"Dataclysm"

[fiefoe]

• The paper suggests that autocomplete will eventually perpetuate the stereotypes it should only reflect,
• The archaic pantheons—Norse, Egyptian, Greek—all have a god dedicated to the dark art of gossip.
• that’s what projects like this always seem to be called: Condor, spirit-bird of government grants
• In social science, knowledge, like water, often takes the shape of its vessel.
• Zipf’s law  very elegantly: rank × number = constant
• Imagine a dot all the way in the corner: to be there, the word would have to appear on every single white male profile and at the same time never appear anywhere else. At least as far as words in a self-summary go, that’s the platonic ideal of identity.
• I will point out a few broad trends: white people differentiate themselves mostly by their hair and eyes, Asians by their country of origin, Latinos by their music... The lists above are our shibboleths. As such, they are something no one could generate a priori,
• Also, please notice that the “least Asian” things are all misspellings, working-class occupations, and other underachievements, like single fatherhood.
• as a point of professional pride—when you ask an algorithm “What aren’t black women talking about” and it tells you “tanning,” you know you did something right.
• Visibility, on the other hand, creates acceptance... Remarkably, if you walk that dotted line out to 100 percent support of gay marriage (statistically imagining a future world of perfect tolerance), you find it implies that roughly 5 percent of the population would say they are gay, absent social pressure not to be. That’s the same number implied by Google Search, where the lack of social pressure isn’t just theoretical.
• three of the biggest forces in modern data—Nate Silver, Google, and Facebook
• At OkCupid, rivers are an endless irritant to the distance-matching algorithms.
• in a bright green swath stretching from Minnesota down through Ohio and over to the Atlantic covering all of New England, Stayathomia.
• Melding the cold steel of cluelessness to brass balls is the well-paid talent of pitchmen everywhere
• Being an American with 1 million Twitter followers is roughly equivalent to being a billionaire.
• We focus on the dense clusters, the centers of mass, the data duplicated over and over by the repetition and commonality of our human experience. It’s science as pointillism. Those dots may be one fractional part of you, but the whole is us.
• The better-looking a photo is, the better chance it has of being outdated.
• five new constitutions are written every year
• we must all recall Tennyson’s aging Ulysses and resolve to search for our truth in a slightly different way. To strive, to seek, to find, but then, always, to yield.
• Edward R. Tufte.... books, there’s a two-page examination of the Vietnam Memorial, not as stonework or as history, but as an artifact of data design.
• To use data to know yet not manipulate, to explore but not to pry, to protect but not to smother, to see yet never expose, and, above all, to repay that priceless gift we bequeath to the world when we share our lives so that other lives might be better—and to fulfill for everyone that oldest of human hopes, from Gilgamesh to Ramses to today: that our names be remembered, not only in stone but as part of memory itself.
• Data sets currently move through the research community like yeti—I have a bunch of interesting stuff but I can’t say from where;
• Any child under thirteen who visits newyorktimes.com violates their Terms of Service and is a criminal—not just in theory, but according to the working doctrine of the Department of Justice.
• Shazam relies on an incredible principle: that almost any piece of music can be identified by the up/down pattern in the melody—you can ignore everything else: