Nate Osgood, together with 4 students from the Computational Epidemiology and Public Health Informatics Lab in Saskatoon, Canada, recently ran a community group model building event focusing on the drivers for homelessness in their city. This post describes the event, and the next steps that they are planning to take.| Topos Institute
Institutions often applaud public engagement, until the backlash begins. Then what? At a Berlin workshop, researchers explored how to move from awareness to action.| Elephant in the Lab
You can find a link to the full interview on Eric’s blog below: A Category Theory-Inspired BBN How the Topos Institute tackles problems in complex systems In putting together this piece, Brendan and I had over three hours of messy, wide-ranging conversations and interviews. We've distilled them into this final, more readable, interview format. Full post| Topos Institute
Credible documentation is the best tool for working with data. Short of that, labor (and computational) intensive validation may be required. Recently, I had the opportunity to expand on these ideas in a cross-post with Select Star. I explore how a “good” data analyst can interrogate a dataset with expensive queries and, more importantly, how best-in-class data products eliminate the need for this. My post is reproduced below. --- In the current environment of decreasing headcount and ris...| Emily Riederer
In this short analysis, Sami Nenno takes a closer look at the content of fact-checks and misinformation in Germany.| Elephant in the Lab
We’ve all worked with poorly documented dataset, and we all know it isn’t pretty. However, it’s surprisingly easy for teams to continue to fall into “documentation debt” and deprioritize this foundational work in favor of flashy new projects. These tradeoff discussions may become even more painful in 2024 as teams are continually asked to do more with less. Recently, I had the opportunity to articulate some of the underappreciated benefits of data documentation in a cross-post with ...| Emily Riederer
Documentation can be a make-or-break for the success of a data initiative, but it’s too often considered an optional nice-to-have. I’m a big believer that writing is thinking. Similarly, documenting is planning, executing, and validating. Previously, I’ve explored how we can create latent and lasting documentation of data products and how column names can be self documenting. Recently, I had the opportunity to expand on these ideas in a cross-post with Select Star. I argue that teams ca...| Emily Riederer
The Italian Renaissance, like nearly every other time and place, is a real blank spot in my knowledge of history. I recently read The Book of My Life (1575), a memoir by the mathematician-doctor-ph…| The Best That Can Happen
This blog post is an edited transcript of a talk I recently gave on the past and future of privacy. I argue that the story may be a more positive and hopeful one than people often realize. The tal…| The Best That Can Happen