data

  • Many products run into ethical dilemmas around their data practices. Here are some questions to ask:

    • What data do you plan to collect?
    • Do your customers understand that you’ll be collecting that data?
    • Do your customers understand how you’ll be using that data?
    • Are you planning to share that data with third parties? If yes, how are those third parties planning to use that data?
    • If your customers fully understood how you planned to use their data, would they be okay with it?

    — Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value by Teresa Torres

  • The ability to create rich, detailed models of natural and artificial phenomena and to process large volumes of experimental data created by a new generation of scientific instruments that are themselves powered by computing makes computing a universal intellectual amplifier, advancing all of science and engineering and powering the knowledge economy.

    Cloud computing is the latest technological evolution of computational science, allowing groups to host, process, and analyze large volumes of multidisciplinary data. Consolidating computing and storage in very large datacenters creates economies of scale in facility design and construction, equipment acquisition, and operations and maintenance that are not possible when these elements are distributed.

    — The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, et al.

  • Curation covers a wide range of activities, starting with finding the right data structures to map into various stores. It includes the schema and the necessary metadata for longevity and for integration across instruments, experiments, and laboratories.

    Without such explicit schema and metadata, the interpretation is only implicit and depends strongly on the particular programs used to analyze it. Ultimately, such uncurated data is guaranteed to be lost. We must think carefully about which data should be able to live forever and what additional metadata should be captured to make this feasible.

    — The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, et al.

  • Our project in the years to come will be to advance a positive vision of what liberal democracy can deliver with the new tools that technology is placing at our disposal. Its pillars must be:

    • Broadly shared prosperity.
    • Democratic accountability.
    • Scientific inquiry and truth-telling.
    • Long-term thinking.
    • Universal entrepreneurial opportunity.
    • Profound investment in the public goods that benefit everyone: basic science, R&D, education, health care, infrastructure.

    We must be guided by real research into which solutions are likely to work for society’s greater good. We must harness all of the tools of human culture and creativity to this vision: the arts, rhetoric, leadership, and education. And, of course, we must embrace change and disruption. We should understand technological development as a constant source of renewal and enlarged possibilities.

    We must plant the seeds of this new vision now. “…” entrepreneurship can be part of this solution by:

    • Creating new sources of growth and prosperity.
    • Cultivating a new cohort of leaders among all generations who are not bound by convention or obligation to the ideas of the past yet are yoked through long-term incentives and mindset to the possibilities of the future.
    • Integrating scientific thinking into every kind of work.
    • Providing new opportunities for leadership to people of every background and circumstance.
    • Helping public policy become more long-term in its objectives.

    The good news is, this new organizational form is more effective, treats talent and energy as a precious resource, and is designed to harness the true source of competitive advantage in the years to come: human creativity.

    — The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries

  • Use tools to collect data and process it into conclusions and actions. Imagine that virtually everything important going on in your company can be captured as data, and that you can build algorithms to instruct the computer, as you would instruct a person, to analyze that data and use it in the way you agreed it should be used. In that way, you and the computer on your behalf could look at each person and all the people together and provide tailored guidance.

    — Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

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