Stories for "data"
TED’s Bruno Giussani is back on the TED stage to invite up this morning’s cadre of audience talks. No long preamble … we’re straight into it: Jason Pontin, editor and publisher of MIT Technology Review, wants us to think about why we can’t (or think we can’t) solve big problems anymore — what is our generation’s […]
At TED2011, Deb Roy shared his talk, “The birth of a word,” describing when he and his wife, Rupal Patel, brought home their baby boy for the first time. The pair sought to shoot a different kind of home video: in every room of their house, a camera recorded eight to ten hours of footage […]
Artist Julie Freeman uses data as a source material to make biologically inspired artworks — giving musicality to the movement of fish and expressing city lights in the quiver of moths’ wings. Now she’s finding ways to translate data so that we may gain new perspectives on what it’s trying to tell us. What do […]
TED speaker Rick Smolan is asking students between the ages of 13 and 18 to become “Data Detectives” for a new project he’s unveiling today — and that he will talk about at TEDYouth this Saturday. By answering a 20-question online survey, teenagers will help build a data set that will let then compare themselves to […]
In his recent TEDTalk, “What doctors don’t know about the drugs they prescribe,” Ben Goldacre sounded a warning about the vast numbers of pharmaceutical studies that go unpublished. “Positive findings are about twice as likely to be published as negative findings,” said Goldacre, noting that this is a big problem because it means doctors are […]
Just by living our plugged-in lives, each of us is producing a constant stream of data. Little snippets are left behind of what we search, what we buy, where we go, what we tweet … This endless flow of numbers is referred to as “big data,” data sets so large that they require sophisticated parsing […]
In the information age we have access to more data and knowledge than at any previous point in human history. But more accessible data doesn’t necessarily mean more processable data — tax returns, court cases and newspaper archives may be available to the public, but they are often hard to interpret and understand. Data artists […]
One might ask Nate Silver, the data whiz behind FiveThirtyEight.com, which shot to prominence after providing eerily accurate forecasts of the 2008 election, what makes for good predictions. His answer will come as a surprise. In his new book, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail But Some Don’t, Silver explains the […]
Wired UK brings news of a fascinating collaboration to explore data from NASA’s Kepler mission, which has brought back evidence of thousands of exoplanets, or planets outside our own solar system. Some exoplanets are huge, some tiny, near or distant, hot or cold — and some may even be Earth-like, offering clues to the origin […]
Humanity is generating a huge explosion of data, information that can be used for or against us. How can we democratise access to it? With the Vibrant Data Project, complexity scientist Eric Berlow has created – in collaboration with artist and designer David Gurman – Tru North MAPPR, a revolutionary new tool that harnesses the […]