Everybody (1, 2, 3) is talking about big data and the chances that are not to be missed. So it would be fatal to miss this opportunity, for instance, by impo...
Big Data’s Radical Potential
Today, big data is used to boost profits and spy on civilians. But what if it was harnessed for the social good?
Out of the box
The open-data revolution has not lived up to expectations. But it is only getting started
How statistics lost their power – and why we should fear what comes next | William Davies
The Long Read: The ability of statistics to accurately represent the world is declining. In its wake, a new age of big data controlled by private companies is taking over – and putting democracy in peril
The Limits of Data
Policymakers want to make decisions based on clear data, but important factors are lost when we rely solely on data. A philosopher writes:
People Hate Datacenters, Survey Finds
The data drops as Sen. Bernie Sanders calls for a moratorium on datacenter construction. 'We need to take a deep breath. We need to make sure that AI and robotics work for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.'
Is the Left Making a ‘Massive Strategic Blunder’ on Data Centers?
A conversation with Holly Jean Buck, author of a buzzy story about Bernie Sanders’ proposal for a national data center moratorium.
China’s plan to organize its society relies on ‘big data’ to rate everyone
The Communist Party wants to harness vast troves of online data to score people and companies on their behavior.
7. Death, and how tech forgot about mortality / Michael Kibedi / FFConf 2024
Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century
Back in the 1990s, computer engineer and Wall Street “quant” were the hot occupations in business. Today data scientists are the hires firms are competing to make. As companies wrestle with unprecedented volumes and types of information, demand for these experts has raced well ahead of supply. Indeed, Greylock Partners, the VC firm that backed Facebook and LinkedIn, is so worried about the shortage of data scientists that it has a recruiting team dedicated to channeling them to the businesses in its portfolio. Data scientists are the key to realizing the opportunities presented by big data. They bring structure to it, find compelling patterns in it, and advise executives on the implications for products, processes, and decisions. They find the story buried in the data and communicate it. And they don’t just deliver reports: They get at the questions at the heart of problems and devise creative approaches to them. One data scientist who was studying a fraud problem, for example, realized it was analogous to a type of DNA sequencing problem. Bringing those disparate worlds together, he crafted a solution that dramatically reduced fraud losses. In this article, Harvard Business School’s Davenport and Greylock’s Patil take a deep dive on what organizations need to know about data scientists: where to look for them, how to attract and develop them, and how to spot a great one.
The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced From the Facts
All those scary numbers aren’t what they seem.
Is “Big Data” racist? Why policing by data isn’t necessarily objective
Concerns with predictive big data technologies appear in most big data policing models."
Data centers contain 90% crap data
We need to talk about the data. Crap data. We’re destroying our environment to create and store trillions of blurred images, half-baked videos, rip-off AI ‘songs’, rip-off AI animations, videos and images, emails with mega attachments, never-to-be-watched-again presentations, never-to-be-read-again reports, files and drawings from cancelled projects, drafts of drafts of drafts, out of date, inaccurate and plain wrong information, and gigabytes and gigabytes of poorly written, meandering content.
AI Is A Money Trap
In the last week, we’ve had no less than three different pieces asking whether the massive proliferation of data centers is a massive bubble, and though they, at times, seem to take the default position of AI’s inevitable value, they’ve begun to sour on the idea that
Digital Socialism?
What opportunities does the new feedback infrastructure of data capitalism offer for non-market forms of social coordination? Hayek and the Calculation Debate revisited in the age of big data.
A history of the data center panic - part 1
Pre-ChatGPT and the creation of common wisdom
