“Beguiling, baffling or both—that’s blockchain. Aiming to clarify the subject for the benefit of companies and other organizations, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a straightforward introduction to blockchain, which underpins Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Virtual barrels of digital ink are flowing in the media nowadays about these cryptocurrencies and… Continue Reading
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Monthly Archives: January 2018
Two new books focus on the injustice of algorithms
The difficulty with talking about the technology industry is that it’s increasingly hard to define. “A tech company can be a giant data-mining operation turned advertising platform, like Facebook or Google. But it can also be a design-heavy producer of phones, computers and software. But it can also be a design-heavy producer of phones, computers… Continue Reading
Data-Driven Navigator on Gun Laws
Global Investigative Journalism Network: How They Did It: Developing a Data-Driven Navigator on Gun Laws “Last August, Everytown for Gun Safety, a non-profit research and advocacy group for gun control, launched the Gun Law Navigator, an exploratory data visualization tool explaining how states in America regulate guns. The project, developed by the Boston-based creative digital… Continue Reading
National Institute of Building Sciences Issues New Report on the Value of Mitigation
“Today, the National Institute of Building Sciences issued Natural Hazard Mitigation Saves: 2017 Interim Report, more than a decade after releasing its original report on the same topic and only days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) declared 2017 the costliest year on record for weather and climate disasters. As NOAA exemplified (16 events in… Continue Reading
HBR How the Data That Internet Companies Collect Can Be Used for the Public Good
Harvard Business Review: “A new year has arrived, along with the usual air of optimism. Yet the 21st century is already shaping up to be a challenging one. From climate change to terrorism, the difficulties confronting policy makers are unprecedented in their variety, but also in their complexity. Our existing policy tool kit seems stale… Continue Reading
Discover 20,771,524 images, texts, videos, and sounds from across the US
Via @DPLA – “We are pleased to announce that the beta for our all-new website is now available for you to explore! The new site is more user-centered than ever before with more content for our “Pro” communities coming soon! Check it out: https://beta.dp.la Look for both new and familiar features on our all-new beta… Continue Reading
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation – independent global health research center
“The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent global health research center at the University of Washington. The Global Health Data Exchange (GHDx) is a data catalog created and supported by IHME. The GHDx directly supports IHME’s mission to improve the health of the world’s populations by providing the best information on… Continue Reading
PDF Forensic Analysis and XMP Metadata Streams
Arman Gungor – Meridian Discovery – Link to complete posting: “Portable Document Format (PDF) forensic analysis is a type of request we encounter often in our computer forensics practice. The requests usually entail PDF forgery analysis or intellectual property related investigations. In virtually all cases, I have found that the PDF metadata contained in metadata… Continue Reading
Oxfam – The State of Inequality in the World
“Our new report about the state of inequality in the world reveals how our economy is delivering unimaginable rewards for those at the top by exploiting millions of ordinary workers at the bottom…Last year saw the biggest increase in billionaires in history, one more every two days. This huge increase could have ended global extreme… Continue Reading
Paper – Stewardship in the “Age of Algorithms”
Stewardship in the “Age of Algorithms” by Clifford Lynch, First Monday, 4 December 2017. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/fm.v22i12.8097 “This paper explores pragmatic approaches that might be employed to document the behavior of large, complex socio-technical systems (often today shorthanded as “algorithms”) that centrally involve some mixture of personalization, opaque rules, and machine learning components. Thinking rooted in… Continue Reading
DuckDuckGo moves beyond search to also protect you while browsing.
DuckDuckGo News: “Over the years, DuckDuckGo has offered millions of people a private alternative to Google, serving over 16 billion anonymous searches. Today we’re excited to launch fully revamped versions of our browser extension and mobile app, extending DuckDuckGo’s protection beyond the search box to wherever the Internet takes you. It’s hard to use the… Continue Reading
New on LLRX – Judging Lawyers: Objectively Evaluating Big Law Litigation Departments
Via LLRX – Judging Lawyers: Objectively Evaluating Big Law Litigation Departments – Itai Gurari talks about a new tool from Judicata called Clerk that analyzes and grades briefs, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, looking for areas of improvement and attack. Clerk’s analysis spans seven dimensions that measure how well the brief is argued, how well… Continue Reading
