Kenneth Cukier
Data Editor, The Economist
Kenneth Cukier is the Data Editor of The Economist. His writings have also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Prospect, The Financial Times and Foreign Affairs, among others. He has been a frequent commentator on business and technology matters for CBS, CNN, NPR, the BBC and others.
Kenneth is co-author of BIG DATA: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think.
Typically you have to commit a crime before you are penalized for that crime. But what if Big Data can predict that you have a likelihood of committing a crime?
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There’s a new area called predictive maintenance where companies look at vibration patterns and other patterns admitted by machines days or hours before the breakdown before a part falls apart.
I can’t tell individuals at the point of collection what I’m going to use the data for. And therefore I can’t ask them to consent to that because there’s nothing to consent if I don’t know what I’m using it for.
What they’re able to identify by datafing text is that references to the one painter Marc Chagall, in the German language, went dark between 1933 and 1945. He was Jewish. The world leaves a trace. And the trace is data.
Datafication refers to the fact that daily interactions of living things can be rendered into a data format and put to social use.
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