Tag: data

From exploding Ford Pintos to racist algorithms, all harmful technologies are a product of unethical design. Yet, like car companies in the ’70s, today’s tech companies would rather blame the user.

When Google Maps’ data renamed an African American neighborhood, it opened up residents to the looming forces of gentrification.

“The idea seems to be that we all live in the great database in the sky, occasionally summoning aliens with our minds.” Emily Harnett explores Silicon Valley’s appropriation of UFO culture.

If we want to liberate ourselves from the tech monopolies, we have to figure out what to do with our data.

We use Facebook to access certain apps and stay in touch with distant friends and relatives. Deleting Facebook won’t stop other companies from misusing our data.

Quotas allow superiors to blame failure on subordinates and take credit for success.

China’s WeChat app has become a place to both mourn death and share graphic videos of the moment itself.

In Real Life Mag, information accessibility and data-use expert Zara Rahman explores the coercive power of the location drop-down menu.

In 2011, Diederik Stapel, a bright social psychologist at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, was suspended for fabricating data on a study that brought him much praise. At the Guardian, Stephen Buranyi profiles the team of researchers from the university’s psychology department, Chris Hartgerink and Marcel van Assen, who have since focused their research on scientific fraud.

The Web dwells in a never-ending present. It is—elementally—ethereal, ephemeral, unstable, and unreliable. Sometimes when you try to visit a Web page what you see is an error message: “Page Not Found.” This is known as “link rot,” and it’s a drag, but it’s better than the alternative. More often, you see an updated Web […]

When a problem exists in Philadelphia schools, it generally exists in other large urban schools across the nation. One of those problems—shared by districts in New York, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, and other major cities—is that many schools don’t have enough money to buy books. The School District of Philadelphia recently tweeted a photo of […]

Lately there has been some angst about the state of longform journalism on the Internet. So I thought I’d share some quick data on what we’ve seen within the Longreads community:

"You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but […]

This week we’re proud to share a Longreads Member pick from Nate Silver‘s new book The Signal and the Noise, published by The Penguin Press. Chapter 1, “A Catastrophic Failure of Prediction,” comes recommended by Janet Paskin, editor of Businessweek.com, who writes: Could there be a more appropriate hero for our time than Nate Silver? We can quantify and track […]

The National Security Agency is building a “spy center” in Utah with the purpose of gaining intelligence by breaking codes. But the center will also collect massive amounts of private domestic data, including phone calls, emails and Google searches: The NSA also has the ability to eavesdrop on phone calls directly and in real time. […]

The power of habits in guiding our behavior—and how companies like Target have used customer data to create new buying habits: There are, however, some brief periods in a person’s life when old routines fall apart and buying habits are suddenly in flux. One of those moments — the moment, really — is right around […]