide
Add another curiously mesmerizing big data visualization to your procrastination list. This colorful visualization serves up a (presumably filtered for a G rating) constantly-updating view of all the Google search terms people in the U.S. are entering in near real-time. For fun, toggle over to see search terms in ten other countries, including Australia, India, and Russia. Feature request: a customized version …
Friday 5 – 05.24.2013
Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet. There’s a new Pew Internet/Berkman Center report on teens and privacy. The report confirms that sharing on social is up overall; more teens are on Twitter; and enthusiasm for Facebook and its drama may be waning. Those mobile-savvy teens eschewing Facebook in favor of Tumblr …
The inevitability of big data hacks
Geeks often talk about “layer 8.” When an IT operator sighs resignedly that it’s a layer 8 problem, she means it’s a human’s fault. It’s where humanity’s rubber meets technology’s road. And big data is interesting precisely because it’s the layer 8 protocol. It’s got great power, demands great responsibility, and portends great risk unless we do …
Unpacking the algorithms behind online experiences
Relinquishing human free will to the machines generally gets a bad rap. In the media, all kinds of scientists are nefarious in their data-driven ways — even well-intentioned science yields Frankenstein’s monster far more often than the reasonable paleontologist in Jurassic Park. The Terminator franchise in the 1980s was among the first to introduce the concept …
Welcome to the age of big data
It’s a revolution,” says Gary King, director of Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science. “We’re really just getting under way. But the march of quantification, made possible by enormous new sources of data, will sweep through academia, business and government. There is no area that is going to be untouched. – New York Times on big data