Data News: Why the Boom in Big Data Journalism Makes Sense & More

Some writings worth reading,

• “Global Warming Scare Tactics” http://ytimes.com/2014/04/09/opinion/ …
• (Some) “agencies withhold grant money from researchers who do not make publications openly available” http://nature.com/news/funders…
• (sometimes, I have the feeling that it works also for “Professors vs. Students”) MT @yochum “Programmers vs. Users”

• “Let’s stop talking about HFT for a little while” http://mathbabe.org/2014/04/09/lets… (or not) via @adelaigue
• “So Much to Do, So Little Time” http://insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/09/… via @NGhoussoub
• “Voronoi diagram of NHL teams” http://imgur.com/r/hockey/VUOdW see

• “A team built by numbers won’t add up to much” http://timeshighereducation.co.uk/comment/opinion/…
• “The Fire Power of the Financial Lobby” http://corporateeurope.org/financial-lobby/2014/04/… the report is http://corporateeurope.org/sites/ …
• [photography] Surfing in Indonesia http://huffingtonpost.fr/2013/08/13/… great pictures !

• “You’re less likely to die in a car crash nowadays” http://vox.com/2014/4/2/5572648/… by @susannahlocke
• “the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing” http://washingtonpost.com/local/serious…
• “Is There a Wonk Bubble?” http://politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/… “Why the boom in data journalism actually makes sense” by @felixsalmon
• “Does the ‘Mad Professor’ Stereotype Stand on Solid Ground?” http://fromquarkstoquasars.com/… via @goulu
• Awesome Google Maps http://readwrite.com/2014/02/27/google … via @visionscarto see e.g. iso-temperature

• “900 Years of Tree Diagrams, the Most Important Data Viz Tool in History” http://wired.com/2014/04/…
• “Cathy O’Neil talks about trust in data analysis” http://junkcharts.typepad.com/numbersruleyourworld/2…
• “Why I won’t let my children learn French” http://spectator.co.uk/features/9169081/why… (via http://courrierinternational.com/…)
• “The less Americans know about Ukraine’s location, the more they want U.S. to intervene” http://washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/…
• “Some philosophers think mathematics exists in a mysterious other realm. They’re wrong. Look around: you can see it” http://aeon.co/magazine/world-views/…

“What is mathematics about? We know what biology is about; it’s about living things. Or more exactly, the living aspects of living things – the motion of a cat thrown out of a window is a matter for physics, but its physiology is a topic for biology. Oceanography is about oceans; sociology is about human behaviour in the mass long-term; and so on. When all the sciences and their subject matters are laid out, is there any aspect of reality left over for mathematics to be about? That is the basic question in the philosophy of mathematics. People care about the philosophy of mathematics in a way they do not care about, say, the philosophy of accountancy. Perhaps the reason is that the certainty and objectivity of mathematics, its once-and-for-all establishment of rock-solid truths, stands as a challenge to many common philosophical positions. It is not just extreme sceptical views such as postmodernism that have a problem with it. So do all empiricist and naturalist views that hope for a fully ‘scientific’ explanation of reality and our knowledge of it. The problem is not so much that mathematics is true, but that its truths are absolutely necessary, and that the human mind can establish those necessities and understand why they must be so. It is very difficult to explain how a physical brain could do that.” [to be continued...]

• “Eight (No, Nine!) Problems With Big Data” http://nytimes.com/2014/04/07…
• “How politics makes us stupid” http://vox.com/e/5320503  by @ezraklein
• “Author inflation in academic literature” http://benjaminlmoore.wordpress.com/2014/04/… via @Rbloggers
• Back on Snakes and Ladders, http://datagenetics.com/blog/november… (see also http://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/2327  for the Markovian analysis of the game)
• Teaching statistics (via http://reddit.com/r/funny/comments/220513/ …)

• “Selfies push more toward plastic surgery” http://journalscene.com/article/… by @mkreber
• “Why we all love numbers” http://theguardian.com/books/2014/apr/04/…
• “Big data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity” http://mckinsey.com/~/media/… (2011 report)
• “Applying behavioural insights to charitable giving” https://gov.uk/government/… via http://theguardian.com/sustainable… ht @aston_ward
• “Michael Lewis has shown how tech nerds rigged the stock markets. But who will guard the geeks?” http://theguardian.com/business/…
• [ebook] “This is Not a Pipe” by Michel Foucault http://monoskop.org/images/9/99/…
• “A New Look at Big-Bank Subsidies” http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/03/…
• “Even in academia, most people aren’t motivated by the truth. What they want, above all, is not to be bored” http://theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/…

“Do you long to become a “thought leader”, thinkfluencing your way from TED talk to tech conference, lauded for your insights? I hope not. But if so, you could do worse than consult a paper published in 1971 by the maverick sociologist Murray Davis, entitled “That’s Interesting!” (I found it via Adam Grant.) What is it, Davis asks, that makes certain thinkers – Marx, Freud, Nietzsche – legendary? “It has long been thought that a theorist is considered great because his theories are true,” he writes, “but this is false. A theorist is considered great, not because his theories are true, but because they are interesting.” Even in the world of academia, most people aren’t motivated by the truth. What they want, above all, is not to be bored. Forty-three years on, this feels truer than ever. We live in the Era of Interestingness: attention is money, and purveyors of the interesting can make millions from Twitter feeds of amazing facts – even if they’re not always true facts – or from books or blogs offering intriguingly counterintuitive perspectives. (This column’s part of the problem, except I’ve yet to make millions.) Moreover, Davis argues, there are only a handful of main ways for an idea to be interesting. To grab people’s attention, you should argue that something we think of as bad is good, or vice versa; that some apparently individual phenomenon is really collective; that several seemingly disparate things are actually part of the same thing; and a few others. It’s unnerving how many thinkers can be pigeonholed this way. Christian morality seems good, Nietzsche argued, but really it’s bad. Mental disorders, dreams and slips of the tongue might seem unrelated, Freud said, but really they’re the result of the same inner drives. And on and on…” [to be continued...]

• “There’s no shortage of female expertise in universities, yet men’s voices still predominate in the media” http://theguardian.com/higher-education-network/…
• via @TheEconomist “Foreign students are going off English universities” http://economist.com/news/britain/…
• “The Association between Eating Behavior and Various Health Parameters: A Matched Sample Study” http://plosone.org/article/… via @cblatts
• “How Will Rescue Work If A Plane Goes Down in the Arctic?” http://cryopolitics.com/2014/04/02/… by @miageografia ht @visionscarto

• via @CallOut4 “I’ll finish the dishes when I’m dead… a manifesto to be less busy” http://time.com/48975/overwhelmed…
• “This is what happens when Facebook controls the signal, and it defines you as noise” http://gigaom.com/2014/ … ht @manovich
• “World Airports Voronoi” https://jasondavies.com/maps/… by @jasondavies via @recifs see

• “Corporates weigh risks, opportunities of changing climate” http://climatenewsnetwork.net/2014/… (via @visionscarto)
• “Threatened pandemics and laboratory escapes” http://thebulletin.org/threatened… “Self-fulfilling prophecies”
• “Global Luxury Index Stock Returns” http://businessinsider.com/global … in one chart