image from NY Times
A recent article in the NY Times, “Disruptions: Data Without Context Tells a Misleading Story,” by Nick Bilton, February 24, 2013, talks about the relationship between data and the story you want to tell.
It relates how Google’s flu-predicting algorithm went awry this past winter because of an incomplete awareness of the context in which the data were collected.
He also relates a project undertaken on this theme at NYU involving Arduino to experiment with the context of data. Projects like that could be done in the Physical Computing course I’m teaching this summer.
