I’m delighted to see that the White House has just released its report on “big data” — “Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values” along with an amazing collection of supporting documents. This report is the culmination of a 90-day review by the Administration, spearheaded by Counselor John Podesta. I’ve had the fortune to be a […]
The era of “Big Data” has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and many others are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing information from Twitter, Google, Verizon, 23andMe, […]
I gave today’s opening keynote at the WWW Conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. My talk was about methodological and ethical issues involved in the study of Big Data, focusing heavily on privacy issues in light of public data. The first third focuses on four important arguments: 1) Bigger Data are Not Always Better Data; 2) Not […]
Scott Golder recently wrote blog post at Cloudera entitled “Scaling Social Science with Hadoop” where he accounts for “how social scientists are using large scale computation.” He begins with a delightful quote from George Homans: The methods of social science are dear in time and money and getting dearer every day. He then turns to […]
Excerpt from “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” Sergey Brin and Larry Page (April 1998) What follows is the crib from my keynote at the 2017 Strata Data Conference in New York City. Full video can be found here. In 1998, two graduate students at Stanford decided to try to “fix” the problems with major search engines. Sergey […]
In mid-April, journalists heard about a student poster at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting called “A Description of Facebook Use and Academic Performance Among Undergraduate and Graduate Students.” The poster suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school. As the media picked this up (most […]
In 2015, I was invited to join the Commerce Department’s Data Advisory Council. Truth be told, I was kinda oblivious to what this was all about. I didn’t know much about how the government functioned. I didn’t know what a “FACA” was. (Turns out that the “Federal Advisory Committee Act” is a formal government thing.) […]
I was in elementary school, watching the TV live, when the Challenger exploded. My classmates and I were stunned and confused by what we saw. With the logic of a 9-year-old, I wrote a report on O-rings, trying desperately to make sense of a science I did not know and a public outcry that I […]
It’s been 20 years — 20 years!? — since John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” — a rant in response to the government and corporate leaders who descend on a certain snowy resort town each year as part of the World Economic Forum (WEF). Picture that pamphleteering with me for a moment… Governments of the Industrial […]
I love data and I hate stats. Not stats in abstract — statistics are great — but the kind of stats that seem to accompany any web activity. Number of followers, number of readers, number of viewers, etc. I hate them in the way that an addict hates that which she loves the most. My pulse quickens as I […]