Category: politics

  • Seduced by Big Data

    What do you need of you want to be Big Brother? Big Data, of course! Data is powerful, and “big data” is very powerful. I deal with it every day in my work as a research scientist at Adobe, where I write and utilize algorithms capable of processing petabytes of data. I’ve been actively recruited…

  • “A Republic, If You Can Keep It”

    I’m really disturbed (surprised isn’t quite the right word) at what I’m learning about the government’s massive, untargeted surveillance of millions of American citizens over the last 7 years. I thought we had this debate during the Bush administration and all decided it was illegal and should stop. Apparently, folks at the NSA and in…

  • A Nerdly, Software-Engineering-ish, Computer-Sciencey Approach to the Gay Marriage Debate

    Gay marriage is a proposed change that’s hoped to be an optimization. Advocates say that the current system (society) is sub-optimal in that a particular sub-system (marriage) is not sufficiently general (same-sex couples aren’t allowed to participate). Let’s say marriage is a function by which a man and a woman are combined to create an…