Datadoodle

Home » book

book

Cities / Too much “smart” can make you dumb

by

Richard Sennett’s new book, Buildings and Dwellings, has a new variety of ambivalence about so-called “smart cities.” It’s one I hadn’t heard.

From the Los Angeles Review of Books’ review:

Referring to smart cities that use technology to dictate city life and surveil citizens, he warns, “By using machines, people would stop learning. They would become stupefied. The prescriptive smart city is a site for this stupefaction.”

But there might be a kind of “smart” that actually makes people, not machines, smarter.

Sennett, though, holds out hope for technology that can “coordinate” urban life, by exposing citizens to new ideas and enabling them to understand their worlds and voice their opinions more clearly than they currently can.

… Read the rest “Cities / Too much “smart” can make you dumb”

Stephen Few: data’s “harmful ways”

by

Visualization guru and data-industry skeptic Stephen Few in has a worthwhile review of Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil.

Data can be used in harmful ways. This fact has become magnified to an extreme in the so-called realm of Big Data, fueled by an indiscriminate trust in information technologies, a reliance on fallacious correlations, and an effort to gain efficiencies no matter the cost in human suffering.

Read his review here.

Alpine Data and Goliath

by

Vision and bravado came from the Alpine Data Labs CEO and a spokesman for the venture fund at the recent Alpine Data Labs reception. But the stack of books near the exit told the real story: Malcolm Gladwell’s latest, David and Goliath, tells how Alpine intends to take on the “giants.”

CMO “and data geek” Bruno Aziza, in his second month since SiSense, says that where the Goliaths demand coding, Alpine demands none. Where the Goliaths sit on the desktop, Alpine floats on clouds. While the Goliaths extract from Hadoop, Alpine rides on top. Go, Alpine.