English | EN VINTlabs Big Data Bookmarks: @Duivestein
Jun 16, 2012
As researchers we do a lot of reading. Every week one of the researchers shares the most valuable articles he has read. Consider these posts as a curated reading experience. This week: Sander Duivestein.
Rethinking Privacy in an Era of Big Data
Danah Boyd: “Defaults around how we interact have changed. A conversation in the hallway is private by default, public by effort. Online, our interactions become public by default, private by effort. [… ] Technologists need to re-engage with regulators. We need to get to a model where we really understand usage. We have very low levels of computational literacy, data literacy, media literacy, and all of these are contributing to the fears.”
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/04/rethinking-privacy-in-an-era-of-big-data/
In Search of Serendipity
“Today’s world wide web has developed to organise, and make sense of, the exponential increase in information made available to everyone by the digital revolution, and it is amazingly good at doing so. If you are searching for something, you can find it online, and quickly. But a side-effect of this awesome efficiency may be a shrinking, rather than an expansion, of our horizons, because we are less likely to come across things we are not in quest of.”
http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/ian-leslie/search-serendipity?page=full
Insider tells why Anonymous ‘might well be the most powerful organization on Earth’
“The entire world right now is run by information. Our entire world is being controlled and operated by tiny invisible 1s and 0s that are flashing through the air and flashing through the wires around us. So if that’s what controls our world, ask yourself who controls the 1s and the 0s? It’s the geeks and computer hackers of the world.”
Noise and signal
“In business and economic decision-making, data causes severe side effects —data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity; and the share of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed into it. A not well discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities —even in moderate quantities. […] The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part called the signal); hence the higher the noise to signal ratio. And there is a confusion, that is not psychological at all, but inherent in the data itself.”
http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2012/05/noise-and-signal-nassim-taleb/
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