The Future of Big Data
While many see promise in the future of data analysis, some fear that work with gigantic stores of information could lead to privacy abuses and mistaken forecasts
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Respondents’ thoughts One major sign of the sanctification of Big Data as a topic of interest with vast potential emerged in March this year when the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health joined forces “to develop new methods to derive knowledge from data; construct new infrastructure to manage, curate and serve data to […]
Overview of responses Background Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, has an even grander vision for what the web can be. He and his allies have been working through the World Wide Web Consortium on an evolving initiative they call the semantic web. Berners-Lee and co-authors wrote in Scientific American in […]
Last week, bloggers gave more attention to the subject of global warming than at any time this year. And while skeptics continued to focus on “Climate-gate,” defenders were more vocal than in previous weeks. On Twitter, the growing Tiger Woods scandal earned the most attention. And on YouTube, a feisty exchange between the White House press secretary and a reporter was the most viewed news video.
Overview The general public and members of the Council on Foreign Relations are apprehensive and uncertain about America’s place in the world. Growing numbers in both groups see the United States playing a less important role globally, while acknowledging the increasing stature of China. And the general public, which is in a decidedly inward-looking frame […]
A vote in Switzerland to ban the construction of Muslim minarets and controversies over global warming research led conversations in the blogosphere last week. On Twitter, it was a story about a local billboard campaign with unintended consequences. And on YouTube, a pop singer made her second appearance in recent weeks.
Faced with a long-running and difficult war in Iraq, continued worries about terror attacks and growing economic uncertainty at home, the public became less supportive of global engagement during the final years of the Bush presidency. That marked a significant change from the period immediately after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when there […]
Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in May 2009 for the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life’s Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Francis S. Collins, the former director of the Human Genome Project, discussed why he believes religion and science are compatible and why the […]