Now we are all counted. The location of everybody in the country on Sunday is plotted with absolute precision. Public services over the coming decade can be fine tuned to take account of who is where. I am in favour of that. I have no problem with the general principle of a census. But the [...]
The pope, it is said, asked Michelangelo, ‘How do you know what to cut away?’ And Michelangelo replied, ‘It’s simple, I just remove everything which doesn’t look like David’ Hadley Beeman wonders how best to characterise the new approach she is devising to aggregate public data to allow questions to be asked of it and [...]
Data is the plankton of the new economy. It seems plentiful, tiny, and insignificant but whole ecosystems of companies, large and small, are emerging to feed off of it. David Eaves (h/t @martinsw)
As long as your personal information is secret, you don’t even have a privacy problem. It’s only when somebody else knows your personal information that you have a privacy problem Privacy is the problem you have after you share sensitive information. When you discover that you might have a socially awkward medical condition and you [...]
Or so Personas would like to have you think: Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one’s aggregated online identity. In short, [...]
You hug your data. You don’t want to let it go until you have made a beautiful web site for it. Well I want to suggest that, yes make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, we want the unadulterated data, we have to ask for raw data now. Tim Berners-Lee’s impassioned [...]