How hard is it to get into Oxbridge? 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. But how hard is it to be accepted to study there? Across the board, admissions tutors at Oxbridge receive just over five applications for each place – short-listing candidates on the basis of their A-levels and personal statement as well as their performance in any entry tests and/or essay submissions.
So what kind of grades are they looking for? If you're shortlisted – last year around 60% of those applying to Oxford were – you'll normally sit between two and four interviews. Your chances of getting in depend on what subject you've chosen. On average, 36% of all state school applications between 2009 and 2011 were for the five most oversubscribed subjects at Oxford. So which courses are the most competitive? Data summary Download the data • DATA: download the full spreadsheet NEW! Focus-mindmap-for-web.jpg (JPEG Image, 1220x889 pixels) - Scaled (72%) How much information is there in the world? 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 has it grown? Prepare for some big numbers: Looking at both digital memory and analog devices, the researchers calculate that humankind is able to store at least 295 exabytes of information.
Telecommunications grew 28 percent annually, and storage capacity grew 23 percent a year. US Data Consumption. Information Overload Fueled by Bytes, and Hype. Why We Should Learn the Language of Data. 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“. The planet can’t be warming, they said; look at all this white stuff! Romm — a physicist and climate expert with the Center for American Progress — spent a week explaining to reporters why this line of reasoning is so wrong. Statistics is hard. Consider the economy: Is it improving or not?
Problem is, to calculate that stat, economists remove stores that have closed from their sample. Or take the raging debate over childhood vaccination, where well-intentioned parents have drawn disastrous conclusions from anecdotal information. 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. De ce point de vue là, les plateformes sociales ne sont qu’un intermédiaire entre le contenu et les internautes. Un intermédiaire à valeur ajoutée, mais qui présente tout de même une certaine fragilité dans sa pérennisation (cf.
Les données à la base du… journalisme de données Après les portails de contenus, les portails de données. The evolution of data products. Six Provocations for Big Data by Danah Boyd, Kate Crawford. The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and many others are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions.
Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing information from Twitter, Google, Verizon, 23andMe, Facebook, Wikipedia, and every space where large groups of people leave digital traces and deposit data. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale analysis of DNA help cure diseases? Or will it usher in a new wave of medical inequality? Will data analytics help make people’s access to information more efficient and effective? Or will it be used to track protesters in the streets of major cities? This essay offers six provocations that we hope can spark conversations about the issues of Big Data. Big Data’s Impact in the World. 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. The impact of data abundance extends well beyond business. Justin Grimmer, for example, is one of the new breed of political scientists. Welcome to the Age of Big Data. What is Big Data? Why Big Data is now such a big deal | Technology | The Observer.
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. He would have known that just as you can never be too rich or too thin, you can also never have too much RAM. The computer on which I'm writing this has four gigabytes (GB) of it, which is roughly 6,000 times the working memory of the original PC, but even then it sometimes struggles with the software it has to run. But even Gates could not have foreseen the amount of data computers would be called upon to handle within three decades. Big Data : la nécessité d’un débat. 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. 6 provocations à propos des Big Data Traduction : Pierre Grosdemouge (@cultord) & Fred Pailler (@Sociographie) à l’initiative de Laurence Allard.
L’ère de Big Data a commencé. L’histoire de l’innovation contemporaine c’est les Big Data. 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. Cependant, malgré leurs forces, les mesures ont un défaut. Suisse: une clinique dans un musée guérit les intoxiqués de l'information. Suisse: une clinique dans un musée guérit les intoxiqués de l'information BERNE (Suisse) - Affaire DSK, crise de la dette grecque, guerre en Libye... Trop d'informations peut rendre malade. Dès lors, un traitement s'impose. C'est le fil conducteur d'une exposition insolite au musée de la Communication à Berne, qui propose à ses visiteurs une clinique pour soigner leur mal. Dès son arrivée, le visiteur découvre dans une salle plongée dans une semi-obscurité 12.000 livres entassés sur des étagères.
En principe la communication est quelque chose d'important, quelque chose qui fait plaisir, mais de nos jours il y a un flot d'information, explique à l'AFP la directrice du musée de la Communication, Jacqueline Strauss. On peut comparer ça avec l'alimentation. Selon les experts de l'université de Berne qui ont participé à l'exposition, un être humain peut lire un livre de 350 pages en une journée s'il se concentre et n'a rien d'autre à faire. Etes-vous stressé, débordé, lessivé? THE COUNTRY'S PROBLEM IN A NUTSHELL: Apple's Huge New Data Center In North Carolina Created Only 50 Jobs. Apple Yes, it's huge. But only 50 people work there. Optimists argue that the solution to the US's sky-high unemployment and income inequality is more companies like Apple--the resurgent tech company that has revolutionized the digital industry and become one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Apple has not not only created amazing, beloved products. If only America produced more companies like Apple (and Amazon, and Google, and Facebook, et al), the story goes, the country's problems would be fixed. It is true that having more companies like Apple would certainly help the US. But we would need a lot more companies like Apple to make a dent in our unemployment and inequality problems.
Why? Because Apple also actually exemplifies some of the reasons why we have such huge unemployment and inequality problems: Now, of course Apple also helps employ an "ecosystem" of other companies that build products that work with Apple products, such as iPhone apps.