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Why Big Data Has Some Big Problems When It Comes to Public Policy
From ACM Opinion

Why Big Data Has Some Big Problems When It Comes to Public Policy

For all the talk about using big data and data science to solve the world’s problems—and even all the talk about big data as one of the world’s problems—it seems...

In Praise of Efficient Price Gouging
From ACM Opinion

In Praise of Efficient Price Gouging

In the four years since the car service Uber launched, it has been beset by criticism from myriad groups, including city officials annoyed by its sometimes cavalier...

A ­nified Theory
From ACM Opinion

A ­nified Theory

For the last half-century we've had a popular notion that our intellectual culture is sundered in two—the literary and the scientific.

How to Save the Net: Keep It Open
From ACM Opinion

How to Save the Net: Keep It Open

For all of its history, the Internet has enjoyed the fruits of an openness principle: the idea that anyone can reach any site online and that information and data...

Anatomy of an Air Strike: Three Intelligence Streams Working in Concert
From ACM Opinion

Anatomy of an Air Strike: Three Intelligence Streams Working in Concert

In a fast-moving war with an elusive foe like the Islamic State militants, information is as important as guns, jet fighters and bombs.

Police Cameras Can Shed Light, but Raise Privacy Concerns
From ACM Opinion

Police Cameras Can Shed Light, but Raise Privacy Concerns

Michael Brown, the unarmed teenager who was shot during an encounter with police in Ferguson, Mo., on Aug. 9, was recorded by a convenience store surveillance camera...

Could Google Glass Ruin Your Memory?
From ACM Opinion

Could Google Glass Ruin Your Memory?

We’ve all done it: We’re at an event, we take a bunch of photos with our phones, we take a selfie and maybe one with a friend, we post all the images online,...

Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet
From ACM Opinion

Email Is Still the Best Thing on the Internet

All these people are trying to kill email.

Why the Public Library Beats Amazon—for Now
From ACM Opinion

Why the Public Library Beats Amazon—for Now

A growing stack of companies would like you to pay a monthly fee to read e-books, just like you subscribe to Netflix to binge on movies and TV shows.

Beyond Classic Brain Illustrations That Make ­S Drool
From ACM Opinion

Beyond Classic Brain Illustrations That Make ­S Drool

I threw down a bit of a challenge last month at the Association of Medical Illustrators Conference in Minnesota.

Artificial Intelligence Will Not Turn Into a Frankenstein's Monster
From ACM Opinion

Artificial Intelligence Will Not Turn Into a Frankenstein's Monster

The singularity—or, to give it its proper title, the technological singularity. It's an idea that has taken on a life of its own; more of a life, I suspect, than...

How Wwi Codebreakers Taught Your Gas Meter to Snitch on You
From ACM Opinion

How Wwi Codebreakers Taught Your Gas Meter to Snitch on You

In the depths of night on August 5th 1914 the British Cable Ship Alert took the first significant action of World War I, severing the five German submarine cables...

Security Secrets, Dated but Real
From ACM Opinion

Security Secrets, Dated but Real

Was the National Cryptologic Museum designed using a code of some kind?

A Tool That Answers 'what's That Typeface?'
From ACM Opinion

A Tool That Answers 'what's That Typeface?'

The Internet is, from its very core to its most distant peripheries, a vast universe of text.

The Weird Reasons Why People Make ­p False Identities on the Internet
From ACM Opinion

The Weird Reasons Why People Make ­p False Identities on the Internet

Sockpuppetry—using false identities for deception—is centuries old, but the advent of the web has made creating sockpuppets, and falling for their tricks, easier...

Why Is Science Fiction So Hard to Define?
From ACM Opinion

Why Is Science Fiction So Hard to Define?

Time Out, the weekly listings magazine, recently ranked the 100 best sci-fi movies of all time.

Google Bets a Billion Dollars on Twitch
From ACM Opinion

Google Bets a Billion Dollars on Twitch

Video gaming differentiates itself from the older forms of escapism—literature, theatre, film, television—with interactivity.

How to Invent a Person Online
From ACM Opinion

How to Invent a Person Online

On April 8, 2013, I received an envelope in the mail from a nonexistent return address in Toledo, Ohio.

When Robots Come For Our Jobs, Will We Be Ready to Outsmart Them?
From ACM Opinion

When Robots Come For Our Jobs, Will We Be Ready to Outsmart Them?

Non-human employees are filling positions in all sorts of workplaces, and they are proving themselves to be fast, accurate, and reliable—more so than their human...

How the ­.s. Stumbled Into the Drone Era
From ACM Opinion

How the ­.s. Stumbled Into the Drone Era

On Sept. 7, 2000, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, a U.S. Predator drone flew over Afghanistan for the first time.
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