mattdiaz.org

• Emily Nussbaum on the new season of “Mad Men” http://t.co/WwJs5SkM8W ->
• NYT: The Food-Truck Business Stinks http://t.co/TLOSxWW6Kj ->
• NYC Study Finds Protected Bicycle Lanes Boost Local Business http://t.co/qZ244PW9bE ->
• Deconstructing New York's Bike-Share Freak Out http://t.co/t78Bbk3ihB ->

• NYT: Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony Has a Point to Prove http://t.co/ckw3eDDlij ->
• NYT: Celtics Confident, Whatever the Record http://t.co/SuPTUpUpm3 ->
• Escaping PCs | Asymco http://t.co/0SZRypNdLl ->
• Spaceship | Asymco http://t.co/XUrxkhFpMU ->
• NYT: Waking Up on the Wrong Side of a Ratings War http://t.co/OfJPO1HA3O ->

• "So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies." http://t.co/vL5TJQGREB ->
• NYT: Roger Ebert, Popular Film Critic, Dies at 70 http://t.co/INMlmEKgOi ->

An interview with Physician and Social Scientist Nicholas Christakis on “A New Kind of Social Science for the 21st Century.”

In the 20th century, there was a tremendous expectation, or appreciation, for the role that the biological and the physical sciences could play in improving human welfare and human affairs. We had everything from the discovery of nuclear power to plastics to, in biology, the discovery of new drugs, beginning with penicillin (which is one of the gigantic feats of human ingenuity ever). We had this phenomenal progress that was made in the sciences, in the physical and the biological sciences.

In the 21st century, the social sciences offer equal promise for improving human welfare. The advances that we have made and will be making, especially in understanding human behavior and its very deep origins, will be translated into interventions of diverse sorts that will have a much bigger impact in terms of improving human welfare than many of the prior examples that I gave.

(via Edge.org)

Kate Crawford writes on “data fundamentalism” and its necessary antidote:

…we must ask how we can bring together big data approaches with small data studies — computational social science with traditional qualitative methods. We know that data insights can be found at multiple levels of granularity, and by combining methods such as ethnography with analytics, or conducting semi-structured interviews paired with information retrieval techniques, we can add depth to the data we collect. We get a much richer sense of the world when we ask people the why and the how not just the “how many”. This goes beyond merely conducting focus groups to confirm what you already want to see in a big data set. It means complementing data sources with rigorous qualitative research. Social science methodologies may make the challenge of understanding big data more complex, but they also bring context-awareness to our research to address serious signal problems. Then we can move from the focus on merely “big” data towards something more three-dimensional: data with depth.

(via Harvard Business Review)