After a year in which further details of national intelligence agencies’ shadowy surveillance networks were laid bare, a fresh leak of documents reveals the obsessive surveillance that extends as far north…
Behavioral scientists have seized on social media and their massive data sets as a way to quickly and cheaply figure out what people are thinking and doing. But some of those tweets and thumbs ups can…
Kiss your lunchtime web surfing plans goodbye, because I guarantee that whatever page you were planning to visit next, you will instead want to go to YouGov. We know that your musical taste tells everyone…
Staff recruitment and retention are an ongoing challenge for employers. Proponents of big data in the workplace are now claiming they can change that. We’re entering a new age of predictive selection that…
It’s that time of year when undergraduates who want to continue their studies are busily looking around for advice on which masters degree to apply for and school leavers are pondering their university…
Social scientists have to get better at recognising and responding to ethical problems. Although economists, political scientists and psychologists have not been responsible for the same level of abuses…
In sport we don’t just want to know who won. We now want to know how to replicate success and then improve on it. And to do this, we’re using data – and lots of it. The field of “big data” analytics has…
There have been so many leaks, hacks and scares based on misuse or misappropriation of personal data that any thought that “big data” could provide benefits rather than only opportunities for harm may…
Walter Gilbert won the Nobel Prize in 1980 in Chemistry for his contribution to sequence DNA, or “determination of base sequences in a nucleic acid”. Mohit Kumar Jolly, researcher at Rice University and…
Corporations everywhere are hoovering up petabytes of data in a bid to understand and predict consumer preferences. But what if they’re missing the point, and should instead focus on “small data”? In a…
With the sale of first its desktop PC business and now its server business to Chinese partner Lenovo, IBM has come full circle. By exiting the hardware business IBM leaves behind the low-end market it…
A passer-by happens upon a drunk searching for a lost wallet under a streetlight. With nothing in plain sight, the passer-by asks “Where did you drop your wallet?”. “Over there,” gestures the drunk across…
The days when Coles and Woolworths only sold groceries are long gone. Both are now established players in a broad range of consumer markets, with interests in liquor and hotels, fuel and convenience, general…
The backlash against “big data” studies is well underway. And no more so than in the area of humanities and creative arts research. If I had a dollar for every person who has told me over the past year…
There is great enthusiasm for using “big data” to enable better biomedical research across the globe. But big data isn’t just about collating lots of old and new records. Including ongoing real-time data…
In November 2013, the New Yorker published a profile of Eliot Higgins – or Brown Moses as he is known to almost 17,000 Twitter followers. An unemployed finance and admin worker at the time, Higgins was…