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examples of data journalism in audio / podcast form - including: Right To Remain Silent is one particularly good example, because it's about bad data: specifically. police who manipulated official statistics. You might also listen to Choosing Wrong, which includes a section about polling. Another favourite of mine is an audio story by The Economist about the prostitution industry, based on data scraped from sex trade websites: More bang for your buck (there are even worse puns in the charts). David Rhodes, a BBC data journalist, has a range of stories on his Audioboom account, including pieces on Radio 4, Radio 5 Live, and a piece discussing "Did Greece really not pay 89.5% of their taxes in 2010" from the excellent factchecking radio programme, More or Less.

Last month, CNBC reported on a page in Google's account settings titled "Purchases" - a month-by-month list of items you've bought across online services like Amazon and other apps that are collected via Google services like Gmail. Purchases is a jarring example of how leaky our data really is and how large companies can aggregate that information unbeknown to the consumer. I, for one, was unaware that almost every concert ticket, Domino's pizza and Amazon purchase (including a 2014 accidental purchase of the film "Tango & Cash") was being logged by Google. Equally troubling: The purchases can't easily be deleted from the page without also deleting the receipt emails from your Gmail account.

Cool study showing the potential of data analyses to give us new kinds of insights! What does instagram tell us about peoples' nutrition decisions? Food deserts, or places where people have limited access to fresh food, are usually measured by the distance people have to travel to get to a large grocery store. What's harder to measure is what the residents of these areas are actually eating day to day. To do so, researchers typically have to rely on surveys, ...In a recent study, De Choudhury and her colleagues propose another method: mining Instagram. All those artfully arranged plates, all that latte art, just waiting for someone to analyze it!

Mashable's series Algorithms explores the mysterious lines of code that increasingly control our lives - and our futures. The world in 2020 has been given plenty of reasons to be wary of algorithms. Depending on the result of the U.S. presidential election, it may give us one more. Either way, it's high time we questioned the impact of these high-tech data-driven calculations, which increasingly determine who or what we see (and what we don't) online. The impact of algorithms is starting to scale up to a dizzying degree, and literally billions of people are feeling the ripple effects. This is the year the Social Credit System, an ominous Black Mirror-like "behavior score" run by the Chinese government, is set to officially launch. It may not be quite as bad as you've heard, but it will boost or tighten financial credit and other incentives for the entire population. There's another billion unexamined, unimpeachable algorithms hanging over a billion human lives.

Social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and our own genetics are among the factors influencing us beyond our awareness. This raises an ancient question: do we have control over our own lives? This article is part of The Conversation's series on the science of free will.