If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it.]]>
To test this, I gathered mean journey times to London from Traintimes for every railway station in the UK, and mean asking prices for 3-bed houses near each station from Nestoria. Here’s the graph of all stations, with a moving-average line added. You can find your station (if you commute to London by rail). Powell-Smith has just joined the Government Digital Service - a sort of tiger team which gets government departments to think digital. A good hire.]]>
We’ll see a new kind of digital divide open over the next couple of years. Not a divide between people who can and can’t afford technology but a divide between people who are willing to go over the freaky line and those who aren’t.
It’ll be interesting to see who will go over the freaky line and who won’t and what that will mean for each group. It is the biggest social shift since the Web came on the scene in 1994. Scoble's new Big Thing is "context", which arguably is what devices need to have so they can be more useful. But does our data have to be sold on? Can't we just pay companies to use our data, but without advertising at us? The idea that monetisation must mean adverts is a peculiarly American one. (Thanks @modelportfolio2003 for the link.)]]>
The mountain ranges you see here are not natural geography but the landscape of Tweets — billions of them, visualized across cities. The peaks represent the places most Tweets are sent from, the troughs the fewest. Explore New York closely and you can pick out the Brooklyn and the Queensboro bridge — even the Staten Island ferry.Hugely cool.]]>
The research was completed as part of the Data for Development competition run by Orange which released 2.5bn call records from 5m mobile phone users in Ivory Coast.
The anonymised data is the largest of its kind ever released.
Such data could be used by urban planners for new infrastructure projects, said IBM. Discovery: they could reduce travel times for people by 10%. If they could have integrated it with bus timetables..]]>
My data was intact save for the last thing I’d worked on–a spreadsheet containing a client’s account numbers and passwords. It seems that Google’s engineers determined this single document violated policy and locked down my entire account. My request to get that document back is still pending.
I returned to the Google fold with eyes wide open to my responsibilities as a user. In relationship terms, I am no longer monogamous. "Dependence on one supplier" is the new monoculture.]]>
As you can see Australia and Europe seem to be using more of the Xperia Z, whereas the US and Canada seem to heavily favour the Blackberry Z10. We know it is home turf for Blackberry in Canada, but it seems Blackberry have managed to chip away at the American market as well.
Surprisingly the UK shows a small favour towards the flagship Sony device. Have Blackberry lost their dominance in the UK, or are they still a force in to be reckoned with? Lots more very interesting graphs if you go to the "Product -> Mobile Analytics" page. (Ironically, it doesn't work well on mobile.) The one for Europe for OS share demonstrates that it's very much an Android/iOS world - and that the UK is the only place where BlackBerry makes a strong showing in Europe.]]>
The Article 29 working group, which is made up of data protection authorities from across the European Union, has issued fresh guidelines for mobile phone applications. The overall principle of data minimization - only collecting the data strictly necessary for the app to operate - is the cornerstone of the group's recommendations.
However, according to Nick Pickles, director of Big Brother Watch, there is much confusion in the market, and in February, Christopher Graham, the U.K.'s Information Commissioner, said that some app developers had a "cavalier" attitude to personal data protection. The principal aim is to stop people being tracked by "advertisers and any other third party". Not sure where Google fits into that.]]>
"Someone at Google really likes beer," the post said, implying that the categories were created by Google employees. Turns out, the lists are pulled from Google's search database using an algorithm that creates sets, or categories, of common words and names. It's essentially Google-powered word association — not a window into the world of Google engineers, but into the internet's collective view of how things are related to one another. Super list-filling tip.]]>
According to developer Feross Aboukhadijeh, who uncovered the bug this week, data dumps can be performed on most major Web browsers, including Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Opera, the BBC reported. The only browser to stop data dump tests was Mozilla's Firefox, which capped storage at 5MB. (Thanks @clarkeviper for the link.)]]>
Worse, critics say the methods used to analyze that data are also deeply flawed in many cases. What you end up with, researchers told me, is a field where key pieces of the puzzle are missing entirely and where multiple scientists are reaching wildly different conclusions from the exact same data sets. For instance, because of those differences in the definition of “defensive gun use” some researchers will tell you that Americans use a gun to defend themselves something like 1.5 million times every year. Others say it happens maybe 200,000 times annually. Part one of a series. Read.]]>
It would be even harder (or maybe impossible) to do something more complex like find the latest 20 pieces of content about environmental issues or people who have been in northern Britpop bands. Here text searching starts to become significantly less powerful.
The primary goal of the Linked Data Platform is to make sense of all the BBC's creative works and provide an API to allow the retrieval of any creative work about any 'thing', with the added benefit that we hold a semantic graph of data behind the 'things'.
This means the platform doesn't just know that tomorrow's episode of the Culture Show features Jarvis Cocker. It also knows that Jarvis is from Sheffield, was the lead singer in Pulp, that Pulp were a Britpop band, that they had a single called Common People, and that Common People was played on 6 Music this morning. Berners-Lees's ideas coming to life.]]>
But will it always be faster?]]>
Was that it? Had a bout of harmless home hardware hackery led to me being flagged as a fraudster?]]>
As a potential advertiser, I would not be impressed. As a journalist, I wonder whether the same sloppiness exhibited on this promotional page extends to the company's research.
And then there's this FTC news release from March 14, 2011:
The FTC reached a settlement with online advertising company Chitika, Inc. that ends the company’s allegedly deceptive practice of tracking consumers’ online activities even after they have chosen to opt out of online tracking on Chitika’s website.Chitika certainly isn't what you'd call cooperative about where its data comes from. But none of the data-pimping sources is. Nor do companies themselves provide all the numbers you want. Essentially, you have to triangulate on the most reliable and repeatable data.]]>
Second, most competant developer-DBAs are more than capable of manipulating very large data set, and getting existing staff to tackle such challenges is a great opportunity to expand their skill set.
What I’d say is more exciting is that the capacity to collect what were once very large data sets, of the order of billions of items, and that for 99% of the requirements that can be analysed with traditional techniques (relational SQL databases) on commodity server hardware.]]>
[Michael] Anderson [PM Cameron's special envoy on the UN's post-2015 development goals] said: “I’m sure that a big part of [how much it is being used] is the kind of way that we are delivering the data. I recognise that we need to get better data out in a usable form.
“We still publish things in PDF files, which is awful. But we are going to improve, and we all have to move on this together.” Can't expect much use if you publish data in PDF files.]]>
"[According to last night's forecast], the destructive potential of the storm surge was exceptionally high: 5.7 on a scale of 0 to 6," he wrote. "This is a higher destructive potential than any hurricane observed between 1969 - 2005, including Category 5 storms like Katrina, Rita, Wilma, Camille, and Andrew." ]]>
"Data in annual reports in PDF, that is in breach of our own open government license - and we will deal with that," [Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude] said. You're urged not to be one of the people Francis Maude has to "deal with".]]>
The data is noteworthy in light of recent network and pricing strategies by wireless carriers. AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless currently charge customers on a per-MB basis, where prices decline as subscribers add more data to their monthly allotment. Elsewhere, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA offer unlimited smartphone data services. This seems like a colossal amount; the sample was 1,000 Android users, in which those aged 18-24 used the most mobile data (1.05GB/month); those aged 55 or older used the least - 750MB/month. This still seems huge compared to normal usage in the UK, where 500MB marks off high usage.]]>
Data Nation 2012, published by Deloitte, found that while 82% of the U.K. population are aware their data is collected by organizations, only 29% are confident companies will not sell or share their data with other groups without their knowledge. Sceptical, dammit.]]>
Of course, the new plan is better value for heavy users. But it’s a slap in the face for consumers who count their minutes and texts and try to keep their monthly bill as low as possible. Suddenly, UK carriers look a lot more reasonable. Also: most people are moderate users. It's only a tiny percentage who are immoderate enough to get value out of this. ($90 = £58 at present rates.)]]>
That’s precisely what’s on the cards in Germany, where Schufa, the country’s largest ratings firm, wants access to data from the Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts of its customers. Not good.]]>
In November, Google offered a limited number of developers access to some of its most powerful data analysis software, part of what Google uses to index the Internet, in a product called BigQuery. On Tuesday, Google announced that it was selling that software, which can scan terabytes of information in seconds, as a service to corporate customers.]]>
The board will be chaired by UK digital champion Martha Lane Fox and will meet twice a year to advise the Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service (GDS) on the accessibility of online services, as they are rolled out across Whitehall departments.]]>