digital

“But we don’t want to teach ‘em," replied the Badger. “We want to learn ‘em” Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame.* We are told that the future of the UK economy lies in a better educated, and hence more productive, workforce. Some of this extra productivity is expected to come from the intellectual benefits of higher education - an area where there is an ever greater focus on student choice. What is less often noted is that the market for university degrees has many characteristics which make it difficult for student choice to drive higher levels of teaching quality....

Geotagged photos in central London, John Davies. Image based on the locations of over a million geo-tagged photos on Flickr by 38,255 photographers or, at least, photo accounts. Social media data, such as that produced by Twitter and Facebook use, is opening up new ways to understand society, but how do people obtain this data, and what are the challenges in using it to learn about our lives? API days...

The Printers won’t kill the Pin Factory To hear some of the talk around 3D printers one could be forgiven for thinking they’ll transform us all into a collection of skilled artisans creating in our bedrooms. Regardless of what one makes of other spectres that have been raised (neighbours running off 3D guns and the undermining of copyright) this seems an undeniably attractive image. Though it probably won’t be quite like that in reality, for a rather old-fashioned reason....

Es Devlin’s “BLUEWHITESKY” at the 2021 LUX exhibition More and more of the digital services we use involve the cloud, where the computing is not done on our laptop or mobile, but accessed over the internet. However, coming across its technical details for the first time, the cloud can be slightly opaque to someone whose background is not computing - I certainly found it that way. From a data science perspective working with it involves things that are not related to statistics, machine learning or even programming narrowly defined....