Big Data: Experts say new forms of information analysis will help people be more nimble and adaptive, but worry over humans’ capacity to understand and use these new tools well.
Tech experts believe the vast quantities of data that humans and machines will be creating by the year 2020 could enhance productivity, improve organizational transparency, and expand the frontier of the “knowable future.†But they worry about “humanity’s dashboard†being in government and corporate hands and they are anxious about people’s ability to analyze it wisely.
In a way, these passages [of Whitman’s] present a challenge to the modern academic terminology of “the speaker.†In this critical tradition, students may discuss the words not of John Donne but of “Donne’s speaker,†and even (though this sounds more peculiar) not the words of Emily Dickinson but of “Dickinson’s speaker.â€
Useful though the notion of “the speaker†may be sometimes, it is challenged by certain poems.
For all its many virtues, the fifth edition is not perfect. Its one glaring flaw is an introductory essay written by the chairman of the Usage Panel, Steven Pinker, a Harvard University linguist and cognitive scientist who is also an avowed descriptivist. In “Usage in The American Heritage Dictionary,†Pinker writes, “(W)hen many speakers misuse a word on many occasions in the same way — like credible for credulous, enervate for excite, or protagonist for proponent – who’s to say they’re wrong? When enough people misuse a word, it becomes perverse to insist that they’re misusing it at all.â€
A team of Canadian researchers have uncovered an unusual new example of “upstream filtering,†where online content in one country is blocked in another country due to filtering that happens in transit.
Researchers at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, revealed that some Oman Internet users using the Omantel ISP are also being subjected to Indian content restrictions because of traffic flowing through India.
“It goes to show what you can find when you begin to probe beneath the surface of the Internet, and what you see when you have governments start to mess with the openness of the Internet,†Ron Deibert, Citizen Lab’s director, told Ars on Thursday. “In this case you have a perverse situation where citizens in one country are subject to filtering in another country.â€
