Data Science

The first time that I mapped out poverty statistics at a municipal scale, I was completely mind blown (figure 1). Looking at the spatial inequities from a bird’s-eye view drove my desire to find more granular data of social indicators to better understand intra-urban socioeconomic inequities. Spatial data techniques help us to find patterns and anomalies across data that improves our understanding of people’s lives in cities, raising new questions about urban infrastructure in terms of public goods provision, land-use, and access. However, finding granular socioeconomic...

In light of recent scandals involving the misuse and improper handling of personal data by large corporations, advocacy groups and regulators alike have given increased attention to the issue of consumer privacy [e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. National and local governments have been enacting privacy legislation that requires companies to minimize the amount of data they collect, deters the collection of sensitive data, limits the purposes for which the data are used, and critically, gives users more transparency into data collection and use.

As part...

One of the frequent ways people can run into random numbers is through their research. We often hear the term “random sample,” or a “randomized” assignment to control. Or, sometimes, we can randomly select a certain number of rows or columns from data to perform an analysis on a representative snapshot of the data. Additionally, for many of us from a natural science or engineering background, random numbers are often used in simulations or optimization models. Given the wide variety of uses for random numbers in Data Science, I thought it would be interesting to take an...

Introduction

When Janet Vertasi, a sociology professor of technology at Princeton, learned of her pregnancy, she decided to conduct a personal experiment. She hid her pregnancy from the internet for nine months. This meant only sharing her pregnancy with close friends and family, using her own personal server while making purchases on Amazon and even opting to use cash For many of her transactions. During this time Amazon mistook her as a “suspicious customer” (Vertasi 2014, Gray 2014). Recall another incident of how Target found out about a...