Ever wonder why ads for a particular duad of socks keep follow you around the web ? Why Pandora keeps diddle that song you detest , even though you give it a thumbs - down every individual fourth dimension ? Or why that one person you scarcely have sex keeps showing up in your News Feed when your old friends seldom seem to appear ? Ask aside .
drop a line in with your datum and algorithm questions , and we will examine to decode them together .
The Living With Data serial will prominently have voice that are personal , both yours and mine . So I wanted to take a moment tointroduce myself . I ’m a technology critic , a inquiry fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia , and an affiliate with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard . But really I ’m an internet - enabled nomad , presently establish in Singapore . I ’ve save about our human relationship to engineering for publication like The Atlantic , Wired , Slate , and now here at Gizmodo .
For me , being a critic is n’t about taking a negative , reactionaryposition . It ’s about reaching a more balanced and nuanced understanding of the role that engineering dally in our everyday lives — beneficial , big , and everything in - between . We have film critic and food critics ; almost all cultural artifact are subject to literary criticism , so why not approach engineering with the same careful and considered attention ?
My goal for this serial is to make data and algorithms a little less abstract and a little more approachable . Where potential , we ’ll cover what we know about information and how it ’s being used . When the answers are less clear , we ’ll at least figure out where to keep digging .
I ’ll be hanging out live on Gizmodo answering questions and tattle about how data bear upon your lives at 11:30 ET today . I ’ll talk about my process , my approach to engineering unfavorable judgment , and we can sire some area to research in succeeding columns .
Update : Wrapping up now . Thanks everyone for your questions , and there ’s enough more exploring to do . What strange encounters with algorithmic program have you had ? Results that seem off , recommendations that storm you , assumptions made about your browsing habits …
This series is all about deal your history and surfacing young ways of understand our kinship the data and algorithms around us . indite in to[email protected]with your examples and query . And thanks !
mark off out therest of the seriesfor the kinds of stories we ’re interested in explore .
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