Week 5 – Activities, Thoughts and Questions

cw-#lak12

This week’s topic was one that I was looking forward to and think is most important. It is was however also the week where I had the least time to devote to the activities and readings and am thus trying to create a list of issues and questions that I want to go back to:

In the Aspen report the three questions raised are ones that I will want to follow up on:

·   Do huge datasets and advanced correlation techniques mean we no longer need to rely on hypothesis in scientific inquiry?

• When does “now-casting,” the search through massive amounts of aggregated data to estimate individual behavior, go over the line of personal privacy?

• How will healthcare companies and insurers use the correla­tions of aggregated health behaviors in addressing the future care of patients?

Why am I not surprised that the most attention was received as big data applies to financial markets and risks there?

I did like Bollier’s (2010) description thought: “Computing has become ubiquitous, creating countless new digi­tal puddles, lakes, tributaries and oceans of information” (p.1).

Key words:

·        -  Real-time decision making tool

·         - Teasing out potentially useful patterns

·         - Petabites have 15 zeros

·         ... imperil personal privacy, civil liberties and consumer freedoms

·         - Visualization of data and other data cleaning choices

·         - Now-casts

·         - “The benefits of personalization tend to accrue to businesses but the harms are inflicted on dispersed and unorganized individuals, Taipale noted” (p. 23).

·         - “smart mobs” demonstrate the ability of non-com­mercial actors to influence trends

·         - Science Commons

·         - “securitize” people’s health

·         - Data integrity

Boyd & Crawford was a good read:

·         - analysis conducted only at a fixed point in time

·         - possiblity to de-anonymize parts of the dataset

·         - accountability is a multi-directional relationship

·          -   the “difference between being in public and being public” (boyd & Crawford, 2011, p. 12)

·         - “While institutional inequalities may be a forgone conclusion in academia, they should nevertheless be examined and questioned. They produce a bias in the data and the types of research that emerge” (p. 13).

I liked the Times multimedia options for the resources this week. Yes, the power of habit...

Yesterday I watched a video interview with George where he explained the difference between complicated and complex: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qesp9b2w_aY

I liked the meeting with Erik Duval and his insight and European perspective.