South China Morning Post: Coming soon: a new tool to grapple with Chinese economic data. “A Washington think tank outlined a new tool Wednesday to address a problem that has plagued economists for decades: how to make sense of data from China often suspected of being more politically driven than statistically based.”
University of Arizona: UArizona researcher at the forefront of Indigenous data sovereignty. “The concept known as IDSov emphasizes Indigenous Peoples’ right to control data about their people, lands and cultures. Stephanie Russo Carroll, associate director of the University of Arizona Native Nations Institute, has focused her career on encouraging institutions to adopt policies and practices that recognize that right.”
Online Journalism Blog: What is dirty data and how do I clean it? A great big guide for data journalists. “If you’re working with data as a journalist it won’t be long before you come across the phrases ‘dirty data’ or ‘cleaning data’. The phrases cover a wide range of problems, and a variety of techniques for tackling them, so in this post I’m going to break down exactly what it is that makes data ‘dirty’, and the different cleaning strategies that a journalist might adopt in tackling them.”
Route Fifty: Have Thoughts on Criminal Justice Data Collection? . “As part of a larger effort to build trust between police and local communities, the White House issued a request for information to better understand how law enforcement agencies collect and use data.”
Bleeping Computer: Activision confirms data breach exposing employee and game info. “Activision has confirmed that it suffered a data breach in early December 2022 after hackers gained access to the company’s internal systems by tricking an employee with an SMS phishing text. The video game maker says that the incident has not compromised game source code or player details.”
Smashing Magazine: A Guide To Getting Data Visualization Right. “In this article, Sara Dholakia presents a guide on how to choose just the right type of data visualization, with guidelines and things to keep in mind.” A good deep dive.
Columbia News: What Is the State of Data Science Today?. “In recent years, the field of data science has exploded into the mainstream, and into our daily lives. Data science now touches nearly every aspect of society and affects how governments, the private sector, the healthcare profession, and many other vital sectors operate.”
Duke Global Health Institute: Decolonizing Research Data: A Necessary New Normal. “In 15 years of working alongside health researchers in Kenya, Wendy Prudhomme O’Meara has seen an all-too-familiar pattern: An outside organization comes in to collect health-related data in the country and then retains sole ownership of the data despite the collaboration of others involved, including the people who provided the data in the first place. When this occurs in the context of a historical power imbalance, the practice has become known as ‘data colonialism,’ and a growing contingent of global health researchers are speaking out against it.”
WIRED: How to Back Up Your Digital Life. “If the perfect backup existed, then sure, three would be overkill, but there is no perfect backup. Things go wrong with backups too. You need to hedge your bets. At the very least, you should have two backups, one local and one remote. For most people, this strikes the best balance between safety, cost, and effort.”
ProPublica: Visualizing Toxic Air . “Making data public isn’t enough when it’s incomprehensible to the people it affects. ProPublica set out to decode a complex EPA data set to expose hot spots of industrial air pollution across the U.S.”
Wall Street Journal: How Data Is Changing the College Experience. “In the real world, Pounce is a fuzzy game-day presence, rooting on the university’s athletes. In the virtual world, the mascot is a chatbot enhanced with artificial intelligence. The virtual version was introduced in the summer of 2016 to incoming freshmen, who could text questions to Pounce 24/7 and in just seconds get answers about financial aid, registration, housing, admissions and academic advising. Three years later, Pounce was rolled out to the entire student body, with broader capabilities—able not only to answer questions but also to initiate interactions on its own. For example, the chatbot can intervene when a student is determined to be at risk of failing a class or dropping out of school.”
BBC: National Sample Survey: How India taught the world the art of collecting data. “Indian data is staring at a credibility crisis with official numbers on a range of subjects – from Covid deaths to jobs – being questioned by independent experts. But not too long ago, the country was seen as a world leader in data collection, writes author and historian Nikhil Menon.”
WIRED: Democracy Is Asking Too Much of Its Data. “WE’VE ALLOWED OUR democracy to devolve into a game of musical chairs. The population of the United States has tripled, while states must fight over the same 435 seats and must see their fates determined by an algorithmic system plagued by arbitrary outcomes. It is time to enlarge the House of Representatives, a conclusion shared by a bipartisan committee of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “
Newswise: Data Ethicist Cautions Against Overreliance on Algorithms. “Pigeons can quickly be trained to detect cancerous masses on x-ray scans. So can computer algorithms. But despite the potential efficiencies of outsourcing the task to birds or computers, it’s no excuse for getting rid of human radiologists, argues University of Oregon philosopher and data ethicist Ramón Alvarado.”
MIT News: Estimating the informativeness of data. “Not all data are created equal. But how much information is any piece of data likely to contain? This question is central to medical testing, designing scientific experiments, and even to everyday human learning and thinking. MIT researchers have developed a new way to solve this problem, opening up new applications in medicine, scientific discovery, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.”
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