Daniel Rourke /stream

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When businesses latch onto a buzzword, it quickly becomes the solution to everything. Not long ago, in the era of “big data,” companies scrambled to add chief data scientists to their…

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The parallel between Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and CCTV may be clear, but what happens when you step into the world of data capture? The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his…

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The parallel between Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and CCTV may be clear, but what happens when you step into the world of data capture? The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his…

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The Traveling Museum of the Paranormal & Occult, the world’s only mobile museum of haunted artifacts, has launched the first-ever initiative to 3D scan and compile a database of paranormally-active objects.

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A NEW commodity spawns a lucrative, fast-growing industry, prompting antitrust regulators to step in to restrain those who control its flow. A century ago, the resource in question was oil. Now…

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“Language is easy to capture but difficult to read”, in the words of the poet and media researcher John Cayley.1 Cayley wrote this sentence merely as a footnote to an essay…

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Alexandra Elbakyan is a highbrow pirate in hiding. The 27-year-old graduate student from Kazakhstan is operating a searchable online database of nearly 50 million stolen scholarly journal articles, shattering the $10…

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Glitch art resonates with the increasingly complex love-hate relationship humans have with technology. Errors, and by extension the changes, that can occur within software source code and data can provide a fertile…

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In our second installment on Glitch Art we’re going to look at a type of glitch that is made using the compression artifacts from digital video called datamoshing. Datamoshing visual effects…

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All Mark Rittman wanted was a cup of tea. Little did he know he would have to spend 11 hours waiting for his new hi-tech kettle to boil the water. Rittman,…

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Janet Vertesi, assistant professor of sociology at Princeton University, had an idea: would it be possible to hide her pregnancy from big data? Thinking about technology—the way we use it and…

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There’s a fascinating Q&A in a recent issue of New Scientist with doctor and genetic researcher Karin Ljubic Fister. Fister studies “plant-based data storage,” which relies on a combination of artificially…

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IT IS HARD to simply skim through the materials on Amitav Ghosh’s website. The information is bountiful, and the data is incredibly varied, indexing the many dimensions of his oeuvre. One…

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Entrusting your money to a bank once seemed strange and risky. Similarly, entrusting all of your data to a company and letting its algorithms build a detailed model of you from…

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This is the very lightly edited text of a lecture delivered as part of Through Post-Atomic Eyes in Toronto, 23-25 October 2015. Huge thanks to Claudette Lauzon and John O’Brian for…

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Genomes are so regularly represented as strings of letters—As, Gs, Cs, and Ts—that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t just abstract collections of data. They exist in three dimensions. They…

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When businesses latch onto a buzzword, it quickly becomes the solution to everything. Not long ago, in the era of “big data,” companies scrambled to add chief data scientists to their…

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The parallel between Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon and CCTV may be clear, but what happens when you step into the world of data capture? The philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously requested in his…

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There is no doubt that Sci-Hub, the infamous—and, according to a U.S. court, illegal—online repository of pirated research papers, is enormously popular. (See Science’s investigation last year of who is downloading…

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The Traveling Museum of the Paranormal & Occult, the world’s only mobile museum of haunted artifacts, has launched the first-ever initiative to 3D scan and compile a database of paranormally-active objects.

Bookmark

“Language is easy to capture but difficult to read”, in the words of the poet and media researcher John Cayley.1 Cayley wrote this sentence merely as a footnote to an essay…

Bookmark

Alexandra Elbakyan is a highbrow pirate in hiding. The 27-year-old graduate student from Kazakhstan is operating a searchable online database of nearly 50 million stolen scholarly journal articles, shattering the $10…

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On November 7, 2016, the day before the US election, I compared the number of social media followers, website performance, and Google search statistics of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  I…

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All Mark Rittman wanted was a cup of tea. Little did he know he would have to spend 11 hours waiting for his new hi-tech kettle to boil the water. Rittman,…

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Imagine you’re moving apartments and shopping for new furniture at a couple of stores. You see a couch you like, but you’re not sure, so you leave thinking maybe you’ll return…

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There’s a fascinating Q&A in a recent issue of New Scientist with doctor and genetic researcher Karin Ljubic Fister. Fister studies “plant-based data storage,” which relies on a combination of artificially…

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Entrusting your money to a bank once seemed strange and risky. Similarly, entrusting all of your data to a company and letting its algorithms build a detailed model of you from…

Bookmark

Genomes are so regularly represented as strings of letters—As, Gs, Cs, and Ts—that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t just abstract collections of data. They exist in three dimensions. They…

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Automated Insights has opened up beta access to Wordsmith, its platform for automating repetitive, time-consuming writing tasks using your data.