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The conceptual, practical, and ethical issues surrounding "big data" and data in general begin at the very moment of data collection. Particularly when the data concern people, not enough attention is paid to the realities entangled within that significant moment and spreading out from it.1. Data sets are the results of their means of collection. It's easy to forget that the people collecting a data set, and how they choose to do it, directly determines the data set. An illustrative example can be found in the statistics for how many hate crimes were committed in the United States in 2012. According to the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), the number was 5,796. However, the Department of Justice's Bureau of Statistics reported 293,800 hate crimes.

Some advice on evaluating claims made on data Bergstrom believes that calling bullshit on data, big or otherwise, doesn't require a statistics degree-only common sense and a few habits of mind. "You don't have to understand all the gears inside a black box in order to evaluate what you're being told," he said. For those who were unable to enroll in INFO 198/BIOL 106B this spring, here is some of his and West's advice:

Australian farms generate huge volumes of agricultural data. Examples include the types of crops being grown, crop yields, livestock numbers and locations, types of fertilisers and pesticides being used, soil types, rainfall and more. This data is typically collected through the use of digital farming machinery and buildings featuring robotics and digital technologies, artificial intelligence, and devices connected to the internet ("internet of things", or IoT). But a recent review from the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics highlights the patchy and fragmented nature of existing government and industry approaches to agricultural data. What that means is Australian farmers are currently not adequately protected from their farm data being collected and used without their knowledge or consent.

On the importance of having data, in order to understand and tackle an issue... The most recent U.S. estimate...concluded approximately 513,000 women and girls at risk of genital mutilation...But that number should be taken with a big grain of salt...the data doesn't account for immigrants from countries where female genital cutting isn't studied or widely practiced...."You also can't assume that people who come to the U.S. are a representative sample of their country of origin," Clark said. That's especially problematic for estimating rates of female genital cutting, since it's not practiced uniformly within countries. It's also possible, he said, that some immigrants abandon the procedure as they assimilate....some advocates point out that although the estimates focus on immigrants, ...female genital cutting isn't new to the U.S. Female circumcision was performed as a treatment for masturbation by American physicians as recently as the mid-20th century...

For decades, researchers and physicians tended to think about pregnancies as either planned or unplanned. But new data reveals that for a significant group of women, their feelings don't neatly fit into one category or another. As many as one-fifth of women who become pregnant aren't sure whether they want a baby. This fact may reshape how doctors and policymakers think about family planning. For women who are unsure, it doesn't seem enough for physicians to counsel them on pregnancy prevention or prenatal care. "In the past we thought of it as binary, you want to be pregnant or not, so you need contraception or a prenatal vitamin," said Maria Isabel Rodriguez, an obstetrician-gynecologist at Oregon Health and Science University whose research focuses on family planning and contraceptive policy. "But it's more of a continuum." The new data comes from a recent change in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's big survey of new mothers, now allowing them to answer a question about their pregnancy desires by saying "I wasn't sure." It shows that some women want to avoid making a decision about becoming pregnant, or have strong but mixed feelings about it.

The census has been used for hundreds of years to determine how many U.S. House members each state will have, and it currently helps determine how hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending is divvied up. "The risk that really troubles me is that there's a big undercount and then there's a big lack of representation," said John Thompson, who was director of the U.S. Census Bureau until he resigned last year (the bureau is still without a director).

We learned this week that the Trump campaign may have tried to dissuade millions of Black voters from voting in 2016 through highly targeted online ads. The investigation, by Channel 4, highlighted a still little-understood online advertising technique, microtargeting. This targets ads at people based on the huge amount of data available about them online. Experts say Big Tech needs to be much more transparent about how microtargeting works, to avoid overblown claims but also counter a potential threat to democracy.

Every year in Australia, the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) results show Indigenous school students are well behind their non-Indigenous peers. Reducing this disparity is a vital part of Australia's national Closing the Gap policy. ... Using an updated version of our equivalent year levels metric, introduced in Grattan Institute's 2016 report Widening Gaps, we estimate year nine Indigenous students in very remote areas are: five years behind in numeracy six years behind in reading, and seven to eight years behind in writing. In other words, the average year nine Indigenous student in a very remote area scores about the same in NAPLAN reading as the average year three non-Indigenous city student, and significantly lower in writing. But it would be a big mistake to see this only as a problem for isolated outback communities. Most Indigenous students live in cities or regional areas. So, even though learning outcomes are worse in remote and very remote areas, city and regional students account for more than two-thirds of the lost years of learning.