… In many elections, voters choose their candidate along party lines. But in the case of the Tokyo governor, issues are believed to be more important than the party. We want to understand which issues are important, and how these issues vary across Tokyo. The Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shinbun has […] Read more »
The Age of ‘Infopolitics’
… What we need is a concept of infopolitics that would help us understand the increasingly dense ties between politics and information. Infopolitics encompasses not only traditional state surveillance and data surveillance, but also “data analytics” (the techniques that enable marketers at companies like Target to detect, for instance, if […] Read more »
Obama’s Not-So-Big Data
… The innovations of moneyball in politics and the way the Obama campaign deployed data are real and important. But those innovations have not gone as far as the hype says they did. Can political campaigns use data to predict exactly how we’ll vote? Can they subtly manipulate our votes? […] Read more »
Listen to Pandora, and It Listens Back
Pandora, the Internet radio service, is plying a new tune. After years of customizing playlists to individual listeners by analyzing components of the songs they like, then playing them tracks with similar traits, the company has started data-mining users’ musical tastes for clues about the kinds of ads most likely […] Read more »
2013 Was the Year of the Dataset
This past year may end up being remembered as the year that we discovered that the NSA and telecommunications companies were gathering enormous troves of personal data on us and using it for … well, we don’t quite know what yet. But on the less nefarious side, 2013 was also […] Read more »
A model world
… Computer simulation, only a few decades old, is transforming scientific projects as mind-bending as plotting the evolution of the cosmos, and as mundane as predicting traffic snarl-ups. What should we make of this scientific nouvelle cuisine? While it is related to experiment, all the action is in silico — […] Read more »