big data

Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica presents at the 2016 Concordia Summit on using big data, psychographic profiling and behavioral microtargeting in elections.

A five-minute lightning demo of VisiData, a terminal tool for exploring and manipulating data. It uses two months of NYC 311 complaint data to drill down, plot points on a virtual map and save selected rows.

Eager Space examines the practicality of putting data centers in orbit, walking through three scenarios with cost calculations and the launch cost reductions that would be required.

Tantacrul examines sonification, the practice of turning data into sound or music, and critiques how scientists and musicians, including NASA and CERN projects, use it well and poorly.

Scott Manley analyzes the idea of putting data centers in orbit, prompted by Lumen Orbit's funding. He examines the claimed advantage of constant solar power against launch cost, cooling and mass.

An LGR Oddware episode looking at Sony's MDH-10 MD Data drive from 1995, which used MiniDisc for computer storage years before Hi-MD. The host tries out the drive with its original drivers and software.

Joe Kava, VP of Google's Data Center Operations, gives a short tour of a Google data center. He covers security, sustainability and the core infrastructure architecture.

A how-to video on datamoshing, the glitch-art technique of removing keyframes so that motion data smears across video. It walks through the tools needed, such as ffmpegx and Avidemux, though the author notes parts are outdated.

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

Fox Business interview in which Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison claims Oracle will beat Amazon at cloud databases. He argues the world's valuable data lives in Oracle and says Amazon struggled to move off it.

A short Tesla promotional video touring the company's Crash Lab. It describes using data from the fleet and replicated real-world crash scenarios to engineer vehicle safety.

Steve Yegge's OSCON Data 2011 talk imagines what you could do with Google-scale storage and compute a decade later. He argues smart people should work on hard problems such as biology rather than cat pictures, and the talk ends with a moment many took as him quitting Google.

minutephysics, in collaboration with the US Census Bureau, explains differential privacy and why the 2020 census adds noise to protect individuals' data. It walks through how statistics can leak private information.

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether time began at the Big Bang. It explains that the Big Bang is not what most people were taught and what 'start' of the universe really means.

A clip from the 2015 film The Big Short in which FrontPoint Partners investigate mortgage lending in Florida and place their first trade. It shows brokers and a stripper-adjacent loan scene illustrating subprime lending to unverified borrowers.

The official music video for A$AP Mob's Yamborghini High featuring Juicy J, known for heavy datamoshing and glitch effects with hue shifting.

Tony Heller argues that US thermometer data shows a century of cooling and that NOAA adjusts the record to produce a warming trend.

A clip from the 1998 film The Big Hit featuring the 'trace buster buster buster' scene, where characters try to defeat a phone trace.

A More Perfect Union report on xAI's data center in Memphis, which residents say burns gas without permits or pollution controls and harms their health.

The 4K, 60fps version of Big Buck Bunny, the Creative Commons-licensed animated short film from the Blender Foundation.

A five-minute clip from The Big Short (2015) in which FrontPoint Partners confront Morgan Stanley risk assessors and an S&P ratings representative about inflated mortgage bond ratings.

A Last Week Tonight segment on the tension between public and private weather forecasting, including NOAA data and AccuWeather's lobbying against free public weather data.

A scene from The Big Short in which Jared Vennett pitches credit default swaps on mortgage bonds to a hedge fund team, using a Jenga tower to illustrate collateralized debt obligations.

John Rauser's Strata 2014 keynote argues that programmers can learn statistics quickly by simulating random processes and shuffling data. He explains p-values through resampling rather than formulas.

Coffee Break analyzes about 40,000 videos from seven months of YouTube's trending tab. It examines whether trending is biased toward mainstream media and late-night shows.

Matt Parker examines claims that Biden's 2020 vote counts violate Benford's Law, explaining the law and why it often does not apply to precinct-level election data.

A scene from Moneyball in which Brad Pitt's character argues with scouts who pick players on intangible impressions instead of performance data. It is a four-minute clip.

BigClive tears down and tests a germicidal UVC lamp from eBay that floods a room with narrow-band ultraviolet and ozone. He warns of the eye and skin hazards.

An animated ranking of the most popular programming languages from 1965 to 2019, built from popularity indexes, GitHub access data and historical surveys.

A five-minute excerpt of Rich Hickey's Clojure Made Simple talk, with new slides, ranting about HttpServletRequest and specificity. He argues for using generic maps instead of many specific classes and getters.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

A short IBM behind-the-scenes documentary on how researchers moved individual atoms to make the world's smallest movie. It introduces the scientists and their work on atomic memory and data storage.

SciPy 2015 talk by Nathaniel Smith and Stefan van der Walt on choosing a new default colormap for Matplotlib. It covers why Jet misleads, how perceptual color spaces work, and how viridis was designed.

Big Clive tears down a smart meter with a wireless modem found among fly-tipped materials. He examines its internals and checks conspiracy claims about microphones, cameras and 5G.

BigClive tears down a heated electric shower head of the type common in some countries, often called a suicide shower. He examines the construction and the dangerous fault conditions, such as poor insulation and missing earthing.

Andrej Karpathy's Databricks talk on Software 2.0, the shift from human-written code to code produced by neural network training. It covers how developer work moves toward curating datasets, the advantages and challenges, and opportunities for new tooling.

Sean Carroll introduces his video series on the biggest ideas in physics, such as symmetry, space and matter, as informal discussions with follow-up Q&A videos. This is the short opening video of the series.

Wendover Productions explains why Boeing's efficient 787 beat Airbus's giant A380, contrasting hub-and-spoke with point-to-point routes. It covers the economics of long-haul flights.