Hundreds of wildlife rehabilitation centers across the US and Canada treat sick and injured animals and birds. Digitizing their records is yielding valuable data on human-wildlife encounters.
Big data is not the answer to all the challenges that faced Census 2022, but it may be a key enabler for gathering reliable national data in the future.
Advanced Alzheimer’s disease can be seen on brain scans, but gathering more data could allow for earlier diagnosis and treatment.
Shutterstock/Rakstaput
Disorders such as Alzheimer’s and epilepsy are difficult to diagnose with only occasional doctor visits. A new approach would allow fathering of extensive real-world data directly from patients.
Platforms like Zoom have been helpful in bridging geographical distances. However, a recent proposal to mine data raises questions about ownership of Indigenous Knowledge.
(Chris Montgomery/Unsplash)
In-person collaboration between Indigenous communities has been aided by information technologies like Zoom. However, recent attempts to mine personal data raise concerns about data ownership.
Publicly available data on social media opens a new avenue for studying the environment with “incidental citizen science”.
SAURON: radio intensity (purple) from MeerKAT overlaid on an optical image from the Dark Energy Survey.
Michelle Lochner / The Dark Energy Survey Collaboration 2005
Humans are expert pattern-finders. But artificial intelligence tools are better at trawling through vast data sets to find anything from waste dumps to heat-tolerant corals.
France’s goalkeeper #01 Hugo Lloris (C) jumps for the ball during the Qatar 2022 World Cup quarter-final football match between England and France at the Al-Bayt Stadium in Al Khor, north of Doha, on December 10, 2022.
Jewel Samad/AFP
How are Wikipedia pages about contentious events put together? Heather Ford discovered a hotbed of passion, a rotating pack of editors and a struggle for power behind its mirage of neutrality.
Twitter itself produces a lot of data that’s available nowhere else.
STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images
If Twitter were to go dark, with it would go a valuable source of data as well as a means of sharing information relied on by activists, journalists, public health officials and scientists.
Predictive policing may be a useful addition to traditional policing in contexts like South Africa.
Fani Mahuntsi/Gallo Images via Getty Images
Whether we’re talking songs that are popular on Spotify, or were Billboard hits through the ‘40s up to recent years, popularity cannot be attributed solely to quantifiable acoustic elements.
Kelly Bronson, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa
Big data from social media have been revealed as biased, but we should also pay attention to agriculture firms whose play for big data is likely to have detrimental environmental and social impacts.