Tag: Big Data
After the mass media kerfuffle over Facebook’s Emotional Contagion Experiment wherein the company manipulated 600,000 users’ feeds to study their emotional responses, dating megasite OKCupid made the unlikely choice of transparency regarding its own user testing. In a casual blog post, OKCupid announced the findings of three specific studies. The New York Times described the experiments: In one test, [OKCupid] […]
If you post photos of your cat on social media, the internet probably knows exactly where your cat lives. And, unless your cat has its own place, that’s probably where you live too. Florida State University professor Owen Mundy was trying to tell you this when he created I Know Where Your Cat Lives — an interactive map […]
Software engineer and artist David Huerta has made a mixtape that is encrypted against NSA surveillance, for the express purpose of sending it to the NSA. This snarky subversion is inspired by the “cypherpunks” of the 90’s, whose open sourcing of encryption software allowed regular people access to government-level privacy enforcement. “I work outside the […]
Last week, the New Scientist published an “emotional contagion study” conducted by researchers employed by Facebook, which proved that people can be influenced by the emotions of others online, just like “in real life.” The study’s unsettling methodology caught our attention: The experiment’s subjects were nearly 700,000 regular Facebook users whose feeds were manipulated to contain more […]
“In the digital realm, we are naked all the time,” flashes the text in the promotional video for x.pose, a project by Xuedi Chen and Pedro Oliveira. The sculpture is composed of several layers, one of which is a reactive display that, using bluetooth, alternates between transparent and opaque depending on the amount of personal data […]
I’m the guy in a lot of those photos above. There’s me in college, studying abroad in Trinidad; there’s me goofing off with my best friend in high school; there’s (lots and lots of) me and my girlfriend. It’s a little unsettling having all those tiny, relatively intimate moments up there, but if I’m sharing […]
