Tags: data

The People’s Cloud

A documentary by Matt Parker (brother of Andy) that follows in the footsteps of people like Andrew Blum, James Bridle, and Ingrid Burrington, going in search of the physical locations of the internet, and talking to the people who maintain it. Steven Pemberton makes an appearance in the first and last of five episodes:

1. What is the Cloud vs What Existed Before?
2. Working out the Internet: it’s a volume game
3. The Submarine Cable Network
4. How Much Data Is There?
5. Convergence

The music makes it feel quite sinister.

Font Map · An AI Experiment by IDEO

Fontlandia is yours to explore.

By leveraging AI and convolutional neural networks to draw higher-vision pattern recognition, we have created a tool that helps designers understand and see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.

Approximate Text Search Made Easy

A step-by-step explanation by Henrik on how he implemented fuzzy search on his music site—something I could do on The Session. He even talks about expanding this to work with ABC notation.

Closing Communities: FFFFOUND! vs MLKSHK – Waxy.org

Andy compares the impending shutdowns of Ffffound and Mlkshk. They’re quite, quite different when it comes to handling data rescue.

What should you think about when using Facebook? – Vicki Boykis

To be clear, every company currently does some form of this tracking of users. There would simply be no other way to measure operations. But Facebook has quite clearly been tiptoeing outside the bounds of what is ethically acceptable data business practices for a while.

A thorough round-up of Facebook’s current data collection practices and what you can do about it.

Social Media Needs A Travel Mode (Idle Words)

We don’t take our other valuables with us when we travel—we leave the important stuff at home, or in a safe place. But Facebook and Google don’t give us similar control over our valuable data. With these online services, it’s all or nothing.

We need a ‘trip mode’ for social media sites that reduces our contact list and history to a minimal subset of what the site normally offers.

Open Access at ESA

Images, videos, sounds, and 3D models are now available from the European Space Agency under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-alike license.

Stuff in Space

A gorgeous visualisation of satellites in Earth orbit. Click around to grasp the scale of the network.

Calling Bullshit

A proposed syllabus for critical thinking: Calling Bullshit in the Age of Big Data.

Our aim in this course is to teach you how to think critically about the data and models that constitute evidence in the social and natural sciences.

Practical tools and case studies are also provided.

Trump: A Resister’s Guide | Harper’s Magazine - Part 11

You, the software engineers and leaders of technology companies, face an enormous responsibility. You know better than anyone how best to protect the millions who have entrusted you with their data, and your knowledge gives you real power as civic actors. If you want to transform the world for the better, here is your moment. Inquire about how a platform will be used. Encrypt as much as you can. Oppose the type of data analysis that predicts people’s orientation, religion, and political preferences if they did not willingly offer that information.

From Tape Drives to Memory Orbs, the Data Formats of Star Wars Suck (Spoilers) | Motherboard

As always with sci-fi interfaces, the important part is telling the story, not realism or accuracy. Personally, I liked the way that the World War II trappings of Rogue One extended to communications and networking technologies.

A Day in the Life of Americans | FlowingData

Watching this data visualisation on its high speed setting is quite hypnotic.

Data on the Web Best Practices

This document provides Best Practices related to the publication and usage of data on the Web designed to help support a self-sustaining ecosystem. Data should be discoverable and understandable by humans and machines.

Datafication and ideological blindness — Cennydd Bowles

Run from data-driven companies. In thrall to semi-science and blinded by their dogma, they’ve lost the ability to see intelligent alternative perspectives on their business, their products, and the world. Embrace instead data-informed companies. This isn’t mere grammatical pedantry – a company genuinely informed by data understands the risks of datafication and adopts sophisticated, balanced approaches to strategy that blend quant, qual, and even some of that unfashionable prediction and intuition.

Designing for new digital rights

A series of quick’n’dirty prototypes to illustrate some of the design challenges involved in handling personal data:

• Data access tracker
• Data minimisation
• Guardian for digital identity
• Home privacy settings
• Portable shopping list
• Single trip insurance checker

If we don’t start exploring what the General Data Protection Regulation means for people, the same thing that happened with the cookie law will happen again.

These new rights have the potential to improve how our digital products and services work.

Is Dark Matter Hiding Aliens?

Here’s a fun cosmic hypothesis on the scale of an Olaf Stapeldon story. There are even implications for data storage:

By storing its essential data in photons, life could give itself a distributed backup system. And it could go further, manipulating new photons emitted by stars to dictate how they interact with matter. Fronts of electromagnetic radiation could be reaching across the cosmos to set in motion chains of interstellar or planetary chemistry with exquisite timing, exploiting wave interference and excitation energies in atoms and molecules.

Our World In Data

If you’re in need of some long-term perspective right now—because, let’s face it, the short-term outlook is looking pretty damn bleak—then why not explore some of Max Roser’s data visualisations? Have a look at some of the global trends in inequality, disease, hunger, and conflict.

What’s wrong with big data? | New Humanist

The view that more information uncritically produces better decisions is visibly at odds with our contemporary situation.

A superb piece of research and writing by James, skewering the technological determinism that underlies the current faith in “big data.” At best, this misplaced trust is inaccurate; at worst, it is deadly.

To the algorithmic imagination, the practice of journalism and the practice of terrorism appear to be functionally identical.

The Digital Transition: How the Presidential Transition Works in the Social Media Age | whitehouse.gov

Kori Schulman describes the archiving of social media and other online artefacts of the outgoing US president. It’s a shame that a lot of URLs will break, but I’m glad there’s going to be a public backup available.

Best of all, you can get involved:

In the interim, we’re inviting the American public – from students and data engineers, to artists and researchers – to come up with creative ways to archive this content and make it both useful and available for years to come. From Twitter bots and art projects to printed books and query tools, we’re open to it all.

Working with mobile technology - Digital Service Manual - GOV.UK

Excellent guidelines from GDS on providing services that work well on mobile. The watchwords are:

• responsive design,
• progressive enhancement,
• open data, and
• emerging technology (service workers, notifications, etc.).

Native and hybrid apps are rarely justified.