To open or not to open? that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Did Hamlet wish for better data?
Continue reading “Did Hamlet wish for better data?”Numbers often get the spotlight in news stories. Sometimes they deserve the front stage as valuable information describing a situation that would be hard, if not impossible, to adequately capture without them. But, they can also easily mislead. All numbers in the news come with baggage. For some numbers, the baggage is out in the open like a carry on, but for many it is of unknown form, size, and weight – and hidden deep in the baggage compartment.
Continue reading “Numbers and their baggage”When state governments within the United States issued stay-at-home orders in 2020, companies started providing interactive data visualizations and dashboards to show how well or not so well certain regions of the United States were social distancing. Unacast, a technology company out of New York state, was one of them. They gathered smartphone data from up to 15 percent of people in every county of the United States, and then assigned grades to each state based on how much smartphone users traveled after COVID-19 related closures, compared to before.
Continue reading “How data privacy methods can hide the real data story”