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Posted: October 22, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: datagotham, youtube | Leave a comment »

I’m happy to be able to share that the full set of videos from DataGotham 2013 are now on youtube.

The talks are a wide perspective on the interesting work happening around data in New York, and I believe you’ll enjoy all of them!

Posted: October 6, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: data, mugshots, privacy | 12 Comments »

The New York Times has a story this morning on the growing use of mugshot data for, essentially, extortion. These sites scrape mugshots off of public records databases, use SEO techniques to rank highly in Google searches for people’s names, and then charge those featured in the image to have the pages removed. Many of the people featured were never even convicted of a crime.

What the mugshot story demonstrates but never says explicitly is that data is no longer just private or public, but often exists in an in-between state, where the public-ness of the data is a function of how much work is required to find it.

Let’s say you’re actually doing a background check on someone you are going on a date with (one of the use cases the operators of these sites claim is common). Before online systems, you could physically go to the various records offices, sometimes in each town, to request information about them. Given that there are ~20,000 municipalities in the United States, just doing a check would take the unreasonable investment of days.

Before mugshot sites, you had to actually visit each state’s database, figure out how to query it, and assemble the results. Now we’re looking at an investment of hours, instead of days. It’s possible, but you must be highly motivated.

Now you just search, and this information is there. It is just as public as it was before, but the cost to access has become a matter of seconds, not hours or days, and we could image that you might be googling your date to find something else about him and instead stumble on the mugshot image. The cost for accessing the data is so trivial that can come up as part of an adjacent task.

The debate around fixing this problem has focused on whether the data should be removed from the public entirely. I’d like to see this conversation reframed around how we maintain the friction and cost to access technically public data such that it is no longer economically feasible to run these sorts of aggregated extortion sites while still maintaining the ability of journalists and concerned citizens to explore the records as necessary for their work.

Posted: September 26, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: code, philosophy, teaching, thinking | 4 Comments »

I recently had a tweet that’s caused a bit of comment, and I wanted to expand on the point.

Everyone does realize that it’s not about teaching people to CODE as much as it is about teaching people to THINK … right?

— Hilary Mason (@hmason) September 17, 2013

I’m a huge fan of the movement to teach people, especially kids, to code.

When you learn to code, you’re learning to think precisely and analytically about a quirky world. It doesn’t really matter which particular technology you learn, as long as you are learning to solve the underlying logical problems. If a student becomes a professional engineer, their programming ability will rise above the details of the language, anyway. And if they don’t, they will have learned to reason logically, a skill that’s invaluable no matter what they end up doing.

That you can apparently complete a three month Ruby bootcamp and get a job today is an artifact of a bizarre employment market, and likely unsustainable. But by dedicating three months to learning to think in a logical framework, you’ll also gain an ability that will open opportunities for you for the rest of your life.

Posted: August 12, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: datagotham, nyc | Leave a comment »

Registration is open for DataGotham 2013, our second annual New York data community conference, September 12th and 13th. The core of the conference is a series of brilliant data practitioners telling the stories about what they work on. The content is technically-oriented but not all deeply technical, and we really welcome anyone curious about how New York companies and institutions are pushing the boundaries on data to attend.

We have two goals for the conference. The primary goal is to connect people in the greater New York data community who are working on interesting things. If our community is strong and supportive, we will all do better work.

Our second goal is to highlight the amazing working happening here, so that people near and far will realize that New York is the best place in the world to do data science.

Come join us to hear these stories firsthand and meet fellow data-minded practitioners! Register now:

(Readers of this blog can use discount code “IheartNYC” for 10% off, and I hope to see you there!)

Posted: April 14, 2013 | Author: Hilary Mason | Filed under: blog | Tags: google, search | 4 Comments »

In 2008, cuil, a search engine startup, displayed my bio alongside a photo of deceased actress Hilary Mason. In January 2013, Bing confused us, this time putting my photo next to her bio (they fixed it after a suitable amount of mocking on Twitter).

Today, Google did the same thing. (live search link)

Today I win the internet?

If you zoom in on the bio section, you can clearly see that it’s her bio with a photo of me (originally from Crain’s New York 40 under Forty). Further, if you go into her filmography, you continue to see my photo.

I’m most proud of my starring role in the amazing film Robot Jox. (bottom right of the image below)

I know that entity disambiguation is a hard problem. I’ve worked on it, though never with the kind of resources that I imagine Google can bring to it. And yet, this is absurd!