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How hard is it to get into Oxbridge? | Education
Applications to Oxbridge close on October 15th. But what are your chances of gaining a place? Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian Oxford and Cambridge come top of the Guardian's university guide .
Feb. 11, 2011 — Think you're overloaded with information? Not even close. A study appearing on Feb. 10 in Science Express, an electronic journal that provides select Science articles ahead of print, calculates the world's total technological capacity -- how much information humankind is able to store, communicate and compute. "We live in a world where economies, political freedom and cultural growth increasingly depend on our technological capabilities," said lead author Martin Hilbert of the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. "This is the first time-series study to quantify humankind's ability to handle information." So how much information is there in the world?
How much information is there in the world?
The latest information about information overload is a lot to handle. Wielding numbers that stretched to 20 or more digits, researchers recently reported on the world's massive ability to store, communicate and compute information. All three have grown at annual rates of at least 23% since 1986, according to a study published this month in Science. Translated to a human scale, the massive numbers mean that the average person in 2007 was transmitting the informational equivalent of six newspapers per day, and receiving, in turn, 174 newspapers of data.
Information Overload Fueled by Bytes, and Hype
Why We Should Learn the Language of Data
<img alt="Illustration: Ellen Lupton" src="/magazine/wp-content/images/18-05/st_thompson_statistics_f.jpg" title="Start" width="660" height="411" /> Illustration: Ellen Lupton How can global warming be real when there’s so much snow?” Hearing that question — repeatedly — this past February drove Joseph Romm nuts. A massive snowstorm had buried Washington, DC, and all across the capital, politicians and pundits who dispute the existence of climate change were cackling. The family of Oklahoma senator Jim Inhofe built an igloo near the Capitol and put up a sign reading “ Al Gore’s New Home “.
Du contenu roi aux données reines
Souvenez-vous… il y a quelques années, le contenu était considéré comme la matière première du web : Celui qui maîtrisait le contenu maitrisait le web (les portails qui agrégeaient de très nombreuses sources de contenu concentraient également l’audience). Puis il y a eu MySpace, les Skyblogs, Facebook, Twitter, FourSquare… et maintenant il parait que c’est la communauté qui est reine. Certes, les plateformes sociales sont indéniablement en haut des tableaux d’audience, mais je reste convaincu que sans contenus une communauté n’est pas viable. Comprenez par là que ce sont les contenus qui alimentent les conversations et font tourner les communautés.
The evolution of data products
In “ What is Data Science? ,” I started to talk about the nature of data products. Since then, we’ve seen a lot of exciting new products, most of which involve data analysis to an extent that we couldn’t have imagined a few years ago. But that begs some important questions: What happens when data becomes a product, specifically, a consumer product? Where are data products headed?
Six Provocations for Big Data by Danah Boyd, Kate Crawford
danah boyd Microsoft Research; New York University (NYU) - Department of Media, Culture, and Communication; University of New South Wales (UNSW); Harvard University - Berkman Center for Internet & Society Kate Crawford University of New South Wales (UNSW) September 21, 2011 A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society, September 2011 Abstract: The era of Big Data has begun.
Mo Zhou was snapped up by I.B.M. last summer, as a freshly minted Yale M.B.A., to join the technology company’s fast-growing ranks of data consultants. They help businesses make sense of an explosion of data — Web traffic and social network comments, as well as software and sensors that monitor shipments, suppliers and customers — to guide decisions, trim costs and lift sales. “I’ve always had a love of numbers,” says Ms. Zhou, whose job as a data analyst suits her skills. To exploit the data flood, America will need many more like her. A report last year by the McKinsey Global Institute , the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the United States needs 140,000 to 190,000 more workers with “deep analytical” expertise and 1.5 million more data-literate managers, whether retrained or hired.
Big Data’s Impact in the World
Why Big Data is now such a big deal | Technology | The Observer
Microsoft boss BIll Gates plays frisbee with the newly invented floppy disk in 1985. Today’s computers boast thousands of times more power. Photograph: Deborah Feingold/ Corbis One of the most famous quotes in the history of the computing industry is the assertion that " 640KB ought to be enough for anybody ", allegedly made by Bill Gates at a computer trade show in 1981 just after the launch of the IBM PC. The context was that the Intel 8088 processor that powered the original PC could only handle 640 kilobytes of Random Access Memory (RAM) and people were questioning whether that limit wasn't a mite restrictive. Gates has always denied making the statement and I believe him; he's much too smart to make a mistake like that.
Il nous a semblé intéressant de traduire, de façon collaborative (via Framapad ), l’essai original que viennent de publier danah boyd et Kate Crawford présentant “Six provocations au sujet du phénomène des Big Data”. Ces chercheuses, orientées vers l’ethnographie des usages des technologies de communication, s’interrogent – en toute connaissance de cause [cf. cette étude sur les tweets des révolutions tunisiennes et égyptiennes à laquelle a participé danah boyd ]- sur les limites épistémologiques, méthodologiques, mais aussi éthiques des Big Data : champ d’études qui s’ouvre aujourd’hui sur la base des énormes jeux de données que fournit internet, en particulier celles générées par l’activité des usagers des sites de réseaux sociaux, que seuls des systèmes informatiques ont la capacité de collecter et de traiter.
Big Data : la nécessité d’un débat
La lecture de la semaine provient de la vénérable revue The Atlantic et on la doit à Erik Brynjolfsson , économiste à la Sloan School of Management et responsable du groupe Productivité numérique au Centre sur le Business numérique du Massachusetts Institute of Technology et Andrew McAfee auteurs Race Against the Machine (“La course contre les machines où comment la révolution numérique accélère l’innovation, conduit la productivité et irréversiblement transforme l’emploi et l’économie”). Elle s’intitule : “l’histoire de l’innovation contemporaine, c’est les Big Data” (c’est le nom que l’on donne à l’amoncellement des données). En 1670, commence l’article, à Delphes, en Hollande, un scientifique du nom de Anton van Leeuwenhoek ( Wikipédia ) fit une chose que beaucoup de scientifiques faisaient depuis 100 ans. Il construisit un microscope. Ce microscope était différent des autres, mais il n’avait rien d’extraordinaire.