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Tag: data

  • The stupidest chart you’ll see today – The Economist

    Calculating reciprocal tariffs is hard. It takes years of determined study to get a PhD in trade economics. And you need teams of these types of wonks to come up with policies that will work. Scratch that. All that’s needed is an idiot, an AI chatbot, or some combination of the two. It took no more than a couple of hours after President Donald Trump announced the United States’ new reciprocal tariff rates for the commentariat to work out how exactly they had been arrived at.

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  • MIS market churn spring 2025 – WhichMIS?

    Looking across the January census figures from 2021 to this year, we see that the SIMS school numbers have fallen dramatically, from a healthy 15,753 schools using their MIS in January 2021 to just 8,818 this year. That is a loss of some 6,935 schools in just four years! This means that some 44% of their schools have moved away from SIMS in that time. It reduces their market share from 67% in 2021 to just 40% now. Looking further back, SIMS was the dominant player for many years, with around 85% of the market in England only ten years ago…

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  • Surveillance and the secret history of 19th-century wearable tech – The MIT Press Reader

    Another story in the Railway and Engineering Review included a similar hack attempt by a Portland night watchman. Having previously been caught mechanically rigging the button-pushing work of his nightly rounds, the watchman was given a pedometer to ensure that he was manually completing his work. Although this use of quantum media — media that count, quantify, or enumerate — to more closely monitor the watchman’s activities seemed to work for several nights, he was eventually found sleeping in the engine room, having attached the pedometer to a piston rod. […]

    While much of the popular discussion in the early 19th century focused on men’s uses of pedometers, in the second half of the century the devices became part of women’s fashion and close surveillance as well. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced in 1879 that “a pedometer is now an indispensable feature of every young ladies’ attire.” In a piece titled “A Slap at the Dancing Girl” that ran in the Los Angeles Times in the spring of 1890, a “frail consumptive Connecticut girl who wanted to attend a dance” but pleaded illness when asked to wash dishes was sent to the local dance by her father in a coach with two servants and a pedometer in her pocket. As the paper reported, “When she got home in the morning it indicated that she had danced enough to cover thirty-one miles.” Echoing yet inverting earlier textual accounts of women’s behavior, the paper suggested that the tracking revealed the untrustworthiness of young women.

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  • How to disappear completely – The Verge

    The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia.

    This is a particularly complex problem for digital storage. For every painstakingly archived digital item, there are also hard drives corrupted, content wiped, media formats that are effectively unreadable and unusable, as I discovered recently when I went on a hunt for a reel-to-reel machine to recover some audio from the 1960s. Every digital media format, from the Bernoulli Box to the racks of servers slowly boiling the planet, is ultimately doomed to obsolescence as it’s supplanted by the next innovation, with even the Library of Congress struggling to preserve digital archives.

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  • Citigroup erroneously credited client account with $81tn in ‘near miss’ – Financial Times

    Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send only $280, an error that could hinder the bank’s attempt to persuade regulators that it has fixed long-standing operational issues. … A total of 10 near misses — incidents when a bank processes the wrong amount but ultimately is able to recover the funds — of $1bn or greater occurred at Citi last year, according to an internal report seen by the FT. The figure was down slightly from 13 the previous year. Citi declined to comment on this broader set of events.

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  • Use this app instead of Excel to directly edit CSV files – Lifehacker

    ModernCSV, an indie app for Linux, Mac, and Windows computers, is the best tool I’ve come across for this purpose. If you work with CSV files frequently, or just need to edit one quickly, it’s worth checking out. This application is built specifically with CSV files in mind and makes working with them simple. … There’s even a command bar, triggered with the keyboard shortcut CLTR/CMD-L. This lets you quickly use any of the commands offered by the application without needing to learn the dedicated keyboard shortcut—just type what you want to do and hit enter.

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  • Archivists work to identify and save the thousands of datasets disappearing from Data.gov – 404 Media

    Disproportionately, the datasets that are no longer accessible through the portal come from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But determining what is actually gone and what has simply moved or is backed up elsewhere by the government is a manual task, and it’s too early to say for sure what is gone and what may have been renamed or updated with a newer version.

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  • Visualizing the daily scroll of the average social media user – Visual Capitalist

    On social media, users casually scroll through an estimated 300 feet of newsfeed daily—about the same height as the Statue of Liberty. According to the paper, around 5 billion people worldwide use social media, and the average social media user now spends about two and a half hours a day online.

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  • In search of logged time – Public Books

    Now, the carefully curated caches of our digital histories—and, therefore, almost all of our histories—face an existential threat. The creators of internet content—that is, us—believe they own their digital material, whether it’s a blog started at age 15 or a carefully backed-up Google Drive. This notion is proving to be a lie. The “digital dark age” is a term that was popularized in 2013 among archivists, who noticed that much of Web 2.0—the space that characterized the internet from the 2000s to now—faces complete obsolescence. Link-rot (dead URLs) and bit-rot (corrupted data) metastasized blog servers, video players, and chat forums. In 2019, 50 million tracks from 12 million artists on MySpace disappeared. This year, Christopher Nolan and Guillermo Del Toro warned film buffs to own DVDs as an archive source in a world where you don’t own many physical things, let alone the films you watch on streamers.

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  • Climate, technology, and justice – Data & Society

    Climate change is perhaps the most urgent issue of the 21st century. The changing climate already disproportionately impacts communities in the majority world, and energy-intensive technologies like generative AI make the problem worse, exacerbating global emissions. Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program investigates how technologies impact and influence the environment, and how communities participate in or resist these processes. We examine the social and environmental repercussions of the expanded global infrastructures and labor practices needed to sustain the growth of digital technologies, from AI and blockchain to streaming and data storage. We trace the environmental implications of technology development across the entire life cycle, from ideation and use to disposal or refurbishment. We also seek to better understand the sociotechnical implications of climate-focused technologies, from low-carbon innovations like community energy, solar, and wind turbines, to the integration of algorithms and AI into climate modeling, disaster prediction, and emissions tracking.

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  • Data protection in schools – Record keeping and management – Guidance – GOV.UK

    How to carry out an audit to check what personal data your school holds. You can use a data retention schedule to document how long you’ll keep different types of data for. The Data Protection Act 2018 and UK GDPR says you should only keep data for as long as you need it. You should check each year what data you hold and if you still need to keep it. If you identify any information you no longer need, you should dispose of it safely. It’s important to put in place policies and processes so you can prove and evidence that you’re not keeping data for longer than necessary.

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  • Record keeping and retention information for academies and academy trusts – GOV.UK

    Academies and trusts should follow good practice and retain records about: pupils – a pupil record is defined in section 12 of the key stage 2 assessment and reporting arrangements; staff; buildings; finance; governance; the history of the school or academy (if applicable, including the ‘school history’ prior to the conversion to an academy) – examples can be found in The National Archives’ research guide on schools. All records should be retained in line with regulations and retention guidelines. Details can be found in the Academy Trust Handbook and Data protection in schools – record keeping and management.

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  • The Pudding Cup: The best visual and data-driven stories of 2024 – The Pudding

    Battle of the Chocolate Bars: You may have heard that food is better in Europe, compared to the US. This is especially the case for chocolate. We really liked how this project broke down the differences between European and American chocolate standards, annotating ingredient lists and incorporating chocolate imagery into all of the charts. Moreover, readability wasn’t lost when chocolate was used in the graphics, which often happens when deviating from typical chart shapes.

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  • Attendance and absence advice for adverse weather conditions – Lewisham Services for Schools

    Following the national weather warnings across the country predicted over the coming days, we thought it would be useful to publish advice on how to apply the new attendance and absence registration codes in the event of travel disruption or school closure associated with bad weather.

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  • Century-scale storage – Harvard Law School Innovation Library Hub

    We are on the brink of a dark age, or have already entered one. The scale of art, music, and literature being lost each day as the World Wide Web shifts and degenerates represents the biggest loss of human cultural production since World War II. My generation was continuously warned by teachers, parents, and authority figures that we should be careful online because the internet is written in ink, and yet it turned out to be the exact opposite. As writer and researcher Kevin T. Baker remarked, “On the internet, Alexandria burns daily.”

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  • AI teacher tools set to break down barriers to opportunity – GOV.UK

    Kids are set to benefit from a better standard of teaching through more face time with teachers – powered by AI – as the Government sets the country on course to mainline AI into the fabric of society, helping turbocharge our Plan for Change and breaking down the barriers of opportunity. £1 million has been set aside for 16 developers to create AI tools to help with marking and generating detailed, tailored feedback for individual students in a fraction of the time, so teachers can focus on delivering brilliant lessons. […]

    The prototype AI tools, to be developed by April 2025, will draw on a first-of-its-kind AI store of data to ensure accuracy – so teachers can be confident in the information training the tools. The world-leading content store, backed by £3 million funding from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, will pool and encode curriculum guidance, lesson plans and anonymised pupil work which will then be used by AI companies to train their tools to generate accurate, high-quality content. […]

    Almost half of teachers are already using AI to help with their work, according to a survey from TeacherTapp. However, most AI tools are not specifically trained on the documents that set out how teaching should work in England, and aren’t accurate enough to help teachers with their marking and feedback workload. Training AI tools on the content store can increase feedback accuracy to 92%, up from 67% when no targeted data was provided to a large language model. That means teachers can be assured the tools are safe and reliable for classroom use.

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  • Information management toolkit for schools – Information and Records Management Society

    Simplify your compliance journey with the IRMS Records Management Toolkit for Schools and Academies. A step by step guide with templates and examples designed specifically for Schools and Academies.

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  • So. Farewell then Progress 8 – FFT Education Datalab

    Much has been written over the years, including by ourselves, about how Progress 8 favours schools serving intakes with particular characteristics (and conversely how it works against others). For this reason we have long advocated for a contextualised Progress 8 measure to be published alongside Progress 8 and Attainment 8. But it will become apparent next year that Progress 8 is far fairer to schools serving disadvantaged intakes than raw attainment measures that do not take account of prior attainment. […] The picture is clear: the relationship between disadvantage and outcomes is far stronger for A8 than for P8. Put another way, the least disadvantaged schools will be even more likely to be ranked highly based on A8 compared to P8.

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  • WhichMIS?

    WhichMIS? is a free online publication for schools, multi-academy trusts and the wider education industry. It aims to present a balanced view of the MIS landscape in the UK, with views from all the key market players, as well as reviews, the latest news and expert commentary.

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  • Leon Eckert

    Hallo! I am a German programmer, researcher and artist focusing on the critical discussion of technology and its impact on society. My work is inspired by the psychological, cultural and geopolitical processes at play in a time of large-scale data collection and analysis.

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