View, in extreme close up, of a cat as seen with its teeth bared and a raised claw.

Metadata for Image Search and Discovery

Metadata helps you search for and find images of cats, for instance, whether or not you have a specific feline in mind.
Robert Smalls, born in Beaufort, SC, April 1839

Using Data to Discover and Explore the Stories of Enslaved People

Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade brings together datasets from multiple sources in a single free website that anyone can use.
Members of the Cascades Butterfly Citizen Science Team

A Scientific Look at Citizen Science

Citizen science involves using large numbers of volunteers to collect data for scientific research. But does it result in usable data?
popularity rankings

What’s in a Popularity Rating?

A leader's popularity usually has more to do with the market, the economy, and other external factors than with the leader's personality.
ominous smartphone

How Pleasure Lulls Us into Accepting Surveillance

The domestication of surveillance technology has caused big legal and ethical implications for security on both a personal and a social scale.
Deleting Facebook

Why Deleting Facebook isn’t the Answer to Data-Driven Targeting

We have to become smarter news and advertising consumers, and learn to resist the unceasing stream of slanted messages that come our way.
Graphic of computer rendered waves above an aerial map of a city

It’s Time to Plug Into the Internet of Water

Scientists are "digitizing" water to better manage the precious resource. What does that mean and how is it helping?
data mining

Testing Americans’ Tolerance for Surveillance

What would have been considered a dystopian level of surveillance a mere twenty years ago has now become the norm. Why don't internet users care?
DNA Strand

Using DNA As a Memory Drive

Scientists have successfully encoded a simple movie in bacteria DNA, and played it back. Using DNA for data storage is not as crazy as it sounds...
Hollerith Machine

WWII and the First Ethical Hacker

Rene Carmille has been called the first ethical hacker for sabotaging the computerization of data about French Jews during World War II.